Ethan Evans is a career development expert dedicated to helping professionals overcome career blockages and advance to the next level. After retiring as VP from Amazon, where he built Prime Gaming, managed Amazon's first game studio, and contributed to Twitch, he shifted his focus to paying forward his good fortune by assisting clients from top US companies. With 70+ patents, over 10,000 resumes reviewed, more than 2,500 interviews conducted, and experience leading global teams of 800+, Ethan offers a wealth of expertise.

Join us to explore his remarkable career journey, including insights on overcoming career challenges, the significance of proactivity and emotional intelligence, and practical advice for advancing your career.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• The Importance of Taking Responsibility
• Navigating Common Career Struggles and Workplace Challenges
• The Importance of EQ in Career Growth

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Ethan Evans on LinkedIn
• https://www.ethanevans.com/

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about their recipe for success. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Heroes of Aldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. 

Today, we finally have Ethan Evans with us. Ethan is a retired Amazon VP who built Prime Gaming and worked at Twitch. He is now providing executive coaching to a small group of motivated clients. His mission is to share the lessons he learned in his long career to save others delay and frustration when struggling with issues he has been through before.

Ethan is a LinkedIn top voice and board member. He has 70+ patents. He's led global teams of over 800. He's reviewed over 10,000 resumes, conducted 2,500 interviews, and he's made over a thousand hires. He was an Amazon bar raiser and a bar raiser for a leader responsible for training and maintaining Amazon's group of interview outcome facilitators.

Let's get started, Ethan. Thanks for being here. And I'm excited to dive in. And guess I'm coaching myself. This is just a free coaching session. 

Ethan Evans: That's right. It could be. Well, I got to thank you. That was a comprehensive introduction. I do a lot of podcasts and you did a wonderful job rounding out where I've been and what I do.

If you're as well prepared for the rest of the conversation, it will be stellar. What, where would you like to begin? 

Lizzie Mintus: I want to know more about your own business and what you're doing. For anybody that doesn't follow you on LinkedIn. And if you don't please do. 

Ethan Evans: Yeah, okay. So after I left Amazon, I wanted to pay forward my good fortune by helping other people. And so I write every day on LinkedIn for free, some kind of career advice. I rolled that into a Substack newsletter because LinkedIn posts are limited to 3,000 characters and you can only put so much advice there. So Substack lets me go a lot deeper. 

There's a free version and a paid version. The paid version comes with a community. And then on top of that, I teach a number of courses. The best known, reviewed, received is called, Stuck at Senior Manager, breaking Through to Executive. And so it's all about that transition from being a solid mid level leader, teams of 25, 30, up to 60, 70, 80. Versus really being in the leadership team of either the division in a large company or the whole company itself in a smaller firm.

That's been my sweet spot, helping people get across that promotion bar. Of course, the challenge has changed with the economy and, with the industry, gaming has been an especially tough place the last year or two. But that's what I do and I love it. It's perfectly aligned with my life mission.

Lizzie Mintus: And it allows you freedom to live your life and work. 

Ethan Evans: It does. Everything I do can be done from almost anywhere. Last year I was sitting on a mountaintop in Switzerland, looking down into the valley. So I had a cell signal writing a post about thoughts I had that day hiking in the mountains.

So, hard to beat that. I spent about 45 minutes sitting in a meadow surrounded by cows with their sort of Swiss cowbells, thumbing out a post on my phone. And that was a great way to do it. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's where the creative juice comes from. And that's where you get your best ideas. So it makes sense.

Tell me some good success stories from your time being a career coach. 

Ethan Evans: Wow. So many. I guess, one of them, I don't want to reveal the person's name, but I made friends when I was at Twitch and I was streaming online. I made friends with a gentleman from Mexico, who was struggling really in his small town to build a better life. He was working in it and he had his own advertising billboard business and he was doing all these things. And he also started helping me with the first version of my website. But he really wanted to get a job in the US where he could only work one job and sort of have a stable career for his wife and for him. 

So ultimately I was able to help him get a role in Amazon. What I did was introduce him to some managers and say, look, they didn't report to me. I said, you don't have to hire him. Just talk to him. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, 

Ethan Evans: But he wasn't getting calls and he wasn't getting good feedback. And I said, just give him some feedback, talk to him and give him some feedback. Well, of course someone did hire him, which got him a visa and got him here. Then as I'm sure you're aware, all the downsizing hit. And so actually he was downsized, which is terrible because, it means, if you're on a visa, you have 60 days or you'll be sent home. But he was able to find another role inside Amazon. And just a few nights ago, this is the truly feel good part...

So feel good part number one is I was able to help him realize his dream of getting a tech job in the US. Feel good part number two is, some of the things I taught him, he's now in a new role within Amazon. And a few nights ago, I went to dinner with him and he brought his manager, a very large scale director working at Amazon to dinner.

He made us both dinner and I learned that he's being prepped for promotion to the next level. He's had more people put under him. She really values what he does. And it's things I know I talked to him about how to do. So I guess that's a recent, hot off the presses within the last four days, feel good story.

Lizzie Mintus: That's very good. What are some of the things without giving away your course and all of your secrets for free, but what are some of the things that you advised him that listeners could take back to their job? 

Ethan Evans: Yeah. So, one thing listeners can take back is just be proactive. All of my advice is variations of how do you focus on what you control and what you can do.

It's very easy to say, well, my company should, or my peers should, or my manager should. You don't control any of that. So you can ask them, you can ask your manager, would you, but you don't control what they do. You control what you do. And what you can do is go ahead and talk to your leader and say, How can I help you? What can I do that you need? And that's what he was doing. 

 He came into a situation, I think, his director was fired for incompetence. Shortly after he got there or fired, for whatever reason. And the new director came into him. Well, it wasn't confidence actually. Now they think about the story, but his new director came into a mess. The mess left behind. I didn't really have any context coming from a completely other part of the company. And so she really just needed help in terms of what's going on and hiring people, educating people. 

So a story that would be near and dear to your heart as a recruiter, they had to stand on their head to get positions opened late in the year that sort of, Bean counters had held up all year. And they managed to get them open with three weeks left in the year. And because there was a lot of available internal talent, they filled 25 positions in their organization in three weeks over Christmas. 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. 

Ethan Evans: Now they had the advantage. There were people on the market who needed jobs. So it was just, I say, just, just still means a lot of work. It was sorting through who's a match and who do we want to bring on and then closing all those deals. But that's what the team needed and he stepped up and did that. 

And so what I always tell people they can do is your manager is enormous in the development of your career. Give them a hand. So many people do their job and wait to be asked to do more or do their job and want to pick and choose and only be given the shiny work.

The way you often move up is by, you know, metaphorically scrubbing the sink , but you scrub the sink a little, and then you get the shiny jobs. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's how life works, which is I think a misconception for a lot of people starting their career. I think the shiny job happens. They don't know about the sink scrubbing. 

Ethan Evans: Right. Well, and there are times right there are times when the market is great and the shiny job is right there. I think a lot of people in the current climate, from 2008 to say, 2022, that's all they experienced, was sort of up into the right and bigger stock market and bigger opportunities and bigger paychecks and cooler things to do.

And I'm happy for them, right? It's not like I'm like, Oh, you don't know how tough it was. But things are cyclical and we had this long enough cycle that people forgot or never knew. 

Lizzie Mintus: Always. You talked about realizing that you can only control the things that you control. For me, I remember very early in my career, I listened to this Gary Vaynerchuk bit, not that he is a great person to listen to, but there's always little nuggets. And it's actually a mandatory thing that I have to listen to for work.

But he was saying that once you realize everything in life is your fault, your life becomes a whole lot better. Everything. You get hit by a bus, that's your fault. Everything in your life. And so that opens so many doors. So, that's a core belief for me too. Once you start taking accountability for everything, figure out what action you can take.

Ethan Evans: Yeah, there's an awesome story about this. I can't pull it all back together now, but it's a fairly famous, I think, scientist who had spent a lot of his time sort of, I'll call it, whining. And then, one day I woke up and said, I am going to treat everything as my fault or at least my responsibility.

And the best way I've heard that framed is, I use a bad word, which is fault. A better word is just, it's your responsibility. So like that, you get hit by a bus. Wow, maybe that truly wasn't your fault. But you have now been hit. It's your responsibility to deal with it. Like no one else is going to deal with it. So you can definitely spend two minutes saying, okay, this sucks and it's unfair and wrong. And, you know, the bus driver, whatever... but none of that's going to make you better or get you back on your feet. That's you. And, and wow, if people do that in their career... 

Well, for the current example, I made a post, coming back from the Ted conference that I was at. I made a post about how I was excited for the potential of artificial intelligence to allow me to create bespoke entertainment of my choosing at the moment I wanted. And actually, a lot of people in your client space in video gaming were deeply offended. 

Lizzie Mintus: Deeply. I was going to say, I'm sure your post blew up. 

Ethan Evans: It blew up because how can you say that AI will ever mirror my creativity? Oh, well, whether it will or not, the fact is changes are coming. And those changes are going to impact every profession and they are going to impact writing and movies and video gaming and fiction and music and so on. 

And we already see this. We already see what can be done. I saw a demo, I was put into a demo where they deep faked me at the Ted conference. And they were taking my picture, just using my LinkedIn picture and putting it on other pictures. And were they perfect? No, but a lot of these people were saying like, well, AI written fiction today sucks. 

Sure. So did car phones when they had to be carried in a bag and it was literally a car phone. You compare that to your iPhone. The point is these changes are coming. And I think to the point of taking responsibility and owning it, we have to deal with that.

To own that myself. I'm a career coach. I write online. The days where my writing is going to be better than what a good coaching AI can do are numbered, particularly when you consider that coaching will be available 24 seven in any language. And so I'm going to have to continue to evolve what I do to stay ahead of that.

Lizzie Mintus: So what's next? 

Ethan Evans: That's something that I'm wrestling with right now is of the many possible evolutions, which way to go. What we are doing is actually probably the first stop, which is to go to more visual and interactive discussion, because the first step is going to be the AI can answer very well, whatever career question you have, but do you have the right answer to the question. And so people with experience will for a while have an edge on, ah, but I know what you should be asking. And I can proactively tell you that. Second AI will also catch up to that. 

What it can't do is it doesn't have a history. It can never have a 30 year career, at least not for 30 years. And so it can't relate what it actually did at an emotional level. So my stories and tales and experiences are still mine. And then the last level is, AI may get to where it can sound extremely empathetic, but I wonder if humans won't always sort of question that. Even though this AI sounds like it's listening to me and is nodding at all the right times and saying, tell me more. Do I feel as connected? Some people will, some won't. But I think that's the last bastion of humanity. 

Until we become convinced that the AI is actually equally alive with the same feelings, we'll prefer humans for certain things because some of the time, it's not about what someone knows, it's how much they care for you.

Lizzie Mintus: Definitely. Thought about recruiting too. I mean, I could in theory eventually shortly do a lot of recruiting tasks, right? 

Ethan Evans: Absolutely. And it will. 

Lizzie Mintus: But do you really want to work with an AI on an emotional level for your emotional need? We'll see. 

Ethan Evans: Yeah, I don't think so. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I want to work with a person and the more AI bullshit that I get every day, the more I want to talk to a real person.

Ethan Evans: Right. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, I want to talk a little bit more about career coaching and your advice and then about Amazon and your stories. You talk about taking accountability and raising your hand and being proactive in terms of getting a promotion. What are some other common struggles people have in their careers? And how do you advise that they navigate them? 

Ethan Evans: So of course, different people have different stumbling blocks. One common stumbling block I see is how do I make sure my work is seen without being a bragger, particularly people who may be from a minority group or women? 

So a couple things there. There are techniques to advertise or publicize your work in a way that's less likely to attract the idea that you're bragging. One is I just encourage people rather than wait for a huge accomplishment, send out the small milestones. 

And the reason here, the reason for this is what's called recency bias, which is we all tend to remember what we heard about yesterday or last week much better than what we heard about in August of last year. And so many people feel like, Oh, I have to wait until I have a big accomplishment. So it's noteworthy. It actually can be better to say, well, this week I completed this, and last week I published that or whatever.

Now, the second thing is if you're really uncomfortable with the 'I', by the way, I say the way to do that is just send a status report. And by the way, send it to your manager and copy a bunch of other people and just report your status. So it's kind of a, 'just the facts' way of publicizing. 

But if that's not working or you're uncomfortable with that, my other favorite approach is share the credit. Send a message that says, Lizzie and I just completed recording an excellent podcast. She was such a good host. She was really well prepared, blah, blah, blah. And I talk all about you, but how great our podcast was. Well, no one's going to get down on me for talking about you, right? Unless it's just complete nonsense, but today I will talk about you. And tomorrow I will talk about the book I authored with someone. And the next day I talk about the collaboration I'm doing on a newsletter with someone. And over time I'm talking about what I'm doing. And the common element ends up being me. 

And so people keep hearing of the work I am involved in. I'm never talking about me, me, me, but because I keep talking about what I'm doing. So to get past the stumbling block of your work being noticed, publish it regularly and call attention to others, share the credit. And those things will tend to deflect any like, wow, that guy's really always tooting his own horn. 

The other place I see people's careers get stalled, there are lots of them, but the other common place I see them get stalled is building relationships.

Everyone has people they don't like, that they don't fit with. Sometimes you have co-workers that are actually just difficult people. They're actually dishonest or lazy or whatever. 

Lizzie Mintus: But I was waiting to hear you had this pause. I was waiting to hear how you're going to fill it in.

Ethan Evans: Right. And then sometimes though, you just have people who aren't your cup of tea and you struggle because there's a stylistic difference. They're a detailed person and you're a big picture person or vice versa. No matter what the issue is, though, we have to collaborate. And particularly as you go up in level, that becomes more and more of your job.

There's this idea, which I strongly believe in, which is in the end, EQ trumps IQ and where I specifically see high performers get stuck. And I'm sure this is true in the gaming industry as they want to focus on, 'but I'm the best' program. My technical solution is right. I'm the best artist. My art is brilliant.

If you can't work with somebody else, it doesn't matter. And in a larger scope, it's great that your work is good, but you need to be able to relate with others. And I think our school doesn't our schooling system doesn't help us with this. Because if you think about how school is, any projects you have are small and with only a few people. 

And in the end, school teaches you that there's a right and a wrong, there's a right solution to the math problem and a wrong solution. There's a right solution to the algorithm question and a wrong one, which trains us all in this right or wrong. And that doesn't translate that well into business, where oftentimes, moderate solutions executed really well can have tons of value. 

I love to tell the story that I once drove by a really big house on the beach and I asked someone whose house is that? And they said, Oh, that guy came up with the idea of making the tape on either side of a bandaid clear. So that it would look like anybody's skin. If you put it on black person, the black skin would show through you, put it on white person, the white skin would show through and that's his house. And I'm like, You know, there's no right or wrong to band aid tape. There's just seeing a solution. And that's what we're after. People who can get something valuable done. Yeah, it's not the highest value is rarely purely intellectual. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's true. I think grit plays a big part. So if somebody is having this predicament, I guess the first issue would be to identify that you're having this predicament, which may be hard if you are lower on the EQ.

So do you have any tools for self analyzing of EQ? Is it just an EQ test you would take online? Asking peers for feedback? How do you start? 

Ethan Evans: Peers for feedback is wonderful, but, you know, the way I've learned, sadly, was getting fired for having a big mouth a couple times. And I think I have a client, who I talk about sometimes, he was working at a great big tech company, got fired, went to the next big tech company.

Also started off like a rocket, got a promotion, got fired. Got to his third big tech company. So good for him, right? He's still managing somehow to bounce from household name to household name, but down level on the third bounce, and immediately got himself in trouble for the same stuff. And we can have the discussion now that I'm coaching him off, look, three companies in a row, what's the common element?

I think the thing to look at is if you're always struggling with peers and you're like, wow, this person, this and that person, that. Yes, one person, it may be on their side that they're really difficult. Several people, it's probably you, right? So the Taylor Swift solution, right? I'm the problem, it's me. 

You said, you take responsibility for everything. Will that include your interactions? If you're having bad interactions with peers or you feel like people don't respect you or don't listen to you, I'm the problem. It's me, right? Somewhere I don't have the skill to engage them and convey the ideas in a way they can hear and to listen well.

 And then you go get feedback. If you have a significant other, you probably have easy access to all the feedback you need if you can listen. Or a family member, they're the harshest critics, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Ask your SO. So take a look at the mirror, I guess, figure out the repeated issues, and talk to someone close to you. 

Ethan Evans: And the great news is, if you fix a few of these things, your career will soar forwards because others aren't. Others aren't volunteering. Others are remaining hard to work with. Others aren't just doing the rudimentary, get the word out about the good work they're doing. 

And there's five more things I could list maybe, but if you just do those three things, which is step up and help be more easy to work with and hard across a broad range of people and make sure that your work gets reasonable notice, those three things will definitely push your career flying forward.

Lizzie Mintus: Those are easy. Keep it simple. 

 We can't remember that much. And we don't need to. It's about executing. And with EQ, of course, one bad day can erase ten or twenty good ones. So you really do have to be careful. 

Ethan Evans: I was discussing someone today who has explosive anger problems. It only comes out very occasionally, but everybody remembers.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's true. 

I want to hear about getting into Amazon. And I want to hear the story, including getting laid off with a newborn baby.

Ethan Evans: So there was a step in the middle between getting laid off with a newborn baby. I went somewhere else before I went to Amazon. In that case, I was working for a startup in Washington, DC, and I was going through an adoption process. My management knew that the startup was really struggling. And I had actually talked to my manager before and said, why are you keeping me here?

Like, not that I'm sad, but there's kind of no work for me. But they were hopeful of recovering and wanted to keep people like on the bench so that they could pull back out. Well, anyway in the fullness of time, I was getting ready to head to China.

As it turns out, they knew they were going to let me go, but they also knew that would mess up my adoption process because the Chinese government would be like, you're unemployed. We're not going to give you a kid. So they didn't say anything because they didn't want to stress me out. They just made a decision of like, well, we're going to wait until he's back. And then unfortunately, let him go right after. 

So how it played out is my wife and I flew back into the country with a seven month old newborn. We landed on either saturday or sunday. I went to work on monday. Everything was fine. I was sick on Tuesday and when I walked in Wednesday morning they handed me a pink slip. 

And so 48 hours roughly after returning, I was out of work. I was lucky enough, something you would know all about as a recruiter. I had a simple severance package. As an executive that gave me three months of salary. So that was good. And, it was a very bad economy. It was 2003, so after 9-11. 

And ultimately to get a job, I used my network. That's how I got the job. So the job was through someone who knew me, but I had to relocate to Boston to get that job. And it did take me about all of the three months. And I definitely understand the pressure of watching the bank account. I was early in my career and the three months of salary was what we had. Like everyone else, we kind of had nothing else. And I was watching, you know, I was literally doing math every week of like, well, the bank account will hit zero on this day. And then our little bit of money in the 401k will take us this far. And then the credit cards. And then I don't know.

Luckily I never found out that far. But I definitely understand the stress. And the tragedy there is we had been a two income household. We had agreed that my wife, because we were adopting a little girl who would have been, and of course had been in an orphanage system, we didn't just want to take her from one institution and put her into another, so we'd gone from two incomes to one voluntarily, and then suddenly we're at zero. And we're like, Oh... So that's what happened there. 

 And then for Amazon, the job I took at another startup, wasn't that great. The job was great, but the startup wasn't well capitalized. So I took, of course, in that desperate situation, the job I could. And while I was there, it started to go downhill. And luckily, I put my resume out and I also updated my LinkedIn cause I was very, very early on LinkedIn. 

And Amazon reached out. And the fun part about that, the best part of that story of getting hired at Amazon is I came into town. I had not eaten on my flight. I think they didn't have food or they'd sold out of food or whatever the issue was, I got there and I was starving. It was late at night. The only thing open was the bar to get bar food. So I went and like sat in the last seat at the bar, hoping like I'm just going to eat and go to bed. 

And this guy next to me who was having a terrible day and life starts talking to me and I end up feeling like, okay, I need to help this guy who's in so much distress. He's crying his eyes out. And so, yeah, he was a wreck. So I end up staying up till like 2 a. m. And I go up to my hotel room and I just think to myself, well, this interviews are right off. But I got to try. And so I went to sleep ordering a pot of coffee for breakfast from room service.

And I roll out of bed, you know, drink the pot of coffee. I have a religious background. And so I basically said, God, you wanted me to talk to that guy who was suffering last night. Today is on you. I'm going to show up, but who knows? And I crushed the interview while half asleep. I don't know how much divine intervention I can tell you from a human viewpoint if I wasn't at all stressed. I had already written it off. I was just going through the motions. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Ethan Evans: And so since I felt like well, I I flushed this last night at 2 a. m, It was very easy to just go through the day. And then at the end Something you will find, you'll recognize as a recruiter. They brought in the big boss to close me. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Ethan Evans: And I didn't even... 

Lizzie Mintus: That's the best.Was it Bezos? 

Ethan Evans: One level down an SVP named Steve Castle. So he was a Bezos direct. I didn't even realize, like, it took me a while to click that he was trying to get me to ask him a question because I'm sort of used to the idea that you ask questions at the end of an interview. But I came into the start of the interview and I'm like, so what would you like to know?

And he's like, well, what would you like to know? And I, we kind of went through that a couple of times. So I realized, oh, I'm supposed to talk to him. But yeah, they made me an offer and the rest is history. It was great, I don't know how often you've had to do this, probably some, they were selling me on, they wouldn't tell me what I'd be doing. I was just joining a group called Media Technologies. 

And so, honestly, I might not have taken the job if the platform I was on wasn't burning. Like the ship was taking on water. So stepping onto any shore seemed better, because I had no idea what I'd be doing, but the offer was financially fair and definitely a better place. And so I was grateful. 

Lizzie Mintus: Look, look where it took you. So you joined in 2005. 

Ethan Evans: Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: How big was Amazon then? 

Ethan Evans: As best I can tell about 14,000 people. 

Oh, 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. Bigger than I would've thought. Okay. 

Ethan Evans: Yes. So, you know, it's interesting, both bigger and smaller. It was by far the biggest company I had ever joined. I had only worked for small startups up and in one company that had grown to 1400.

So 14,000 seemed to me enormous, 10 times as many people. But over the time I was there, it grew to 1.4 million. So a hundred times the scale. So yeah, 14,000 is big until it's really small. 

Lizzie Mintus: Until it's not. Yeah. I was complaining the other day. Someone in my life always tells me how busy they are, but to me, they're not busy.

And my friend told me you would complain and stuff like Jeff Bezos would say, what do you mean? You're busy. So it's all just perspective. 

Ethan Evans: Yes, it is all perspective. 

Lizzie Mintus: In Amazon's first game studio, you led Amazon's first game studio. Your LinkedIn says you shipped over a dozen games. Can you talk about that journey and what the games were?

Ethan Evans: Yeah, so we bought a tiny game company called, Reflexive Entertainment in Orange County, California. It was a little tiny by about 25 people and they had two businesses and we were buying them for their PC game sales business. So they sold the modern equivalent as either a humble bundle or good old game.

They ran a business like good old games do now. But they also had a game development wing. And so they had two pillars. Well, we bought them for game sales because Amazon, they sold tons of games on DVD for PCs, but then of course, definitely for all the consoles. They were trying to buy their way in to compete with Steam. But the idea, well, you can obviously see that never worked, but we acquired 10 or so game developers in this process. And they built a range of games. They had built an XBox game through XBox connect. They had built early iPhone games. Probably their best known game was, uh, an iPhone game called Airport Mania. And it was a time management game, not unlike Diner Dash basically only for landing and taking off airplanes was the thing. And then I show up and how I end up showing up is I was part of the due diligence team that assessed, were we paying a fair price for this business?

And then I asked the guy who bought it, I said, look, you're not gonna have time to run this. I would love to try running this whole company. Can I do that? And he said no. And then he did it himself for like six weeks and he called me back and said, are you still interested? 

Lizzie Mintus: It goes back to asking.

Ethan Evans: Right? Yes, absolutely. He would have never come to me if I hadn't asked. That's a good point. I've never really thought about that in that case. So I find myself running this game studio and I have to tell a story here.

Amazon now gets a lot of hard knocks still for being clueless in the game industry. But the SVP I rolled up to was not this guy, Steve Kessel. It was someone else. I won't out on your podcast. I had been reorganized, but as one of our famous SVPs. And I was discussing how we were going to make money and something we were going to do. And he said, we're going to be able to sell virtual items like a Vorpal Sword.

 He said, coming from his Amazon background, how exactly will that ship? Like, What kind of box will it go in? How will it go through our fulfillment center? And I'm like, okay, let me wind this back. So in the beginning, Amazon management was so disconnected. Now, interestingly, Jeff wasn't. 

Jeff Bezos could play. We later built a project, the same team built a project and we handed him a controller. And not only could he find his way around a controller, but we had him playing the Crytek game on CryEngine. And he quickly realized, Hmm, I'm taking an awful lot of hits and not losing health. You've got me in God mode. Like he knew enough to see what was going on very quickly, but most of the company had no idea. 

So the games quote unquote I built or I oversaw will be interesting to your game audience because we were asked, can your game developers build games for the Kindle? And I don't mean the Kindle tablet works like an iPhone. I mean the E Ink black and white book reader. Can you add value to our book reading Kindles? And what made that really interesting is the Kindle only had a four way, a single four way switch for a controller. So basically a four way joystick. And most difficult black and white or grayscale images, one refresh a second. So now people want to play it like 120 Hertz, one Hertz, one. The animation's gonna look like an old Pac Man machine... 

Lizzie Mintus: Is it like Snake? I mean, what are you playing? 

Ethan Evans: We did build a couple things, but none of them relied on movement. We went for the audience there, duh, who buys a book reader? Reading lovers. So, the answer turned out to be word games. 

We had a, what amounted to a simple process, which was to troll around the internet, figure out what people are playing on the free word game sites and build some related version. But I can say I put out a dozen games that all had more than a million installations, the top one with 10 million installations. And we build other games also. I did a little of everything in that role. So that's where I learned personally about game development. 

Lizzie Mintus: And then you went on to come up with the idea behind Prime gaming. 

Ethan Evans: Ultimately. Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: And did your experience at this game studio that you raised your hand for prime you for that? Is that what led you to it? Do you think? 

Ethan Evans: Yes and no. So it did indirectly. Working in games told me I loved games. I ended up taking another job, it was building Amazon's app store, which kept me in games, which was desperately needed. And that got me to vice president. And when I reached the vice president, I said, well, what do I really want to do for my next act? And I said, I want to go back to games. We had just acquired Twitch. And so I asked to go work at Twitch, which put me right back in the heart of games and gaming. And from there, the insight I had was, I knew from working in Amazon, Amazon's typical customer is actually you, Lizzie. 

Lizzie Mintus: The suburb mom? 

Ethan Evans: The suburb mom, because... 

Lizzie Mintus: spending power. 

Ethan Evans: And you have two children you shared with me. You need a lot of stuff and you can't go to the store. 

Lizzie Mintus: If Amazon didn't exist, I would have so much less time than I do now. I outsource absolutely everything. 

Ethan Evans: Right. 

Lizzie Mintus: I hope to never go to a store. 

Ethan Evans: And, and so that makes you Amazon's customer.

Lizzie Mintus: For sure. Dedicated. 

Ethan Evans: The place where Amazon, at the time, and I would guess still is weakest, is young Men. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Ethan Evans: Right. Young, single guys. Well, what does Twitch have? Up, down, and sideways. And who dominates gaming? And so how we came up with Prime Gaming is we essentially said, what can we do to engage young men in Prime and to get them to see value in Prime? Because they don't see the value in having boxes show up at their door the way you do. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. What are their priorities? I mean, if you're a single 18 year old guy, gaming. Gaming garbage. 

Ethan Evans: Right.

Lizzie Mintus: Maybe not all of them. 

Ethan Evans: Yeah, no, absolutely not all. But many have simple lives compared to managing a household, a job. And we thought this is the perfect way to connect these worlds, though. And so that's how we came up with Prime Gaming. The motive is how do we make Prime valuable to gamers, because mostly gamers represented a demographic that Amazon didn't have as much. 

Lizzie Mintus: It seems so simple. Every story has ups and downs along the way, and one way doors, in an Amazon term. Do you have any stories of one way door experiences, hard decisions you had to make or near failure, fatal decisions in launching a product. 

Ethan Evans: Well, for one way doors, Prime Gaming is actually a great example. You never want to rebrand. We called it Twitch Prime. The idea being it was the Prime program for the Twitch demographic.

And we put a lot of effort into that, launching that and getting traction around it. We kept it for about two years and we found it was confusing regular Prime members of, what the hell is this? And it was confusing Twitch members because it wasn't only about Twitch. So it wasn't only Twitch things. And so we had to rebrand.

And so that's an example, it's the only example I can think of me being personally involved in forcing my way back through the locked one way door to say despite having invested in this branding, we're going to admit we were wrong and re-educate on a new brand. 

And it's a little bit of a lose-lose situation because even though it wasn't working for Twitch, and the Twitch leadership supported changing the name. They kind of wanted freedom, because they didn't run the Twitch Prime program. It was run ultimately within the Prime program, which means it carried their name and they didn't fully control it. So they didn't really love it either. But their audience was like, Oh, Amazon took it away. And so not all of them, but it was a painful lesson and we thought we were doing the right thing and we weren't.

As for one way doors, the idea of fatal Jeff teaches correctly, Jeff Bezos teaches that most decisions are reversible, that you can recover or change or back off of most things. So, I saw an awful lot of things, launched poorly and still recovered, still get traction. I saw things launch with horrible bugs. I did it myself. So really very little is fatal. 

I know we're quoting Jeff a lot here, but another one of his sayings that was very powerful is that most people give up too soon. Like a lot of people, everybody now loves to talk about how AWS was so successful. Well, yes, there was like 10 years of work that went into Amazon. Talks a lot internally about our 10 year overnight successes. 

I helped start Amazon studios, which makes a lot of the Prime video content in 2009, roughly. And it wandered around doing nothing of note for four or five years. I mean, if you were to look up the shows from that era, they're very little known. I'm sure they're still there somewhere cause you've made them, but nobody watches them. They got lousy reviews. And it's only very recently that they started to figure it out with things like Jack Ryan and the Lord of the Rings prequel and so on. 

That's definitely a full decade later they got traction. So again, a 10 year "overnight success". 

Lizzie Mintus: Well, overnight success doesn't really exist. I mean, people see the hard work and they think different things, but lots of grueling work. I think that's a big takeaway from my podcast and any successful people sleeping under their desks, working hard, working smart, but there are a lot of hard decisions and ups and downs. And it's not easy.

I have one last question before I ask it. I want to point people to your website, EthanEvans.com. 

The last question is who have your biggest mentors been? And what is a piece of advice that one of them has given you that has stuck with you? 

Ethan Evans: So I'd like to talk about two mentors. My first mentor was essentially my first full time boss.

And at the time I didn't realize it was weird, but I had a female engineering manager in the 1990s, which in hindsight was very unusual. And she kind of got me started on this idea of if you invest in your manager, they'll invest back. I put effort into it. I joined the company and was hired shortly thereafter, but I trained her because I knew the technology and she was coming from somewhere else.

And so I invested in her right out of the gate and she invested back and my career was off to the races early. So that's just an example of her being a huge mentor because she switched me from an individual contributor to a manager and taught me the basics of how to do it. 

Second, the second person was a vice president on Prime Video, the first thing I worked on at Amazon. But, we were having trouble with this guy I mentioned earlier, Steve Kessel. We were not having trouble, but he was asking questions about a project and I sent him an email that I thought explained everything. And then I went to this vice president, Bill and I said, Hey, I sent this message to this SVP, Steve Kessel. Hopefully I got it right or whatever, but I was essentially fishing for a compliment, like, Oh yeah, you're so smart. That was well written. And he's like, Hmm, yeah, that wasn't that good.

Ask him what he wanted us to do. He expects you to know. And so this goes to that, everything's your fault ownership. I thought I was doing a good job by laying out the facts and saying, okay, big boss, what do you want me to do? And he pointed out to me, like, that's not what we expect here. We expect you to be sure, lay out the facts, but then declare a course of action. 

Lizzie Mintus: Please. Yeah. 

Ethan Evans: And that was, that taught me very early to the point we were discussing Amazon's ownership culture of you've got to make it happen. 

Lizzie Mintus: Those are both really good lessons. Yeah. We've been talking to Ethan Evans, who's a founder, career expert, teacher, and newsletter author.

Ethan, where can people go to take your courses or hire you to be their coach or read your articles? 

Ethan Evans: Yeah. Everything is linked off my website, which you mentioned www. ethanevans. com. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Google because I have an unusual name. 

Lizzie Mintus: Really? 

Ethan Evans: Yes, I do.

Lizzie Mintus: It doesn't seem unusual. That's interesting. 

Ethan Evans: Yeah. Well, it's interesting since you said that. I was Ethan at Amazon, um, because there hadn't been an Ethan in the 14,000 people. And the reason is the name has become popular since then, there are lots of young people today. 

The name Ethan is all over, but I got there first. And so I'm Ethan Evans. If you just look up Ethan Evans, even on Google, it'll lead you to everything of mine, which is great. Easy to find. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much. 

Ethan Evans: Thank you. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.