A recent Wall Street Journal article dubbed Amazon as America’s “Tech Industry’s CFO factory.” Many former Amazon employees go on to run other enterprise companies. There seems to be a great demand for chief execs and entrepreneurs who take part in Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ leadership style.
We have compiled a list of 8 Amazon Drop Outs Who Made It Big.
Adam Selipsky: CEO of Tableau
Selipsky’s LinkedIn profile describes him in a chief operating officer role. He is the vice president of marketing, sales, and support. Adam Selipsky took over as CEO of Seattle-based data visualization software company Tableau in September 2016 and helped the company negotiate a $15.7 billion sale to Salesforce.
Selipsky spent more than a decade building Amazon Web Services. He helped grow the cloud business from its pre-revenue stage into a $10 billion business at the time he left for Tableau, and from fewer than 10 employees to thousands.
Jeff Lawson: CEO of Twilio
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Jeff Lawson had a short stint at Amazon, working on what would become AWS before co-founding and becoming CEO of $16 billion cloud communications company Twilio.
He worked as a technical product manager at Amazon for about a year and left in November 2005, a few months before the official launch of Amazon Web Services.
Alyssa Henry: Square executive and Intel director
Alyssa Henry was the vice president of Amazon Web Service Storage Services. He is now general manager and head of Square’s Seller business unit.
Henry recently was named in Intel’s board of directors. She spent more than eight years at AWS and 12 years at Microsoft before that. Henry ran AWS storage services including Amazon S3, the first cloud service AWS introduced and part of the same infrastructure used to run the Amazon.com e-commerce operation before she left to join Square in 2014.
Tim Stone: Ford Chief Financial Officer and former Snap Chief Financial Officer
Chief financial officer Tim Stone left Amazon after 20 years in roles including AWS CFO. He first went to Snap which is Snapchat’s parent company, where he spent less than a year before leaving. Bloomberg reported Stone went behind CEO Evan Spiegel’s back to ask for more money.
Stone joined Ford in April as a chief financial officer.
Steven Halliwell: Chief Product Officer of Promethean
Steven Halliwell was the General manager of AWS Commercial Business – West Area Halliwell and spent nearly eight years at Amazon Web Services. Most recently he started working as head of customer engagement for the company’s western region and its national healthcare and life sciences businesses.
In October 2017, he joined the education tech company Promethean, where he runs its product organization as chief product officer.
Marco Argenti: Goldman Sachs partner and co-CIO
Before joining Goldman Sachs in October as a partner and co-chief information officer, Marco Argenti spent six years at Amazon Web Services. He sent a memo seen by Business Insider detailing the opportunity he sees for the bank to create a financial cloud on Jan 30.
Argenti was responsible for product and engineering for AWS businesses including augmented and virtual reality, automation, and internet of things (IoT) smart devices.
Vivek Sriram: Chief Product Officer of Lucidworks
Chief Product Officer of Lucidworks, Vivek Sriram worked for AWS for four years running project management, business development, and marketing for Amazon CloudSearch and Amazon Elasticsearch Service.
Now, Vivek Sriram is the chief product officer of artificial intelligence-powered enterprise search technology company Lucidworks, a role he took on in November after a couple of years as the company’s chief marketing officer.
Frank DiGiammarino: Executive Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton
Frank DiGiammarino was hired by Booz Allen Hamilton in December 2018 to run the company’s innovation strategy. He’s a former adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden. Frank DiGiammarino spent four years at AWS including in the company’s government business.
Business Insider compiled this list of notable former AWS employees who have become power players at other companies.