Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

By Dave SchappellBusinessEntrepreneurshipCareers
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Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell episodes

  • How Amazon Raised the Bar on Recruiting Talent | John Vlastelica
    Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with John Vlastelica to talk about how Amazon scaled recruitment. They’ll discuss the origin and impact of the Bar Raiser program, where select employees helped pick top notch applicants, the birth of Making Great Hiring Decisions, Amazon’s behavioral interviewing training, how Matt Round’s MRT was designed for the interviewers not recruiters, and the challenges companies face scaling a high hiring bar.
    1 hr 9 min
  • What It Was like to Be Amazon’s 5th Software Engineer | Eric Benson
    Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Eric Benson to discuss his myriad early software engineering projects at a time when Amazon was rapidly growing as a company. He implemented Book Matcher (which didn’t last long) and the Similarities feature, and later built the original version of Weblabs that helped test which Amazon features were optimal. Eric also mentored many of the new software engineers, and later worked to port Amazon from Digital Unix to Linux (along with Bob Vadnais, and others).
    1 hr 9 min
  • How Amazon Built its Merchant Selling Platform | John Rossman
    Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with John Rossman. They talk about how the Merchants@ program was built from scratch, why working directly with third party sellers prompted the principle of seller obsession, launching the Apparel and Sporting Goods categories, developing smaller teams within the retail organization, and essentially, how Amazon’s Leadership Principles led the way to writing his book, “The Amazon Way”.
    1 hr 2 min
  • How Amazon Created a Personalized Store for Every Customer | Josh Petersen & Matt Round
    Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Josh Petersen and Matt Round. The conversation takes us back to Amazon’s early years, when the Personalization team was put together and built on features such as Similarities, Instant Recommendations, Cart Recommendations and more. The team strove to iteratively improve key features; over time, the Personalization and Automation worked toward Jeff Bezos’ vision of “a store for every customer”. They also talk about the effectiveness of small cross-functional teams, feature testing through Weblabs, MRT (Matt’s Recruiting Tool) - a tool still being used today, and much more.
    1 hr 4 min
  • How Amazon Built the World’s Biggest and Smartest Product Catalog | Rebecca Allen
    Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Rebecca Allen. They travel through memory lane by talking about the restructuring of Amazon’s catalog using Base 36, the complications of recycling ISBNs that led to the creation of Amazon’s Standard Identification Number (ASIN), how the Title Authority feature helped customers find books through associations, the seemingly impossible to accomplish Used Books category, and so much more.
    1 hr 1 min
  • How Amazon Used Imagination and Technology to Invent for Customers | Maryam Mohit
    Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Maryam Mohit. They talk about the different iterations of the early Amazon website that massively improved customer experience. Key improvements included navigation, browse, adding search to the homepage, personalizing the website, adding electronic gift certificates, expanding to new categories and much more. It was all made possible by listening to customers and translating their confusion and input into innovative product solutions.
    1 hr
  • How Amazon Built its Associates Affiliate Marketing and Got Big Fast | Shawn Haynes
    Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Shawn Haynes. They discuss how the Amazon Associates team built and grew the affiliate marketing program. Shawn grew the team from several hundred initial affiliate marketing websites to more than 500,000 by the time he moved on. He shares how the learnings from early Associates economics, such as focusing on cost per new customer rather than margin on individual sales, helped inform the Premium Associates and Megadeals that Amazon pursued later.
    54 min
  • Building the Amazon Website in the Late 90s | Alex Edelman
    Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Alex Edelman. They talk about how an English Major from the University of Pennsylvania joined Amazon as the company’s first dedicated “HTML Wizard”, why the V3 project (in 1997) was mainly about obsession over customer experience, the thrilling yet exhausting experience during Launch Nights, and how a boating accident led to shared ownership through pager rotation.
    51 min
  • How Amazon Automated its Google Advertising and Drove Billions in Sales | Blake Scholl
    Today, on the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Blake Scholl. They discuss Blake’s time working on the Amazon Personalization team, and how he went on to build the team that built Amazon’s Automated Advertising engine, that dynamically placed ads on Google Ads (before Google even had an API). Amazon’s Automated Advertising engine started slow, but went on to drive billions in profitable sales for the company. It was fun to hear not only about the successes, but also about the missteps along the way.
    53 min

About Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

From the publisher's feed

Welcome to the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, where I’ll talk with the Amazonians who helped build Amazon.com into one of the world’s most valuable companies. This weekly podcast is for entrepreneurs,…