Threads
I love to read autobiographies of people who started iconic companies. I was fortunate to work for Zuck and Bezos as their origin stories were still being written, and it's fun to...
The best tech companies drive strategy through product. This is why founders and CEOs tend to be product leaders, and product / design / engineering is more important than ops / ma...
I was at Amzn early '00s when we lost 95% of our market cap. Later at FB I negotiated a down-round in '09, and then in '12 our stock dropped 50% post-IPO. I was on the board of a p...
In a full day of interviews at Amazon in 1999, I met 3 people who would go on to shape the internet: Andy Jassy built AWS and is now Amazon's CEO, Leslie Kilgore built Netflix and...
In 2006 I fumbled an initial job offer from Facebook. It was nearly the biggest mistake of my career. Here's what happened:
I was ambitious and worked hard to advance my career at Amazon and then Facebook. I thought the way to get ahead was to deliver results, then push for more responsibility and posit...
People often ask me to compare working for Bezos vs Zuck. I worked with Mark much more closely for much longer, but I did work directly with Jeff in my last 2 years at Amazon incub...
I was at Amzn in 2000 when the internet bubble popped. Capital markets dried up & we were burning $1B/yr. Our biggest expense was datacenter -> expensive Sun servers. We spent a ye...
In 2008 Facebookβs user growth hit a wall at 80M and we were having serious debates about whether any social network could ever reach 100M users. 2 years later we had doubled our u...
In 2002 I was working in Amazonβs retail division. We were organized by department - books, CDs, electronics, etc - and a separate dept for products sold by 3rd parties. Then Bezos...