Daniel Rausch is Vice President at Amazon, where he leads the Alexa and Echo business — the team behind one of the most ambitious consumer AI bets on the planet, with nearly 700 million devices sold. He joined Amazon in 2009 to work on Kindle in its earliest days (keyboard included, touchscreen not yet invented), drawn in by a single line from a recruiter: "We're not trying to be a consumer electronics company — we're changing the way everyone reads." That mission-first instinct followed him into building Echo and Alexa from scratch, and now into leading Alexa's complete generative-AI reinvention. Before Amazon, Daniel was COO of an ed-tech startup that he helped scale into the tens of millions in revenue — until the 2008 financial crisis gutted school technology budgets and forced a brutal reset. He holds a background in formal logic and philosophy. In this episode we discuss:

The recruiter pitch that changed everything — how one sentence about "changing the way everyone reads" convinced Daniel to leave a C-suite startup role for an individual contributor job at Amazon
Learning from failure at scale — the story behind Alexa's "Let's Chat" feature, why it completely flopped, and what it taught the team about rebuilding vs. bolting on
What it's really like to work with Jeff Bezos — the level of focus and seriousness Daniel says he brings to every single meeting, regardless of how big or small
Avoiding complacency as a market leader — why owning a category (like Alexa does) is actually the most dangerous position to be in, and how he pushes his team to self-disrupt
His best advice for landing a job at Amazon or big tech — standing out in a flooded applicant pool, and why being AI-fluent right now is a major differentiator
The one house rule that shaped his parenting — why he never checked email in front of his kids, and how simple, concrete boundaries beat vague "work-life balance" goals
Balancing career ambition with family sacrifice — moving his family across the country with three young kids and no support system, and what he'd tell someone weighing a similar risk