Dive Brief:
- Charlie Kindel, founder and leader of Alexa Smart Home at Amazon has left the company, according to a post on his own blog, cek.log. He held a director level role at Amazon and his last day was Friday, reported TechCrunch.
- Kindel, who had been with the company for five years, is taking "a serious break." His LinkedIn profile shows his current title as "officially goofing off" at Kindel Systems. While he is leaving the door open for an eventual return to Amazon, this is a clean break, he said. A replacement was not identified.
- Kindel joined the Smart Home team three years ago, shortly after Echo was launched and led product management for all Alexa customer domains, except for music and shopping. Prior to Amazon, he was general manager of Microsoft Windows Phone, having been at Microsoft for 21 years.
Dive Insight:
The pressures and pace of working at Amazon — particularly in an upper-level job — can be daunting. It’s a supremely fast-growing company that many other firms, big and small, measure their competitive positioning against. Those employees who survive, thrive and rise to the top, can be subject to burnout.
Charlie Kindel, who was responsible for one of the company’s biggest successes, the Alexa project, needed a break. He wrote in his blog, "The pace of the past five years has finally gotten to me and I simply need to catch my breath."
Kindel said he had considered taking a temporary leave, but liked the idea of total freedom of thought to decide what comes next. Immediately, he plans to clean out his home office, which is "a freaking mess," and work on car projects. He also plans to update his home automation system.
He characterized the Alexa Smart Home team, which he built from the ground up, as "incredible" and said he was going to miss Amazon’s high standards. "The reality is there are many, many things about how Amazon operates that deeply resonate with me. For example, the 14 leadership principles all sing to me and I have always been blown away how seriously everyone at Amazon takes them," he wrote.
One account executive quoted by Business Insider characterized the work culture at Amazon this way: "In 1863 Lincoln freed the slaves and in 1995 Jeff Bezos found a loophole." John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, which was acquired by Amazon last year, described the culture as "challenging."
The Business Insider report, based largely on Glassdoor employee reviews, said the positives about working at Amazon include great compensation and abundant opportunities to learn. But the negatives include management inconsistency and a cutthroat environment. Amazon’s has a well-earned reputation for a churn-and-burn company culture. Its overall Glassdoor ranking is 3.8 out of 5 as of Feb. 1, up from 3.4 in 2015 when a very critical article about Amazon's work culture was published in The New York Times.
Before joining the Alexa team, Kindel created the vision for, and built, the Amazon digital wallet and mobile payment solution, he noted on LinkedIn. He secured funding, built a team and launched the Amazon Wallet experience in a cross-platform mobile app and on Amazon.com.
