College years

Back in my sophomore year as an undergrad, I got obsessed with doing software projects unrelated to my coursework. It all started when I was selected in my batch to build the complete website for my college’s annual business and management festival called Consortium. Here is the Wayback machine’s snapshot of what it looked like (some of the components no longer work now that most browsers no longer support flash). C and Data Structure coursework in my freshman years had completely put me off and got me disinterested in learning programming (blame the super theoretical teaching methods?). Learning to build websites with JS, PHP, and MySQL in a team gave me much-needed confidence and introduced me to full-stack development. More importantly, I lacked formal awareness of the Software development lifecycle and the challenges of collaborating on team projects, which surprisingly made it more fun. I still chuckle imagining how we used to share code among ourselves as zip files, as nobody told us what Git was. To date, nothing beats the thrill of deploying untested, unreviewed duct tape of several JQuery plugins and hacky PHP MySQL code to phpMyAdmin.

Throughout my undergrad, I built enough websites to become the goto person for full-stack development in college - such as the one for our annual technical fest (Wayback snapshot), mid-scale systems with database scaling challenges, and even led a team of 10+ batchmates to successfully launch a social media platform for our college that supported live chats, video calls, feed and more, written mostly from scratch - well The Social Network movie had its global impact after all. Failed enough times in the process that it deserves another post. The skills and experience through these projects came in very handy during campus job placements! By doing these projects, I learned several key things early in my career:

• Software development is a broad field, and building a passion for at least one niche area is critical.
• Start with prototyping and hacking together things early on to validate a new idea.
• Building a simple, intuitive user experience is hard but critical for your product.
• Rapid software development while working in a team is equally challenging and fun.

I completed my undergrad equipped with enough skills to build useful mid-scale software and with a dream of having my own start-up one day. Along the way, I did a formal Master’s as well at NC State to get some specialization in Machine Learning, given all the craze around it.

Amazon Days

Right after graduation, I joined Amazon at its Seattle HQ, at a time when it had around 500,000 employees worldwide. I considered myself very fortunate to be part of the biggest e-commerce website in the world, and I worked on unique challenges— all revolved around the common theme of doing things at scale. The public perception of Amazon makes it sound as if the 9-5 job leaves you with no energy for personal learning and growth, and I thought the entrepreneurship dreams would need to be put on the back burner. It was also not very common to see folks working on their 20% project, unlike a few other companies.

A start-up within a giant

Within a few months, I attended my first company-wide all-hands in-person at the now-called Climate Pledge Arena. At the end of the all-hands, Jeff Bezos handed over a “Just Do It” award with a size 12 Nike shoe, to an employee who showed bias for action and innovation by doing something not part of their job. I was elated to see how the company still has so many avenues to innovate and be recognized at a global level by Jeff Bezos despite its size.

What does a company this big lack where I can independently innovate outside of my regular work (though that was equally exciting)? The question kept me occupied for months. Having failed a couple of times in the past and knowing I would have to juggle any side project with my regular work, I wanted to do my due diligence before investing time in an idea. I talked to my teammates about a couple of ideas and finalized one that had the broadest impact and, hopefully, at a global scale. I also verified that no other team is investing in building a similar product.

What next? I started building a prototype of my idea in the late afternoons and evenings and spent over four months bringing it to life. Initially, I thought about doing it with some of my friends, but I thought that would slow things down as I’d most of the vision in my head and didn’t have the capacity to write it down and align with others. I opted to do things with serverless computing, and as many managed offerings from AWS as possible, as it offered the most flexibility and least configuration to manage things at a medium scale (hundreds of requests/sec) as an individual. And then, I launched it on a Seattle employee mailing list consisting of 50,000+ employees. Wow, did I see a response! I wish I could go more into the actual details of the product, but until it becomes a public product, I’d have to stay tight-lipped.

This was in early 2018, and within a few months of it going viral, an internal employee resource group called Connect@Amazon reached out to me, asking if I’d also like to make this product an official part of it. They have been trying to build something like this for years but with little luck. I couldn’t be more excited. It felt like an acquisition of my idea, and it came with perks - support in building a team of engineers, freedom to operate, and lots of help with organizing regular meetings, hack days, food, and a group of really passionate people who wanted to make a difference in employee experience at Amazon. Nothing better than having the ability to run your own well-funded start-up sans the “my livelihood depends on this” feeling, right?

This wasn’t going to be my full-time day job, though. It was still meant to be a side-project with the aim of someday being managed by a dedicated full-time tea. We assembled a team of really passionate 20+ volunteer frontend and backend developers, UX designers, program managers from Amazon, and who all wanted to either do something they didn’t get to as part of their day jobs or wanted to apply their learnings or just have fun working with developers across 5+ countries. It was a time sink - I spent over 2hrs every day in coordination among the team, providing feedback, making sure we built the right thing with the right technologies, and most importantly, keeping the volunteers motivated enough to continue contributing to the project. I got a chance to travel to Dublin and Paris to meet amazing collegues and providing insights about the product. I learned the most I could have in my career so far, collaborating with people across so many different expertise, and when someone volunteers to do something without monetary incentives, they truly offer their best skills. It took me over 50+ meetings, 20+ hack evenings (sometimes even weekends in office with few passionate folks), and over 3 iterations of design to finally deliver a product that was intuitive, flexible, and one that could operate on auto-pilot for User Generated Content with sufficient guardrails to not be a PR disaster for the company.

We launched for the second time, this time as a well-funded volunteer employee group. It was thrilling, is the mildest way to put it. It was able to attract a steady stream of thousands of visitors per day without much marketing. However it lacked some push to make it a really well-adopted platform across Amazon globally. Eventually, COVID-19 forced everyone to WFH, and employees further looked for avenues to interact with others in informal settings and build connections within the company. That’s when Amazon Gather realllllyyyy took off. By the end of 2020, we had crossed half a million unique users (out of an estimated employee base of 1 million), and it very soon became one of the most loved internal products by employees across the world. We received thousands of messages from employees about the ease of use and the impact it had on their employee experience at Amazon. We very quickly integrated it with several employee-facing landing pages that ensured long-term investment in Gather.

Just Do It Award

Finally, in Oct 2020, I was awarded the coveted “Just Do It” award by Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon, in the company-wide All Hands meeting. Every year, this award recognizes a select few employees who exemplify two of our core values, innovation and bias for action, by creating an impact on their own outside of their day jobs.

My intrapreneurship effort over the last three years in creating the platform “Amazon Gather” has been incredibly useful to several thousand Amazonians for exploring interesting virtual events and meeting like-minded people. In the wake of COVID-19, this has helped people connect virtually and feel secure. It is humbling to see my brainchild, which I started as a side project, materialize into a global team of engineers taking it to the next level.

Joining a huge corporation like Amazon as a fresh grad could be overwhelming at times, but I followed my personal mantra of “don’t wait, just innovate” and identified a key area where I could make an impact. Amazon’s culture provided me with the wings and the resources to shape this idea into the product it is today. Based on my personal experience, I encourage new grads to keep innovating, and with perseverance, I’m sure it will be a rewarding journey.

The award became special to me in few more ways:

• It was the most viewed company all-hands to date - as folks globally joined over virtual conference
• It was the first time it was awarded virtually, I missed the chance to meet Jeff Bezos in person as a result :(
• Jeff Bezos left the position of CEO the next year, so I ended up being the last receiver of this award from Jeff Bezos :)