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Ethan Evans

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2024-01-14
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2024-01-14
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  1. “Thank you, Linny. And I got to say, you are very good at this. You're so smooth. And you just do a great job interviewing. It's been really been a pleasure.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I focus on two topics career development. So, how do you grow in your career, the whole magic loop, and how do you attain promotion or attain a new role of raise if that's your goal? And then leadership specifically. I teach a course that's been very popular called Stuck at Senior Manager Breaking Through to Executive, which is how to get out of that sort of stuck. I'm working really hard. I'm pretty good. I'm managing 25 or 50 people, but how do I get to the big chair? How do I get to the division level leadership? And what do I need to change? It's that whole what got you here won't get you there. And I love to see people succeed at that. You know, people write me back and say, I did get a job. I did get promoted. I did get a raise. And that's my fulfillment.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So, the best place to find me online, I do all my writing on LinkedIn. It's where the professional community is. So Ethan Emmons on LinkedIn, my actual handle there is Ethan Evans VP from my history as a vice president. That's the best place to find me. I do have a substack newsletter. I do teach through the Maven platform, but all of those are linked off LinkedIn. And really, how readers help me? They comment on what I write because I miss things. I am one person's perspective. And so I actually am a process where I take in all the comments people write, all the different perspectives, all the different exceptions or special cases or examples. And that's how I improved my own thinking is I read every comment and think, okay, what did I miss? What could I have said better? How can I incorporate this if I ever talk about this again”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'll get you on the next one. I think I would get on anyone I was offered because of the chance. Unlike Jeff, who claims he wasn't scared, I would probably be really terrified, at least at liftoff, right? While you're up there, it's great. Everything either goes wrong going up or coming down is not the middle.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, I'm old enough that I remember when the Challenger space shuttle exploded. And I said, you know, I would get on the next one. And I said, they're never going to be more careful than the next one.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, I, of course, saw his interview where he talked about how he thought about the safety and the conversation he had to have with his mother. I would like to go to space. I'm not willing to pay what I think the current tickets are. But yeah, I would take the risk. So, you know, what's the risk of that ride? One in 100, 1 in 50, even more that you won't come back. I would probably take the gamble.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I happen to be a Christian, and the motto that I think about the most is to whom much has been given from him much will be required. And so I think a lot about what is my social responsibility, what, you know, I've been very lucky. I grew up on a farm in Ohio. Now, I wasn't a farm boy. My father was a chemist. But I grew up, you know, in like upper middle class settings and I've ended up being extremely successful, able to retire from my job at 50 to kind of coach and teach. What do I owe to pay forward? So those words are, you know, obviously ancient spiritual texts, but they're the ones I take away and think the most about what's my responsibility.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It's silly. But my favorite product that I've discovered recently is the Chuck It, which you used to whip a ball for your dog like a quarter mile. It basically extends your arm Just fine to send a ball soaring like way further than you could ever throw it. And you feel like, wow, look at me. Like I'm a major league pitcher. It's because I have this three foot lever arm and I understand physics. You know, if we look at tech products, there's so many I love. It's too easy to say chat GPT and stuff, so I won't go there.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think my favorite interview question is tell me about a time where you needed to disagree with your management, where you needed to stand up or fight for a position against higher leadership or people in power. Because I think that's really hard to do. I'm normally interviewing leaders. And I think, you know, having a bunch of people who just say yes isn't helpful. You need people who have, you know, as you said, have back.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, at one point, my wife and I were watching it. We would start betting. So the episode is starting. How many people will die in this episode? This ranch in Montana, but yet somehow, you know, they're always killing people. How does this work?”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So, I grew up on a farm, and so all the tailor Sheridan, you know, 1923 and Yellowstone, and all of those series, we've watched everything he's put out, you know, we do kind of laugh like, wow, are you familiar with Yellowstone at all? Absolutely.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And Naval Rabicon is an angel investor responsible for Angel's List. But what I love about that book is he has a recipe. He really boils down how to be successful while loving what you do. And he says, no one can be a better version of you. Don't try to copy me and be, oh, I'm going to be like Ethan or I'm going to be like Linnie. Instead, figure out what you uniquely do best that you love because no one can copy you being you. And that's your defensible sort of career value. And I really like that mental mom.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “My second book, my second most recommended book is Leadership and Self-Deception, much less known than decisive, a little bit harder to approach. It's by a group, a research group called the Arbinger Institute. And it's about how to, the self-deception is we cause a lot of our interpersonal problems while blaming them on others. And it walks through how are you part of the problem you're having with somebody else and what can you do about it? The third and final book was recently brought to me by someone I work with that you know Jason Yum. That book is the almanac of Naval Ravicon.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Two or three books. My number one recommendation is a book called Decisive. It's by Chippin Dan Heath, and it's about the science of making better decisions. The reason I recommend it so much is it will make your career better because leaders are decision makers, but also your personal life. So I apply it at least as much in my personal life as I do in my professional life”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “No, I really enjoyed this conversation. You know, I could talk about careers forever. And I love doing that. But I think we've covered a ton today that really helped people. So I'm good. Let's hit the lightning round.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think too much of the world is contract driven. And we've lost the idea of your word being your bond and like you can actually trust me to follow through on my commitments. And I'm a contrarian there. I realize I will occasionally get burnt. Someone will behave in a way, you know, they'll let me down. But I think when we're always suspicious of people, that's a high cost. And the other place I'm contrarian is just doing business on faith.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “With working from home, we've only been doing that for a few years since the pandemic began. And at all since the internet started 20 years ago, which one is likely to have more opportunity for improvement? There's so many things we haven't explored with remote work. And I think the people who say, oh, you know, back to the office, it's because we know it works. Well, we know what it is, but I have so much more faith in the opportunity to improve the remote experience. And so I think long term, it's going to try up. The one other place where I'm a huge contrarian is doing business on a handshake. I understand companies need lawyers and, you know, I have an attorney for certain things. But, you know, I coach people. Most of the people I coach, there's no NDA in place. There's no contract in place. They pay me through PayPal and I do good coaching for them.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I think a place where I'm currently very contrarian is the return to office movement. You know, many leaders at my level appear or publicly favor the need to get back into the office potentially full time. And I'm contrarian on this because of innovation. Specifically, I looked it up. You can check my facts on Wikipedia. The first purpose-built office, the first building ever built to be an office was built in 1726 in London. And so we're about 300 years into learning how to use offices well. And what that means is offices aren't going to get much better. Like, what's the last major thing you can think of that got better in offices? You might say, well, open offices, but a lot of people say that's not even a good idea. These big rows of desks and loud pits.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “You've got to be very open and always be questioning. Yes, I think I'm right, but what's the new evidence? What am I learning? What's changing? And in fact, it also says they seek diverse perspectives. And that was a way of getting at what's called DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. That's a subtle nod towards if everyone in the room is a 50-year-old white man, you may not really be making the right overall decision for Amazon's customer base. You may be making the one for like 50-year-old white suburban Seattle lights, right? And so it's just some of these. Every word in those has been studied as an individual word inside the company.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And that one's been rewritten to carefully say, you know, it's always interesting what is the history of the edits, which you wish you could see the edit history on these That one got modified to say leaders, something about leaders work to actively work to disconfirm their beliefs. And the key there is it was trying to get at the idea that”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah. I mean, for a bunch of directors to kind of critique the work of people two levels higher. He wanted it, but then he's sort of naturally resistant to it if we're kind of, you know, poking at his baby.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “When we challenge Jeff Wilkie was a strong opinionated leader who didn't necessarily always love being challenged. And so when we first told him, like, well, we think you're missing ownership. He was like, you know, like you're saying that the whole S team can't get its leadership principles right. I mean, it wasn't exactly that way, but he was very much like, well, is this really necessary? Why do you think it's necessary? And his challenge to us to write it was kind of framed as like, well, if you're so sure it's good, show us, right? And so, you know, but again, I'm stubborn and I'm like, all right, let's write it. And we did.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, you know, I wouldn't even claim credit for it, except I kept a copy of the email. That says even thinks it should say blah, like I have the written proof because it's not about the credit. I'm very happy and proud that those words were kept. But in Amazon, I doubt if Jeff knows I wrote those words. You know, it's not like I've ever told him, like, hey, do you know you kept my words? Like, that's not appropriate. It's just a fun anecdote. And it does show, I guess something people can learn from that though. You can influence way up in a company if your ideas are good, you know, and also.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I saw that part of the interview and I thought, wow, you know, that's exactly right. Because, again, Rockets blow up and they have people on them. Like, you've got to get it right. You also have to keep moving because there's always one more thing you can safety test. So, how do you balance it?”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I'm a huge proponent in bias for action. Bias for action says speed matters in business and many decisions are reversible. And so it's important to go faster. And I think people don't understand that in a competitive environment, being right is good, but being quick is necessary because if there are 10 startups working on an idea, some of them will gamble and they'll make bad gambles and they'll go out of business. But some of them will gamble and make an early bet and be right. And if you're not moving quickly, you'll be beaten by the people who maybe got lucky. And so you've got to have a process that values speed, values, what can we do today? What can we commit to today? So I really like bias reaction. Now that is what got me in trouble with Jeff, right? I was willing to gamble. So it has to be in balance. But that's my other favorite.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I propose this specific language as a part of it, and we sent off this draft, and months go by, we hear nothing, and then one day the leadership principles are announced. And ownership is back in. It's been modified, but an owner never says that's not my job is a part of the leadership principle. And it's remained to this day. And what I love about that is it's probably the most because Amazon has one and a half million employees who live by these leadership principles, it's probably the most impactful thing I've ever written.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “And we all sat around and talked that said, Where's ownership? Ownership is missing. So we told him, he said, Look, ownership is missing. We think it should be there. And he said, well, why don't you propose a draft? And so about a half dozen of us sat around and roughed out a draft of how we felt ownership should be written. And I propose these six words, which are an owner never says that's not my job. Maybe that's seven words.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Amazon is now kind of on its fourth version in my mind. Maybe there's more, but its fourth major revision of its leadership principles over its 25 plus year history. And when it was going from version one to version two, Jeff and his leadership team sat down together. And actually in version one, there were three different lists. There were like leadership principles and core values and something else they don't remember. And they were like, three lists is stupid. Let's make one list. Well, ownership, the term had been a part of one of those lists, but when they merged everything, they took it out. And this guy, Jeff Wilkie, I mentioned, the number two and the leader of retail, he brought a bunch of us, a bunch of his directors. He brought the proposed list to us in a meeting and said, hey, this is the proposed new version. Do you have any comment?”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Because we lost a good person and he probably felt very bad about it. And, you know, we all feel bad when we make mistakes. That can't be prevented. That I really regret.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And so he left. And I wish he hadn't done that. And I wish more than that I had stepped in. I didn't realize what he was feeling.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “This thing that broke in front of Jeff Bezos, ultimately it was a new college graduate engineer who wrote that code. He had been left alone to write Part of our user interface, but he had written it in such a way that it didn't scale. Now, we didn't give him any helper oversight. We left him on his own because we were busy focusing on other pieces of the problem. And shortly after the disaster, he left the company. And the mistake I made was not reaching out to him and really reassuring him of like, Yes, you wrote the bog, but that's not on you. Like the system failed you, and we don't see you. Bugs happen. So the thing I regret in this whole thing is not realizing that even though no one in the team ever yelled at him or whatever, he knew it was his bug and he obviously saw me and others sort of taking a beating.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I have two things here. First, Amazon loved in the past, they love surprise launches. They love the idea of we're going to be quiet, quiet, quiet, because basically it was a reaction, I think, to Microsoft where they felt Microsoft always talked about what was coming and then pushed the dates back. And so there was this whole thing about vaporware. And Amazon wanted to be the other way, which is we won't say anything, and then it will just be there. The problem I came to say is the biggest thing I learned with Surprise launches is that you're surprised by what doesn't work. And so I shifted the approach to let's do a lot of beta testing. We always, even if others don't agree, fight and say, you're right, we're not going to have a surprise launch. Some of our beta testers, even if they sign NDAs, are going to leak. And that's a better outcome than launching something that doesn't work. That's one lesson. The other lesson is.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “No, I think I did have to learn. I've always been sort of an operational cowboy, meaning I like to go fast and loose. I prioritize speed. And I really had to step back and say, okay, Amazon at this level and scale doesn't like that. So I've taught myself a new phrase, which was fear the New York Times headline. Like be aware that if Amazon is down, it goes up on every news website immediately. And so if Amazon has some kind of mistake, it's on Wall Street Journal and CNN. And so as a leader, I had to think, is what I'm doing going to generate a New York Times headline? Because if it is, I'd better be really careful. And that's what I taught myself is like, you can't be paralyzed, but you do. I taught my whole team, like, we don't want to be in the New York Times for the wrong thing. And that was the lesson.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Stubbornness of sure, I made a mistake, but like, I'm not gonna live in shame about it, I think is what people can take away. I think a lot of people feel they're more dead in the water than they are because everybody makes mistakes, right? Jeff's, I mean, Jeff and Firefoam, which, you know, it's like his, that'll be an albatross around his neck. You know, Jeff and Firefone will be a phrase of anybody who knows Amazon for the rest of his life.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Over our reputation. You let Amazon down in public, and that was a mistake. He said, second though, at least you knew you were gambling. If you hadn't known you were gambling, we'd be discussing your departure. And I'm like, okay, here I thought I was rolling in this meeting like I'm going to run my relationship playbook and he's evaluating whether or not to keep me. The bullheadedness is even after he had told me he had been considering firing me Mike Well, he isn't, so I'm just going to go forward. And a lot of that, that.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Please step out of the way. I want to talk to Ethan. You're doing a great job, Paul. Now, step aside. And then he kind of read me the Riot Act. And the rest of that funny story is I was so happy with how well my meeting with Jeff Bezos went. I patted myself on the back and like, I'm going to go face Jeff Wilkie now. I'm going to schedule a meeting with him and do the same thing. You know, I've got this down. So I go to meet with Jeff Wilkie figuring like I'm going to run the same playbook. I'm going to look him in the eye and all will be forgiven. And Jeff Wilkie looks at me and says, Ethan, when you launch this, did you know you were gambling with the result? Did you know it might not work? And I said, yes, we had a media commitment to launch on that day. And I thought shooting for the date was more important than perfect certainty. And he said, well, two things. First, you were wrong. You were wrong to prioritize date over.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I think a lot of people in my position would have quit. They would have let the shame. I was just a little bit bullheaded where I'm like, yeah, I messed up, but like I'm still, I know I'm still a good person and a good worker. Yes, I made a mistake, but I'm going to move on. You know, part of the story I haven't told that you might enjoy is I mentioned that Jeff Wilkie was Jeff's number two at that point, Jeff Bezos number two person. And he was my skipped level. Well, he during this process, he came physically into our offices and he wanted to talk to me. And my manager, who was vice president, said, hey, Jeff, this is my team. I own it. If you have any criticism, say it to me. You know, you don't mean to talk to my team. And Jeff Wilkie said to my boss whose name was Paul, Paul, that's excellent leadership. I really appreciate what you're doing.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I mean, work hard and fast, right? You do have to fix the problem You know, my team had been up all night. I had to start sending people home to sleep in shifts. We had to pull in all this help. And so it was a very hard weekend. You know, when you have a mistake, it's on you to pull out the stops, even if it's uncomfortable to recover from it. And again, this is not the time to be like, well, you know, it's the weekend now and my team, you know, we'll hit it Monday. Like that would have been like I'd have been out the door so fast. You know, I would have had like the comic Wiley Coyote skid marks as I bumped down the street. So I would say that's important. Part of showing ownership.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “You're exactly right. I'm trying to hold off micromanagement. I'm trying to give them like, okay, I believe with this and I can wait an hour and then I can wait another hour because that team seems to be honest. So I'm trying to rebuild trust one hour at a time and avoid having three or four levels of management all come in and start helping.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I re earn the trust. I showed I had learned the lessons of how to launch more reliably without outages. And I was promoted. And so I share that story because I think what I want people to understand is if I can get away with publicly failing one of the richest and most famous inventors on earth and then get promoted and finish my career at Amazon very successfully, you can dig out of any hole. You just have to manage it right.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “And I didn't believe Jeff would have forgotten that I let him down. But it was clear he had forgiven it. So I was still going to have to, as it turns out, re-earn his trust. But the thing I did that's key for people to learn from is it's really easy to flame. He had been flaming me, right? Writing angry emails. Angry emails are easy. Stitting three feet from someone and being angry with them face to face is hard. And when faced with, I can either start ranting at this person who reports to me, or I can say something nice. He chose to say something nice, and that rebuilt our relationship. So, the end of this story is two years later, I was promoted to vice president. So even though I had failed the CEO on this very public launch where he was very definitely mad at me”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Sat down right next to his chair and I thought, I don't know, let's find out. And so the meeting goes by. And of course, in my mind, Jeff is totally ignoring me, like not even looking at me. But I think that's just me projecting. Because remember, I wasn't central to the meeting. So at the end of the meeting, everybody gets up to leave. He turns and looks at me and says, so how are you doing? I bet it's been a hard week. And I thought, oh. Okay, we're going to talk. And I said, yeah, you know, I just sort of answered him with, of course, it's been hard, but here's what we're doing and here's what we're going to do in the future. And we had a very human conversation.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “The next part of this story is that following week, I had a meeting with him on another topic. So I was part of this small group that was trying to figure out how to build a competing browser. You may not remember, but Amazon had a browser called Silk for a while. And I was invited to this meeting, but I wasn't a critical participant. So you may know this idea from Scrum where they say some people are pigs and some are chickens and the chickens are sort of observers. I was a chicken in this meeting. And that turns out to be a great analogy because I was thinking, should I chicken out and not go? Like I could skip this meeting with the CEO who's angry at me. But when I had that thought, I realized, you know, if I can't face the CEO, I'd better pack my desk. Like, that's the end. So I went to this meeting early and I, Jeff always sat in the same chair. So I knew where he would sit when he came in.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “The next step is we fix the problem. A bunch of us work together very hard to get the problem all fixed. Now, it took all day, and Jeff was still frustrated because the opportunity to sort of control the messaging and the media by having his letter up had passed. People had noticed our launch and the articles had been written. And so Jeff was still very mad. So we fixed the problem, but Jeff now had no trust in us. The weekend went by. He was using the system like looking for bugs because he's like, oh, this team's not reliable now. Ethan's not reliable. I better check it myself. So you have the CEO checking on you. And he found a problem and emailed me like Saturday night at nine o'clock. Like I was doing this and it broke. And luckily I was able to tell him exactly what happened by like 930. Anyway.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Andy Jassy's organization, which was AWS at that time, and his CTO, a guy named Werner Vogels, said, you're having a database problem. Let's get you some principal engineers from the AWS database team. And these principal engineers showed up at 9 a.m. roughly, and they looked at our design. We had made some fundamental mistakes in our database usage. And they said, you know, it's too complicated to fix this. We're just going to give you like 500 AWS machines so that your crappy design will run anyway. Like that's the immediate fix. And I'm like, okay, well, I guess if you have 500 databases lying around because you're AWS is a great solution and that's what they did.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “And this is what we're going to do. And we'll update you again at 10 a.m. So I was buying life one hour at a time. Now, the other thing I did, and this is a good thing about Amazon, as more and more leaders got copied into this angry thread, they started reaching out in back channel and saying, we've all been under Jeff's eye of Sauron. We know it's miserable. What can we do to help? Essentially,”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “So, what did I do? The interesting is what do you do when the future richest man in the world is mad at you? He wasn't quite richest man in the world yet, but he was headed there. So the first thing I did was I owned it. I said, yes, it's not working. It's my fault. I will deal with it. I took ownership. And the second thing I did was start updating him very proactively and saying, Here's where we are like 8 a.m. This is exactly where we are. This is what we're going to do in the next hour. And this is when you'll get your next update. Like I will update you again at 9 a.m. So here's our plan. And even though Jeff had sort of lost trust in me, like it's down and it's not right and I'm mad. Given that he agreed with the plan, he was willing to give me 60 minutes. And then I would update him again and say, okay, this is what we've done.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “And like 30 seconds later, I have an email back that says, what problems? And at this point, I have to start explaining and, you know, I end up explaining that we're having a problem with a database and we're not, we're debugging this database problem. And he's like, wait, there's a database in your design. We're trying to eliminate all Oracle databases and move to AWS. Why do you even have this? It's just getting more and more frustrated and angry. And he starts copying in my boss and my boss's boss, who's with Jeff Wilkie, the CEO of retail, and they start asking me questions. And it's just this snowballing, you know, but like 730 in the morning, Jeff is clearly angry and there's this list of other people waking up and feeling like, well, Jeff is angry. So my job is to be even more angry. And it's just raining in on me.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I get a message from Jeff that says, hey, I woke up. Where's the letter? Because it was supposed to go live at 6 a.m. right after the market's in New York would have opened at 9 a.m. Eastern. And he says, where's the letter? And I write him back and I say, well, we're working on a few problems. And what I'm thinking in my head is get in the shower, get in the shower. I just need 20 minutes get in the shower.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Of our product that he really liked so that something that made it a little different. And that specific thing was we had a button called test drive that you could click on and it would open the app in a simulator in your web browser so you could check out the app and interact with it before putting it on your phone. So he thought this was really cool and he was all about it. Well, my team had built all this technology. We had test drive working. It was kind of a hard piece of technology if you think about simulating any of thousands of arbitrary apps. And we worked all night to launch it. And it wasn't quite working at 6 a.m. We were still debugging. Now you know engineers very well and I'm sure most of your listeners know about engineers, even if that's not their discipline. We always think we're this close to finding the last bug. So about 615.”

    2024-01-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source