How We Built It | Kim Rachmeler

Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

In our first ever episode, Dave speaks with Kim Rachmeler, former VP Worldwide Discovery and member of the S-Team at Amazon.com, Inc. She’s a skilled engineer and web developer whose efforts helped build and develop Amazon literally from the ground up. She shares the challenges of working with a small team of engineers when tech engineers were scarce and some of the iconic steps the company has taken to cope with consistent monthly growth.

Episode Resources:

• Visit Upaya Social Ventures
• Check out Kim’s LinkedIn
• Subscribe to our Newsletter
• Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:16 How Kim started at Amazon
• 04:50 What three things do you need to want something?
• 07:14 Working as a Technical Project Manager for the first time
• 09:41 Figuring out different process and running experiments
• 13:39 On the 3rd version release of the Amazon website
• 15:40 It started with more or less 35 people doing everything
• 17:20 A 30% monthly growth had created several technical issues
• 20:31 Preventing downtime while website maintenance is ongoing
• 23:13 Adding categories and other big changes
• 26:15 Engineers are difficult to hire back in the day
• 28:56 It was mainly an engineering problem for a long while
• 29:53 From being an engineer to becoming a TPM
• 34:20 Nightly builds prompted people to pay more attention
• 37:16 The service-oriented architecture
• 40:24 Just Do It Award: how it came to be
• 41:44 “Bias for Action” as a core value
• 45:24 Overworking resulted in success, but it’s unhealthy
• 47:59 Tips for young entrepreneurs