Working out of his garage in Bellevue, Washington, Bezos filed incorporation papers for what he first called Cadabra Inc.—a name quickly dropped after a lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver.' Rebranded Amazon after the world's largest river, the company would grow from a books-only website into the dominant force in global e-commerce and cloud computing.
Jeff Bezos left a lucrative Wall Street quant job at D.E. Shaw in 1994 after reading a startling statistic: internet usage was growing at 2,300 percent a year. He drew up a list of twenty possible products to sell online and settled on books, reasoning that the sheer number of titles in print made a physical superstore impossible but an online catalog entirely feasible.
On July 22, 1994, he filed the incorporation papers in Washington state under the name Cadabra Inc., intending a whimsical nod to 'abracadabra.' The name lasted only a few months; his own lawyer reportedly misheard it over the phone as 'cadaver,' and Bezos quickly realized a name evoking death was poor branding for a retail startup.
He renamed the company Amazon, drawn to the image of the world's largest river as a metaphor for scale, and possibly for the fact that it would appear early in alphabetical directory listings. Starting in his garage with makeshift desks built from wooden doors, Bezos built a company that would, within three decades, become one of the most valuable and disruptive corporations in history, reshaping retail, logistics, publishing, and cloud infrastructure alike.