Ann Hiatt is a Silicon Valley veteran with 15 years of experience as the Executive Business Partner for Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon, and as Chief of Staff for Eric Schmidt, CEO/Executive Chairman of Google.
In this episode of The Leader Assistant Podcast, Ann shares the story of how she landed the job supporting Jeff Bezos at Amazon (after a 9 month interview process), the time she booked a helicopter for Bezos that ended up crashing, and what it was like growing in her career while working at Amazon in the “early” days.
But Ann’s story doesn’t end at Amazon, and neither does our conversation. We chat about Ann’s time working closely with Marissa Mayer and Eric Schmidt at Google – and what she learned about leadership, goal setting (OKRs and KPIs), and managing a team.
Lastly, Ann talks about why she wrote her book Bet on Yourself: Recognize, Own, and Implement Breakthrough Opportunities, in which she shares insights on what she learned from her time supporting tech titans.
LEADERSHIP QUOTE
I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I always knew the woman I wanted to be.
– Diane Von Furstenberg
CONNECT WITH ANN
- Ann on LinkedIn
- annhiatt.co
- Ann’s book: Bet on Yourself
ABOUT ANN
Ann Hiatt is a Silicon Valley veteran who received her initial business training during 15 years as the Executive Business Partner to Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) and Chief-of-Staff to Eric Schmidt (CEO and Executive Chairman at Google/Alphabet).
Her very first job was at 16 when she worked at a startup in Redmond, Washington called MusicWare – back when no one knew what a startup was. Growing up in Seattle during the original dotcom boom, surrounded by companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks, was a master class in innovation and it changed the course of her life.
Ann now consults with executives and companies across the globe to reverse engineer their moonshot goals and get results by applying the lessons of innovation, ambition, growth at scale and forward-thinking leadership she learned at Amazon and Google. Aside from this, Ann is committed to democratizing the internet and bringing underrepresented voices to the forefront.
Ann is a sought-after international speaker, angel investor and sits on several boards in the UK. Ann has recently relocated from Silicon Valley to Europe and brings with her a unique perspective on what it takes to succeed in business today. Ann is also the author of Bet On Yourself which will be published by HarperCollins in 2021.
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