I worked with Jeff Bezos at Amazon in the early 2000s. He was amazingly intense and made me rethink the way I view the world.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with David Selinger, the 48-year-old CEO of Deep Sentinel, based in Pleasanton, California.

It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I went to Stanford but didn’t finish my degree, so I went back in 2000 to finish.

In 2002, I got hired at Amazon through on-campus interviews while still in college.

I worked at Dutch Bros, now a publicly traded coffee company, then.

I didn’t initially want to work at Amazon, but I considered it because I was bored.

I had a great job at Dutch Bros, worked very few hours, and made a ton of money.

I took the Amazon interview very nonchalantly.

At Stanford, I studied machine learning, robotics, and AI, but Amazon’s dataset was unique.

Few companies at the time used the word “terabyte” to describe data.

Amazon sucked me in because of the opportunity to work closely with Jeff and to work on something that I wasn’t very experienced with, which was large data sets.

I joined what became the customer behavior research group at Amazon in January 2003.

At that point, we had a few thousand employees, and we were in an office called Pac Med.

On average, I met with Jeff once or twice a week.

My office was down the hall from Jeff, and I could hear him laughing constantly.

He was great and amazingly intense; I greatly enjoyed working with him.

Jeff Bezos made me rethink the way I view the world.

I worked 80 hours a week at Amazon in a gladiatorial culture.

Amazon removed the coordination and restrictions that other traditional companies had.

Everyone criticized Jeff for that, but that’s also what motivated people like me to do things.

Jeff believed, without exception or a willingness to compromise, that nobody else’s opinion mattered about how hard or how impossible something was, that something could truly be that big.

When I joined Amazon, the media was saying Amazon would go out of business this quarter or next — that was the assumption.

Jeff steamrolled ahead, and Amazon took on debt to build warehouses because he had confidence and clarity, which enabled him to overcome what everyone else said was impossible.

One of the things Jeff invented was the two-pizza teams.

It was like an org chart, with little teams led by essentially Rambo squads — each operates independently.

They don’t collaborate; they’re sent out to battle.

That was all based on common-sense knowledge — if you do that, people will quit.

Jeff said, “Okay, let’s deal with the assumption.

1 is that I want to keep people.” Businesses assume the leaders want to keep people.

In its early days, Amazon often rotated leadership out of mid-management every 12 to 24 months.

Jeff believed he could attract the best talent and get the most out of them in those 24 months.

Amazon reinvented the idea of an organizational structure, from being for stability to being for volatility, and discovered the greatest talent in that way.

That wasn’t obvious in 2000, 2002, or even 1995.

When I built my team, Jeff had to convince the board of directors that building a team that would use Amazon data was unique.

My biggest accomplishment at Amazon was convincing Jeff to allow the advertising business unit to exist and grow.

In our first meeting about the potential of ads on Amazon, Jeff said that Amazon is a retailer — we don’t put ads on our website.

After I showed him the data that proved we should run ads, he approved them.

At the time, I didn’t realize it would be that big, but I wanted to start my own thing.

I left Amazon in 2004 and cofounded Redfin, a real estate company, and served as its CTO.

I was full-time for a year, got it funded, got them to hire a CEO, and then I moved on.

I then started Rich Relevance, a machine learning enterprise software company for big retailers, which would eventually merge with another company.

I was in the hopping stage of my life.

Throughout my career, my love for AI has grown.

I wanted to start a company that would have an unequivocal positive impact on the world.

Deep Sentinel provides a security solution that includes cameras and a back-end service that connects the cameras to an AI and connects that AI to live guards.

We stop thousands of active crimes every month at an affordable price point.

We manufacture our cameras and provide the guard service, and I oversee and manage it.

We built all the software and all the back end ourselves.

I self-funded the start of Deep Sentinel and invested about $1M in it.

Then, we funded it in partnership with Jeff Bezos, one of our earliest investors.

I reached out to Jeff, and he agreed to be a part of it.

They did some of the early branding work and logos, and talked about how it would work and operate, and what technology we’d build.

I have offices in Makati, Philippines, Taiwan, and Pleasanton, California.

All my employees in the US are remote.

I go to the office once or twice a month.

My experience at Amazon became the foundation for my career.

Advertisement