Interview Series: Ethan Evans.

The retired VP at Amazon and now Executive Coach shares his mantras.

It may be a name you have heard before but Ethan Evans, despite his high profile has been staying humble. Ethan, former Vice President at Amazon, is a powerhouse of innovation and leadership with a knack for transforming big ideas into impactful realities.

Known for his sharp strategic thinking and a talent for building teams that thrive on challenges, Ethan has been instrumental in scaling groundbreaking programs like Twitch Prime.

A passionate mentor and advocate for personal growth, he combines decades of executive experience with a creative, people-first approach to leadership. Whether he’s coaching future leaders or exploring bold new ventures, Ethan’s unique ability to connect vision with execution leaves a lasting impression.

Did you know out of the original 12 principles of Amazon, he helped advocate for and draft the Amazon Leadership Principle (LP) “Ownership” — the words, “They never say ‘that’s not my job.’” are his (read the story)?

Well, you could tell me “Great, but concretely what does this mean?” When he retired from Amazon as VP, he had 70+ patents; led global teams of 800+; spent 15+ years at Amazon; reviewed 10,000+ resumes; conducted 2,500+ interviews, and 1,000+ hires.

And yes, I am proud to say I was one of these 10,000 resumes and 2,500 interviews. While I didn’t get the job, Ethan made the experience a great and positive learning exercice for me. We also stayed in touch after and I could sense he was already in coaching mode helping everyone willing to learn.

He was an Amazon Bar Raiser and Bar Raiser Core Leader, responsible for training and maintaining Amazon's group of interview outcome facilitators. I am not sure walking with the candidate out of the building and chatting in the elevator and for another good 1/4 miles would have qualified as the official framework. But this glimpse into his knowledge was quite something.

So why not share it with everyone here?

The Delivery Man (DM): What was 10-year-old Ethan’s dream job, and how close did you get to it?

Ethan Evans (EE): I read a lot of dinosaur books as a child, so I wanted to be a paleontologist. My father, ever practical, said that he would rather find an oil well than a dinosaur bone. I discovered computers and computer programming when I was about 14, and the rest is history.

DM: Can you tell us about one person who influenced you early on and what lesson stuck with you?

EE: My father was the most influential person in my early life. He was very financially conservative. He taught me the value of saving money, which is what allowed me to “retire” from Amazon at age 50 and start my dream career helping others succeed.

DM: Did you have any entrepreneurial ventures as a kid? Lemonade stands? Tech hacks? The next Steve Jobs moment?

EE: I grew up on a farm. My dad liked to cut and split firewood, so for a few years we sold firewood to people in town who wanted wood for their fireplaces. It wasn’t much money; it was more something for my father and I to do together.

DM: What was your first real job, and what’s one thing it taught you about work and life?

EE: My first serious job was at a hyper-growth startup. I joined at 160 employees and when I left 3.5 years later it was 1600 employees. I made enough off the stock options to put a downpayment on a house. I switched into management about a year into this first job and never looked back. This is far earlier than most engineers go into management.

DM: If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?

EE: Take more risk. While I have taken some big risks and gotten some benefits, I have generally been more conservative than I wish I had been in hindsight. I wish I had taken more bets, switched jobs when better options were out there, and believed in myself more to invent things. I learned to do much of this in the late stages of my career, when I felt safer, and that was later than I wish it had been.

Career at Amazon & Beyond

DM: Your tenure at Amazon saw so much growth—what was the “pinch me” moment where you thought, ‘Wow, I’m part of something huge’?

EE: There was a point from 2011 to 2014 where my team ballooned from 100 to 800 as fast as we could hire. I was promoted to Vice President as my team grew rapidly and I had offices around the world. This kind of growth was insane. It was about this time the first person asked me to take a photo with me because I worked at Amazon that I realized just how special and unusual the company had become.

DM: What leadership principles do you think are underused by professionals today, especially from Amazon’s playbook?

EE: Though I helped write the Ownership leadership principle, my actual favorite is Bias for Action. I cannot stand moving slowly. I have always preferred moving quickly, making mistakes, and recovering as we go. Of course I do not mean being careless for no reason, but I do mean favoring action long before the outcome is certain.

DM: You’ve transitioned into coaching now. What inspired you to make the leap from corporate giant to guiding others on their journeys?

EE: I went into management even in my first job in college, and then very quickly in my first professional job as well. I did this because I found human puzzles more interesting that technology puzzles. Getting people to work together was fun. I have always had a bit of a teacher inside me and had considered a career as a professor. Teaching others how to manage teams and lead projects came naturally to me. Eventually at Amazon I got to where I could not do my VP job and also increase my teaching and mentoring, so I left to go teach full time.

I liked my work and my coworkers at Amazon, but I love what I do now so much more. It fits me in a way that corporate work did not. Specifically, when I do not get to write and teach now, I become unhappy, even when I am traveling in some beautiful place or doing something amazing around the world. I love the recreation in my life, but the chance to truly improve the lives of others makes me equally happy.

DM: Looking back, what’s the hardest professional challenge you faced, and how did you push through it?

EE: I adopted my infant daughter in China in 2003. We flew home and my company laid me off that week. They had been planning on letting me go but they knew that it would cause problems with my adoption. So they waited for the adoption to be complete but then let me go on my second day home. This was in a tough economy, similar to today, and my wife had already left her job to be at home with our new baby.

At this time in my life I did not have much built up in savings, so I was searching for a new job while watching the bank account plunge towards zero. Finding myself in a situation where I had to find work to pay our bills was definitely the toughest challenge.

I pushed through it by making finding work a job. Every day I got up and put in at least eight hours networking, applying for jobs, and reading technical books to sharpen my skills. It took me three months but I landed a new job.

DM: Let’s switch to trends and insights, AI and automation are dominating headlines—what’s your take on how they’ll reshape leadership and careers?

EE: Before I started my professional career I was working on a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at one of the early homes for this research, the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. I’ve thus been familiar with the ideas of artificial general intelligence for a long time.

I’m quite concerned about the impact of AI on many kinds of jobs. I’ve worked with a member of my community to build an “Ethan GPT” based on Chat GPT and while it is not as good as I am today as a coach, it is quite passable. Some community members use it every day to bounce ideas off “me” and get benefit from it.

I was also at Carnegie Mellon when a project the university started, called Deep Thought, was sold to IBM and became Deep Blue. Deep Blue was the first chess program to beat the highest ranked chess grandmaster. Something that had been thought close to impossible has passed from impossible to possible to something that can probably run on my iPhone.

When I apply this same rate of progress to AI, I tend to think that AI will rapidly reshape most forms of knowledge work and will also obsolete my own career expertise within a few years. If this sounds a bit negative, I am afraid I think it is. Carnegie Mellon is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city known for steel mills. When I went to college there, I saw all the displaced steel workers as their jobs went offshore to Thailand and other places. I saw them struggle to adapt to the reality that their high paying jobs were gone forever. I fear this same thing is going to hit the current generation of knowledge workers pretty hard.

Short term, using AI-based tools well will make top performers more efficient. There was also a period where a computer-assisted human could outplay both computers and humans at chess. But today, a human is useless to the top computer chess players. I think for some kinds of knowledge work this same day will come pretty quickly, where humans bring nothing to the AI in those fields.

DM: With the rise of remote work, what’s one “non-obvious” tip to keep teams engaged and productive?

EE: Spend the money to get the team together a couple of times a year.

You may call this obvious, but some companies will look at it and say, the point of remote work is to save money, we don’t need to do this. However, in my own experience, it is worth it to get together. Humans bond over a shared meal in a way that we have not yet figured out how to replicate remotely. Yes, we can work without this. But we work better after we connect outside of pure task-oriented effort.

DM: What’s your advice to leaders trying to adapt to Gen Z’s work style and expectations?

EE: Have a mission more than money. It used to be that simply having a job was considered a blessing and people were grateful just to have jobs. This has changed, and people now need a reason to work. Figure out why what you are doing matters to the good of the world, and if you cannot do that, perhaps you should move on yourself.

DM: What current trend in tech or business excites you the most right now? And which one do you secretly roll your eyes at?

EE: AI both excites and worries me, as outlined above.

I roll my eyes at Crypto. I understand how blockchain technology works, but I think that the main application, cryptocurrency, has been subjected to so much hype. There is real potential value in the idea of crypto but I am turned off by the relentless evangelists who seem to want to tell everyone not involved how dumb they are.

DM: We hear so much about “work-life balance”—how do you define it, and is it really achievable in today’s fast-paced world?

EE: I think the best saying here is that you can have everything you want, but not all at once.

Here is the thing – promotions are competitive, and there is always someone who either has a different definition of balance or no definition of it at all who is willing to outwork you.

As a legal and financial structure, a corporation simply wants the most productivity per dollar spent. That means that it will tend to reward the person without any balance as long as that person is effective with their extra time.

This process means that it is very hard to have work-life balance if you also want fast growth, because the fastest growth will tend to go to the person who makes work the main focus of their lives.

So, you have to choose. Set boundaries, work effectively, and accept perhaps a bit slower growth. Or start your own business if you can, so that you more directly control your own results and rewards.

Lastly, some people are able to be so effective in limited time that they defy these rules. Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, claims to be such a person. I am not sure if regular people can always actually do what he claims to do.

DM: On the lighter side, if Amazon’s “Buy Now” button worked for anything in the universe, what’s the first thing you’d buy?

EE: Immortality, assuming that I could afford it. But I guess there is a long list of godlike superpowers I would like to buy. Omniscience would be handy. The ability to fly sounds like fun.

DM: What’s one skill you absolutely cannot master, no matter how hard you try?

EE: Is patience a skill? But beyond that, I think I would have to say dancing. I love to dance and have no shame, so in that sense I have mastered it. But it would be nice to become good enough at it that my wife agreed I could dance.

DM: If you could instantly download a new talent into your brain (Matrix-style), what would it be?

EE: Fluent Italian. I mean no offense by choosing Italian rather than French, and I would be open to both. I speak (or at least can read and understand) basic Spanish and German, so it would be great to add true fluency in another language.

DM: You’re stranded on a desert island but get to bring three things—what’s on Ethan’s must-have list? (Bonus: no boats allowed!)

EE: A satellite phone? But if I have to think about really being stranded, I think I want fish hooks, fishing line, and either a lighter or flint and steel (I’m counting that as one item). I watched the TV series Alone a lot, and I grew up on a farm, so if push comes to shove, I’m going to fish.

DM: Ethan, thank you so much for sharing so many great nuggets of wisdom which were earned the hard way. And being honest and vulnerable in the ebbs and flows of your career. This resonates closely with my personal experience when my daughter was born and I was let go. A scary time.

If you are interested in learning more from Ethan, you can subscribed to his own Substack channel LevelUp, read his multiple contributions to LinkedIN and of course, book a 1:1 session with him!