My Prime Time To Leave Amazon
About three and a half years ago I was on the phone with Eric Nakagawa, who has long been a mentor of mine.
I had recently come back from cervical surgery and was pondering life. Graphicly had ended about ten months prior, and while not expected, the two months of rest and recovery from spinal surgery was pretty welcome.
“If I want to stay in the Land of Entrepreneurs, I really only have 4 choices:
I can start something;
I can join something;
I can invest in something(s); or
I can find a big company that has a strong affiliation with entrepreneurs.”
“Fair enough. What do you want to do?” Eric asked.
I have been an entrepreneur since I was 9 years old. I often joke that I am farmer because I grew up on the Farm (literally, my dad worked at Stanford for much of my life). Entrepreneurship is all I know.
But this time it was different. My brain and body just refused to allow me to consider starting something.
“Of the four, I have never worked at a big company.”
Big companies have always been the enemy of the entrepreneur. The Big Bad. The thing we were working to destroy, end, disrupt.
But never having spent significant time at one how could I understand the enemy if I never truly knew it?
Eric proceeded to introduce me to a hiring manager at AWS, where they had a team of founders and ex-VCs that spent time with accelerators and venture capital firms. A few days later I started a new gig.
Working at Amazon has been wonderful.
When I started there were 150,000 employees. I think we are close to breaking 600,000 now. What AWS was doing in annual revenue is now beaten quarterly and not slowing down.
Alexa hadn’t even launched. No Amazon Studios, really. Prime was just two-day shipping. I think we had just launched a phone.
I never understood innovation at scale until I worked at Amazon.
Over the years, I worked with hundreds of founders, and watched many of them go from ideas to millionaires, start new companies, and even more become the next wave of investors and mentors. Now some are coworkers (Hi Matt Sandler!).
Everything I wanted to learn about big companies I learned in triplicate.
I learned in interview loops and working backwards documents. I learned in meetings with leadership and in every engagement with a product leader.
Did I learn everything? No, but I learned what matters most:
Big companies are not the enemy.
They strive for innovation and speed much like startups do. They have challenges and barriers much like startups do. They are thinkers and doers and full of passion much like startups.
And that leads to what’s next for me.
I am going to explore ways to drive real change at the nexus of corporate innovation, startup innovation and civic innovation.
Entrepreneurship will change the world, but it can’t in a vacuum.
I want to do it in the Pacific Northwest. It’s beautiful here and filled with some of the most clever, insightful, and purposeful people I have ever met. What is missing is the story telling mechanisms that exist in Silicon Valley and (much more naturally) in Los Angeles and New York.
I want people to experience what I have experienced.
At Amazon, I spent every waking minute thinking about ways to help companies and founders grow (not “growth”). Mostly as an accelerant; sometimes in non-conventional ways; always with the founder in mind.
I will continue that work.
I will create ways for first time founders to learn from my (and so many founders like me) mistakes; and for second-time founders to not repeat the mistakes of the past.
I have spent the majority of my life in Startup Land. It’s the world that I know and love, and my stint at Amazon has given me a stronger skill set (and knowledge base) to be a positive member of our world, and I loved every minute working and every Amazonian that experience connected with me.
What am I going to do next?
I’m going to do good well.