David Selinger.
Courtesy of David Selinger
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with David Selinger, the 48-year-old CEO of Deep Sentinel, based in Pleasanton, California. It's been edited for length and clarity.I went to Stanford but didn't finish my degree, so I went back in 2000 to finish. In 2002, I got hired at Amazon through on-campus interviews while still in college.I worked at Dutch Bros, now a publicly traded coffee company, then. I was running their tech side.I didn't initially want to work at Amazon, but I considered it because I was bored. I had a great job at Dutch Bros, worked very few hours, and made a ton of money. I took the Amazon interview very nonchalantly.I found the data side of Amazon appealingAt Stanford, I studied machine learning, robotics, and AI, but Amazon's dataset was unique. Few companies at the time used the word "terabyte" to describe data.Amazon sucked me in because of the opportunity to work closely with Jeff and to work on something that I wasn't very experienced with, which was large data sets. I got the job.My job title was the manager of customer behavior researchI joined what became the customer behavior research group at Amazon in January 2003. At that point, we had a few thousand employees, and we were in an office called Pac Med. On average, I met with Jeff once or twice a week.
