That's a very good question. Um, I've been at Amazon since 2015 so it's about five years now. I originally got hired here to handle their virtual currency for their APP store business, and it was to help grow Thea store business with games and with APS, um, that transitioned into a role leading their E sports initiatives in campaign to try and grab a foothold on that side. My experience for the post MBA portion of my career has been focused in gaming. I started out at a company called T H Q. My handling mobile gaming. Then I later transitioned into console and PC gaming, mostly for the kids, for titles such as the Disney Pixar titles and the Marvel Kids titles and things of that nature. I've had a lot of experience working with licenses and my mobile gaming as well work with Lucasfilm in the NFL and the W W. E. In the N. B. A HBO. I've had direct relationships with a great many different organizations on the licensing management side, too. After that for THQ, I went to a Japanese game publisher called Bandai Namco on I spent four years. They're mostly working on what they call core games. Three kids games arm or what they call rated E. And these are, you know, they lack profanity and violence and things of that nature. And when I went to bend I it was an opportunity to work on MAWR adult Focus games. And I spent about four years there where I ended up leading their group for a lot of their Western focus games. Uh, started a small startup briefly on. I spent about nine months doing that. Um, signed a hip hop artist. He was past his Brian, but his his name's Snoop Dog. We signed a deal with him todo APS and there's a good story there about why we did that and how it helped our business. I ended up actually selling that Teoh THQ as I went back to them, uh, to transition back into the console games. Um, Amazon happened, actually, uh, really. Serendipitously, someone a lead product manager in their APP store group was unsatisfied with the efforts that his group was making with giving him candidates for a lead product manager position. And he literally went on, linked in and found my profile and sent me a message thing. Hi. Would you be interested in this role? I think you'd be pretty good for it. Um, at the time, I didn't know if he was a headhunter. You know, you don't pay a lot of attention to these things. I just did. Sure, you know? Sure. Why not? On that's how that started. And my phone interview with Amazon lasted almost two hours, and it was a very intensive case study style of interview. You guys are probably aware that consulting firms do this. You know how many phone booths are there in the city of San Francisco? Type questions? Um, they asked me if you are open our app store business in Mexico, What would you dio? That was my first question. And I went through that, you know, exercise. And I got two more case study questions. What's funny? Is that the end of this to our call? Um, the manager who was speaking to be a broader manager speaking to me was an engineer. He said, you know, Amazon has a lot of different jobs. You might wanna look at some other jobs too, and I took that as a okay. He doesn't like me for this role. No problem, right? I I enjoyed the conversation and I thanked him and I hung up and I emailed the recruiter, the Amazon recruiter back. And I said to our conversation was very intense, but I don't I don't think he's interested in May because he told me to look at other jobs. Eso you know, thanks a lot. It was a great experience. Take care. Not 20 minutes later, I got an email back and said No, on the contrary, Hey, liked you for multiple positions. And that was the reason why he pointed you to these other roles was because he wanted to know where your interest waas because he felt like you could do this role. But you would actually be stronger in a marketing role. And would you consider a marketing role? And I said, Yeah, absolutely. And so they gave me four Mawr links to job openings and said, Could you please rank these for us? And I did that. I came in and I did the loop. It was like, you know, the four hour loop where you interview with, like, six people. It's really exhausting, and I went through that process. Um, and it went, you know, reasonably well Amazon when they interview you. I'm not sure if anyone is aware, but if you Google Amazon leadership principles, Amazon actually has a set of principles that every employee adheres to on day. Take this very seriously. In a lot of companies, you have these types of, you know, leadership principles and vision statements. But they're really just flattery. Marketing statements. That's not how it is in Amazon. They take those very seriously. They apply them directly to the interview. They will just ask you to tell us about the time you took ownership of the situation. Tell us about a time you disagreed with this. You know, someone senior to you on. You know what happened when you disagree with them? How did you disagree with them? So it was different. It was very different, but it was interesting. Um, so they said, Hey, you can have this position at this product manager. But would you be interested in interviewing for this marketing position? And I was like, Do I have to go through that loop again? And they said you would, and I said, Sure, I'll do it and I came back and I interview with another set of people, did it all over again on. Then I got. I got that offer and I ended up taking that one. So that's how I got to Amazon. But, yeah, there's there's a lot more to my my backstory. I also worked in Korea. I went overseas for about four years, and that path was I graduated. U C San Diego with a poly psy major. Um, I worked for about a year at a test prep company called Kaplan. They're like the Princeton Review, and I worked in the Palo Alto Center near Stanford on I managed that on. Then I went to law school at Pepperdine. This'll was in 1995 94 95. You guys probably don't remember, but this was where the birth of the Internet kind of happened. Um, at that time, you couldn't just jump online and Google or go to YouTube and get a lot of information, and I really didn't know what lawyers did. I just went because I was a descendant of Korean parents, and you know how Korean parents and Asian parents are. You become a doctor or a lawyer, right? And I was like, Well, I'm not smart enough to be a doctor, So I guess I'll try to be a lawyer. And when I got to law school and realized what it is that lawyers actually dio, I found that I was not a good fit for it at all. On It was difficult because I had just invested a year of my life in about $65,000 in loans, um, to go to school, and I realized at this point that it was an expensive mistake. But I had a mentor who said to May, Brian, What you've done is what's called the sunk cost. No matter what you do, you can't get that money or that year back. The worst thing you can do right now knowing that this isn't for you is to continue right and to finish school and then just be miserable. And that convinced me to take a leave of absence from law school. And that's what prompted me to go to Korea. My plan was to do international business for two years and then come back and get an MBA, and that's what led me to Korea. And then on my way back, I fell into the gaming industry much the same way I fell into Amazon. Recruiter just found me with my resume. There was something in my resume that the hiring manager picked out and said, Wow, I want to talk to this person on That's how I ended up in the gaming industry.

So you know, in any job in marketing, um, there's always a blend. There's a blend of the actual job itself, the day to day management of projects, working with cross functional teams to get, you know, task completed. It's like piecing together a puzzle. Right? In marketing, there's PR. There's the advertising, There's social media, there's the product management. There's a lot of different aspects of it. So, you know, a good portion of the job is really about managing the product and the marketing and the communications internally, right, making sure all the different parties are aligned and moving in the same direction. But then also managing partners, right, making sure that they're aligned with the direction that you want to go in, the larger the organization that you're in, the slower things move because the more layers that there are. I've worked in startups where I had great deal autonomy where I could move very fast, just make decisions and go. And whereas Amazon, it's just there's layer after layer after layer that you have to work through, Um, and it becomes very much an exercise in planning, right? You have to really plan ahead, and you have to learn how to make adjustments, where you're going to get certain people who are not quite aligned with you. It's never black and white. It's often very gray on. You've got to make compromises that you go. Three other aspects of the job, our relationships. You've got to really make sure that you're communicating what you want to get across and articulating what you want. Influencing decisions and persuading people in the right way. That requires building trust. Right? Trust is the most important thing that you have to have to be successful over a long period of time. Somebody does not trust you. You're gonna have a very hard time getting them on board with what you wanna do. Eso that's very important. There's the people aspect. And then there's the actual the work aspect of it. Um, yeah, priorities for May. They're, you know, an Amazon. It's really governed by your chain of command. Um, they will help you a line on what your priorities are, um, in my job, particularly right now it's It's about driving awareness and engagement with our consumers who wanna watch sports sports programming on fire TV. So to that end, Right now, my real priorities are always the customer and making sure that we're offering the customer great value on prioritizing. You know, their needs. And our decisions are governed by making sure that we're offering them something that really eyes of value to them. Whether or not it actually drives revenue or not, we want to make sure that their experience is going to be excellent no matter what. Um, that Z in a nutshell, what the priorities really are. Otherwise it's It's in building good relationships, you know, with, uh, not only people on my team, but cross functionally with other people. Um, that's always very important as well. Yeah, um, it's it ebbs and flows. Um, because I just started on this team in June. Uh, three weeks after I joined the team, I was asked Thio take over the sports and to build out a plan, and I had about 10 days to do it. Um, I didn't understand the business because I came from the gaming side. The way Amazon works is they believe that if you come into Amazon that you're going toe, have the ability to adapt to any business quickly. They think that. You know, given your intellect, your experience and your skill set, they can throw you into anything you're gonna You're gonna get there, you're gonna ask the right questions. You're gonna know where to look for information. You're gonna build a point of view, and then you're gonna be able to actually attack whatever it is that you've got do very quickly. Um, and I've experienced that firsthand. Um, and at that point, yeah, I was working on average. So about between 10. PM and about one or 2 a.m. in the morning, uh, was working weekends all day into the night to get the plan ready for review, you know, with management. Andi, it took about eight weeks to get the program implemented. Toe where now we have a regular cadence off all of the different things that become managed. So it ebbs and flows. It's usually based on specific deadlines that you're trying to run

And I'm sure today's students who have access to so much more, you know, information than I think you know, someone like I did, um, starting out in my career. Um, you know, there's a lot of maxims that hold true. It's sometimes it's not what you know. It's who you know. Ah, lot of times the major challenges that you have are not work related at all. It has very little to do with the actual getting the job done. Um, it most often revolves around relationships with people, and people will all have different priorities, and their priorities may not align with yours, but they may be very important to you accomplishing certain things within your project. So the challenge becomes and trying to get someone to, you know, work on your project on the aspect of your project that they really help control with the same level of urgency right that you have with this name level of importance that you have. So what often happens is there is a lot of, uh reminding. There's a lot of evangelizing right, and that's very that could be very time consuming. A lot of us like to think you know what? I sent an email. It was well articulated, had all the information, and I sent it and it didn't get done. Not my fault. That doesn't fly in the real world. It doesn't fly at all. You cannot just say Well, I did what I was supposed to do and it didn't. You know, it didn't turn out. Not my fault. Um, those words, not my fault, are a good way to find yourself unemployed in the real world. The reality is, the people who will will stick and excel are problem solvers. No matter what the problem is, it's your responsibility to solve it. And the ones who are going to excel and have success are the ones that understand them. And you can apply it. Um, you'd be surprised you'd be surprised early on, the people that just kind of shrug their shoulders and throw up their hands. Um, they don't stick around very long. Don't be shown the door quickly. And it's a dog eat dog world. I hate to say that, um but if you wanna have success, you've gotta be. You gotta be a very self motivated problem solving