Notable businesses founded by former Amazon employees
With $89 billion (2014) in revenue, and almost 154,000 employees, Amazon is one of the key players in online shopping, in addition to web hosting and contents distribution.
Amazon also managed to be a key career stop in several influencers who decides to leave Amazon and start their own business. Here is an interesting list of a number of companies which have been started and founded by former Amazon employees.
- Findory was founded by Greg Linden
- Flipkart was founded by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal
- Foodista was founded by Barnaby Dorfman
- Hulu was led by Jason Kilar, a former SVP
- Infibeam was founded by Vishal Mehta
- Instacart was founded by Apporva Mehta
- Jambool/SocialGold was co-founded by Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein
- Jet.com was founded by Marc Lore
- Nimbula was co-founded by Chris Pinkham, a former VP, and Willem Van Biljon, a former Product Manager
- Opscode was co-founded by Jesse Robbins, a former engineer and manager
- Pelago was co-founded by Jeff Holden, a former SVP, and Darren Vengroff, a former Principal Engineer
- Plugmystore.com was co-founded by Léonard Guillaumont, a former Amazonian and Yann Milin
- Pro.com was founded by Matt Williams (Internet entrepreneur), former longtime Amazon executive and ‘shadow’ to Jeff Bezos
- Quora was co-founded by engineer Charlie Cheever
- TeachStreet was founded by Dave Schappell, an early product manager
- The Book Depository was founded by Andrew Crawford; acquired by Amazon in 2011.
- Trusera was founded by Keith Schorsch, an early Amazonian
- Twilio was founded by Jeff Lawson, a former Technical Product Manager
- Vittana was founded by Kushal Chakrabarti and Brett Witt
- Wikinvest was founded by Michael Sha
- Yellowleg.com was founded by Aashish Gupta
- Zeitgeist Research was founded by Manfred Bluemel, former head of market research worldwide
Source: GigaOM