Charlie Bell

Charlie Bell began his career in 1979 as a developer of mini-computer software used in the engineering of Space Shuttle payload sets. In 1984, he took a hiatus from software development and moved into project engineering of integrated space shuttle cargoes. Mr. Bell owned the payload complement for STS-61B, working a console in Johnson Space Center through the Thanksgiving 1985 mission less than two months before the ill-fated Challenger disaster. He also owned the Hubble Space Telescope deploy mission, STS-31. During the post-Challenger accident “stand-down”, Charlie became deeply involved in database programming.

In 1989, he joined Oracle’s field services team where, for seven years, he wrote c-language Oracle apps and managed numerous transactional systems projects and teams.

In 1996, Charlie left Oracle and started Server Technologies Group as CEO and co-founder to build internet commerce transaction software. The team at Server Technologies became Amazon.com’s first (albeit, very small) acquisition, and in March 1998 put on “Amazon.com” badges.

In his first post at Amazon, Charlie founded a team to build software for Amazon Customer Service, who’s tools at that time consisted mostly of Unix scripts requiring highly skilled customer service agents. By mid-summer, Amazon was going international, and Charlie took over as head of a newly-formed Infrastructure team: a group of very dedicated engineers and technicians who built and ran Amazon’s datacenters, network, servers, and databases. During Amazon’s “Get Big Fast” period, Charlie fed the company’s voracious demand for computing hardware, spending money, as Joe Galli would later put it, “like a drunken sailor.” Fortunately, an experiment in running Amazon’s retail site on commodity hardware and free Linux paid off. As a result, the price of servers for Amazon’s burgeoning 2-pizza teams fell like a rock.