Tom Schonhoff was Amazon's fifth employee and built the customer service department from scratch.

Date worked for Amazon: 1995 — 2001

Most recent Amazon title: Technical program manager

What he's doing now: He nows works as a program manager for Microsoft.

Schonhoff, Amazon's fifth employee, had just earned a computer science degree at the University of Washington when Bezos brought him on board. He ran the whole customer service department for the first several months, working with Bezos to establish Amazon's famous "it's all about the customers" attitude.

He told Business Insider that he was often the one personally making sure packages made it to the post office by jamming them into his car to drop off at the end of his long workday.