Jason Shah: preference

Transcript context

…Wow. Good one. Okay, first ever guest and first two-time return guest. Amazing. Okay. To set a little context for folks on your background, your career, could you just give us a 60-second overview of your background and your career and how you got to what you're doing today? Yeah, for sure. Thanks again for having me, Lenny. So, my career has all been about solving important problems in a unique way. I think the latter part is the youngest child in me who has to be special and do things different than other people, and the former is about making sure that my time is spent well since we're all limited there. So, I actually got started in a sense in tech when I was 15. I started my first company, much like a lot of teenagers, it was around test prep and getting people ready for college, and it was my first exposure to using technology at scale to help people, and I just found it addictive ever since. And so, I ran that company for seven years through school, was lucky to do a small acquisition to a partner of ours that we had worked with throughout, and then I would just hooked, and I moved to San Francisco without a job. I was really arrogant. I said, "I'll never work for anybody else," and then lo and behold, Yammer comes along, I'm super excited about it, I had been working on a product actually in the same space. And so, that was actually my first formal product management role, and I stayed at Yammer, I stayed through the Microsoft acquisition back in 2012. Low and behold, I was at the world's largest productivity company at Microsoft, and most people there in my opinion were wildly unproductive and I wasn't shipping a lot. I got the itch again, so started another company called do.com and ran that for about four years, and then eventually, we found a better fit with Amazon. They were growing their AWS offering, SAS products. So, we partnered with them to kind of do a small acqui-hire and help build the team out and the product there for a little over a year. And then again, to be honest, I got bored and excited about what Airbnb was doing and the mission around belonging. That's why I was lucky to meet you and so many other really wonderful product leaders and just human beings in general at their core, and then to keep things brief for now, I got to work on a lot of really exciting products and businesses there, but eventually got the itch for Web3 after being a kind of observer from afar, investor, and I wanted to be a builder in Web3 specifically, and to me, it's a new vision of a better version of the internet. I'm really excited about that. So, I've been with Alchemy which is a blockchain infrastructure company for the last year, and really excited about all the opportunities. I've gotten to work on products that have been part of most people's everyday lives, and I'm hopeful that we'll get to do that with Web3 and Alchemy as well. Amazing. I just realized as you're chatting there, do.com, I'm pretty sure I used that back in the day. I think I just realized that.…

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