Jason Shah: preference

Transcript context

…Awesome. Okay. We're going to move on from Web3 and chat a bit about some of your other career accomplishments and companies you've worked at. So, you worked at, you mentioned Yammer, Microsoft, Amazon, Airbnb. I'm curious which of those companies has most informed the way you approach product and build product and run teams because they're all so different in how they operate, and I'm always curious what company is the formative experience for you that's like, "Here's how I like to build product most." I know it's always a combination, but how do you think about that? Yeah, it's definitely a combination, but I would say if I had to pick, Amazon, even though I was only there for about a year after the acquisition. I say that because of this blend between product and business thinking that is especially present there. And so, people say Google is an engineering culture. People said Facebook is a product culture, Airbnb or Pinterest, sometimes a design culture or things like this, and I think that Amazon was a place where you couldn't divorce business and product. You couldn't be a product manager without thinking about revenue growth, without thinking about go to market, and I really like that because as a startup founder doing product in a bigger company, it gave me the chance to exercise a lot of those skills. It's very similar actually to how I feel at Alchemy now where I remember my first month there I was like, people ask me how's it going, I'm like, "I feel like an athlete. I feel alive again." I can do M&A one day, I can be doing product another minute. I could be figuring out, oh, we need to hire our first lawyer to write onboarding plans for employees the next minute, and it wasn't as siloed as sometimes a product role can be. So, I think Amazon, I went there to learn and understand. That was my biggest goal was this is an incredible company that's gone into... The Whole Foods acquisition happened when I was there, and I was wondering how does the same company kind of within retail win with the AWS, go create studios, and I think the Amazon culture ultimately more than anything else around ownership, being vocally self-critical is right a lot as one of the leadership principles. All these things combined I think created a really unique culture. So, I would say Amazon's had the biggest impact on me, and there have been certain lessons that I've taken from, like you said, all these places, but Amazon was by far the place that I think left the biggest mark on my view on product and leadership. That's quite amazing that you were there for a year and that's the one that's most informed and impacted you. Do you feel like people should try to go work at Amazon as a training ground as a PM? Is that something you encourage PM to try to do?…

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