Big Technology Podcast - A Dozen Grueling Years At Amazon — With Kristi Coulter

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

Kristi Coulter worked at Amazon for twelve years and is the author of the new book, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career. She joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the state of Amazon today: What is it? Who should be leading it? Where's the culture going? Then, she discusses her experience at the company, which she details in depth in the book. We talk about the paranoia within the company, the difficulty Amazon employees have switching jobs, why she stayed, and everything she wishes could've said at the exit interview that never happened. ---- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

A 12-year Amazon veteran with a new revealing book comes on to talk to us about the company's culture and its future. All that and more coming up right after this. LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We are joined by Christy Coulter today. She's a 12-year Amazon veteran and the author of Exit Interview, The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career. It's out this week. Definitely encourage you to pick it up. I enjoyed reading it very much. Christy's also someone who's worked at Amazon and definitely one of the more favorite conversations I've had about the company.

So I'm very excited to bring that to you today. And Christy, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being here. So you worked at Amazon for a long time. And you worked in the beginning, you know, when merchandising and retail was a big part of the company. And now it seems like that's almost an afterthought inside Amazon. So, you know, know, on one hand, and that's the book that I wrote about the company is called Always Day One, right? And it's all about how it reinvents and that's a good thing. But on the other hand, it can seem kind of amorphous at time when you keep building new products and new business lines. So I'd love to just get your sentence as to like what you think Amazon is today. Like what,

what is it? Because it does have so many different tentacles and so many different businesses. So like, how would you even, you know, categorize the business? Yeah. It's funny that you said tentacles because I was saying to someone the other day that I almost think of Amazon. on as like an organism at this point more than an organization, you know, that it's like this, it is very amorphous. And it's, it's, I almost think of it as an idea more than any specific business. You know, when I got there, it was, I think already the world's most famous retail store. But now it's just as like the prime offering is harder and harder to categorize. You know, like, sometimes I'm like, what is prime now?

A prime used to just mean two-day shipping, and now it means all kinds of things, but not necessarily two-day shipping. It's hard for me to categorize Amazon, too. I think what they are attempting to do and happen attempting to do is to build an ecosystem that people can live entirely within. Yeah, so when you think about, like, what is Amazon going to do next? Like, when it's building out a retail business, you know, it's obvious. It's like make shipping quicker or, you know, you worked on, for instance,

making the packaging less frustrating. So I'm just trying to get in the mind of Amazon leadership. What do you think they're thinking of when they think of, okay, this should be our next step? Like, how do they even think about that when it is, like you say, an organism? Yeah, I think that. So what I found in my time in Amazon was that Amazon, you know, senior leadership was always like three steps ahead of me, you know. So the drones, for instance. Like I found out about the drones on 60 minutes along with everyone else.

that clearly didn't happen. I think Amazon is moving to a place where I do think they would like to take over, I mean, maybe not intent in so many words, but to be the main delivery source for America, you know, to be the mail system. I see it moving more and more in that kind of ops-focused way. There seems to be less and less attention to the retail side of things. things in terms of customers sort of figuring out what they want and more and more on just, well, we've got one of everything and we'll get something to you very, very quickly.

I mean, when I think about like the airplanes and the whole last mile idea, it's all about Amazon closing that gap between what you want and any, you know, the time it takes you to get it. So if I had to speculate, I mean, that's kind of it. But I've been wrong a lot about Amazon too. You know. Where have you been wrong? Just in everything I didn't see coming. You know, I never would have guessed something like Amazon Go was coming. I'm not necessarily a futuristic thinker. You know, I tend to live like in the here and now. So as someone, I interviewed someone at Amazon once and he said, what will Amazon be doing in 20 years? And I just said, well, here's everything that wasn't happening when I got to Amazon. There was no Kindle. There was no web services. There was

no prime. Streaming video didn't exist. There was no phone. Remember the phone? I said basically all I know is that it's something that I probably haven't thought about and you haven't thought about. Right. I was speculating at one point. When I interviewed for Amazon Go, they couldn't tell me what the job was until I had accepted the job. So I had a whole list of speculating. give the possibilities. And I was like, you know, telemedicine, telemedicine, telesurgery, health insurance, banking. They all in their way seemed equally plausible to me. Right. And it is interesting because a lot of this unpredictable energy came from, of course, Jeff Bezos and the systems that he designed to get ideas up to leadership. And also like, there was like, when he was there, at least,

there seemed to be this world class interest in greenlighting. things that were kind of zany and ambitious. Yeah. And when we talk about the future, okay, logistics might be one thing, but it is interesting. Like if that's the direction, well, they have a person who, okay, started in retail and Andy Jassy running the company, but really grew up in the cloud services business. And you hear about this from Wall Street folks and from everybody watching the company that AWS really is the future. So I have a two-parter for you on this one. First, do you think that era of Amazon inventing the future might actually be tailing off given who they put

in charge? And maybe that's fine for the business. It's a little different from Bezos's vision, but it might be fine. And I'm just kind of curious now that we're getting into Jassy, how would you assess his leadership of the company, you know, already, you know, a year plus in? Yeah, it's interesting. I was thinking the other day that I wondered if Jassie, I mean, I'm being kind of facetious, but sometimes I wonder if he regrets becoming so. CEO of Amazon, just because his tenure has been so, I mean, it's just been crazy, you know, historic circumstances and just everything he's facing. It's probably not the job he thought he was walking into. I don't know Jassy well. I worked much more closely with Jeff Wilkie. I've met

Jassy a few times, has some exposure to him. I think he's super smart. I actually think he has more emotional intelligence than, well, than Jeff did, or at least that he's willing to show, you know, more empathy. But I don't see that spark of almost manic inventiveness in him. You know, he always struck me as more of like a steady hand, you know, somebody who can build, but is not necessarily going to come up with the next crazy idea. And from everything I'm just hearing from friends, it does seem like that era might be tailing off, which makes me a little sad as someone who likes big crazy ideas. But to your point, it might be fine for the company. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. Because all these big tech companies, they go through this

evolution, right? You have, you know, Sundar coming in after the founders at Google played that archetype. Tim Cook has played that archetype at Apple. I mean, you could say that Apple is Apple has definite vulnerabilities, which we just talked about on Friday on the show. But, you know, they're doing well. Google's kind of experiencing the downside of this right now, which is that when you're not like working on those zany ideas, you do open yourself up to disruption. Yeah. And those zany ideas are what keep people, some people at the company. I mean, I stayed at Amazon for so long largely because I realized I had a taste for working on things that sounded crazy. You know, I have friends who stayed at the company and worked and, like, saying things, like, you know,

making retail improvements for 12 years. But I wanted to work on stuff that sounded nuts. And there is a, Amazon draws those people. And if they don't get to do that kind of thing, you know, some of the downsides of working at the company may become more apparent to them. But it could be the smart thing for the company. What I'm concerned about is that I see a lot of attention to brass tax, you know, Andy Jassy Sweet Spot kind of stuff. But like the shopping experience is, in my experience, it's degrading. You know, the product pages are hard to navigate. There's more and more kind of spam advertising everywhere. I've had like the shipping promise change between when I put something in my cart and when I get to checkout. And so if they don't

pay attention to that kind of brass text thing, then I'm worried because customer trusts is you don't get it back, you know. Right. And this is a total aside, not a total aside, but this isn't aside. The FTC just, and we're going to talk about the FTC later, but they have brought some charges against Amazon or some allegations that they made it impossible to cancel Prime. And I canceled Prime just to see what the flow is like. And okay, apparently it's been updated since this chart, these charges came out.

So, okay, that's one thing. but I actually found it quite easy to cancel. And my prime just expired a couple weeks ago. And I'm going to try to see what life is like without it. And it's kind of like for a while there, especially during the pandemic, it seemed like it was impossible to live without prime. Right. But now it's like, okay, you just get your cart above 30 bucks and the shipping is going to be free anyway.

Yeah. And it might take an extra few days to get to you, but not that long. Well, and prime shipping isn't what it used to be. Like, I don't really know anymore. if I'm going to, we'll have something on our doorstep in two hours sometimes, and other times it'll take many days. Yeah, so I read that whole, well, so much of that filing was redacted, the FTC document, like a hilarious amount was redacted, but I read what I could. Here is my take on it as someone who worked there for a long time and worked closely with UX designers. Amazon is,

the rank and file are genuinely customer obsessed. I heard every day people talk about what's best for customers in a completely non-cynical way, really sincere. So the idea that U.S. designers would be engaged in a scheme to make it difficult to cancel Prime would really surprise me. Amazon, in my experience, is also vastly under-resourced when it came to designers and U.X writers. And I found confusing navigation and confusing language all over the website during my tenure that mostly happened because they had, you know, like coders or product managers doing the design and writing because there was nobody else to do it. So my immediate thought when I read that filing was this is just lack of resources and amateurs doing the work and the FTC thinks it's

villainy. And I still think there might be something to that. Now, that said, I also kind of remember there were conversations, apparently, that have been documented by the FTC about leaders saying, you know, we need to make this hard. Yeah. I mean, they called it like project like Death Star or some rocky name or Roach Motel, something like that. That's pretty straightforward. Yeah. We'll see how that goes. But it is interesting to see how like, for instance, just the necessity of prime is shifting. So that's something I think that's worth keeping an eye on. Yeah, yeah. We're going to get to the culture and some of the other deep stuff from your book, but I just wanted to ask this one more question, then we'll dive into it.

So you mentioned you were familiar with Jeff Wilkie. You and I've actually talked about this. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's kind of interesting. He was the head of worldwide consumer. Andy Jassy, you know, gets the CEO job. Wilkie leaves right around the same time. And it's interesting because, you know, Amazon built like crazy to get in front of the pandemic and try to keep up with consumer demand and almost maybe thinking that this was potentially going to be behavior change forever that people would just order online and not really want to go to stores. And it built that capacity, but also overbuilt and sort of left it itself in like a precarious logistics and operational place.

Yeah. And to get out of that, a leader like Wilkie seems like, you know, he would be, who ran retail, seems like he would be the right CEO for Amazon. And yet they went with Jassy. And I'm kind of curious, you know, now looking back, do you think that that was the right choice? It's hard to say. I think I told you at the time. I was like, I don't know.

The circumstances have been so bizarre that in some ways I kind of want to see Jassy lead for another year before I have a sense of it. I will say I was really surprised that Jeff Wolfie was not the successor. In my mind, he was, he would have been perfect. He had all that hardcore logistics and retail knowledge. And he also kind of got the soft stuff in a way that very few Amazon leaders did in my experience. He sort of understood why editorial mattered. He understood why you didn't want to sound stupid when talking to customers. He kind of got all that.

So I was pretty shocked. And I think it's possible. I think it's possible that Jeff picked a CEO for a world. that doesn't really exist anymore. I was also surprised to learn to see the other day that Dave Clark had been in the running. I had somehow, yeah, I had not really thought about that. And so was it Flexport that he just left?

Yeah, he just left Flexport. I have questions for you about that, by the way. But yeah, go ahead. That is fascinating. But so in the stories about Flexport, people said, oh, and it was painted as it really being a contest between Jassy and Clark, not Jassy and Wilkie. And that really, that caught me by surprise.

I never would have thought of Dave Clark as being, you know, like an heir apparent to lead all of Amazon. In my experience, the time I was there, I think he was almost completely in ops and very much like the ops guy. Retail operations, right? And they called him the assassin. Apparently, he would just fire mid-level folks on a whim. And they say he would have... That's common inside Amazon. Yeah.

Yeah. Just like... Maybe that if it's that common in the culture for this guy, Dave Clark, to get that nickname. By the way, I've invited him on the pod. So hopefully he comes on. But you really have to be very enthusiastic about firing people to be called the assassin inside Amazon. The rumors where he would hang out in warehouses and if somebody wasn't working fast enough, he, you know, to his mind, he would just fire them. Which, given everything we know about warehouse expectations now, like, I mean, that's just.

Yeah. I mean, it's not nice. It's an unhappy story. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about, we sort of just got into a bit, but let's talk a little bit about the culture and your experience inside the company. There's so many things I want to talk to you about regarding this. But the first is that I think you pretty clearly lay this out inside your book that, now, obviously, and we're going to talk about some of the positive parts of Amazon culture, but let's start with negative because it does seem like there's, it's a culture. of paranoia in some ways. And that goes all the, you know, everything from the leadership principles, you know, sort of instills that in folks. And it also seems like tenure there and the way that they compensate and the way that they give feedback and the way that they promote or don't promote, this is, it all just breeds this culture of paranoia inside the company.

Can you expand upon that? Does I read that right, like between the lines in your book? Absolutely. I think the company really runs on fear. Everybody I knew at Amazon was afraid, you know, just to one degree or another. And it may not be like day to day. You know, most of your colleagues care about you. Your boss hopefully cares about you. But there was really a sense that the moment you stop producing for Amazon, you're in jeopardy. It's been said of a woman I know it was quoted in the New York Times saying it's where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves. And I was like, yes. Yes, that is correct. It attracts people who are used to just kicking ass at whatever they do and overachieving and then makes it impossible to overachieve. Like, you're never really good enough for Amazon.

And so you're in this environment where you're used to getting positive feedback from people and you're used to doing well. And you're just drowning and you never feel like you can do well enough. And for me, that bread, just trying even harder. for many years. I think that Amazon got a lot out of me because I was so desperate to prove that I was good enough. And I think that is kind of what the company runs on. I don't think Jeff Bezos sat down and said, what we should do is terrify everybody. And that's how we'll become a great company. I think he doesn't mind. I think he was okay with that. But I think that it's actually worked well for Amazon to a point. I do think that at some point that you run out

of people, you know, you run out of people who are willing to do that. The tenure, the average tenure is less than two years. Now, it's hard to disentangle that from the fact that Amazon hires rapidly. So there may be times when it's just that a lot of those people have only been at the company for 18 months. But when I left after 12 years, I was in something like the 98th percentile for tenure because most people just, they don't make it even to the point where they own their entire signing votes. They just leave because it turns them into such like, you know, husks of their former selves. Yeah. I mean, you had some amazing anecdotes that you put in in the book. You were scheduled or you're talking about the concept of

promotion. You go in for the meeting to talk about what's necessary for the promotion after having done seems like a great job. And the person who's on the other side of that conversation tells you to change the world and then come back to them. Yeah. And then there was another case where you're like moving divisions and you go in. One person won't meet with you or is out in a different country or whatever. And then you go in just to say thank you. And then the person doesn't even thank you back, just says, great. Yeah, just like, great. That's crazy.

Okay, bye. Yeah, I mean, there's very little thank you at Amazon. And so the people who do thank you end up seeming like living saints. You know, like I worked for Steve Kessel, who is the SVP, who started Kindle, and you ran Amazon Go. And Steve is a kind man. He's like a decent, kind guy. He doesn't walk on water, but at Amazon, just. being like this a nice man, he had incredible loyalty because people were just so grateful

that somebody was being nice to them. I remember thinking like the worst thing is you just wouldn't want to disappoint Steve because he would just look sort of sad. And so I'd work even harder for him because I just didn't want to let him down. But that's very rare. There's very little like sort of human caring, especially at that level. Why do you think that is? Is it retail or just the retail business or it must be something deeper? It doesn't seem like this stuff happens everywhere. Yeah. I mean, I haven't worked at other tech companies, but there may be a little bit of it everywhere. I think everybody is afraid at Amazon. And I think that even those executives, I'll hear younger people say

sometimes like on Twitter, oh, you know, these fat cat executives who don't actually do any work. I can tell you at Amazon, these people who are worth tens or scores of millions of dollars are working insanely hard. You know, they're emailing at four in the morning and they're working all night. These people are crazily driven. And the ones I got close enough to really talk to them would admit to me like they were scared and felt insecure all the time. And so I think it's like even at the highest levels, who knows, maybe Jeff Bezos feels like this. I don't know. But even at the highest levels, I think people are

just afraid. And that sense of fear just trickles down. There's no way to, I mean, I manage teams, you know, and managed managers. I worked very hard at not letting my fear trickle down. And I'm sure it trickle down anyway. So it's just in the water. I felt that there also wasn't much tact in the communication there. I mean, having read your, you're a few chapters about moments where proposals that you made didn't exactly go well. There was, I think this manager, Mitch, was that his name, sort of addresses you down in the middle of a review of a project proposal. Can you, I mean, it's a pretty harsh scene. So can you exactly, can you share like what happened there? Yeah. I had a proposal to make over the merchandiser role at Amazon. So kind of one of the main retail roles. And I had sold it to this other group of VPs and SVPs, including Jeff Wilkie. And, you know, they had questions and quibbles, of course, but we're on board. Like, great work, do this. I got thanked even. And I had to sell it to this other senior VP. And he read their proposal, kind of pushed back his chair. And we said, oh, so

what do you think? And he said, well, it's stupid. And I said, oh, you know, like I've got my game base on. Can you tell me more? Can you give me more feedback? It's stupid. And, you know, we said, well, we'd love to know more because, you know, like Jeff Wilkie and the other VPs were really into it. They didn't read it. I mean, it was just this kind of like almost childish refusal to acknowledge either that there was any benefit to the proposal or that I was a person.

He just said, well, they lied. They didn't read it if they said they liked it. That was a lie. And eventually he ended up calling me stupid, which to me was really crossing a line. Like, it's bad enough to call a document stupid. But to call a person stupid is like, just avoid that. You know,

that's my business advice. And it was a shocking experience to me because in my mind, the job of a senior leader at a company like that is largely to teach, to teach more junior leaders how to embody the company's values. And to just sit there and say, well, it's stupid and you're stupid. Like, that just doesn't do me any good. And at the end of the meeting, and I got to the point, you know, never cry at work where like I could not speak. I was just like, if I speak, I'm absolutely going to cry. And fortunately, my boss was there, and she stepped in.

And he left to me and just kind of like, thanks, guys, bye. Just cheerfully, as though nothing had happened. And it was a formative event for me. Like, it was just seismic. And I thought, will he read this book and will he remember that? And I don't think he'll remember it. I think if he reads it and recognizes himself, he'll be like, huh, you know, did I do that? because I think for so...

You cried in the bathroom afterwards, right? Oh, God, yeah. I mean, I did a lot of crying bathrooms and cars at Amazon, but I did. I did. I was, it was maybe the hardest I cried in my adult life, which is a little pathetic because it's just a job, you know, but my sense of self-worth was so caught up in that job, and I really felt like this is it. This is my doom.

I, you know, at my worst moments at Amazon, I didn't leave because I genuinely believed I would be unemployable in the outside world. I was absolutely convinced that no one would give me a job because I was just that bad. And that, you know, looking back, I'm like, but I was doing really well. I mean, Amazon doesn't keep people around in senior roles for 12 years who aren't, they aren't happy with. but I didn't see it. And it was at a lot of it's because of moments like that. Yeah. By the way, I don't think it's pathetic.

I mean, it's a totally human and natural reaction there. Yeah. I mean, crying is a biological reaction to emotion. And what I've realized about myself, and I think this is true for a lot of women, when I get angry, often my default response is to cry versus really expressing the anger in a different way. And so, yeah, I think it's. totally natural. You mentioned that you thought that you'd be unemployable because, you know, companies had, for instance, like said, we're not bringing Amazon people in because they kind of came

in hardened and, okay, I have their, I've written a couple notes down about some of these companies. So, for instance, Nordstrom would not hire Amazon people because they had brought some people in and just said, nope, that won't work. And you mentioned that Starbucks even tried to deprogram Amazonians. Why do you think Amazonians can't succeed elsewhere? Or there's that notion. Clearly, something's weird about it. Yeah, yeah. With Starbucks, there was this rumor that they actually had a deprogramming process for Amazonians. Starbucks was known as a really consensus-driven culture, and people at Amazon would speak about that with incredible contempt. Like, well, they rely on consensus. And I actually laid in my career at Amazon Go, we ended up hiring a bunch of people

from Starbucks corporate because they knew how to run physical food stores. And they were great. I mean, they absolutely were more consensus driven than we were. But they were also really nice to work with and really smart and really competent. So it was a good reminder that like, oh, no, this can be very good. Nordstrom hired, I mean, I've noticed. I mean, I've noticed, a bunch of people who went to Nordstrom. And there was definitely a sense that they had hired several product managers who just came in like bowls in a China shop. You know, like, this is what we're going to do now. Amazon's here and save you. And Nordstrom is a, you know, it's a local company. It's a family run company. I think they were public and they went private again. And it's very much

like a genteel place that treats its employees well. But it's a family company. And they did not want that. And so I remember taking a headhunter call once, and I talked to Nordstrom about a role that wasn't right for me, but I went out of my way to sort of say, to just address that, to say, I know there's rumors about Amazon people. And I just want to let you know that I'm not like that. You can talk to people I've worked with. Like, I'm actually, you know, I'm direct, but I'm pleasant to work with. And the headhunter said, you know, I actually really appreciate you bringing that up because it's a concern. And it makes us reluctant. to hire Amazonians. I think that people, when they bring in Amazonians, they often do it because

they do want some of that Amazon DNA in their company. But it doesn't mean they want to be like waterboarded with it. You know, you just arrive and change everything. It's more like, take some time, read the room. It's a very particular way of working inside Amazon. And I'm curious, I mean, we won't speculate too much, but we mentioned the Dave Clark. thing at Flexport again. He's the assassin inside Amazon retail. He goes over to run Flexports, logistics business. We've had Ryan Peterson on the show, the now returning CEO, the boomeranging CEO, if you will. And Clark brings in a lot of Amazon people. And you can even see from the comments underneath some of Ryan Peterson's Twitter posts and posts elsewhere that it was not a pleasant

experience for a lot of the folks inside Flexport. So I am curious. I am curious. like what you're and there was plenty of Amazon folks that came along with Clark. So I'm curious like what you're, you know, from the outside. What's your perspective on why that potentially didn't work out? Yeah. The whole thing was fascinating. Um, a friend of mine was telling me the other day that he has heard there's actually several hundred ex-Amazon people in Flexport, you know, here and there. Um, I was really surprised not so much that Dave would go because I think I've seen a lot of Amazon people. leave Amazon, go elsewhere, and then either flame out or just not love it and leave of their own accord. A lot of, you know, jumping around, a lot of boomeranging back to Amazon. What really surprised me was that they let so many of his people go with him. You know, I worked with Nader Kabani back when he was in Kindle. I thought Nader was lovely. I loved working with him. He was like an actual gentleman, which is an unusual thing at Amazon. And he was at Flexport also.

He was at Flexport. Yeah, I don't know. Just let go. Just let go. Yeah, he was one of like the, Darcy Henry, who was, I think, head of HR at Flexport was just let go. So some people that, you know, I didn't know them super well, but good people, like people that I certainly did not find unpleasant to work with.

So that kind of like bloodletting really surprised me. And it felt like, oh, it's not just Dave that they're getting rid of because Ryan Peterson wants to come back. They're trying to get rid of a whole vibe. That was my thought, was like, they just want this Amazon vibe out of there. And that to me was fascinating, because I'm assuming that, you know, any huge ops company is not like a warm and fuzzy place. I mean, it's not Nordstrom. I would assume they're pretty direct and want to begin with. Right, right, right. So I thought, wow, what the hell was going on, that it was that bad? And, yeah, I saw some commentary on Twitter that was basically like, oh, thank God, our nightmare is over.

Yeah, I'm very, very curious to know more. I've been trying to find out more. I was never so close to the upside that I have like a million people I can call up and ask. But call me people if you've gotten me turn on that. Maybe that's book number three for you. Christy Coulter is here with us. Her book is Exit Interview, The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career.

Despite what we spoke about in this first half, she still stayed 12 years. It's parts of the culture that she admires. Some parts of the culture that I admire as well. We'll talk about it right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news,

and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Christy Coulter. The author of Exit Interview, The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, came out this week. I just finished reading it.

I enjoyed it very much. Christy, let's talk about why you, I mean, you stayed. So, you know, okay, you stayed to show, I mean, you said in the first half a little, you gave us a breadcrumb, right? Okay, you wanted to show that you were capable of, you know, surviving and thriving in that culture. Clearly you were. You stayed for longer than, you know, 98% of the other employees when you were there.

But, like, I'm just hearing some of these stories and I read some of these stories in the book and, like, I'm just thinking, man, if I'm like in a big meeting with an executive and the person turns to me and calls me stupid. I'm like giving my two weeks notice right there and then. So, so what made you stay? What good did you see inside Amazon's culture that that you appreciated? Yeah. I think the biggest reason I say, well, first of all, the money cannot be overstated. Like I came from a small town in the, you know, Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I was making, you know, like $60,000 a year and living quite well on it. I end up in Seattle. The stock price is going nuts. I was I was overpaid for the market for,

a lot of my time in Amazon. But, you know, it's not, it's not only money. I was never bored a day in my life at Amazon. And I think that's really what it comes down to. I had gotten, I had a very nice, cozy, safe job in Michigan that I was desperately bored at. I couldn't find new things for myself to do. I kept trying to get to find a new role and the company wasn't big enough to accommodate it. Amazon would push me as far as I wanted to be pushed. I got to write my own job descriptions at Amazon a couple of times. And when I would hit the wall in one area, you know, just burn out or get called stupid by my SVP and decide to go, there'd be something new. You know, I got to go work in publishing at a high level. I got to work on Amazon Go.

You don't just find this everywhere you look. And I found that exhilarating. I mean, publishing, which is an industry I know something about, generally you have to start when you're 21. You know, you start as an editorial assistant. You have six roommates. I was 41 when I got a job of running a translation imprint at Amazon. No one in the publishing world would have done that for me, would have trusted me with that kind of role, probably for some good reasons, you know, because I didn't have the domain knowledge. But what Amazon taught me was that if you were a critical thinker, if you knew how to communicate, and if you were willing to navigate a lot of ambiguity, your transferable skills can take you further than you think. So I was able to do these crazy things,

and they were well funded. I remember coming home and my husband, who's in startup land, would talk about a friend's startup going under. And I would say, well, I don't understand. Why don't they just get more funding? And look at me, like, not everybody has Uncle Jen. you know, just writing text because he believes in your project. But, but we did. You know, he would just say, yeah, I mean, change some things or do better, but here's, here's another $20 million. And that's like a drug. I mean, that kind of risk-taking and excitement. You know, I also have an addictive personality. I write about the alcoholism that ran in parallel to my Amazon career. And I do think it touched something in me. Like, there's something that,

those two things that's looking in common, that wanting those dopamine hits of doing crazy, exciting things and wanting to drink a lot, you know, that neurologically, there's some common ground. Amazon is also a place where I was never the smartest person in the room. I don't want to be the smartest person in any room. Like, I want someone there who I am learning from, who I'm a little bit in awe of. And I got that for 12 years. And that is really hard to come by in the world. This is one of the things that I,

when I talk about Amazon culture and the things that I think are interesting in it, like one of the ways that I look at it is just like the mazel hierarchy of needs or like subsistences at the bottom and self-actualization is at the top, like the highest level of need that you can satisfy, you know, the top level of that pyramid is like basically creating things and making the most of yourself. And I think that out of all the companies, all the big tech companies that I cover, Amazon has people closest to the point of invention more than any other company. And that seems to me to be really an exhilarating thing. Yeah.

And it's absolutely true. And especially early on in my time, like when I worked, I worked on frustration-free packaging just at the launch point. Like I literally came in two weeks before it launched and took over the customer experience. But we were, you know, we made this video to show how it works. that I think we got $200 for a rental video camera. And as an employee taped it, we found a couple of employees who didn't mind being on camera to be the actors in it.

And who knows how many tens of millions of people watched that video. So at that time, we were agile enough, but also poor, not poor, but frugal enough, that you could be really close to the way, you know, you were like in the room where it happened. just by being there. I remember Jeff Wilkie saying in a meeting around that time, you know, this ship is going to get to the point where it's too big to turn around quickly. And we need to be prepared for that day. And I remember thinking like, oh, I don't know.

We still seem pretty agile. And I've since realized, like, Jeff Wolfe is usually right. And like, of course he was right. You know, and that ship, even in my time, got to the point where, you know, to get the VP review you needed to move. forward, you'd have to reschedule a meeting six times and it could get pushed out weeks and everything slowed down. And there were many more layers. And, you know, it's not the kind of scrappy place it once was. But I think that element is still there in smaller ways. And I think it's really thrilling for people who want that kind of thrill. What are some good operational things that happen at Amazon that other companies could put into play? I think the and on cord. Do you know

about that. So the Andon chord, I taught Amazon leaders for a while, and I watched a speech, Jeff Bezos introducing this about 50 times. So it's playing in my head right now. The Antoine Chord came from the Toyota Silk Factory in Japan before Toyota was an auto manufacturer. And essentially, it means anyone in customer service can pull this fake cord that stops a product from being sold. the famous example Jeff used was there was the CS rep who kept noticing that this table would get returned over and over again because it was being scratched. It was arriving scratched. And he asked her like, what do you think is going on? And she was like, oh, the packaging's terrible. And he was like, wait a second, we need to empower her to say something. So they invented this thing

called the Andon cord where she could actually say, I'm taking this down from the detail page. we're going to make it not orderable until we find out what's going on. I think that's brilliant. And everyone dreaded when it happened. I worked in DVD retail for a while, and it would get pulled because the region coding was wrong or something. But your managers are running around freaking out because the DVD is not orderable. But we're making sure that when customers do order, they're getting what they want,

which is the most important thing. so that was that was one thing i thought was brilliant um jeff also instilled this notion of having tenants for a project um so you've probably heard about this before so basically a set of like five to ten like this we believe principles about how we will approach this those are a huge pain in the ass to come up with and you can spend weeks arguing about them but once they're set then you know which way you're going. And when something, when you reach a fork in the road and you're, you don't agree on what to do, you go back to the tenants. And I think, I just think that's brilliant. I think that I'd love to see more companies think harder at the outset about what something

should be like rather than just dive in and start building. And it's like how we should approach this. Like, this is what the product will look like. Or if we hit a fork in the road, we will opt for X-way or what exactly are these things? Yeah, it could be like this is what the product will look like, or it could be like if we ever have to decide between speed and flexibility, we will opt for speed. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, you decide in advance. Amazon also does these internal, what they call a working backwards document, which is

an internal press release and FAQ. That's basically you write the press release, you want to be able to share with the world someday. And you write it and write it and write it until you all agree that this thing you want to build is actually solving the right customer problem. I have spent months having internal press releases reviewed before we all agree that this is what we want to build. And again, it's a huge investment up front. It can drive you crazy. Junior people are just in shock when they go through this for the first time or new people because it's so unusual. But it really forces thinking up front, which saves you thinking downstream. And then the last thing I would say is

having people read written documents in a meeting rather than having a PowerPoint culture is great. It's a ton of work. I do think it gets abused some, but the first half of every meeting is everyone sitting there and reading the same words and same paper. And so you're all on the same page. Nobody's getting ahead of themselves. No one's calling out something about that you know is on slide 10, but you're on slide three now. I think it's great. And I understand why more companies don't do it because it's a huge time suck. But I believe in it. I love how when you recounted like being in meetings with Jeff Basis and he's reviewing these documents. By the way, I think the document is cool because just you can, like, bring it to the highest level of the company and they can read it and be caught up and they don't need to spend multiple meetings getting filled in.

But like the mark of success of a page is when Bezos reads it and like has no comments. It's like page two, no comments. All right, nailed that. Right. That's a victory. You're like, yes, he had nothing to say because he's not going to be like, I think page two is great. You just move on. Yeah.

So this is a heretical question to ask about Amazon, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Well, anyway, we're not beholden to them. I like heretical questions. So does Amazon. Yeah. Is the focus on the customer actually a good thing? I mean, the obsessive focus. Because what it's done, and Amazon has been sort of a forerunner of this.

It's helped create this convenience economy that we have. And in some ways, it's so freaking cool. Like, if you're, you know, the ability to press order and get something like within a couple hours is amazing. But, you know, it just, it also seems like people have taken it for granted. And we've just set such a high standard for customer service and, you know, customer experience that like, you know, it's not like people are any happier. They just expect a higher level of things. Right.

And, you know, I was speaking with someone last week who mentioned that they, that people have become fragile because now something goes a tiny bit not their way and they absolutely lose their shit, which he's totally right about. So do you think, what do you think about just this, you know, Amazon and societies, you know, this insane focus on customer experiences, is it actually helping us get anywhere? That's a really good question. I do think, even in my own life, like if something shows up a day late from Amazon,

I am mad to a degree that is just not proportional, you know? Yeah. I mean, I'm not immune from this either. Right. I'm just like, what is happening, you know? And I'm like, get over it. It's not that important. I thought they had robots in that warehouse.

What the hell? Right. Like, what are they doing? And then I think about the warehouses that I'm. like how don't don't get mad you know it's going to make someone's life measurably worse if you're mad um i do think that we just and and part of this i mean yeah it's it's e-commerce in general but especially amazon you're right that our expectations are so high and we don't see the miracle of it you know it's i don't often stop to think this dot to my i needed a whisk and i ordered it

and it's on my doorstep a day later it's kind of like with with air travel it's it's a miracle that we can get on a plane and fly across the world. But, like, I don't think about that when I'm on the plane. I'm usually just, like, kind of disgruntled and wanting to get out of this tube. And I do think that Amazon has had something to do with that, as well as, like, the very, you know, liberal sort of return policies. I mean, they do have their limits. There are people who are on, like, the bad list. But, you know, I think.

Really? Wait, there's a blacklist if you return stuff too much. There's definitely like you get flagged and there's like, I think there's special people who review things. And I don't know with what the limit is. But yeah, absolutely. Because I'm sure there's people who do just crazy things with returns. But yeah, I do think. And I think we trust, we've gotten to trust Amazon almost too much. Like I don't trust Amazon for as many products as I used to. It used to be that only like high end beauty products I would avoid because I was like, I don't want to spend this if I'm not getting the active. ingredients. But now in the last couple of years, there's been enough like hollabaloo over getting clearly substandard products that aren't as represented. I think that, you know, there's a flood of succumbing in from China that's been of concern. And I'm so used to being, and we're also used to be able to trust that what we think we're getting from Amazon is what's going to arrive, that I think it's coming back to bite them kind of hard because we feel betrayed. in a way that's sort of irrational.

But wait a minute, why didn't it keep me safe from this fraudulent product? You know, they lost the thought. Yeah, I think it's kind of like a learned helplessness situation where like companies are educating people to, yeah, anyway, all of us to be like this. It's very interesting. What's interesting is from the inside, we were so, you know, from the inside you also are hearing abuse all the time, especially if you have one foot in the literary. world, which I always did. It was, you know, Amazon is, they just want to control the flow of

information in the world and, you know, like really malevolent fantasies. And so when we built Amazon Go, my mind was full of every vicious fear people could have. You know, like, what if they poison our food? Amazon doesn't want us to cook at home anymore. And we prepared for all these eventualities. I mean, I wrote FAQs for the worst scenarios. None of it came to pass. It was very easy to forget that customers have shopped in stores before. They are used to having cameras in stores. They are used to stores having security. So none of these things I thought they'd be angry about turned out to be true. So it kind of works both ways, you know. Go is a pretty amazing product. I guess you call it a product that Amazon offers. This just walk out shopping where you can

like pick what you want off the shelves, walk out. It knows exactly what you took. But Amazon's also been shutting some go stores. I definitely wanted to talk to you about this because this was actually a main part of the Amazon chapter in my book, just the creation of Go. It's very fascinating. And they have, it seems like they're moving from like a please come shop at our Just Walkout store with this technology to licensing that technology and putting it

into place inside other Amazon stores like Whole Foods. So I'm kind of curious, can you give us like a quick, update on the state of Go and where we can expect that to go? Yeah, that was always the vision. So when I worked on Go, it was just Amazon branded convenience stores. It wasn't even in Amazon Fresh stores at the time. It was just Amazon Go stores. And that at the time was the short-term focus.

It was like, we want to get these into airports. We want to get them into hotel lobbies. It was about making a store that you could almost just drop in a prefab store. But the idea was always that, yeah, eventually you want people to be able to go to Bloomingdale's and buy jeans this way, bookstores, Amazon Books, which of course no longer exists, you know, anything you want. The trick at the time was that the technology was very dependent on uniformity. So a can of soup, easy, you know, the shelf with the shelves. But like an apple, you would have to figure out, are we doing this by weight? for a while we thought we'd have to have human intervention for fresh produce. I was at an

Amazon fresh grocery store a few weeks ago. I'd actually never been to one before, and they have seen to figure that out. They had the produce was packaged, kind of like it is at Trader Joe's, and I guess they've just figured out, even if these apples way different things, we're going to charge you the same. Either that or they figured out some scale technology that's very sophisticated. So, it seems like they are now able to offer this much more broadly, which as someone who doesn't love standing in line, like, I'm psyched. I'm into it. It's awesome.

Yeah. It's pretty awesome. Okay. Last question for you. Wouldn't be an Amazon podcast if we didn't ask Jeff Bezos question. What do you think about the evolution of Jeff Bezos? You have some, you know, very interesting interactions with him in the book and including noting towards the end of the book that the Jeff Bezos.

that you met early on in your tenure had become just like super jacked arms and head bigger than he was when you'd first met him and now he has, you know, this big yacht with his partner carved into the front of it. So tell me a little bit from like your perspective, like, how do you see the evolution of Bezos? And does he come back ever? Is he boomerang? Yeah, it's fascinating. Like when I met Jeff, you know, he was just this guy and he would come and he ate Pirates booty a lot, you know, that like freeze-dried low-carb cheese thing. And he's wearing his khakis and everything. And I remember, so Jeff has these people called Shadows who are basically his technical advisors. It's you follow him around and basically act as his second brain. And there was a guy who always was with Jeff in early meetings I had with him. And he never talked. He just sat there. And I remember thinking, I bet that's his bodyguard, you know, because the guy was kind of muscular, and I was like, that's got to be his bodyguard. And like, no, he didn't have bodyguards of meetings at that time. It was this guy named Jim Atkins, who was I think probably a senior VP in retail now, and he was Jeff Shadow. By the time I left Amazon, Jeff definitely had, there weren't bodyguards in the room with him, but there were men sort of hovering around, you know, in the hallways outside. lots more security. I mean, he has four children. I have to assume they faced incredible risks, you know, in terms of kidnapping and things like that. He was super checked. He acted the same. It's very disarming because he kind of is a goofy guy. He's really smart. To me, it was always quite pleasant. But he's terrifying. I mean, it's, it's terrifying to be in the room with somebody. with that much power and that much money.

And you can never stop thinking this person could, he can do anything you want. I mean, he virtually lives beyond the law. If you think about how we treat oligarchs in this society, will he boomerang back? Man, I thought about that the other day for the first time when I was thinking about how beleaguered the company seems these days. You know, I'm in Seattle, so I hear all the muttering about returning to office

and how much people hated and the traffic is awful now. And a friend said it's not just day two at Amazon, it's day five, which is brutal. And this is a friend who's been there for 15 years. I wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibility. I, he's still on the board. He's still on the board, of course. I could see him coming back. I don't think it's going to be like a Ryan Peterson scenario where he comes back and it's like, get out of here, Andy Jassy, and take your team with you. But I can absolutely see him deciding he wants to come back and set some things right. You know, I think he associates it strongly enough with his legacy that he, and he's not, he's patient, but he's not infinitely patient. Um, I, I, I, I,

But he was surprised. But yeah, I don't know. Like the yacht thing is just hilarious to me because he, Jeff, when people talk about stealth wealth, like that was always Jeff. Like you knew he had an ungodly amount of money, but he looked normal. Right. That's over. I'm so embarrassed because I have a line in my book talking about how like Bezos views life

as, you know, basically self-actualizing and not writing around in a yacht. And then basically book comes out shortly afterwards. which gets the yacht. Like a yacht that doesn't fit under Bridgett. It's like such a big yacht. I'm absolutely fascinated by all of that. It's funny when his whole scandal happened with the sexting and the nude pictures or whatever, I honestly just thought it was kind of sweet.

I mean, first of all, as far as sexting goes, like that was pretty mild. And it was just, I was like, this is very humanizing. This guy's in love. So I had a very strange reaction to it. I wasn't, I wasn't, like, horrified. I just thought, oh, I wish I'd seen, not literally seen more of that, but, but more of this kind of, this guy. Where are we going with this? Yeah, exactly.

This is drifting. Just more of this kind of like, like, one of the pictures is just him and a suit. Like, oh, he set a picture of himself in a suit to the woman he loves. I was like, this is, he's human. This is kind of sweet. I don't know. I wish I had seen more. I wish Amazon had had room for more of that died,

for all of us to be that kind of person when I was there. The book is Exit Interview, The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career. You can pick it up in bookstores and on Amazon today. Christy Coulter, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Great conversation. Thank you, everybody, for listening. You heard a lot about Christy's time inside the company here.

If you pick up the book, you can hear about when she quits. So it's worth reading to the end. to get to that. Thanks everybody for listening. Thank you, Nick Oatney, for handling the audio. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. We'll be back on Friday with Ron John Roy. We're going to be talking about all the week's news, including the iPhone 15 launch and a little bit more on the Flexport reorganization and return of Ryan Peterson. So more to come on that. I know Ranjan has been eagerly waiting to talk about this, and I can't wait to discuss it with him. Thanks again. And we'll see you.

next time on big technology podcasts.