The The I'm going host Brian McCullough. Shell Caffin was the very first person hired by Jeff Bezos to launch Amazon.com.

A lot of people consider Shell to be a co-founder of Amazon in all but title because he, along with Paul Davis, was largely responsible for the entire technical architecture that Amazon launched with, from the website to the back end

systems that made selling books on the internet possible.

I was thrilled when Shell agreed to talk to me because he does not give a lot of interviews

and I knew that he could shed some light on the earliest Amazon details that absolutely

no one else in the world could.

Shell gives us the background on everything from the earliest commerce systems

to the development of Amazon's famous review and recommendation systems.

This is such a fascinating detailed look at Amazon's earliest beginnings, and I think it reminds

me of all the great details we got from the mosaic and Netscape engineering teams when we spoke to them in the earliest interviews for this project.

So I know you're going to love episode 50 an interview with Amazon's employee number one

Shell Caffin. Shell Caffin, thanks for coming on the Internet History podcast.

I'm glad to be here to talk to you. Thanks for coming on the Internet History podcast.

I'm glad to be here to talk to you.

So from my research, not only are you an alumni of UC Santa Cruz, but you're also a

a Santa Cruz, but you're also a Santa Cruz native, is that right?

Well, not exactly. I moved there to go to college in 1970,

and up until the time I moved to Seattle to work on Amazon,

I lived there most of the time, with the exception of a few years

in First, Palo Alto, which is closer to where I came from.

And then my first computer industry job was in Los Angeles, so I was going for that for a three years or so.

And your degree was in mathematics?

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