How Jeff Bezos convinced Lyft CEO to leave Microsoft, join Amazon in the 90s

In 1996, David Risher told Bill Gates that he was leaving his management role at Microsoft, then already one of the largest companies in the world with an annual turnover of almost $ 8.7 billion, to take a job in an “small and small online bookstore”, called Amazon.

“It was not an entirely rational decision,” admitted an episode of the Podcast Next Podcast which was broadcast on September 30.

In fact, Bill Gates tried to say Risher out of this decision, he said on the podcast, reminding him that he had been “successful” in the biggest company, where Risher had developed the first Database Product of Microsoft, called Access.

GATES – So the richest person in the world, with a net value estimated by Forbes at $ 18 billion in September 1996 – was surprised that Risher would like to leave Microsoft for an internet startup which declared an annual turnover of only $ 15.7 million in 1996, only two years after Jeff Bezos ended up with the company.

“” Things are doing well (here). You want to tell me that you leave this company for a small small internet bookstore that no one has ever heard … It must have been the stupid most that I ever heard someone, “said Risher, Gates said at the time. A spokesperson for Gates did not immediately respond to CNBC made his request for comments.

While Risher understood the inherent risk of leaving a technology giant established for a much smaller and unproven startup, the founder of Amazon had made a convincing matter, said Risher.

Risher actually met Bezos for the first time by phone a year before joining Amazon, when the founder called him to check a reference to work for another new Bezos employee hired.

“We had a big conversation and I was really impressed by the questions he asked, and that the CEO of Amazon would take 45 minutes to personally verify a history,” Risher to journalist Danielle Newnham told a 2015 interview.

In 1996, Risher had become so impressed by Bezos and Amazon that he began to interview for a job at the young startup. There were two things about Bezos who convinced Risher that he made the right decision, he said. The first was Bezos’ obsession for the customer experience.

“The idea that you personally can improve the lives of millions of customers if you take responsibility seriously is very powerful,” he told Newnham.

The other part of the Bezos field which conquered Risher was the confidence of the entrepreneur that Amazon could be the next huge technological business.

At the time, Amazon had a “relatively small business” which was initially focused only on the sale of books. But, Bezos had a clear vision that would start with books and end up stretching more and more product categories until Amazon becomes the “all store” that it is today.

“” I think that if we do everything correctly, when we are in 2000, we will be a billion dollars “,” said Bezos, according to Risher.

Risher obviously bought Bezos’s vision for Amazon. He found the opportunity to be at the forefront of this kind of rapid and fast growth as “very convincing,” he said.

“I said to myself:” How often are you in a business that is just at this crazy intersection of technology and culture and all these different things, and to build something that could be a billion dollars? “” He told Fortune.

Amazon ended up beating Bezos’ prediction by one year old, reaching $ 1.6 billion in annual income in 1999. Risher was a large part of this growth, joining Amazon as a 37th employee of the company overall, he said. Risher’s role was to extend Amazon to a variety of new product categories, including music, films and toys.

When Risher left the company to become a business professor at Washington University in 2002, Amazon’s annual income was $ 3.9 billion.

Today aged 60, Risher has managed Lyft since 2023 and he is still inspired by the leadership of his former bosses, the Billionaires Gates and Bezos, often says Risher. He also remembers the excitement of the first years of Amazon.

“It was really a rocket, which is always a fun thing to do,” said Risher. “This building of something that had never been built before on this scale was really very exciting.”

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