“We didn’t know anybody, so we used to go for buffalo wings every Tuesday night, and there were about a dozen of us at work that did this.”
“I had 57 wings, and I really had difficulty standing when it was done.”
Fortune reached out to Amazon for further comment.
Jassy’s love for competitive chicken wing eating may just be a quirky footnote in Amazon’s origin story, but it reflects something the 58-year-old executive has been deliberate about throughout his career: building relationships with the people around him, including outside the formality of the office.
But the lesson from Jassy’s wing club isn’t the need to eat competitively in order to climb the corporate ladder—but rather consistently and shared experiences can do far more for relationship-building than any formal networking event. Instead of trying to create the biggest LinkedIn network, focus on building genuine, long-term connections with a smaller group.
Strong relationships also tend to go hand-in-hand with finding work that genuinely excites you—something Jassy has emphasized in his own career advice.
“So don’t be afraid to try a lot of different things and don’t let people tell you that whatever you’ve done—even if you’ve done it for a while—is what you must do. You have the opportunity to write your own story.”
