Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, continues to use a desk constructed of a door from Amazon’s early days.
Lauren Sanchez, Bezos’ girlfriend, uploaded the photograph of him utilizing the old desk on Instagram on January 29. Sanchez said she shot the photo when she accidently came into the room and noticed the Amazon founder working.
“I’m so glad he’s still working on one of the desks from the early days,” Sanchez commented, attaching a photo of Jeff Bezos from Amazon’s early days for comparison.
In the two photographs, the billionaire is seated at a big desk with patched-up decorations. This sort of desk is sometimes known as a “door desk” because the top is a piece of wood created to be a door, but legs have been added to serve a new role.
The post went viral right after, with roughly 30,000 likes and over 1,000 comments. Many people praised Jeff Bezos’ work ethic, even amid adverse circumstances, and his simplicity in utilizing a handmade desk for decades. “Engineers will always be engineers,” one commentator said. Others claimed the photograph made them feel as if Bezos had always kept the same posture he had when he first launched Amazon, even as the company grew in size.
“Door desks” are not uncommon at Amazon, and they are even considered a cultural phenomenon. According to a blog post published in 2018 by Nico Lovejoy, one of Amazon’s earliest workers, Bezos designed this style of desk in 1995, when he needed to equip workstations for a limited number of employees.
“When he visited a home improvement store, he glanced at tables and doors. Doors were significantly cheaper, so he decided to buy those and attach legs to them,” Lovejoy said.
According to Amazon staff at the time, Bezos “was not a good carpenter,” therefore the desk was “ugly and quite shaky,” necessitating the addition of paper when in use. “Many of the things we do are inherently quite makeshift, but as long as the makeshift solution works,” Lovejoy went on to say.
According to Insider, the “door desk” has become a symbol of Amazon’s culture, with frugality as a key value. Even though it has grown to be one of the world’s most valuable firms, a contemporary version of the desk can still be found in offices around the company. Amazon even offers how-to tutorials so that employees may develop it themselves.
The report also claimed Marc Randolph, an entrepreneur who met with Bezos, as saying that utilizing a handcrafted desk is a “deliberate message.” “It’s a way of showing that they won’t spend money on things that don’t affect their customers,” said Randolph.
Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994 and will step down as CEO in 2021. He is presently one of the world’s richest persons, with an estimated net worth of $184 billion.
