In our first ever episode, Dave speaks with Kim Rachmeler, former VP Worldwide Discovery and member of the S-Team at Amazon.com, Inc. She’s a skilled engineer and web developer whose efforts helped build and develop Amazon literally from the ground up. She shares the challenges of working with a small team of engineers when tech engineers were scarce and some of the iconic steps the company has taken to cope with consistent monthly growth.
Episode Resources:
- Visit Upaya Social Ventures
- Check out Kim’s LinkedIn
- Subscribe to our Newsletter
- Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 02:16 How Kim started at Amazon
- 04:50 What three things do you need to want something?
- 07:14 Working as a Technical Project Manager for the first time
- 09:41 Figuring out different process and running experiments
- 13:39 On the 3rd version release of the Amazon website
- 15:40 It started with more or less 35 people doing everything
- 17:20 A 30% monthly growth had created several technical issues
- 20:31 Preventing downtime while website maintenance is ongoing
- 23:13 Adding categories and other big changes
- 26:15 Engineers are difficult to hire back in the day
- 28:56 It was mainly an engineering problem for a long while
- 29:53 From being an engineer to becoming a TPM
- 34:20 Nightly builds prompted people to pay more attention
- 37:16 The service-oriented architecture
- 40:24 Just Do It Award: how it came to be
- 41:44 “Bias for Action” as a core value
- 45:24 Overworking resulted in success, but it’s unhealthy
- 47:59 Tips for young entrepreneurs
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