Time for Something New

All stories, no matter how magical, have an end, and this is mine. I have decided to leave Alexa and Amazon, and my last day will be June 6th. I'll share more about my next story in a future post. https://alexa.design/changes

Over the holiday season in 2015, Matt Freiburg showed me the Amazon Echo pre-order announcement. Alexa was the coolest tech I’d ever seen, and I needed to find a way to be a part of it. A few months later, my old friend? Dave Isbitski reached out to see if I would be interested in joining the team, and by the summer of 2016, I was an official Amazon employee, working on Alexa as a developer evangelist.

It’s hard to believe that was almost 7 years ago.

In that time, I’ve had the opportunity to travel the world, launching Alexa in Japan, Australia, and Brazil. I’ve met thousands of passionate software developers and content creators whose enthusiasm for this voice technology might have only been rivaled by my own, and made many friends along the way. I got a front seat to launching dozens of developers tools, including our first SDK, in-skill purchasing, and Alexa Presentation Language.?I am so thankful that this community of creators accepted me as one of their own, and let me share my passion with them.?It is the community that made every day special.?I have learned so much from so many.

I am so proud of what I have accomplished at Amazon, and I can absolutely imagine a future world where I return to chase another technological passion someday.?For now, I leave this amazing community in the incredibly capable hands of my colleagues,? Emerson Sklar ?and? Amanda Lange . Their excitement for what the future holds reminds me of myself those many years ago. I believe Alexa’s future is bright, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

This process brought back a flurry of memories, so I'd like to share some of them here.

Paul Cutsinger Jennifer Gilbert, PMP Eric King Memo D?ring Robert McCauley Akersh Srivastava Camryn Williams Justin Jeffress Joseph Muoio Jeff Nunn Emily Roberts Andrea Muttoni German Viscuso Sohan Maheshwar Michelle Mullenax Greg Bulmash Karthik Ragubathy Ashish Jha Drew Meyer Brooklyn Herzig Phoebe T. Mat Szwajkos Ashley Rendall Manisha Talwar Rana Pratibha Kumar Sood Sanjeev R Sridharan Azi Farjad Toshimi Hatanaka Jamie Fass Morgan Edelman Gilluly Scotty MacLaughlin Mark Yoshitake Rohit Prasad