Not many people spend $27.95 and get a building named after them.
John Wainwright, an Australian software engineer based in Sunnyvale, Calif., did just that. On April 3, 1995, he became Amazon’s AMZN, +0.96% first non-company customer when he purchased “Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms Of Thought” by Douglas Hofstadter. (It’s still available on Amazon for $33.55 hardcover or $7.80 paperback.) It was not the easiest of orders for Amazon, especially for the company’s very first book sale. “That purchase is still part of my Amazon history,” Wainwright says.
MarketWatch spoke with Wainwright about being No. 1 and how he nearly ended up working for Amazon — before the company’s 1997 initial public offering on May 15, 1997.
MarketWatch: That was quite a book. Chapter 1 is entitled “To Seek Whence Cometh a Sequence.” It doesn’t look like your average bedtime reading.
Wainwright: It wasn’t a John Grisham novel. [Grisham’s “The Rainmaker” made it to the top of the New York Times best seller list in April 1995.]
MarketWatch: I may regret asking this, but what was it about?
Wainwright: It was a work on artificial intelligence and human cognition modeling. It seemed like a reasonable way of catching up with what was going on around the 1990s. It’s a collection of articles and essays documenting research that Hofstadter and his students were doing at the time, modeling human form.
MarketWatch: Where were you when you bought the book?
Wainwright: I was a very close friend of the founding engineer of Amazon, and was working at an Apple/IBM joint venture called Kaleida Labs. Shel Kaphan [widely noted as Amazon’s first employee] worked at Kaleida Labs and in 1994 he decided to leave to work on this crazy idea of an online bookstore. We all thought he was crazy to do that. He kept me up to date on what he was doing. He sent me an email and said, ‘Create an account and order some books.’ I thought I was going to get some free books out of it. But they took my credit card and charged it!
John Wainwright
John Wainwright
MarketWatch: I can almost hear the sound of the dial-up now.
Wainwright: I used a computer T1 link at our offices in Mountain View, Calif.
MarketWatch: As job changes go, that was a smart move by Mr. Kaphan.
Wainwright: I keep in touch with him from time to time. He left Amazon with a huge fortune, a ridiculous amount of money. He runs a nonprofit called the Kaphan Foundation.
MarketWatch: Did you ever think of joining him at Amazon?
Wainwright: There were opportunities to follow Shel to Amazon prior to the IPO. Several of our colleagues at Kaleida followed him there. I went off on a different path and was happy with what I was doing and didn’t want to move my family from Silicon Valley. People often find in life that if they had just turned this way or that that they would have found themselves in a very different situation financially. I’m happy and I’m very happy for Shel and my mates and I have had a comfortable life here.
More:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/meet-amazons-first-ever-customer-2015-04-22Just thought it were a neat bit of modern history.
