Former Amazon VP Ethan Evans explains to Codie Sanchez how he navigated corporate politics and secured advocates across business units.
Insight
Evans: Bezos preferred paying for redundant teams over forcing early collaboration
“I'd rather pay to get two of something because I find when I force people to collaborate too soon, they gridlock and argue about priorities, and what I actually get is nothing. And so I'd rather pay for two Then get zero, and if we're so lucky as to get two wo…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Evans: Amazon employees directly confronted Jeff Bezos over taxes at all-hands
“I've seen people at Amazon actually tell Jeff Bezos, you run an evil company while working for it. Like, why are we evil? I had an all hands, a guy, you know, said, we seem to avoid taxes. Why are you such a tax dodger?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Evans: Amazon employee jumped from $300K to $750K by matching Meta offer
“He went from making about 300,000 and making about three quarters of a million in one jump.”
Assertion Open · timeframe Jun 2026
Evans: Amazon Considered Dropping Ownership Principle, Retained It After Internal Push
“At Amazon, we had an ownership leadership principle, which is part of how Amazon runs. It has a set of principles. And at one point they were considering removing it and I led the fight to keep it. And some of the words in it That I helped create, say an owner…”
Insight
Evans: Damaging a boss's ego kills careers faster than losing company money
“Betrayal is the number one. Any sort of, and to some degree that's the letting me down where you promise something, like I'm counting on something and then it doesn't show up and it makes me look bad. Anything that hits people's ego or identity is actually mor…”
Assertion Partly supported
Evans: Bezos banned PowerPoint because nested slides buried the Challenger launch risk
“Jeff hated PowerPoint and the famous story why it it's old now, but when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, They went and found the PowerPoint slide had been used to justify the launch. And this PowerPoint had like seven levels of nested bullets and the ti…”