What is the history of Amazon?

The company was created as a result of what Jeff Bezos called his "regret minimization framework" – to avoid regretting, in his old age, not having tried to participate in the emerging internet with his own startup.^[5] In 1994, Bezos left his job as a vice president at D. E. Shaw & Co., a Wall Street firm, and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he began to work on a business plan^[6] for what would become Amazon.com.

On July 5, 1994, Bezos initially incorporated the company in Washington state with the name Cadabra, Inc.^[7] After a few months, he changed the name to Amazon.com, Inc, because a lawyer misheard its original name as "cadaver".^[8] Bezos selected this name by looking through a dictionary; he settled on "Amazon" because it was a place that was "exotic and different", just as he had envisioned for his Internet enterprise. The Amazon River, he noted, was the biggest river in the world, and he planned to make his store the biggest bookstore in the world.^[9] Additionally, a name that began with "A" was preferred because it would probably be at the top of an alphabetized list.^[9] Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand and told a reporter, "There's nothing about our model that can't be copied over time. But you know, McDonald's got copied. And it's still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world."^[10]

In its early days, the company was operated out of the garage of Bezos's house on Northeast 28th Street in Bellevue, Washington.^[11]