I'm sure there's some juicy details behind the curtains, but people are too professional to air it publicly. Here's some fun but baseless theories:
1) Typical big-company guy fails to adapt to startup life. A year ago, Flexport's tech team was 400 people. That's minuscule compared to what Dave's used to at Amazon. He came in, insisted on a bunch of unnecessary hiring, bloated the tech team with deadwood, internal kingdoms and politics, and a "move slow and don't break anything" mentality. Founder got fed up and showed him the door, though presumably they were gracious enough to let him hit his 1-year cliff
2) Almost-CEO-of-Amazon tries to build the next Amazon. Makes a bunch of wildly risky investments into random moonshots, because he doesn't want to settle for a single-digit-billion company. Founder is initially taken in by bigshot's vision. But after 1 year of minimal progress and changing market conditions, founder tells CEO to get back to basics and focus on freight logistics. CEO decides that's not sexy enough for him. Waits for his 1-year cliff, then resigns
3) Amazon grad takes hold of a freight forwarder, and then realizes freight forwarding is not a tech company, nor is it just warehousing and distribution.
And then realizes his competitors rely as much on grizzled logistics veterans and their corporate knowledge about customs brokerage and how to Get Shit Done and Get Shit From Point A to Point B as they do on a cool tech stack. And then goes "shit."
Don't get me wrong. From a tech perspective, a lot of Flexport's competitors could use a size-18 boot in the ass. But tech is an enabler for them, not the core business. So there's only so much willingness to fork out cash for what senior leaders see as a supporting function. I mean, if their 40-year-old COBOL backend still works, they DGAF that it's outdated. At least until it can't keep up with the modern side or it starts falling over when all the devs retire, which is a separate story.
This is a very nice sentiment but the truth is that the established forwarders operate in a way that is could be greatly optimized. Established forwarders (and Flexport) have teams of people that "move" shipments by applying an SOP (basically a written algorithm for advancing the shipment to signals that come in from a variety of sources (an origin factory various carriers like truckers, airlines and shipping lines, governments, etc). Paying people to do this work is expensive, and the people, while very good, go home at night, take vacations, make mistakes and are generally human. The technology that enables this process at legacy forwarders is as you say archaic, but it is archaic in _design_ as well as execution. It assumes that human beings will be sitting behind a keyboard pushing buttons and making phone calls based on what it says.
In my opinion, there is nothing about any of these processes that in aggregate be worse if they were automated, and no fundamental issue with automating them. Moving freight is about as complex as any other inter-business process in that the input is some signal (usually an email but potentially a phone call or a fax) and the output is also usually an email or a phone call. The internal logic to that process is not particularly complex either.
So there exists a massive opportunity to provide roughly the same service that existing forwarders do at a much lower cost basis. The requirement to do so is to aggressively automate operations. There's also an secondary opportunity to provide better quality of service (more transparency, more programmatic logic related to movement of goods) to customers (supply chain professionals at F500) but I think that's both harder to do and customers are less sure about how they might take advantage of that better service.
Quite frankly, I don't buy the argument that "grizzled logistics veterans" hold the secret sauce to make this work. I was told probably a dozen times that what I was doing was impossible to automate but when I dug into it, what we were trying to do was a bog-standard business process dressed up in domain-specific jargon and 'tradition' (e.g. we can't do it that way since we've always done it this way). I'm not saying that I'm some logistics savant and there's a vast amount of expertise I don't know. What I am claiming is that I've pulled back the curtain on logistics and the wizard is just a regular guy.
> I've pulled back the curtain on logistics and the wizard is just a regular guy.
I agree, but land at a different conclusion.
I dabbled in logistics a bit at one startup and the thing I found true is that every warehouse and receiving dock did things a little different and sometimes that thing was computer software and other times it was a person with sticky notes all over the walls of their tiny office by the bay door who was on 2-3 phone calls at a time screaming at/being screamed at by people moving goods around the city/state/country/world.
Logistics has a ton of room to optimize and I’m sure we’ll continue to see billion dollar startups roll out every year solving some part of it, but in the day-to-day operations of supply chain, change is so incredibly hard. The middle layer of management always seemed so risk averse to making any changes that had the slightest risk of disrupting their existing workflow because if one day they goof something up it quickly spiraled down the chain.
In the show The Wonder Years, the dad works in freight logistics. Watching him go into his office and slowly get more insane as the day goes on is how they explain why he’s a grumpy guy.
You're not technically wrong, but it's also a much more complex and ever-changing problem set that you're giving it credit for. If it was so easy, Flexport stock would be the next Amazon. What they have going for them is a tech stack that doesn't have 40 years of accumulated crap.
But your description of what goes on at the branch level smacks of someone who has a CS degree and thinks that this means they can engineer the world. Dave Snowden of Cynefin fame has some choice words regarding software engineers who don't realize that human endeavors have what he calls "messy coherence," and think they can optimize the "messy" out of it, forgetting that they're dealing with humans.
There's a lot of ways Flexport could capitalize on the silliness of some of its competitors. But its competitors are also not staffed by idiots, and if it was so easy to automate everything, it would have been automated 20 years ago.
I sat with the Flexport logistics teams for months on end. I watched them move hundreds of shipments. Maybe they concealed all the secret sauce for when I got up to the go the bathroom but nothing I saw was particularly notable. They had rules like "make sure the ISV is filed at least 3 days before expected arrival" and "if the origin agent hasn't picked up the can after more than 2 days, call Joe at the destination warehouse and tell him that it will be late."
Designing these rules are not something that computers can handle particularly well (though Generative AI might change even that), but applying them consistently is something that computers do way better than humans (for the reasons that I mentioned in my previous comment). Yes, there will be exceptions. That's okay, we can also build in logic to handle exceptions.
The fundamental process flow we're trying to automate here is not self-driving cars. It's not cognition, perception, or reasoning. It's not even really complex decision making. The inputs (while not perfect) are actually pretty well quantized. People love to handwave and say that it's so hard and that it's naive to try and reduce it down to a computer program, but I've never had anyone compellingly explain __why_.
For what it's worth, this is not a minimization of the work done by my former colleagues and similar professionals. My colleagues were smart, hardworking, mission driven and gritty. It's just that the work that they did could be more effectively done by computers. That's all.
For what it's worth, I don't have a computer science degree. I studied one of those useless underwater basketweaving majors. That must explain the overall sense of confusion.
Then why has it not yet been done? Has God touched Flexport on the shoulder and said "We deem Ye worthy to redeem the freight forwarding industry?"
It seems to me that if it's so easy as you describe, and yet it hasn't been done, than maybe it's not so easy after all. Perhaps not impossible. Perhaps doable. But perhaps not that easy. People who work in the industry are not stupid. They don't want to do unnecessary busywork. What are they missing? And why has Flexport not taken the industry by storm if it's so easy to automate?
Huge. Gobs of opportunity. One failing of Flexport is it's trying to tackle too much at once. There's a lot of depth to each of the steps and you could build a very solid business out of automating many of them. I seriously looked at a few things in the compliance space and I still think there's a huge opportunity. Sales in the space is generally very difficult as decision makers are slow moving and conservative. But the opportunity to provide value in many places is real. I'd focus more on the supply chain guys at the big CPG companies vs the forwarders if I were to do it again.
What am I doing now? Seems like the same thing everyone else is - Working at BigCo for more money and less stress :). Not looking to change at the moment but urge folks to look into the space for sure. It's a lot of fun and very gratifying. Pure software is more boring in comparison.
Honestly, I think if someone could get really really good at one niche aspect of the problem and not do it in some obscure stack that's hard to integrate with a bog-standard early-2000s-at-best tech stack, they'd be snapped up in a heartbeat by one of the major players still trying to migrate.
Because I can name at least two times that's happened. The big guys' main concern is being able to keep a unified view of who's shipping what, where, and to whom worldwide. They don't own planes, ships or trucks, so their rep rests on stuff delivered on time to the right place and always knowing where it is.
How much do you know about zje logistics software ised by, e.g., DHL and the like?
Because I worked at Amazon, with DHL among others, and I can tell you that in some use cases, DHL has bettwr logistics software than Amazon does. And CargoWise is just a straight genious software suite to run everything from Customs over air, sea and land freight to warehousing. Guess who is using that, or something similar, in some form. Guessed, the majority of logistics companies.
No idea where this "incumbants bad, disruptive start-up so much better and easy" mentality comes from so. If you go into the field of logistics and supply chain with that attitude so, you will fail. And hard, and burn a ton of VC money while doing it. The only company that managed not to fail was Flexport, and even they fell short of theit lofty pitch goals.
Thaz being said, Dave Clark had, to my knowledge, not a lot to do with the "tech" part of Amazon, he always was an supply chain / logistics ops guy. And a good one at that. If anything, he treated it as a numbers driven thing, and definitely not a tech stack driven one. Part of the reason why he was good at his job at running ops.
Unsatisfied with their IBM mainframe which had a 99.99% uptime (seriously how much missed opportunity cost is that hour of downtime per year!) with a kubernetes microservice application where each of the 1000 components had an extremely impressive 99.999% uptime.
The problem is that the legacy applications running on that mainframe are tightly-coupled and thus a bitch to test. They're also hard to automate and hard to scale, because design choices made in the 80s and 90s based on people using them at the speed of manually typing on keyboards fall down when you hook up APIs to them for automated testing and for connections to modern applications.
And most of the people who know how to develop for them are about to retire. When was the last time you heard of a modern CS or IT degree program offering a COBOL elective?
And they're not easy to migrate, because you have 40+ years of business logic locked up in that legacy COBOL application, many of the developers of which are retired or flat-out dead. Did they document it perfectly? LOL! And oh, we're dealing with customs brokerage around the world and also potentially accounting info for a publicly-traded company, which means if you fuck up badly enough, people potentially go to jail.
It's easy to integrate green screens! Just write a program that maps out all of the UI interactions on the fixed-character screen and get the computer to use it!
(For those who think this is a joke: it's not only not a joke, it's one of the better ways to roboticise mainframe interactions.)
3) Bored mega-millionaire wants a neat hobby to try for a year. His previous Amazon compensation for 2021 was $56 million[1], so it's not like he needs to try anymore, or make money basically ever again. 12 months later he's still bored. Maybe he quit to spend more time bathing in bathtubs full of hundred dollar bills.
IME you don't make $56 million by being the type of person who is looking for a neat hobby to try for a year. It's not about the money for these types. If it was they would've retired long ago, before they became top lieutenants.
The story I told myself while reading this article: "Wartime founder thought he wanted to retire, brings in solid peacetime CEO. Founder decides peacetime isn't best for company, and comes back to turn it back into a startup."
Not dissimilar from the early Steve Jobs story at Apple.
> Clark has been unapologetic about his cavalier style, once telling Bloomberg that he favored “lurking in the shadows of … warehouses and scoping out slackers he could fire” during his early years at Amazon.
"Some Flexport insiders say layoffs and an influx of former Amazon leaders are wrecking morale."[1]
'"These people do not have conversations — they make demands," one laid-off employee said. Unsatisfactory answers could be met with harsh feedback, sources said.
One laid-off Flexporter said an Amazon veteran told them, "I don't believe a word you're saying," during a presentation they said took months to prepare.
Clark was asked at Tuesday's conference whether his Amazon hires meant he wanted to change Flexport's culture.
"The only place I've really worked in my life is Amazon. And so I didn't get out much. And I worked in supply chain so most of the people I know are Amazon people," he said. "Turns out Amazon's pretty good at moving stuff around."'
See also, the Dave Clark effect at Amazon:
"Amazon generally delivers later than competitors. That can be terrifying for some of its drivers"[2].
I don't like to look askance at alumni of particular employers, but I have had one too many a poor experience from ex-Amazon hired into leadership roles. The above matches my experience.
For me, the worst casualty as various lackeys followed arrival (also ex-Amazon) was the choking out of candidness. Second worst was turning the company into a document factory.
You have me at “document factory “. Writing a doc is good to convey your intentions. Revising a doc for the fucking 20 times because of unsettled sentences, paragraphs are a waste of time.
Do you mind saying more about "the choking out of candidness"?
I know they've got their "leadership principles" kool-aid [1] at the interview stage, but I always assumed that a seriously profitable and hard-working company (which they seem to be) wouldn't waste time mincing words.
With the incoming cabal there were many meetings of reading doxuments and solicitations for feedback. But it became apparent veey quickly that the confused muddle of documents were their wishes. Being candid, by say raising feasibility concerns, would only get you a fiesty rebuttal followed by being ostracized from future decision making.
What was a very social confident team at peace with asking vulnerable questions turned into a team where people took care to avoid trouble. The cabal preceding reading-meetings with gibberish, and after reading time received feedback of tense silence.
Not OP, but have worked in a similar situation run by ex-Amazon leadership. Project leaders focus mainly on writing docs on their "ideas". These docs are then spread around to other project and org leaders. Most of their time is spent reading or commenting on these and planning meetings for feedback. Typically the last people to read these documents are engineers who then have to make sense of and build whatever was laid out in the documents. Many times after all this is done the project is then shelved or engineering shuts it down so it was a waste of time.
Project managers can then point to these documents as promotion material and take credit for "leadership".
Obviously I'm being a bit harsh here and that in no way represents the average - but it is something I've seen too often.
Both Amazon and Google have document writing cultures. If you want to propose an idea, you write a doc about it.
The value of a doc writing culture is that writing things down encourages rigor and thoughtfulness. Docs can be widely distributed, and you can read it, think about it, and add comments. Exchanging ideas can be asynchronous rather than meeting oriented.
But also it can all get a bit carried away (because these artifacts become an important component to promotion).
I work at Google, which is a doc culture. But I worked most of my career at startups where we never wrote anything down. Overall, I prefer doc cultures. But yes, left to it’s own devices it can seem like you are working at a doc factory.
I worked at a startup without any documentation. The cto knew everything, because he'd been in every meeting and made every decision. Everyone else became somewhat helpless due to lack of information.
Doc culture is better than the alternative. 95% of docs get thrown away because half-way through writing it you realize it cannot work. In the absence of the design doc, you will instead hand-wave your way through the design phase and realize the mistake after several people have wasted time actually implementing it. It is a very, very good thing to know whether your idea solves or does not solve the given problem, at the earliest opportunity.
There's a happy medium. Even a startup can do with some well-maintained READMEs. But the problem with startups is churn, which makes for docs that rapidly go out of date, and the only thing worse than no docs is out of date docs that lead you down the wrong path.
So many people in leadership at top companies just won the start-up lottery as a junior employee and had the internal drive to get promo at all costs to gradually get to the top. As soon as they leave the bubble it’s clear how few real skills they possess.
Likewise, the degree to which Director+ jobs just hire based on current title at a competitor alone is bonkers. I’ve worked under people who are utterly clueless but managed to make VP at the place up the street. So they just get to be a VP at the next place.
Yup. If you got your foot in the door at the right place and people in leadership liked you, you're on the track to be a director in 6-8 years. Usually the people who promoted you were themselves early employees with no experience being executives, who just peter-principled into senior director/VP roles.
I've watched these failsons get promoted to senior director/VP, leave before they were ever accountable for their bad decisions, and then bring all their cronies over to the new place at the same levels.
If I could go back to the 70s and re-do my character creation, I'd put all my skill points into Charisma and would have been a CEO by now. Why bother with Comp Eng and business degrees if I could have instead just "be liked".
This is indeed all too common but sadly not unbelievable. Most mid-to-higher manager roles are not to be effective with a mission necessarily (which would require "real skills"), but instead to hold responsibility over a particular function. If the proverbial storm hits the fan, these Directors/VPs can migrate to another company, bringing all their previous cronies with a nice title/pay bump.
I've experienced something similar at Peloton where a C-level kept bringing former reports at Uber for key roles and started to push out the existing employees. It's business at the end of the day but I do think there's a graceful way of bringing people in from former companies.
Same thing at my company, only it was a former Microsoft employee who brought along all his buddies. They screwed up a bunch of stuff because they didn't understand our market or customers, and then all slowly got let go before having to contend with the full consequences of their bad decisions.
This hits so hard and so painfully. Had a VP from Amazon come into google
Cloud and he seemed to have no clue about the ladder or discipline he was executive over. We had to explain his job to him several times.
He was an absolute incompetent in every sense of the word and fired high quality workers the entire time until he himself was fired.
This practice of bringing in former reports or buddies is very common in the industry, both in startups and established companies.
You just have to look at the About us / Management/ Leadership page on the company web site and correlate a few names, current positions and positions in former companies, to get it.
I feel conflicted about the matter. I understand the appeal of bringing in people you know; they are a known quantity and involve less risk-taking than hiring an unknown person.
I can see it going super well if the new people brought in are liked and the culture from the older company is good. In our case, it was the opposite and tanked the team morale.
In my experience, the new top guy brings in his old lackeys because they complemented him, and made him look good, in the context of the top guy's previous company.
Hence they often turn out to be one dimensional, rather than rounded contributors - e.g great at bringing in projects on time even though everyone hates working with them, or great at technical due diligence/sniffing out skunk projects even though the new company's best work is in skunk projects.
One division where I work brought in a bunch of ex-Cisco folks. It’s odd but for some reason, they did really well here, even though Cisco is quite different than FAANG.
Why? If they were futzing with the wording of a powerpoint for months that is indeed bad. If they worked hard on getting answers to questions nobody else can answer that can be reasonable.
After all one can describe a phd defense as “a presentation which took years to prepare.”
Pretty provincial attitude probably propagated by some overpaid MAANG bro who doesn't realize that there's an entire industry of tech folks out there who aren't making $300K/yr TC. So if you are making that . . . a little humility is in order.
I indeed was a former “MAANG bro”, but this is sentiment gleaned from both a cohort of former coworkers who had stints there, along with general Flexporter attitude on Blind (which, for its imperfections and distortions, gives pretty good signal on company morale and culture).
I'm saying for what you call a "retirement colony," there are dozens of businesses in which the vast majority of the tech industry actually work. Blind is where spoiled rich people complain about being rich in the wrong way.
Isn't Flexport the company that was on HN's top page pretty much every week for like 2-3 years? Always hiring?
Having a general idea of how logistics work ( it's an huge complex and many times insane monster sometimes devourer of men ), something's was "off" with this whole Flexport signaling.
Not saying it's a time bomb or a WeWork because I don't have any information about that, but I always had the general feeling to stay away.
About the CEO thing, who knows.. CEO's are to blame but we tend to forget founders and "the board" are most of the times the biggest offenders. Their "visions" and key objectives many times lead to an absolute mad-house inside companies and ruined lives.
The thing to keep in mind is that they have competitors still eating their lunch while running 40+ year-old COBOL backends which have their IS departments tearing their hair out regularly.
It's as if the efficacy of a business isn't completely positively correlated with the coolness of its tech stack. I work for one of their competitors, and I'd kill for their tech stack. But ultimately their business revolves around a bunch of professional logisticians and customs brokers being able to execute reliably and effectively, and all tech can do is enable this. I wonder if they realize this.
Ocean freight is only one piece of the puzzle. A big one, but air is generally more lucrative. Ocean moves lots of mundane everyday predictable crap. Air moves crap that has to be there RIGHT NOW.
I interviewed with them in 2018 and at least at the time (much much smaller company of course) everyone there was very focused on the tech being an enabler for the logistics people. Their claim at the time was that all of the projects they pitched as possible work were driven by feedback from the front line people. Maybe that wasn’t true then, or maybe it’s changed, or maybe it’s still true but it’s not enough?
The problem IMO is scaling the logistics side of the house. No one cares how cool your tech is unless/until you can move shit from Point A to Point B at scale, and handle the same big problems as, an Expeditors, UPS Global Logistics, DHL, Kuehne + Nagel, or DSV Panalpina.
> Their claim at the time was that all of the projects they pitched as possible work were driven by feedback from the front line people.
I have worked as a software engineer in Operations in Amazon for years, and this even if this is true, it is not all positive.
What it meant for us is that instead of developing a solution we developed small disconnected projects here and there, that all required slightly different maintenance, different technology to build, etc.
This was a problem technically but also personally as there was nothing meaty enough for a promotion, and most projects were incredibly boring "I want a dashboard to show metric X".
Mass layoffs and terrorizing employees, while being the fallguy for a terrible plan to "solve the last mile problem so it's profitable", which Amazon haven't been able to solve
>"It’s been a real roller coaster for them. Hopefully it settles down a bit."
I don't quite understand what you mean; were they forced to switch each time, was each company 'poaching' from the prior one, did a whole team get up and move twice, or did they get laid off twice?
Logistics, freight forwarding, global shipping is as removed from the latest innovation in IT as you can imagine. I worked for a client with a fairly modern stack but we hit major problems when it came to integration with the IT stack of a global shipping incumbent. It's even worse than the banking systems. That world still runs on paper, faxes and REST APIs are generally not used there, because they are too new. XML is all the rage because it lets them stuff Word documents into CDATA. FTP is cool too. It's extremely difficult to make a dent in that world, unless we are talking about dents to the sids of the shipping container ships hitting some rock.
The highest valuation for a freight forwarder is 0.96x revenue last I checked. (K&N) Just not a very exciting business from a late stage/public investor standpoint. Lots of ways to make money in the space but not a straightforward path to IPO.
> Clark has hired political consultants to advise him on a potential 2026 run for governor of Texas, where he resides, according to people familiar with the matter. Greg Abbott, a Texas Republican, is currently serving a third term as governor.
It’s weird that the Wall Street Journal doesn’t say what party he’s considering running as. People who know he hired political consultants would also know who they are and thus if those consultants are Republicans or Democrats.
The article characterizes him as a "moderate Republican," which is an endangered political class in the state. His core constituency is probably your median "social moderate/fiscal conservative/anti-labor" CxO residing in the ultra-moneyed enclave of Highland Park, where he moved to last year. Take his show on the road to any major blue city or the deep-red GOP bastions in the west and he'd quickly discover just how unloved he'd be.
Maybe this will sound silly if you’re not from Texas but having “auburn football” (out of state team) in your twitter bio practically automatically disqualifies you from a major political role.
As much as I despise the trend of tech execs used to thinking that the're mini-gods who can do anything running for office, Texas can hardly do worse than the current government.
Dude was famous in his earlier career for being a giant narc and patrolling the warehouses for people to fire. Not sure he'd be anything but a ghoul given real power.
From what I heard during my time there, it wasn't just patrolling, he used to hide in the shadows out of sight waiting for someone to mess up then jump out and fire them right there publicly, which imo is much worse.
He used to have nickname of Sniper Dave or something of that sort.
Yeah, Abbott is awful. This comment from someone who worked near Clark though suggests that he is not even capable of pretending to not be a complete piece of shit, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37413442
Still, will be interesting to see two terrible out of touch people tear each other apart in the name of populism.
Depends on the intent. I don't know Flexport's situation, so I can't say this is what happened. But, it's pretty common to parachute in outsiders to do the terrible things you want to do (layoffs, big policy changes, etc) that you know will have an adverse effect on morale. Then, once it's done, you boot the outsiders and commiserate with the masses..."yeah, sorry, clearly that was a bad idea".
I’ve worked for one at Cruise who got “parachuted” like you put it and he was generally well respected as he definitely cleaned up the house there as the company scaled massively - I’d consider working for him again. That is to say it works for some companies but probably not everyone and ymmv depending on who you parachute.
I guess it depends on whether the company owners want to parachute someone in who has outside expertise/experience and can help out, or just someone who's a fall guy.
I think this is kind of a silly thing to say. It's a high risk path to bring in senior leadership - it means you don't have anyone internal you think is good. So it's not surprising when the move fails, whether that external hire was from amazon or anywhere else.
This quote from Dave Clark definitely stands out - "Founders have a right to change their mind". Interesting that he's leaving I would have thought his expertise would still be immensely useful.
I appreciate the candor there. I also appreciate a founder “changing his mind”
The old maxim of “Hire slow, fire quickly” rarely hits the C-suite it seems. It’s almost refreshing seeing it. Of course he probably has a massive parachute to cushion his landing that the rank and file usually do not.
Sounds a bit like the very common story, "We hired this STAR EMPLOYEE from BIGCORP to do BIG things and it was a DISASTER! Help!"
I have often thought about this throughout my career, both being in the reporting chain of said star, and once being that star. The fundamental thing is that a persons performance in a role is much less under their own control than even they often expect. So why is that? Especially in management roles?
People have a reputation that permeates the organization they lead. It will have plusses and minuses, fans and haters, but generally there is a tremendous amount of context about how they lead and how to interpret their actions. There is also a tremendous amount of history about their choices and how they have dealt with both good and bad outcomes from their choices.
Additionally, people who have been in an organization a "long time" (years) and especially if they have "grown up" through that organization, have a really solid network of other folks they can turn to who both know what they can do, and understand what they are asking.
When you change jobs there is a "honeymoon" period where what you do, or don't do, can always be ascribed to "they are new here." It is imperative that new leaders use this period to "course correct" to get to a point where they can effectively lead the new organization they are leading. This is the most important thing they need to do in their first 100 days. Even if you are dropped into a complete dumpster fire, understanding how to "wield" your organization is critical if you want to actually address the fires. On at least one occasion I watched a VP Eng parachute into an org and flame out horribly (even though they had the chops to get the job done) because they focused on "getting things back on track" before "getting to know the organization."
If you work for someone who is new and "previously experienced" (which is to say they got their experience somewhere else). Helping them learn the ins and outs of the organization will benefit both you and them. You because you won't be subjected to obviously stupid decisions which are only obvious if you know how the organization works, and the "new guy" (assuming they aren't a sociopath) will appreciate your efforts and look favorably on your future inputs.
I could probably write a book on him and everything he did at Amazon that was worth talking about, and I gotta admit, I didn't want to start today, but you're right that he deserves an explanation. Here's a few snippets that can be directly attributed to him:
* Amazon's policy of firing people on the spot for talking about unionizing.
* Their (former) policy of not operating anywhere where they would end up having to pay taxes
* Their policy of dropping prices through the floor as a negotiation tactic to get competitors to fold or get bought out
* Their policy of abandoning entire towns once they had already hired and fired everybody once
* Their policy of inventory co-mingling, and the deflection of blame to random merchants when they couldn't prove who had sent fakes.
* Their policy of always documenting anything that could even be remotely construed as a fireable offense, just in case he ever fired someone on the spot, as he commonly did.
Outside of official policies:
* The way he enforced a cult of personality, only hiring people who would constantly praise him, and fire people the moment they said anything that questioned his authority. He would even hold petty grudges against people that disagreed with him, using amazon's ridiculous non-competes to harass them after they left the company.
* The way he went to managers of pregnant women the moment they started to show, telling them to find any bullshit but legal means to fire them. (I actually overheard him say this, talking about one of my co-workers the moment she left the room).
* The way he bought a robotics company without any due diligence or even a product demo, forced adoption of the robots throughout his network, only to find out they had fundamental problems that prevented scaling to amazon's scale. Instead of writing off his shitty investment, he came in and micromanaged out every last person from the original company due to unrealistic and impossible demands.
* The way he unintentionally forced operations managers to completely change their operations every time he visited, so they wouldn't get fired for not listening to him, only to have to change it back the moment he left so they could actually be productive enough to not get fired.
* The way he would kick people out of elevators when he would get in, because he had to talk about "confidential stuff", and it couldn't wait til he got to his office. (First hand experience here, lol).
* BTW, he was never actually good at his job. For the entire time he was in charge of Amazon's retail business, they had progressively worse inventory turns, logistics costs, gross profit margins, returns on advertising, employee retention rates, etc. If you wanna see a hilarious accounting time lapse, you can literally take a zip file full of their public financial statements, skip to the parts about the Amazon retail business, and watch him waste trillions of dollars while constantly shifting blame to anything but himself.
In the words of a former US Army Major General (I went through first week training with him), when he quit after just 6 months on the job as a regional director: "Amazon is the most disfunctional organization I have ever seen, and I did my PhD on the Soviet military [1]. Also, that guy is a fucking psychopath."
[1] (the subtext of this joke was that the Soviet military was even more disfunctional than the US military, which he was always ranting about, but Amazon easily takes the cake)
Wow. When someone is that much of a prick, they become a one-dimensional stereotype.
The problem with asshole-led corporations is they, surprise, reward assholes. Civilized workplaces make a principled effort to kick out the assholes and find competent, productive people with normal-sized egos that can fit through the hangar doors.
> Also, that guy is a fucking psychopath.
Ahaha. Reminds me of the 6 Sigmas from "30 Rock". The 3 main organizational morale killing personality traits are bullying, depression, and low impact. And the problem is most organizations promote the opposite of each in reverse order, often forgiving bullying and harassment when there is $ignificant impact.
Not sure which ones you're referencing, but if its about the Alabama unionization effort, it's extra hilarious. He made such a show to say that Amazon pays its workers $15/hr, but what he didn't say was that he treats his employees so poorly that they couldn't hire anybody to work for anything less than $15/hr, which was already 30% higher than market prices in the warehouse fulfillment industry. He was the reason that they were paying $15/hr, and he was bragging about it like it wasn't one of his biggest failures as a wannabe cutthroat businessman.
Too many people forget the pissing in Coke bottles fiascos.
Also, people forget how bad workplace conditions can get, i.e., when Carnegie's Pinkerton snipers opened fire on Homestead union steel workers in the massacre of 1892.
The US middle-class had it best post-War when unions were strong between 1947 and 1965. Now, there is about an 1930's-level of unionization that is declining without any floor in sight.
Socialism in the US is a distant memory of its former self.
I heard him talk at a conference once and thought his insights were somewhat benign for someone in his position, but he didn't strike me as evil. Just uninteresting, I guess.
He's got a reputation for being particularly brutal on workers -- this is the guy who was, after all, responsible for Amazon's warehouse and logistics conditions, including working with GC Zapolsky to go after unionization and workers' rights efforts. Amazon's retail profitability pretty much rests on his ability to squeeze every cent out of employees' sweat, but the human toll has been high. (One particularly telling story about Clark is that he oversaw Amazon's noncompete lawsuit against his longtime friend and best man at his wedding, logistics head Arthur Valdez, when Valdez left Amazon for Target.)
> (One particularly telling story about Clark is that he oversaw Amazon's noncompete lawsuit against his longtime friend and best man at his wedding, logistics head Arthur Valdez, when Valdez left Amazon for Target.)
He's evil; a level of sinister and corrupt that should be investigated. As in, he needs to be held liable in the Amazon lawsuit, alongside Amazon, as a co-defendant.
I always thought it looked like a really neat company, but looking at glassdoor and seeing employees complain about new people wanting to get paid well turned me off of them.
1) Typical big-company guy fails to adapt to startup life. A year ago, Flexport's tech team was 400 people. That's minuscule compared to what Dave's used to at Amazon. He came in, insisted on a bunch of unnecessary hiring, bloated the tech team with deadwood, internal kingdoms and politics, and a "move slow and don't break anything" mentality. Founder got fed up and showed him the door, though presumably they were gracious enough to let him hit his 1-year cliff
2) Almost-CEO-of-Amazon tries to build the next Amazon. Makes a bunch of wildly risky investments into random moonshots, because he doesn't want to settle for a single-digit-billion company. Founder is initially taken in by bigshot's vision. But after 1 year of minimal progress and changing market conditions, founder tells CEO to get back to basics and focus on freight logistics. CEO decides that's not sexy enough for him. Waits for his 1-year cliff, then resigns
Exited to hear more wild theories from others.