Here's where Amazon's first 21 employees are now

When Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, started driving northwest from Texas in 1994, they were setting off on a journey to create one of the biggest e-commerce sites in the United States, based in Seattle.

Although they took that first long road trip alone, it didn't take Bezos — with his grand vision and boisterous laugh — long to start pulling in talent.

Brad Stone's book "The Everything Store" plus a conversation with early employees Tom Schonhoff and Mike Hanlon helped us figure out the names of some of Amazon's first critical employees. (The first 10 employees are listed in the order they were hired, though the others are not. If you know someone else who was there in the earliest days, let us know).

Some early Amazon employees have since become entrepreneurs. Others went on to other major companies. A few are happily retired. Here's what they're all doing now, more than two decades after Amazon got its start:

Jillian D'Onfro contributed to an earlier version of this story.

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