Amazon
Facts
- HQ
- SEATTLE
- Sectors
- E-commerce, Cloud computing, Aerospace/Satellites, Media/Streaming, Advertising, Consumer devices
- Founded
- 1994
- Type
- Corporation Seattle business license
- Employees
- 1600000
- Registered name
- Amazon.Com Inc Seattle business license
- Stage
- Public
From Microsoft Exit to Building the NFL Draft for AI Talent
Send us Fan Mail Serial entrepreneur Nikesh (Niki) Parekh joins us to share lessons from building Suplari, an AI-powered procurement intelligence company acquired by Microsoft in 2021, and his newest venture, Provn. Niki takes us behind the scenes of Suplari—from validating the idea with customers and finding product-market fit to scaling enterprise sales, navigating setbacks, and ultimately selling the company to Microsoft. He also shares what he would do differently and offers practical lessons for founders building enterprise software. We then explore Provn, which Niki describes as the “NFL Draft for AI talent.” Instead of relying on resumes, prestigious universities…
Live show: Amazon, Meta and the fight over the future of AI; Plus, is Seattle still the place to build?
This week: Amazon is blocking Meta's new Muse AI assistant from shopping on Amazon.com, saying the agent doesn't identify itself and violates the site's conditions of use. We explain why the standoff is an early sign of a much bigger fight over whether AI agents can use websites and apps on people's behalf, and why Amazon has so much riding on the answer. For the definitive word on the issue, we ask Muse what it has to say for itself, and get an impressively sophisticated and evenhanded answer. We recorded this week's show live at Daniel's Broiler in downtown Seattle…
Foundation Models Go Vertical with leaders from Open AI, Mistral, Clarify and Oumi
In this episode of Shift AI, Manos, CEO of Umi, Patrick Thompson, CEO of Clarify, Brian Hall, CMO of Mistral AI, and Ben Gaffney, Deputy General Counsel at OpenAI, join host Boaz Ashkenazy for a live panel recorded at Seattle Tech Week on who actually owns intelligence in the enterprise AI era. One panelist argues that any enterprise still treating a frontier model as its core intelligence layer is renting something it should own, and predicts that in two years we'll look back at CTOs defending that approach the way we look back at driving a Ferrari to the grocery…
Amazon's drones finally take off, inside Anduril's Seattle-area buildup, and an AirTag leads to a secret Amazon facility
This week: Amazon's Prime Air drones are finally going national, nearly 13 years after Jeff Bezos unveiled the idea on 60 Minutes. GeekWire's John Cook goes inside Anduril's unmarked Bellevue office as the defense company builds toward 1,000 Seattle-area engineers. Plus: a reporter hides an AirTag in a rare book and tracks it to a secret Amazon book-scanning facility in Las Vegas. With John Cook and Todd Bishop; edited by Curt Milton. Related stories and links Mentioned at the top Want to know what Jeff Bezos brings to Liverpool FC? Study Amazon's Leadership Principles Amazon drone delivery Amazon drone delivery…
Bezos and Liverpool FC, a Meta vet's AI startup, Auger's Dallas move, and the demise of Microsoft's AI blob
This week: What should Liverpool FC fans expect from Jeff Bezos as a member of the storied club's new minority ownership group? We consult the Amazon leadership principles for the answer. Plus, a tip and an SEC filing lead to a scoop on a former Meta AI director's new startup, the GeekWire Editorial Board convenes to decide whether Dave Clark's Auger stays on the GeekWire 200 after moving its HQ to Dallas, and Microsoft quietly semi-retires its AI blob. Bezos and Liverpool FC Group including Jeff Bezos buys minority stake in Liverpool FC, with option to become controlling owner —…
Elon Musk's Starlink swagger, SpaceX vs. the cloud giants, and Seattle’s tech universe revisited
This week: SpaceX reports its first quarter as a public company, and Elon Musk says Starlink could deliver a majority of the world's internet within a decade, leveraging production facilities in Redmond. Musk also explains the company's data center ambitions, calling terrestrial infrastructure a trivial problem next to reusable rockets. Plus: we bring two Washington tech universe posters into the studio, 17 years apart. The 2009 original turns up gems including Boeing's unlikely connection to Classmates.com, a 1990s forerunner to Facebook. The 2009 poster also brings back memories of Teledesic, the Craig McCaw venture backed by Bill Gates that tried…
Amazon's next big business, Satya Nadella's DIY app, and a VC's rallying cry for Seattle tech
This week: Microsoft and Amazon both reported quarterly numbers, and both stocks rose on cloud results that beat expectations. Is AI spending is paying off in real business? And in related news, Microsoft sees a rare annual headcount decline, hitting product R&D hardest. Plus: Satya Nadella builds a Power BI dashboard out of an analyst's research report, and touts it on the earnings call to make a bigger point. Jeff Bezos names Amazon's chips business as the long-awaited fourth pillar. And AI House managing director Jacob Colker delivers a much-needed pep talk for Seattle tech, calling on the region to…
What's going on with Seattle startup funding, a Kalshi setback, Impinj's long game, and a smartphone detox
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Seattle startup funding drops 40% in the first half of the year while AI money floods everywhere else. We dig into the numbers and the implications for the region. Plus: a Seattle judge deals Kalshi a setback, Impinj marks a decade on the Nasdaq after a 26-year climb, and nearly 40 Seattleites trade their smartphones for flip phones for five weeks. Related Stories Venture funding drops in Seattle area as AI boom reshapes startup world Helion raises $465M at $15.5B valuation as it aims to commercialize fusion UK data center startup Nscale bets big…
Kavian Mojabe - Founder and CEO of MediScan AI
Kavian Mojabe is the Founder and CEO of MediScan AI, the AI back office for independent medical evaluators. These are the licensed physicians whose opinions decide the outcome of workers' compensation, personal injury, and disability cases. MediScan's best-in-class record review engine does in minutes what used to take weeks, helping physicians optimize chart reviews to help patients faster and more effectively. Before MediScan, Kavian was a founding engineer at two startups acquired by Amazon and Adobe. But this one is personal—his father is an independent medical evaluator in Southern California, and Kavian grew up watching the toll the busy work…
Zuckerberg's yacht, Meta's layoffs, a robot pizza flameout, and a reality check on AI expenses
This week on the show: Mark Zuckerberg's superyacht arrives in Seattle the same day Meta discloses nearly 1,400 local layoffs, robot pizza startup Picnic flames out and sells to a mystery buyer, and corporate America confronts the rising cost of AI, including the leaderboard-gaming practice known as "tokenmaxxing." And we return to the theme of billionaire yachts for our trivia challenge. With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Elon takes the stand, Big Tech drops big numbers, and a small VC gets in on a billion-dollar deal
This week on the show: Todd reports from inside the Oakland federal courthouse where Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Microsoft, with jury selection revealing just how hard it is to find anyone neutral about Musk these days. Meanwhile, Microsoft and OpenAI restructured their partnership the same morning the trial began — and less than 24 hours later, OpenAI's models landed on Amazon's cloud. Then, Microsoft and Amazon both dropped blockbuster earnings, with Azure up 40%, AWS posting its fastest growth in 15 quarters, and the two companies combining for nearly $400 billion in capital spending this year…
The tough new realities for startups, Amazon's next big strategic bets, and Allbirds' crazy AI pivot
This week on the GeekWire Podcast, a week of Seattle-area startup news shows how the AI era is reshaping the regional tech scene. Q1 venture numbers reveal bigger checks going to fewer companies, with Seattle slipping behind the likes of Austin and Miami on deal volume. And yet the distributed nature of modern startups is complicating what it even means to be a regional tech hub. (Does a mailbox in Pioneer Square really count as a Seattle headquarters?) Founders and CEOs are navigating the shakeout in different ways. Those with enough cash in the bank are eyeing strategic acquisitions, including…
Rec Room shutdown, robot umps, FedEx meets Amazon, and OpenAI's odd media buy
This week: Rec Room, the Seattle-based social gaming platform once valued at $3.5 billion, is shutting down — and Snap is picking up some of the pieces. Todd talks about what it was like fielding calls from distraught users on the night of the announcement. John offers his thoughts on what the shutdown says about the VR hype cycle, and whether everyone betting on the AI boom should take notes. Plus: Major League Baseball's new automated ball-strike system is already exposing umpires and creating a whole new kind of showboating — including one player who was so confident the robot…
How to Sell AI Into the Enterprise: Pilots, Pricing, and Closing 12-Month Deals
What does it really take to sell an AI-native product into the Fortune 500? In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain sits down with two founders deep in the trenches of enterprise AI adoption, Esha Joshi (Co-founder, Yoodli) and Anup Chamrajnagar (Co-founder, Gradial.) Their companies are selling into some of the world's most complex organizations, like Google, SAP, Snowflake, Databricks, and more. And they break down what founders often underestimate about enterprise AI sales. They dive into: Why most AI pilots fail and how to prevent it The "three-legged stool" of enterprise sales How AI…
Anthropic acquires Vercept, the AI job crisis scenario, and Microsoft's past Epstein connections
Anthropic acquired Seattle startup Vercept on Wednesday, raising familiar questions about the impact of early exits on the broader Seattle startup ecosystem, and the question of whether AI startups can compete long-term against the giants of the field. We dig into the deal, the public feud between two of the company's early investors on LinkedIn, and why one co-founder's prior departure to Meta may have been worth more than the entire acquisition. Plus, a new research paper envisions a 2028 "global intelligence crisis" driven by AI-fueled white collar job losses, and we're already seeing early signs in the news. Then…
GeekWire Podcast, Live from Fremont: Seahawks, AI, and Seattle's Future
We're live this week in the "Center of the Universe" in Seattle for a special recording of the GeekWire Podcast, presented by the Fremont Chamber of Commerce at Fremont Brewing Co. Fresh off the Seahawks' Super Bowl victory, we debate some potential ownership groups for the Seahawks and Sonics — from Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez to Costco's Jim Sinegal. (Who wouldn't want $1.50 hot dogs and sodas at Lumen Field or Climate Pledge Arena?) Then we dig into the debate over Seattle's tech future, sparked by angel investor Charles Fitzgerald's GeekWire column, "A warning to Seattle: Don't become the…
Amazon's big bet, a 'MySpace for bots', and a conversation with AI veteran Oren Etzioni
Upcoming GeekWire Podcast Live Event: Join us from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb 12 at Fremont Brewing for a live recording of the GeekWire Podcast with Todd Bishop and John Cook. Free for Fremont Chamber members, $15 otherwise. Register here. This week on the show: Andy Jassy tells Wall Street that Amazon is planning $200 billion in capital expenses this year, mostly to build out AI infrastructure, and investors give it a thumbs down. Microsoft's financial results beat expectations but the company loses $357 billion in market value in a single day after investors learn the extent of…
Microsoft's private OpenAI emails and Satya Nadella’s new AI catchphrase
Newly unsealed court documents reveal the behind-the-scenes history of Microsoft and OpenAI · including a surprise: Amazon Web Services was the Silicon Valley AI lab's original partner. Plus, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella debuts a new AI catchphrase at Davos, startup CEO Dave Clark gets attention for his "wildly productive weekend," Elon Musk talks aliens, and the latest on physical AI startups in the Pacific Northwest, including Overland AI and AIM Intelligent Machines. With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop; edited by Curt Milton. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Amazon fixes Alexa voice ordering bug; Microsoft rethinks AI data centers; Stadium cameras capture every Seahawks fan
Someone listening to last week’s GeekWire Podcast caught something we missed: a misleading comment by Alexa during our voice ordering demo — illustrating the challenges of ordering by voice vs. screen. We followed up with Amazon, which says it has fixed the underlying bug. On this week’s show, we play the audio of the order again. Can you catch it? Plus, Microsoft announces a "community first" approach to AI data centers after backlash over power and water usage — and President Trump scooped us on the story. We discuss the larger issues and play a highlight from our interview with…
A silver lining for Seattle in the DJI ban, and the verdict on the 2007 Camry tech retrofit
The FCC delivered a massive shakeup to the drone industry right before the holidays, adding foreign-made drones (most notably from industry giant DJI) to its "Covered List" of national security threats. While the move effectively bans the sale of future DJI models in the U.S., GeekWire’s Todd Bishop and John Cook explore why this might be a golden economic opportunity for the Pacific Northwest. Featuring highlights from a recent interview with Blake Resnick of Brinc, the Seattle-based maker of public safety drones, who lobbied for the U.S. policy change and supports the move. Related story: Drone capital of the world?…
Bezos is back in startup mode, Amazon gets weird again, and the great old-car tech retrofit debate
This week: Jeff Bezos is back in startup mode (sort of) with Project Prometheus — a $6.2 billion AI-for-the-physical-world venture that instantly became one of the most talked-about new companies in tech. We dig into what his return to the CEO title really means, why the company’s location is still a mystery, and how this echoes the era when Bezos was regularly launching big bets from Seattle. Then we look at Amazon’s latest real-world experiment: package-return kiosks popping up inside Goodwill stores around the Seattle region. It’s a small pilot, but it brings back memories of the early days when…
Seattle’s history of hardware heartbreak: Big raises, high hopes, hard landings
Seattle’s consumer-hardware ambitions are once again colliding with economic reality. The struggles of Glowforge and Rad Power Bikes echo a long regional history of big raises, high hopes, and hard landings — shaped by the pandemic, VC, and the unforgiving nature of building real products. GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook recorded this conversation for the purpose of providing the audio to an AI tool that turned the conversation into a written column that was edited and reviewed before publication. Check it out here. Related Stories: Glowforge hits restart: After restructuring, co-founders acquire key assets of laser engraver startup…
Ring founder Jamie Siminoff on failure, reinvention, and his second act at Amazon
What’s it like to pitch your dream on Shark Tank, get rejected on national TV in front of eight million people — and then turn that failure into a company Amazon later buys for more than a billion dollars. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff did just that. A serial inventor and entrepreneur, Siminoff joins us to talk about his new book, Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door (out Nov. 10), sharing the messy, high-stakes, and ultimately inspiring story behind the company. Now back at Amazon as a vice president leading Ring and the company’s…
Seattle’s tech paradox: Amazon's layoffs and the AI boom — or is it a bubble?
Why is Amazon laying off 14,000 people during a massive AI boom? Todd and John analyze the Seattle tech paradox, digging into Andy Jassy's 'startup' reasoning and debating whether the AI frenzy is a bubble. Then, they take on the Cascadia high-speed rail: a necessary connector or a misguided project? Related headlines from the week Amazon layoffs Amazon confirms 14,000 job cuts, says push for ‘efficiency gains’ will continue into 2026 A tale of two Seattles in the age of AI: Harsh realities and new hope for the tech community Filing: Amazon cuts more than 2,300 jobs in Washington state…
From Google and Amazon to NewDays: Why These Tech Vets Bet on AI for Dementia
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter sits down with Babak Parviz and Daniel Kelly, co-founders of NewDays, a platform purpose-built for older Americans living with cognitive change to help them reclaim abilities, preserve independence, and keep being themselves. Babak and Daniel share how their experience at Amazon and Google led them to apply AI in the most human way: helping people with dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) with scalable solutions. They dive into: Why we chose to build at the intersection of AI and cognitive health How to translate clinical science into accessible…
People
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Jamie Siminoff Executive, Vice President
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Ben Wild Co-founder of Hubble Network, Former Amazon Product Lead
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Manish Srivastava Director, Product & Technology, A to Z Platform & PXT AI
