amazon
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Mark Britto and the art of getting paid
From an Amazon acquisition to the founding of Boku, Mark Britto has spent decades working on the moment a customer becomes a buyer. His career follows the money - and the connections that let it move.
Ashraf Alkarmi and the art of choosing five things
Before becoming Dropbox's co-CEO, Ashraf Alkarmi spent years making video easier to create, find and use. His next assignment begins with a familiar discipline: deciding what deserves attention.
Peter Chen and the education of a robot
A Berkeley friendship led Peter Chen from AI research to warehouse floors. His bet at Covariant, and now Amazon, is that useful robots learn by getting to work.
Kolton Andrus and the art of an uneventful day
After years of managing outages at Amazon and Netflix, Kolton Andrus built Gremlin to rehearse them. His ambition is a quieter internet - and fewer emergencies for the people who keep it running.
David Risher and the trouble with good enough
A paper route, a locked library and a cancelled ride help explain Lyft’s CEO. David Risher has spent his career asking why things that almost work still let people down.
Andrew Jassy’s very long short stay
He came to Seattle with a plan to leave. Nearly three decades later, the Amazon CEO is still finding reasons to stay - and asking everyone around him to move faster.
Mark Stewart and the business of coming full circle
His father worked in tires. His grandfather repaired cars. After a career through auto parts, Amazon and Stellantis, Mark Stewart arrived at Goodyear with a family connection - and a company to reshape.
Janet Menzies and the value of a quiet room
Before Janet Menzies became technical adviser to Amazon’s Worldwide Stores CEO, she had to learn how to sit in silence. Her route from McDonald’s to Seattle is a story about listening, introductions and the work behind a promise.
Jamie Siminoff and the trouble with answering the door
He built a video doorbell because he couldn’t hear visitors from his garage. Then Jamie Siminoff discovered how much could happen on the other side of a front door.
Yoda Yee and the ten-percent rule
At Amazon, Yoda Yee learned to watch for dangerous dependencies. At Threecolts, he has applied that lesson to the software, the customers and the marketplace his business grew up around.
Harish Abbott and the trouble with getting there tomorrow
He helped bring fast delivery to merchants outside Amazon, then sold Deliverr to Shopify for $2.1 billion. At Augment, Harish Abbott is working on the quieter obstacle to moving goods: getting people, messages and systems to agree.
David Selinger and the minutes a camera misses
After Amazon, Redfin, and RichRelevance, David Selinger turned to a problem close to home: a security camera could record a crime while nobody interrupted it. Deep Sentinel puts a human voice into that gap.
Raunak Nirmal and the experiment that became a career
An Amazon selling experiment led Raunak Nirmal into brands, reimbursement software, and finally Acquco. His wager: knowing how a business works is a useful place to start before buying it.
Tyler Moore and the business of starting again
After a year traveling through 22 countries, the former Amazon reliability leader joined Brydon to acquire and grow small businesses with a friend who knew him long before the deal search.
TJ Parker and the trouble with arriving
He sold PillPack to Amazon, found a ski town, and discovered that finishing a company did not finish his appetite for building. Now TJ Parker is back in the CEO chair, with familiar collaborators and a different sense of what the work is for.
Jeff Bezos Wants to Shorten the Distance Between an Idea and an Object
After building a store that rewired shopping and a rocket company that reached orbit, Bezos has returned to the CEO chair. At Prometheus, he and Vik Bajaj are trying to give engineers a new kind of tool for the physical world.
Marcy Comer Wants Marketers to Look Up From the Dashboard
The EagleView CMO has spent 26 years turning technical products into human stories. Her current prescription for the AI era is unexpectedly analog: talk to customers, consume art and keep the decision committee small.
Ohad Rozen
Ohad Rozen is the co-founder and CEO of Tymely, a New York and Israel based startup building an AI agent that resolves complex e-commerce customer service tickets end-to-end. A former NLP research scientist at Amazon and Yahoo with a PhD from Bar-Ilan University, Rozen previously ran the guided-onboarding startup Toonimo. Tymely has raised roughly $15.25M across seed and Series B rounds, backed by Hetz Ventures, DESCOvery (D.E. Shaw's venture studio), and 97212 Ventures.
Elizabeth Liu
Elizabeth Liu is the CEO of Crowd Cow, the Seattle-based online marketplace that connects independent farms and fisheries directly with people who want to know where their meat and seafood comes from. She has been with the company since its earliest days, rising from category and operations roles to VP of Marketing before taking the top job in February 2023 when co-founder Joe Heitzeberg stepped down. Before Crowd Cow she spent roughly 15 years in direct-to-consumer and marketplace commerce, including marketing director at Wayfair, payments product manager at Amazon, and business development at Zulily. She holds an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and mentors early-stage founders through Techstars.
Jason Kowalski
Jason Kowalski is the co-founder and CEO of ProductWind, an influencer technology platform built for brands that sell on online retailers like Amazon and Walmart. A former Amazon product lead who built the retailer's self-service marketing platform, Kowalski started ProductWind in 2020 on a contrarian idea: brands should market to retail algorithms, not just shoppers. The company coordinates thousands of micro-influencers to move e-commerce metrics that matter to those algorithms - sales velocity, reviews, organic placement, and Best Seller Rank - rather than chasing likes and reach. Bootstrapped and profitable from day one, ProductWind grew revenue tenfold before raising a total of roughly $5.17M in seed funding.
Emily Choi-Greene
Emily Choi-Greene is the co-founder and CEO of Clearly AI, a Y Combinator (S24) startup in Seattle that automates the slow, paperwork-heavy security and privacy reviews enterprises dread. She spent five years at Amazon leading Alexa AI Security and later owned data security and privacy at Moveworks, performing hundreds of reviews by hand before building the tool she wished she had. A Dartmouth computer scientist who graduated with High Honors, she runs the company alongside her husband and CTO Joe Choi-Greene, whom she met in 2019 over an Alexa security review. Clearly AI has raised roughly $8.4M and counts Fortune 500s and global brands among its early users.
Penny Chen
Penny Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Pax, the Y Combinator (S24) startup rebuilding duty drawback - the U.S. program that refunds import tariffs - as an AI-native brokerage. An MIT PhD and former research scientist at Amazon and Flexport, she stumbled on duty drawback while building supply-chain algorithms and saw a math problem hiding inside a bureaucratic one: each year roughly $10-15 billion in eligible refunds go unclaimed because legacy brokers take 10-20% and won't touch claims under $100k. Pax turns the rulebook into algorithms and LLM data extraction, promising a TurboTax-style experience that cuts filing from 9-12 months to a few weeks. The company raised $4.5M in seed funding led by Initialized Capital in April 2025.
Satayan Mahajan
Satayan Mahajan is the founding CEO of Datalign Advisory, a Cambridge, Massachusetts fintech that matches Americans with vetted fiduciary financial advisors using AI and human-centered design. An MIT alumnus and Media Lab pioneer, he spent two decades building motion-capture and gaming companies (Motus, iClub) before an eight-year run at Amazon as a GM and Head of Product. He returned to startup mode in 2024 when Cogo Labs founder Dave Blundin recruited him to lead Datalign, which has since referred more than $80 billion in assets across thousands of advisors.
Dave Selinger
Dave Selinger is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Sentinel, a Pleasanton, California company that pairs AI with live human guards to stop crimes before they happen rather than just record them. An early Amazon data scientist who reported to Jeff Bezos, he went on to co-found Redfin, build personalization giant RichRelevance, and now runs a security operation that says it intervenes in thousands of crimes a month. In June 2025 Deep Sentinel raised an oversubscribed $15 million Series B.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Alasdair McLean-Foreman is the founder and CEO of Teikametrics, a Boston-based AI platform that helps Amazon and Walmart sellers optimize advertising and pricing across more than $10 billion in marketplace transactions. A former Great Britain 800m runner and Harvard track captain, he started selling sporting goods from his dorm room in 2001, became one of Amazon's first third-party retailers in 2003, exited a fitness startup to News Corp, and has raised roughly $65 million for Teikametrics from investors including Intel Capital, Jump Capital, Centana Growth Partners and SoftBank's Lydia Jett.
Cheryl Liu
Cheryl Liu is the founder and CEO of Raspberry AI, a New York generative-AI platform that turns fashion designers' sketches into retail-ready, photo-realistic images, technical drawings, and CAD files in minutes instead of months. A former KKR retail private-equity analyst who later built product and machine-learning teams at Amazon and DoorDash, she spotted the opening for fashion-specific image generation the moment DALL-E and Stable Diffusion arrived in late 2022. Raspberry AI now serves brands including Under Armour, J.Crew, Tapestry, and Li & Fung, raised a $24M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and was named one of CB Insights' 2026 AI 100 as the only creative-AI application on the list.
Cortney Lusignan
Cortney Lusignan is a seasoned communications and public relations executive currently serving as Senior Program Manager, AWS Communications, supporting the AWS Global Communications Vice President at Amazon Web Services. With a career spanning major PR agencies including Weber Shandwick and Edelman, and deep industry expertise in financial services, healthcare, and technology PR, Lusignan has built a reputation as a trusted operator at the intersection of enterprise cloud and strategic communications.
Jesse Dougherty
Jesse Dougherty is Vice President of Global Networking and Network Edge Services at Amazon Web Services (AWS), based in Vancouver, British Columbia. He leads AWS's global network backbone including CloudFront, Elemental, and Perimeter Protection services, while also serving as the Vancouver site lead overseeing an office of 1,000+ software engineers. With 20+ years in software engineering and leadership, he previously spent nine years at Microsoft as a Group Program Manager for Exchange Server and Office 365, and held technical leadership roles at Sophos, ActiveState Software, and Mindquake Software. A champion of the Vancouver tech ecosystem, he has been instrumental in Amazon's expansion in Western Canada and serves as a mentor in the BC Tech Association's Dragons 1-on-1 Mentorship program.
Jonathan Vlock
Jonathan Vlock is Vice President of Marketing, Demand Generation and Enablement at Amazon Web Services (AWS), bringing over two decades of B2B marketing leadership across cloud, cybersecurity, ESG, and enterprise technology. Before AWS, he held senior marketing roles at PwC, S&P Global, NetApp, and Wipro, and earlier co-founded Cooking Planit, a patented personal cooking assistant app. A Cornell MBA, Jeet Kune Do practitioner, and self-styled 'mad scientist' of integrated marketing, Vlock blends data-driven pipeline strategy with a restless entrepreneurial streak.
Deren Baker
Deren Baker is the CEO of Flywheel Ventures, the innovation arm of Flywheel Commerce Network - now part of Omnicom Group after a landmark $835 million acquisition in 2023. A serial operator with deep roots in digital commerce analytics, Baker has led transformative companies including Jumpshot (which tracked 160 billion monthly clicks) and Edge by Ascential. He is a recognized thought leader in ecommerce strategy, retail media, and data-driven advertising, with bylines in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur Magazine.