A Dozen Grueling Years At Amazon — With Kristi Coulter

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: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  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. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience, and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then, I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

• 0:47Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:14Speaker 01

  LinkedIn presents.

• 1:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 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.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  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, on one hand, and that's a 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... There 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 sense as to like what you think Amazon is today, like what, what, what is it? Because it does have so many different tentacles and so many different businesses. So like, how would you even categorize the business?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny that you said tentacles because I was saying to someone the other day that I almost think of Amazon 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

• 3:13Speaker 01

  they are attempting to do and happen attempting to do is to build an ecosystem that people can live entirely within.

• 3:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  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?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that, so what I found in my time at 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 that kind of ops focused way. There seems to be less and less attention to

• 4:27Speaker 01

  The retail side of things in terms of customers sort of figuring out what they want. Um, 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, the, the airplanes and the whole last mile idea. Um, 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?

• 5:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Where have you been wrong?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Um, just in everything I didn't see coming, you know, I, I never would have guessed, um, something like Amazon go was coming. Um, 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, um, streaming video didn't exist. There was no phone, remember the phone? Um, I said, basically all I know is that it's something that I probably haven't thought about and you haven't thought about.

• 5:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Um, Right.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  I was speculating at one point, when I Amazon 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 speculative possibilities and I was like, you know, telemedicine, tele-surgery, health insurance, banking, um, they all in their way seems equally plausible to me.

• 6:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  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, it, it was like, when he was there, at least there seemed to be this world-class of, uh, interest in green lighting things that were kind of zany and ambitious.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  And when we talk about the future, okay, logistics might be one thing, but it is interesting. Like if that's the, 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' 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

• 7:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  know, already, you know, a year plus in?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting. I was thinking the other day that I wondered if Jassy, I mean, I'm being kind of facetious, but sometimes I wonder if he regrets becoming 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, had 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

• 7:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 would, 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, 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.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  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's 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

• 9:46Speaker 01

  tacks, you know, Andy Jassy sweet spot kind of stuff. But like the shopping experience is, in my experience, it's degrading. You know, the, 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 tacks thing, then I'm worried because customer trust is, you don't get it back, you know?

• 10:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And this is, this is a total aside, not a total aside, but this is an 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.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  I saw that.

• 10:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I canceled Prime just to see what the flow was like. And I'm okay. Apparently it's been updated since this this chart, these charges came came out. So, okay, there that's one thing, but I actually found it quite easy to cancel. And my prime just expired a couple of 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.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  But now it's like, okay, you just get your cart above 30 bucks and the shipping is gonna be free anyway.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it might take an extra few days to get to you, but not that long.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Well, and prime shipping isn't what it used to be. Like, I don't

• 11:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  really know anymore if I'm gonna, 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 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 UX designers would be engaged

• 11:54Speaker 01

  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 UX 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, 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

• 12:38Speaker 01

  that. Now, that said, I also kind of remembered there were conversations, apparently. That have been documented by the FTC about leaders saying, you know, we need to make this hard.

• 12:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, they called it like project, like Death Star or some rocky name or Roach Motel, something like that. But that's pretty, uh, yeah, pretty straightforward.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  It was pretty straightforward.

• 13:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  So we'll, we'll see how that goes. But it is interesting to see how like, for instance, just the necessity of prime has shifted. So that's something I think that's worth keeping an eye on.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 have actually talked about this.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Um, you know, it's kind of interesting. He was the head of worldwide consumer. Andy Jassy, you know, is 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.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  And to get out of that, a leader like Wilkie seems like, you know, he would be, who ran retail, seems like he'd be the right CEO for Amazon. 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?

• 14:07Speaker 01

  It's, it's hard to say. I think I told you at the time, I was like, I don't know. Um, the circumstances have been so bizarre that in some ways I kind of want to see Jassy lead, lead for another year before I have a sense of it. I will say, I was really surprised that Jeff Wilkie was not the successor. Um, 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. Um, 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. Um, and I think it's

• 14:52Speaker 01

  possible. I think it's possible that.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Jeff picked a CEO for a world that doesn't really exist anymore. I was also surprised to learn just 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?

• 15:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, he just left Flexport. I have questions for you about that, by the way, but yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  That is fascinating. But so in the stories about Flexport, people said, oh, and he it was painted as it really being a contest between Jassy and Clark, not Jassy and Wilkie. And that really is 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, very much like the ops guy.

• 15:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Retail operations, right? And they they called him the assassin. Apparently, he would just fire mid-level folks on a whim.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  And they say he would.

• 15:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's uncommon inside Amazon.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, just like.

• 16:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  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.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  The rumors were he would 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 unhappy story.

• 16:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  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, that goes all the, you know, everything from the leadership principles, you know, it 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

• 17:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  inside, inside the company. Can you expand upon that? Did I read that right? Like between the lines in, in your book?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I, 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, 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 as saying, it's where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves. And I was like, yes, that is correct. It attracts people who are used to just kicking ass at whatever they do and overachieving,

• 18:06Speaker 01

  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 bred, just trying even harder for, 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 it's, I think he doesn't mind. I think he

• 18:49Speaker 01

  was okay with that. But I think that it's, 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, 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 eighteen months. But when I left after twelve years, I was in something like the ninety-eighth percentile for tenure. Because most people just, they don't make it even to the point where they

• 19:30Speaker 01

  own their entire signing bonus. They just leave because it turns them into such, like, you know, husks of their former selves.

• 19:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 other side of that conversation tells you to change the world and then come back to them.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  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.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like, great.

• 20:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's crazy.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Okay, bye. Yeah, I mean, there's very, there's very little thank you at Amazon. And so the people who do thank you end up seeming like, like living saints, you know, like, I worked for Steve Kessel, who was the SVP, who's who started Kindle, and he 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.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Especially at that level.

• 21:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  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.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I haven't worked at other tech companies, but it 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 they're working all night. These people are crazily driven. And

• 21:57Speaker 01

  the ones I got close enough to 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, um, I mean, I manage teams, you know, and manage managers. I worked very hard at not letting my fear trickle down. And I'm sure it trickled down anyway. So it's just in it's in the water.

• 22:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  I felt that there also wasn't much tact in the communication there. I mean, having read your your 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 dresses you down in the middle of a 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?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had a proposal to makeover of 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 were 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 the 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 face on. Can you tell me more? Can you give me more feedback? It's stupid.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  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. Um, which to me was really crossing a line. Like it's bad enough to call a document stupid. But um, 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, you know, 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.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  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 gonna cry. And fortunately, my boss was there and she stepped in. And he left the meeting 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, 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, I, did I do that? Because I think for

• 25:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  You cried in, yeah. You cried in the bathroom afterwards, right?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Oh, God, yeah. I mean, I did a lot of crying in bathrooms and cars at Amazon. But I did, I did. I was, um, it was maybe the hardest I've cried in my adult life. Which is a little pathetic because it was, it's the 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. Um, I, you know, at the, at my worst moments at Amazon, I didn't leave because I genuinely believed I would be unemployable in the outside world. Um, 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,

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Amazon doesn't keep people around in senior roles for 12 years who aren't, they aren't happy with, but I, I didn't see it. And it was, a lot of it's because of moments like that.

• 26:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. By the way, I don't think it's pathetic. I mean, it's a totally human and natural reaction there. So.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, crying is a biological reaction to emotion. And, and what I've realized about myself, and I think this is true for a lot of women, when I get angry, um, often my default response is to cry, uh, versus really expressing the anger in a different way. And so, yeah, I think it's totally natural.

• 26:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  You, 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 can't, kind of came in hardened and, okay, I have their, I've written a couple of notes down about some of these companies. So for instance, Nordstrom, uh, would not hire Amazon people because they had brought some people in and just said, nope, that won't work. You mentioned that Starbucks even tried to deprogram Amazonians. Uh, why do you think Amazonians can't succeed elsewhere? Or there's that notion? Clearly something's weird about it.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I, with Starbucks, there was this rumor that they actually had a deprogramming process for, for Amazonians. Um, 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, late in my career at Amazon Go, we ended up hiring a bunch of people from Starbucks corporate, uh, because they knew how to run, you know, 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

• 28:03Speaker 01

  competent. So it was a good reminder that like, oh no, this can be very good. Um, Nordstrom hired, I mean, I've known a bunch of people who went to Nordstrom and there was definitely a sense that. I they had hired several product managers who just came in like bulls in a china shop. You know, like, like, this is what we're gonna do now. Amazon's here to save you. And Nordstrom is like, 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.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  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 and the the headhunter said, you know, I actually really appreciate you bringing that up because it's 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. Um, you you just arrive and and change everything. It's more like, take some time, read the room.

• 29:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 Flexport's logistics business. We've had Ryan Peterson on the show. The now returning CEO, the boomeranging CEO, if you will.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Boomerang.

• 29:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 and posts elsewhere that that it was not a pleasant experience for a lot of the folks inside Flexport. So 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?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, the whole thing was fascinating. Um, and 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, and leave of their own accord. Um, a lot of, you know, jumping around, a lot of boomeranging back to Amazon. Uh, what I, what really surprised me was that they let so many of his people go with him. Um, you know, I worked with Nader Kabani back when he was in Kindle.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Um, I thought Nader was lovely. I loved working with him. He was like an actual gentleman, which is an unusual thing at Amazon.

• 31:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  And he was at Flexport also?

• 31:14Speaker 01

  He was at Flexport. Yeah. I don't know.

• 31:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just let go.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Just let go. Yeah. He was one of like the, Darcy Henry, who was I think head of HR at Flexport was just like, oh. Um, so some, 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, 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.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Um, I would assume they're pretty direct and want to begin with.

• 32:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, right, right.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  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, I'm very, very curious to, to know more. I've been trying to find out more. I was never so close to the ops side that I have like a million people I can call up and ask, but, um, call me people if you've got major on that.

• 32:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe that's book number three for you. Christie 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. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate.

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• 34:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 and I just finished reading it. I enjoyed it very much. Christy, let's, 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, 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, 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

• 35:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  there and then. So, so what made you stay? What good did you see inside Amazon's culture that, that you appreciated?

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the biggest reason I stayed, well, first of all, the money cannot be overstated. Like, I came from a small town in, you know, Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I was making, you know, like $60,000 a year and living quite well on it. And if in Seattle, the stock price is going nuts, I was, I was overpaid for the market for a lot of my time at 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 a, find a new role and the company wasn't big enough to

• 36:26Speaker 01

  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

• 37:06Speaker 01

  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. You know, so I was able to do these crazy things and they were well-funded. I, I remember coming home and my husband, who's in startup land, would talk about a friend's startup going under.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  And I would say, well, I don't understand, why don't they just get more funding? And he'd look at me like, not everybody has Uncle Jeff, you know, just writing checks 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 dollars. 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, there's something that, those two things have something in common.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  That wanting those dopamine hits of doing crazy, exciting things and wanting to drink a lot. You know, that neurologically, there's, there's some common ground. Um, Amazon is also a place where I was never the smartest person in the room. Um, 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.

• 39:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  This, this is one of the things that I, um, 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 Maslow hierarchy of needs or like subsistence is at the bottom and self-actualization is at the top, like the, the highest level of need that you can satisfy. Um, 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.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 worked that I think we, 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, you know, I, who knows how many tens of millions of people watched that video. So at that time, we were agile enough, but also poor, and well, not poor, but frugal

• 40:17Speaker 01

  enough that you could be really close to the way, you know, to kind of, 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 Wilkie's 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

• 41:02Speaker 01

  were many more layers. And, you know, it's not the kind of scrappy place it once was. But I think that element is, is still there in smaller ways. And I think it's really thrilling for people who want that kind of thrill.

• 41:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  What are some good operational things that happen at Amazon that other companies could put into play?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  I think the Andon cord, do you know about that? So the Andon cord, I taught Amazon leaders for a while and I watched a speech Jeff Bezos introducing this about 50 times. So it's in my, playing in my head right now. The Andon cord 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. So 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.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  And he asked her, like, what do you think's 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. You know, I worked in retail, in DVD retail for a while and it would get pulled because like the region coding was wrong or something. But you know, your, 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.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  So that was, that was one thing I thought was brilliant. Jeff also instilled this notion of having tenants for a project. So you've probably heard about this before. So basically a set of like five to 10, 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 could 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.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  What something should be like rather than just dive in and start building?

• 43:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  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?

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be like this is what the product will look like, or it could be like if we, if we ever have to decide between speed and flexibility, we will opt for speed.

• 43:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you decide in advance. They, Amazon also does these internal, what they call a working backwards document, which is an internal press release and FAQ.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  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 upfront. 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 upfront, which saves you thinking downstream. And then the last thing I would say is having people read

• 44:57Speaker 01

  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, I understand why more companies don't do it because it's a huge time suck, but I believe in it.

• 45:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  I love how when you recounted like being in meetings with Jeff Bezos 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. No.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Right. That's a victory. You're like, yes, he had nothing to say because he's not going to be like, I think it's too is great. You just move on. Yeah.

• 46:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  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.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  I like, I like heretical questions. So does Amazon.

• 46:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 of hours is, 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.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, 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 is totally right about. So do you think, what do you think about just this, you know, Amazon and society's, you know, this insane focus on customer experiences? Is it actually helping us get anywhere?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  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?

• 47:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm not immune from this either.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Right. I'm just like, what is happening? You know, and I'm like, Get over it.

• 47:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  I thought they had robots in that warehouse.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  What the hell?

• 47:34Speaker 01

  What are they doing? And then I think about the warehouses and 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 stuff 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, 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.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  And, and I do think that Amazon has, 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,

• 48:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really? Wait, there's a blacklist if you return stuff too much?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  There, I did, 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 what the limit is, but yeah, absolutely. Cause I'm sure there's people who do just crazy things with returns. But I, yeah, I do think, and I think we trust, we've gotten to trust Amazon almost too much. Like I, 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 hullabaloo over getting clearly substandard products that aren't as represented. I think that, um, you know, there's a flood of stuff coming in from China that's been of concern.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  And I'm so used to being, and we're all so 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, it's coming back to bite them kind of hard because we feel. Betrayed in a, 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,

• 49:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  They've lost the plot.

• 49:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think it's kind of like a learned helplessness situation where like,

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Companies are educating people to, yeah, anyway, all of us to be like this. It's very interesting.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  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, and we prepared for all these eventualities.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  I mean, I wrote FAQs for the, the worst scenarios. None of it came to pass. It, 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, it kind of works both ways, you know?

• 50:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Go is a pretty amazing product. I guess you call it a product that Amazon offers this just walkout shopping where you can like pick what you want off the shelves, walk out, it knows exactly what you took. But Amazon has also been shutting some Go stores. I definitely wanted to talk about 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?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  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 the short term focus was like, we want to get these into airports. We want to get them into hotel lobbies. Um, 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, uh, bookstores, Amazon books, which of course no longer exists, you know? Um, anything you want. The trick at the time was that

• 52:18Speaker 01

  uh, 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, um, are we doing this by weight? For a while, we thought we'd have to have human intervention for fresh produce. Um, I was at an Amazon Fresh grocery store a few weeks ago. I'd actually never been to one before and they have seemed to figure that out. Um, they had the pack, 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 weigh different things, we're going to charge you the same. Either that, or they've figured out some scale technology that's very sophisticated.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  So it seems like they are now able to offer this much more broadly. Um, which as someone who doesn't love standing in line, like I'm psyched. I'm, I'm into it. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Yeah.

• 53:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  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, uh, you know, very interesting interactions with him in the book, um, 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 carved into the front of it. So tell me a little bit from like your perspective, like, well, how do you see the evolution of Bezos? And does he come back ever? Does he boomerang?

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fascinating. Like when I met Jeff, you know, he was just this guy and he would come and he ate pirate's booty a lot. You know, that like freeze dried low carb cheese thing and he was 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 gotta be his bodyguard. And like, no, he didn't have bodyguards in meetings at that time.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  It was this guy named Jim Atkins, who was, I think, probably a senior VP in retail now, and he was Jeff's 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 jacked. He acted the same. It's very disarming because he kind of is a goofy guy. He's really smart. He's, to me, was always quite pleasant.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  But he's terrifying. I mean, 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.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  He can do anything he wants. I mean, he virtually lives beyond the law. Um, 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 the muttering about returning to office and how much people hate it. And and the traffic is awful now. And a friend said, it's not just day two at Amazon. It's day five, um, which is brutal. And this is a friend who's been there for fifteen years.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  I wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibility. Um, I, 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 could 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 wouldn't be surprised. But yeah, I don't know, like the yacht thing is just hilarious to me because he,

• 57:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Um, right.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  That's over.

• 57:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  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 riding around in a yacht. And then basically book comes out shortly afterwards, he quits, gets the yacht.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Like a yacht that doesn't fit under Bridget is like such a big yacht. I'm, I'm absolutely fascinated by all of that. It's funny when his, when his whole scandal happened with the sexting and the, and the. Nude pictures, 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, you know? 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.

• 58:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Where are we going with this, Kristy?

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Like, this is drifting. Just more of this kind of like, like, one of the pictures is just him in a suit. Like, oh, he sent 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'd, I wish I'd seen more. I wish Amazon had had room for more of that, that guy, and for all of us to be that kind of person when I was there.

• 58:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  The book is Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career. You can pick it up in bookstores and on Amazon today. Kristy Coulter, thank you so much for joining us.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Thank you. It was a pleasure.

• 58:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great conversation. Thank you, everybody, for listening. You heard a lot about Kristy'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, Niko Atene, 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 Ron John 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 Podcast.

• 59:33Speaker 02

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• 1:00:04Speaker 03

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