Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Technical assistant, exactly. The reason that Jassy becomes Jeff's first shadow is Jassy was a Harvard MBA, he had been a product line launcher, he had launched music for Amazon, he ended up in the marketing department after that. And then 2000–2001, dot-com crash, Amazon acts as the whole marketing department. We're not doing ads anymore, we got to get profitable. Jassy was going to get laid off with the whole department, but Jeff liked him. Jeff said, I'm going to save Andy. He's not going to get laid off. I'm going to find something for him to do. While we're figuring this out, let's take this technical assistant idea from Microsoft. He can come to be my shadow, and he creates the role for him. Andy's background is not technical up until this point. He becomes the technical assistant. He's brilliant, but he came in as one of the MBAs who was a category launcher when they were figuring out music, electronics, and all these different verticals that they were going into. I can't remember which one Andy launched, but he was the launcher for music for one of those. I think, fairly recently, within the last five years before this, he had considered a career in the sports industry. Oh, yeah. He wanted to be a sportscaster.…

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