“One of the things that Jeff would regularly say is when the data and the anecdotes don’t align, trust the anecdotes,” Hart tells Fortune. “Because it probably means that you’re either measuring the wrong thing in the data, or that the data is telling you something that you’re just not seeing yet.”
“(Coursera) is one of the leaders in the edtech space, certainly,” Hart says. “But hasn’t yet achieved what I would call the true breakout success that I was fortunate to have seen when I was at Amazon.”
While serving as technical advisor, Hart was asked to turn Bezos’ two-sentence idea for the implementation of virtual assistant technology into a product found in consumers’ homes, later known as Alexa.
With little background in hardware or software, Hart recalls being hesitant: “Why am I the right person to tackle this challenge?”
“He (Bezos) was unbelievably gracious. He said, ‘you’ll do fine, you’ll figure it out,’” Hart says.
“Pushing decisions down as close to the customer as possible was certainly something that I learned from Jeff,” he says. “The fewer decisions that have to go to the CEO, the faster the organization will move.”
“There is a huge opportunity for Coursera, not just to serve all the people who are online today and give them access to world class education so they can transform their lives, but also to do that for the population that will come online,” Hart says.
For young people looking to push their careers up the corporate ladder and emulate a jump from Nordstrom to Amazon,Hart’s advice is simple: Focus on learning—not on a flashy job title or cushy salary.
“Don’t optimize for titles, don’t optimize for salary, optimize for learning. And if you do that in the long run, it will benefit you,” he tells Fortune.
“I tried a lot of things, and I think that early on it’s just as important to learn what you don’t want to do as what you want to do, because it actually helps you figure out what you want to do,” Jassy added.
And while Jassy admits career success involves an element of luck and may include multiple setbacks, remaining persistent is what ultimately might land you a shot at the corner office.
“I feel like my journey or adventure was a lot of luck, and I think maybe one of the things I did best was not overthink it,” Jassy added to Novak.
