Today we had our first meeting with a company! This morning we had the pleasure of talking with an employee from Amazon.com who worked in the legal department. So at 8:30AM we walked the seven or so blocks to the Amazon head quarters where we met our contact Sam who worked in the legal department, got our visitor badges, and then headed up to a conference room.
Our talk with Sam was very helpful and insightful to both understanding the details of Amazon as a company, and its culture as well. The first thing that I learned from our meeting with Sam is that I greatly underestimated both the size of Amazon and its potential and vision of expansion. One division of Amazon that I hadn't heard of but seems like a large and growing part of the company is the Amazon Web Services in which Amazon provides computing and hosting services for companies from Netflix all the way to small startups. Amazon plans to grow this product to the point that they are the one and only provider for hosting and computing and are essentially the information center for the world.
Another thing that Sam talked about was the things that the company is most worried about, or as he put it "keeps him up at night". The first thing that he talked about and was the most unexpected to me was the issue of possible anti-trust lawsuits against the company. According to him, Amazon has been flying under the radar of trust laws in the United States, but as they continue to grow within their current markets and expand to new ones, the possibility of anti-trust lawsuits increases dramatically. For example if Amazon were even to come close to reaching their goal of the usage of their web services, there could definitely be some concern from both the public and the government over violations of anti-trust laws.
The second thing that Sam said kept him and the top management worried was privacy and information security, which given the recent Target security breach is very topical. As an e-commerce company Amazon stores incredible amounts of personal data that if lost would be very harmful to the public. So given the recent interest in information security it was reassuring (although not unsurprising) to hear that Amazon is thinking and hopefully acting on this concern.
The final topic which Amazon would be concerned about is their brand image and keeping it positive, which was a bit surprising to hear. When Sam first mentioned this I thought it was a bit odd because I don't have a negative image of Amazon, however when he said that they didn't want to become like Walmart which is known for its harsh treatment of employees and business partners, it made sense that Amazon would want to be actively staying away from this sort of image. It was nice to hear that this was something that Amazon was concerned about, even though it wasn't affecting them much at this very moment. One way in which Amazon recently attempted to better their image was through the introduction of their Amazon Smile program which gives (if I remember correctly) 0.5% of each sale to a non-profit of the consumers choice. This program could not only serve to better countless non-profits nationwide, but also to keep the public happy with Amazon and to increase their brand loyalty.
All in all, our meeting with Sam was very informative. I was a bit nervous at first that with his location in the legal department he would only be able to give us insights into the legal side of Amazon, however this was far from the case as he was very up to date on the company's vision, culture, and inner-workings.
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