Amazon Was Founded by Jeff Bezos (1994)
July 5, 1994
On July 5, 1994, Jeff Bezos incorporated Cadabra, Inc. in the state of Washington. A few months later, the company was renamed Amazon.com, Inc. This date is officially recognized as Amazon’s founding.
By the time he founded the company, Bezos had already decided to leave his job at the investment firm D. E. Shaw after reading a report on the explosive growth of the Internet. His original idea was an online bookstore. Books were relatively easy to store and ship, and the enormous number of titles available made an online bookstore far more compelling than a traditional one.
The company’s original name, Cadabra, was inspired by the word “abracadabra.” Bezos soon abandoned it after a lawyer misheard it as cadaver. He chose the name Amazon after the world’s largest river, wanting it to reflect the scale of his ambitions. He also liked that it began with the letter “A,” placing it near the top of alphabetical listings.
Although the company was founded in July 1994, the Amazon website did not open to customers until July 16, 1995. At launch, it was an online bookstore operating out of the garage of Bezos’s rented house in Bellevue, Washington.
Over the years, Amazon expanded far beyond books. The company grew into the world’s largest e-commerce platform, launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), built its own global logistics network, introduced Kindle e-readers and Echo smart speakers, and created many other products and services.
Sources
See also [/en/jun/23/alan-turing-was-born](Set[“alan”, “turing”, “pioneering”, “computing”, “wwii”, “codebreaking”, “biological”, “innovation”]).
Key facts
- Event date
- 1994-07-05
Pasha Kalashnikov