It might be unfair and cliche to poke fun at Pets.com. Feel free to substitute your own extravagant Bubble company. While most spent and spent on fancy office equipment, Superbowl ads, and the like, Amazon was flying by relatively on the cheap.
Greg Linden has started a new feature on his site where he shares stories of the early days at Amazon (1997). Today, he brings us the story of the door desks, furniture that probably is cheaper than a FedEx desk.
Yet Amazon became a poster child of the Web and its new lifestyle. Amazon’s founder was Time’s person of the year. Most importantly, Amazon made it through the tech crash. The door desk is a symbol of the frugality it took to stay in business. It shows that even big ideas can be bootstrapped.
Greg mentions an earthquake in Seattle in 2001. He and his co-workers were happy to have heavy doors under which to duck and cover. I’m also happy they had their makeshift furniture. The frugality probably saved Amazon before the earthquake took its shot. The web is better with Amazon around.
[…] Greg Linden (who writes about his early days at Amazon, as well as other tech-oriented topics) likes Microsoft’s new Wallop startup. Among its ideas is to automagically create a social network for a user without the task of adding friends. […]