Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is still using one of the original desks he made out of a door to save money shortly after founding the company to this day, according to a social media post from his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez.
Sanchez posted a picture on Instagram on Sunday that showed Bezos working at one of the original door desks Bezos and colleagues made as cost-effective, homemade furniture when the e-commerce giant was still a young startup.
“After all these years… When I walked in on him working this morning, I took this picture,” Sanchez wrote. I just love that he is still working from one of the first desks that have been around since the beginning (see next slide),” Sanchez wrote.
“This is where countless hours of hard work meet the heart of Day one. Here’s to the endless pursuit of what’s possible,” she added.
Bezos founded Amazon in July 1994 as an online marketplace for books and the company started from his garage in Bellevue, Washington.
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.
Bezos’ 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.”
“We built door desks because it was the cheapest way we could support a desk. A lot of the things that we do are scrappy by nature. So long as the scrappy solution works,” Lovejoy said.
He noted that at the time, Amazon’s entire e-commerce platform was run through a pair of servers dubbed Bert and Ernie that were situated on “pretty wobbly” door desks crafted by Bezos.
“I went out and replaced the hardware on the desks Bezos built,” Lovejoy said in Amazon’s post. “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.”
Thousands of Amazon workers continue to use modern versions of the classic door desks at offices around the world, the company noted.
Amazon’s website also features a how-to guide for building an Amazon door desk that was authored by Lovejoy.