SEATTLE — From scrappy Seattle startup to global superpower: this month marks the 30th anniversary of Amazon.
The retailer went from a humble Bellevue start-up to a world-force that’s changed the way we shop, move, and live.
But before Amazon made up more than a third of the online retailer market share in the U.S., before it was worth a colossal $2 trillion, and before it ever employed 1.6 million employees globally, its founder, Jeff Bezos, was just a guy with a dream and some slimy toys.
"This is a slime dog," Bezos said in a sit-down interview with KING 5 in 1998. "It, um ya know, it sticks to the wall." Bezos threw his toy on his office wall and guffawed with delight.
At that point, just four years after founding Amazon, he had already become a billionaire from it. Still, he was one of the most colorful-- and most ambitious-- CEOs of the time.
"I knew that when I was 80, that I wasn’t going to be thinking about what happened with my Wall Street job, but what I might really have regretted is not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was gonna be a really big deal," Bezos told KING 5 in 1998.
To understand the true origins of Amazon, however, you have to go back to the very beginning, to Bezos' high school years in Miami.
KING 5 sat down with Jonathan Leblang, Bezos' friend and classmate from Miami Palmetto High School.
"I was really into computers, so I got one in 1980," Leblang said. "Jeff would come over and we played with it together, you know? Open it up and play with the hardware inside... to sort of figure out how things work, and do things.”
He was one of the rare few Bezos knew who owned a computer at that time.
When the Internet went public in 1993, it makes sense that Bezos saw an opportunity.
Leblang said his decision to move came about swiftly.
"I got a call from him," Leblang said. "And he's like, can't make it Memorial Day. We're moving out west. I’m gonna do this Internet thing.”
Bezos quit his steady job at a hedge fund and took a gamble, after doing some research about how much growth the Internet was experiencing.
Bezos and his then-wife Mackenzie Scott landed in Washington state. Thirty years ago, in July of 1994, 30-year-old Bezos founded Amazon in the garage of a Bellevue craftsman home.
"Oh here, this is my desk here, and that’s the fax machine,” Bezos said in a video he posted on his Instagram.
Originally, however, the venture had a different name. Bezos told KING 5 the story in 1998.
"When the lawyer who was incorporating the company said, 'What do you want the company to be called?’" Bezos said. "I said, ‘Cadabra. Like Abra Cadabra.’ But he heard ‘Cadaver.' And he said ‘Cadaver?’ and I said, ‘No, that name’s never going to work.'"
He landed on Amazon.com.
"This is the first office of Amazon.com, Inc." Bezos said, in the Instagram video.
Early Amazon employee John Schoettler said a fledgling group of the first employees were boxing up customer orders by hand in that garage.
"I recall the story that, in Jeff's garage, they were all on their knees," Schoettler said. "One day somebody stood up and said, 'Oh, my back! Ya know?'"
Without a budget for desks, Bezos bought a door and drilled four legs onto it.
"Flipped it over and that became the first door desk," Schoettler said.
The door desk became a lasting symbol of the company’s modest beginnings. Some employees still work on them to this day, according to Schoettler.
KING 5 asked Schoettler, "Why was it good to be in Seattle in those early days?"
He replied, "I think that there was a lot of great talent here."
That pool of talent included Bettina Stix, who is now the director of disaster relief at Amazon.
"We’ve just come such a long way between being a scrappy start-up," Stix said.
Stix joined Amazon in 1999, inspired by Bezos’ vision.
"I have a PhD in literature, and you have no idea how hard it was to get books," Stix said. "I felt like, 'He speaks my world.'"
She started the same year Amazon moved into Seattle’s "Pacmed building," also known as the Pacific Medical Center. It is the recognizable art-deco building on Beacon Hill.
But in the years to come, Amazon would outgrow the building.
“And then we started to move down into the South Lake Union and here in the Denny Regrade," Schoettler said.
Seattle -- and South Lake Union -- would never be the same.
People have accused the tech giant of prompting gentrification and pushing out some of the older businesses that were in the area.
"How do you respond to that?" we asked Schoettler.
"Well, I think about what was here before," Schoettler said. "We had a lot of parking lots, vacant motels, and a movie theater that was no longer in operation."
South Lake Union was industrial, but lower-income Seattle locals, often people of color, were pushed out of downtown as housing costs spiked. These are topics the company is still working to address; for example, Amazon set up a Housing Equity Fund.
“$3.6 billion dollars that has been invested to not only preserve existing affordable housing units but to create new ones," Schoettler said.
Fast-forward to 2018, and the Amazon Spheres went up in South Lake Union.
The spheres represented a new era for Amazon locally, while their warehouses exploded in number globally.
Controversy has followed: the company faced accusations of union-busting and of illegally operating as a monopoly.
The earliest Amazon employees point to the positives, however, of being a giant.
"That scale, you know, has also enabled us to just do things that are like, unique, you know?" Stix said. "If you think, going back to disaster relief, like: we can operate anywhere around the globe."
On this 30-year milestone, they're now pausing to take in the view from the top.
"It’s hard to imagine a world without Amazon now," we said.
"I can’t," Schoettler said. "But who knows what the future holds. I think that we continue on and on. But none of us know the future, or a crystal ball... but you can order one at Amazon.”
As for Bezos, he recently said in an Instagram post, "'What a long, strange trip it’s been'... So much we still have to do better. I wouldn’t trade the ride for anything."