Jeff Bezos’ trajectory from a rented Bellevue garage to the helm of a $2.4 trillion enterprise is now business legend. In the summer of 1994, Jeff Bezos left a fledgling Wall Street career and moved to Bellevue, Washington, with a vision: to build an online bookstore that could one day sell everything. The first headquarters of Amazon was a modest rented house, and he and his then-wife, MacKenzie, worked side by side, packing books and driving them to the post office. The garage, with its concrete floor and humming servers, became the birthplace of what would soon be known as “the everything store.”
It also gave birth to Bezos’ mentality as Amazon founder, one that he would ingrain some day in his much larger company as “Day 1,” as in, every day of your job should be tackled as if the company was one day old and you were still in the garage. Success or failure could be just around the corner. Bezos worked from his own day one to institutionalize innovation, risk-taking, and data-driven iteration.
