What Amazon’s ‘most important employee’ thinks of Jeff Bezos' company 21 years after leaving

Amazon's first ever employee has shared his thoughts on Jeff Bezos' $2.37 trillion empire.

What started out as a modest(ish) mail-order bookshop in 1994, rapidly evolved into the world's largest online retailer.

Now a household name, Amazon has expanded far beyond e-commerce, with off-shoots like Prime Video and Amazon Fresh, though not every Bezos project has proven successful. Starting out, the entrepreneur couldn't flog the business alone, and was loaned $250,000 from his parents. Must be nice.

Money secured, Bezos was still missing a crucial skill for the internet age: coding.

So, he made what is arguably his smartest business move to date, by hiring computer programmer Shel Kaphan.

Joining Amazon in 1994, Kaphan is responsible for making ordering online simpler than ever by developing 1-Click.

Amazon now ships more than 1,000 packages a minute (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

He also co-wrote Amazon's first website, and wrote the product review system - integral parts of the business.

Bezos didn't mince his words when he described the University of California graduate as 'the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com'. Wow.

Yet, Kaphan went on to resign from the booming retailer in 1999 after only five years.

He claims Bezos didn’t seem especially bothered, and made no effort to persuade him to stay.

The two have not spoken since and are reportedly not on good terms.

Shel Kaphan worked for Amazon for five years (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Kaphan went on to keep a low profile and rarely discussed his time at Amazon, until 2019 after he read Zucked, an exposé about big tech.

In a 2020 PBS Frontline interview, 21 years after quitting, he shed some light on Amazon's culture.

He said the company's early days were 'fun' and 'eclectic', but that all changed as it expanded.

"There was a bit of a culture clash between the very early, generation zero of Amazon, and the people that started coming in," Kaphan said.

And when discussing Bezos' business mentality - from his eight years on Wall Street - Kaphan explained: "It’s basically cold-blooded. It’s looking at things through a particular, fairly narrow lens that - it’s valid, but it’s not complete."

Bezos back in the day (Paul Souders/Getty Images)

Kaphan also said the former Amazon CEO 'likes to win at any cost'.

And while Kaphan was 'proud' of what Amazon had achieved, he was also afraid of what it had become.

On the company's present-day success, he said: "I think that the characterization of Amazon as being a ruthless competitor is true.

"And under the flag of customer obsession, they can do a lot of things, which might not be good for people who aren’t their customers."

He also expressed concerns over Amazon's monopoly making the US' inequality worse.

"Some amount of inequality is inevitable and motivating. But if you take it too far, you reach, like, a breaking point where we’re going to see things potentially get uglier.

"And I don’t want to see that."