There is perhaps no story quite as demonstrative of Amazon’s frugality as the door desk story. When Amazon first started, founder Jeff Bezos got his employees to construct desks, made out … of doors.
The official story, told through the company’s website, goes like this:
It was the summer of 1995, back when Jeff Bezos could count his Amazon employees on one hand and those few employees needed desks. Bezos’ friend and employee number five, Nico Lovejoy, says Bezos himself found a scrappy, cost-effective solution right outside their doors.
“We happened to be across the street from a Home Depot,” said Lovejoy. “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.”
With that, the Amazon “door desk” was born. What neither of them knew at the time was that the scrappy, do-it-yourself desk would turn into one of Amazon’s most distinctive bits of culture. More than 20 years later, thousands of Amazon employees worldwide still work each day on modern versions of those original door desks.
“We built door desks because it was the cheapest way we could support a desk,” said Lovejoy. “A lot of the things that we do are scrappy by nature. So long as the scrappy solution works.”
A year later, Joe Kearney joined Amazon and quickly found himself building and working on the makeshift desks. “They would shake, they would rattle, you would have to use cardboard underlays to even them up so they wouldn't shake so much,” he said.
Lovejoy says back then, all of Amazon ran on a pair of computer servers affectionately named Bert and Ernie. The servers sat atop door desks built by Bezos, which Lovejoy described as “pretty wobbly.”
“I went out and replaced the hardware on the desks Bezos built,” Lovejoy said. “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.”
It wasn’t that they couldn’t afford desks — Bezos had left a well-paying job at famous quant hedge fund D. E. Shaw. He funded the early startup with $94,000 of his own money, made out in interest-free loans to the company. A few months later, Bezos’s parents invested $100,000. In the grand scheme of things, tables were cheap. But Bezos built the door desks to make a point.
From Colin Bryar and Bill Carr’s Working Backwards:
The first Amazonians worked elbow to elbow in three small rooms, upstairs from a converted basement filled mostly with overstock from the army surplus store across the street. Desks, including Jeff’s, had been fashioned out of doors affixed to four-by-fours with metal angle brackets. A padlocked plywood door in that basement secured the first Amazon ‘distribution center’, a room measuring perhaps 400 square feet that had last served as the practice space for a local band whose name was still spray-painted on the door.
The desks are still around — and highly symbolic — when author Brad Stone met with Jeff Bezos in the 2010s, as documented in the opening chapter of The Everything Store:
Bezos met me in an eight-floor conference room and we sat down at a large table made of half a dozen door-desks, the same kind of blond wood that Bezos used twenty years ago when he was building Amazon from scratch in his garage. The door-desks are often held up as a symbol of the company’s enduring frugality.
And this is indeed confirmed by the official company history:
As Amazon grew, a decision was made to keep using door desks as a symbol of one of the company’s core values, frugality. Today, a version of the desk has even become a makeshift trophy. Amazon recognizes well-built ideas that help deliver low prices to customers with a Door Desk Award. For Lovejoy, it also represents “ingenuity, creativity and peculiarity, and the willingness to go your own path.”
The door desks were not the only symbol of Amazon’s frugality, though. Circa 1998, just as the mania of the dotcom bubble was starting to get underway, Bezos continued to take pains to model frugality. In The Everything Store, Stone writes:
In the midst of Amazon’s frenzied growth and the crush of the holiday selling season, Bezos kept coming back to the kind of culture he wanted to instil in his young but rapidly growing company. With door-desks and minimal subsidies for employee parking, he was constantly reinforcing the value of frugality. A coffee stand on the first floor of the Pac Med building handed out loyalty cards so a customer could get a free drink after his or her tenth purchase. Bezos, by now a multimillionaire, often made a deliberate show of getting his card punched or handing his free-drink credit to a colleague waiting in line next to him. Around that time, he also started traveling via a private plane, which he subleased from a local businessman. But whenever he flew with colleagues, he invariably declared, “The company isn’t paying for this, I am.”
If we take a step back, it is actually pretty notable that Stone could get these stories from various early employees. The Everything Store was published in 2013, and written in the early 2010s. These are anecdotes from the late 90s. It is a strong signal that the stories stuck.
On 29 January 2024, Bezos’s fiancè Lauren Sanchez posted a photo of the man on her Instagram, working at a door desk.
Jeff Bezos working at a door desk. (Source)
Like Bezos, many Amazon conference rooms around the world continue to use door desks. It is not necessary, and is in fact may be seen as costly to build — if counted in terms of employee hours. But it lives on.
Sources
Working Backwards, by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
The Everything Store, by Brad Stone
https://www.aboutamazon.sg/news/workplace/how-a-door-became-a-desk-and-a-symbol-of-amazon
Official, corporate promotional video on the door desk:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C2pnmuXOiV7/?img_index=1 (archive.is link)