Who Invented Amazon Prime?

Ethan Evans says two people claim Amazon Prime. Charlie Ward, then a principal engineer and later a VP, says he invented it. Jeff Bezos also says he invented it. Evans joined right after Prime and does not know whether they had the same idea at once or whether one of them took the credit.

The original idea was not a bundle of perks. It was only fast shipping. Bezos could see a bad quarter lining up, still in the aftermath of the internet crash, and he wanted something to tell Wall Street. The effort was called Project 100 because they had to announce it and start doing it in 100 days. He insisted on the words two-day delivery, not two-day shipping. It began with a lot of FedEx two-day shipping, and he knew that over time the post office or Amazon's own trucks could often do it in one day, without telling the customer which method. He was not yet the inevitable tycoon. He was still the dot-com founder who might turn out to be a dot-bomb.

Amazon kept an Idea Tool where anyone could submit an idea, and Bezos sometimes looked. Ward put a rapid-shipping program into that tool, and about 100 days later Prime launched. The extra perks came later.