CTO by chance! Short story of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels

-
I was recently listening to a podcast which featured Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels.
"Sometimes you have gifts that you don't know about untill you start doing them"

Did you know:

  • He studied radiology and worked at hospitals
  • He was an Academic and had been a research scientist at the Cornell University
  • In 2004, Amazon (the book company!) invited him to give a talk about some material he was working on and Werner seemed skeptical about visiting a "book" company
  • After joining Amazon, in 6 months he became the CTO because the existing "Tech guy" at the company really wanted to be a developer!
#DiverseBackground

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Overcoming challenges : If she can do it, why can't we?

-
Image
Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast episode Think Bigger & Innovate from ' The Psychology Podcast ' featuring "some" Columbia business professor. Half way through the episode I learn that the guest professor is a blind person! She is Dr Sheena Iyengar! According to Wikipedia, " As a child, she was diagnosed with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease of retinal degeneration. By the age of nine, she could no longer read . By the age of sixteen, she was completely blind, although able to perceive light.  She remains blind as an adult. In 1992, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School and a B.A. in psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences. She then earned her Ph.D . in Social Psychology from Stanford University in 1997 " If she can do it, why can't we? #Inspiration #Resilence #NeverGiveUp #WhatsYourExcuse
Read more

Getting started with an App idea

-
Image
Quick story of how I took that first baby step towards building my App business (MyChessApps.com & FollowChess.com). For this, lets rewind to the year 2007. I was posted in the US from my first job. I was already 4 years into the job as a Java Software Engineer. Back then, the  Symbian  OS platform was very popular. This was much before Android & iOS gained popularity. Being a chess afficionado, I used to learn chess and participate in chess tournaments. Learning was mostly via software on the laptop. However, when it came to mobile, there was hardly anything. I owned a Nokia Symbian S60 device and could find only on good chess app called Chess Genius. But it was mostly for playing vs the AI whereas my need was of an app or tool to help in my learning process (i.e. solve chess puzzles and view games of past chess masters) Seeing this void and trusting in my tech skills, the idea to develop something on my own popped into my head! This is when I started exploring ...
Read more