Wei: An Amazon recruiter hired him after saving his unqualified cover letter
Eugene Wei · 20VC: Eugene Wei on "Status as a Service", Why Networks Grow and Stop Growing, The Worst Design Choices Social Media Incumbents Have Made & The Next 10 Years of Media and the Metaverse · Nov 22, 2021 · at 4:30
Eugene Wei, tech strategist and former executive at Amazon, Hulu, and Oculus, describes how he got his entry point into Amazon in the late 1990s despite lacking qualifications for the VP role he applied for.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.1s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I wrote a super long cover letter. This is the era before companies had computers just screening resumes, and I wrote this really long, impassioned cover letter, and a recruiter read it and said, well, he's obviously not qualified for this job, but this cover letter is so great, I'm going to pin it over my desk, and when we have a job that fits, I'm going to give him a call, and she did.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Eugene Wei
Wei: Facebook's Friending Push Caused Long-Term News Feed Context Collapse
“If you think about Facebook encouraging people to follow everyone under the sun, That had huge downstream consequences for them in the, you know, types of context collapse that they're still struggling to deal with newsfeed.”
Wei: Social Graph Design Is an Irreversible Decision for Startups
“And the problem for social startups is that if you have people build a very particular social graph, and you build your feed off of it, and you build notifications off of that graph, most people tend to not want to unfollow people down the road, so this is kin…”
Eugene Wei: Primary mechanism of network growth is status game creation
“Status as a service posits, there are two things that explain a lot of this. One is that humans are just hardwired to seek status, or as you would call it, status, which sounds more classy. The second is that humans... Will tend to gravitate towards the most e…”
Eugene Wei: Twitter tweetstorms are the optimal status tactic for VCs
“Now I feel like the new meta for investors is to build a personal brand on Twitter. And the way you do that is the tweet storms. That's a classic example of a optimal status seeking tactic within Twitter that has been adopted by the universe of players.”