Jeff Bezos is a man who has made it big since his days in a 1,540-square-foot, single-family house that he rented in the early 1990s to start Amazon. Since then, he has carved out a new life as a centibillionaire with a new life partner, Lauren Sanchez. One might believe the past to be unrecognizable, but as helicopter pilot and Bezos’s lady love, Sanchez revealed on social media, that’s far from the case. The doting fiancée captured an engrossed Amazon co-founder in a beautiful picture and compared it to a throwback image. What remained unchanged was his focus, determination,, and one of the original desks he made out of a door to save money shortly after founding the company.
It is indeed heartwarming and almost eye-opening to see a man worth a whopping $184 billion still using an old thing to this day. Sanchez captioned the post, “After all these years… When I walked in on him working this morning, I took this picture. I just love that he is still working from one of the first desks that have been around since the beginning (see next slide). This is where countless hours of hard work meet the heart of Day One. Here’s to the endless pursuit of what’s possible.”
Considering that Bezos founded Amazon in July 1994 as an online marketplace for books, this table is nearly as old as the billion-dollar enterprise and is three decades old. Amazon’s website notes that the company’s door desks originated in the summer of 1995 when Bezos and a handful of employees needed desks.
According to Fox Business, Bezos’s friend and Amazon’s fifth employee, Nico Lovejoy, explained, “We happened to be across the street from a Home Depot. He looked at desks for sale and looked at doors for sale, and the doors were a lot cheaper, so he decided to buy a door and put some legs on it.” He added, “We built door desks because it was the cheapest way we could find to support a desk. A lot of the things that we do are scrappy by nature. So long as the scrappy solution works,” Lovejoy said.
Lovejoy quipped, “I went out and replaced the hardware on the desks Bezos built. You would never want to hire Jeff Bezos as a carpenter. He’s much better at other things. I think he’d tell you the same thing.” He certainly is good at the things he knows, and the last 30 years of his life are proof. Interestingly, Fox Business also pointed out that thousands of Amazon workers continue to use modern versions of the classic door desks at offices around the world.
