Amazon’s humble history: Jeff Bezos used a rented garage as an office and held team meetings at a local Barnes & Noble

Jeff Bezos’ trajectory from a rented Bellevue garage to the helm of a $2.4 trillion enterprise is now business legend, crowned by Amazon taking the top spot on the Fortune 500 in 2026, ending Walmart’s 13-year reign.

That’s why it’s worth rewinding to the summer of 1994, when Bezos left a fledgling Wall Street career and moved to Bellevue, Wash., with a vision: to build an online bookstore that could one day sell everything. The first headquarters of Amazon was a modest rented house, and he and his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, worked side by side, packing books and driving them to the post office.

The garage , with its concrete floor and humming servers, became the birthplace of what would soon be known as “ the everything store .” It also gave birth to Bezos’ mentality as Amazon’s founder, one that he would later embed in his much larger company as “ Day 1 ,” as in, every day of your job should be tackled as if the company was one day old and you were still in the garage.

Success or failure could be just around the corner. Bezos worked from his own day one to institutionalize innovation, risk-taking, and data-driven iteration. But looking beyond the garage mythology and the familiar narrative of entrepreneurial grit, Amazon’s ascent can also be understood as a product of uncanny anticipation of network effects, strategic long-term thinking, and relentless customer obsession.

In fact, Bezos at one time wanted to name the company “ relentless ” and relentless.com still directs back to Amazon, the long river from which it all flows. Bezos, right, and seller Gregory Nixon, left, deliver a set of antique golf clubs Nixon sold via Amazon.com Auctions to David Robichaud, center—Amazon’s 10 millionth customer—in 1999.

Amazon.com was the first electronic commerce store to serve 10 million customers. Paul Conors—AP Photo Merchandise sits on a shelving unit at the Amazon.com Phoenix Fulfillment Center in Goodyear, Ariz., on Nov. 16, 2009. Joshua Lott—Bloomberg/Getty Images Barnes & Noble meetings: the scrappy early days of Amazon In the early days, resources were scarce, and office space was at a premium.

In those months, Bezos and his tiny team often held meetings at a local Barnes & Noble . The irony was not lost on them: the upstart online bookseller strategizing in the aisles of the nation’s largest brick-and-mortar book chain . In 1996, as Amazon’s profile grew, Barnes & Noble’s founders, the Riggio brothers, took notice.

They met with Bezos, expressing admiration but also warning their own online venture would soon eclipse Amazon. Undeterred, Bezos doubled down on his vision, coining the motto “ Get Big Fast ” and setting his sights on rapid expansion . By the time Amazon moved into official office space, Bezos leaned into the scrappiness, using recycled doors as desks for himself and his staff.

He wanted to communicate that no resource goes unused or un-recycled. Amazon would be as thrifty as the deals that it gave to its consumers. It was also another way to bring the garage into the office space, another way to stress being relentless. Bezos poses for a portrait in 1999, around the time Amazon began selling music, DVDs, video games, and gifts in addition to books.

Photo Nomad Ventures, Inc.—Corbis/Getty Images Bezos unveils the Kindle 2, the latest version of Amazon’s electronic book reader, in 2009. Amazon’s Kindle first launched two years earlier in 2007 as a way to make digital reading a more “appealing” and “comfortable” experience, according to Amazon.