TRANSCRIPT

Bettina Stix (00:04)
Every zip code in the US is prone to disasters, every single one.

Brandon Oyer (00:15)
having family in some of the neighborhoods where we operate data centers. I wanna correct a couple of things.

Cornelia Robinson (00:20)
We're trying to impact billions of lives globally. My grandma would say, Well, baby, how do you

Justine Mahler (00:25)
Do that.

Ian Royer (00:29)
My name is Ian Royer and I work with Nikki Foreman on Global Public Relations and we're here on the bridge with some phenomenal people.

Cornelia Robinson (00:37)
I'm Cornelia Robinson and it's great to see each of you first and foremost. Thanks so much for being here.

Bettina Stix (00:43)
Hello everyone. my name is Bettina Stykks and I lead our global Amazon Community Impact program.

Justine Mahler (00:51)
Yeah, so Justine Mahler, been at Amazon for eleven and a half years. I'm on the central sustainability team.

Brandon Oyer (00:58)
Thanks again. Brandon Oyer. So I have the distinct pleasure of leading an organization of engineers as well. I happen to be one myself.

Ian Royer (01:06)
this panel was something I was really excited to put together. So before I came to Amazon, I did a lot of work in nonprofits and community engagement. I spent almost thirteen years doing policy work with UNAIDS. So the community has always been a part of my heart. And I actually got hired into Amazon. They were like, You know how to talk to people really well. Can you come and do this with us in comms? And I was like, Yeah, I guess it's a big corporation.

but the more that I learn four years later about what we do, I think we can do a better job of sharing how we do community impact, especially as Amazon operations and AWS expands. We're doing a lot of work to make sure that we're actually improving the lives of the communities that we're in. So Cornelia, you work at the intersection of Amazon Web Services and Customers Driving Impact.

Cornelia Robinson (01:53)
So AWS is the most comprehensive cloud provider in the world. And we provide pay as you go infrastructure on our cloud. And so it's it's like using our technology to scale, right? And you can build just about anything.

on AWS. We are working really hard to make an impact around the world in the spaces of education, equity, in health access, and in climate resilience. And so we focus on getting technology in the hands of organizations that are doing really important work in those spaces because we know that technology is an equalizer. And so that's the work that I do in AWS, trying to make a

Positive impact.

Ian Royer (02:48)
Thank you. we're gonna go over to Bettina. Bettina is one of the people that I really admire in this company. When they talk about Amazon, you see a problem, you fix the problem, you write a doc. And in that process, Bettina built something amazing. So I'm gonna throw it over to Bettina to tell you what she's doing.

Bettina Stix (03:06)
Let me just start by saying that while I lead this team, basically everybody at Amazon contributes. this is sort of to the core of how we think about community impact that is not a group of people doing the work on behalf of the company. No, everybody gets a chance to be involved. Since Ian asked me how did I get to this job? so I've been at Amazon over 27 years now. Before I worked for almost nine years in

a small program called Amazon Prime. and I was responsible for a super exciting portfolio, basically our benefits and launching countries. So I had the pleasure of going around to every business and say, What are you doing for Prime? what are you have in store for our Prime members? How can you make the life of Prime members better? So I made everybody at the company look through their work through the lens of what

Prime members need. And at one point in my life, I wanted to switch and do actually something more than for paying customers. It felt I needed to really do something that involved giving back to our communities. Through, you know, a long process. I thought, like, how could I do this but use everything that Amazon is good at? How can we put everything that Amazon does uniquely well, our operational excellence?

the people that we employ, the assets that we have to use for something good. And here's the bridge from Prime. Prime is really good at getting stuff to people fast, right? so what if we could do that in a disaster? What if in a natural disaster when lots of things are needed, people scramble to get the help that's needed in a really fast way? What if we just delivered this how Amazon would deliver it?

How what about we partner with organizations around the world, bring them exactly what they need in a very, very fast and reliable way? We got to work and we did what we did. We used every system that we had at Amazon, somehow made it work for disasters, and our disaster relief program was born.

Ian Royer (05:22)
Thank you, Bettina. We're gonna dive some more into that a little bit later. Justine, your role is kind of complex. So you we're thinking about sustainability and climate. How would you explain what you do here to your grant?

Justine Mahler (05:34)
Ooh, okay. I focus on environmental impact areas in waste, water, and biodiversity. So we're very focused on natural resources, community impact as part of the intersection of that work. So if you ever are shopping on Amazon and you see the leaf, my team focuses on the scientific standards to make sure they're credible, measurable, and certifiable, as well as working on regulatory reporting.

And so my grandma's a smart lady, so she understood that fully. and I know Ian, you you sort of asked me about like how did I get to this aspect of my my career at Amazon? And I went to school for engineering. I was always very wanted to work on technical problems and work at corporate scale on really, really, really hard problems. And I got hired by a consumer products company straight out of college. It was one of these classic

They tell you what your role is, you know, in May when you got hired in December. So you don't know exactly what you're gonna do. And the offer came and it said you're gonna work in feminine care. And I was like, maybe not the business unit I would have chose. But what I found really, really early in that role is that our target customer was young women. And I was in an engineering team that had the benefit very early in my career of really obsessing over the customer. And we were taking

customer pain points and translating them into engineering criteria. And we were going so deep into the design where we were literally measuring the the amount of decibels it took to open a feminine care product. And the reason why that was so important is that, you know, young women don't want a public service announcement when they're in the bathroom you d utilizing a product, right? and while, you know, sort of initially I felt a little bit maybe like cautious about the sort of a role like that, but

It really embedded into me the value of working on something that can have impact in a place that's meaningful and having teams really, really, really focused on the customer and working on a product where engineering teams were obsessed with making young women's life better in a very vulnerable period of their life. It totally changed my career trajectory on the tech of roles I was I was willing to take. Fast forward, I started at Amazon as a packaging engineer, focused on reducing packaging waste.

if you're an Amazon customer, I'm sure you've probably at some point in time got an order where it looked over packaged or wasteful or used too much plastic. spent eight and a half years at Amazon just obsessing over reducing that the amount of plastic, reducing the amount of total packaging. and sort of the mental model was the the number one compliment for a packaging engineer is silence because we want it just to be about the product. We want a great experience. It's not about the package, it's about delivering products to customers.

in the least wasteful way. And then a couple of years ago had the opportunity to expand and work across, you know, the Amazon Enterprise on an even growing portfolio of super important programs around, you know, water and nature and biodiversity and waste management. and so that's a bit about my my career arc and the sort of the joy of of the role I get to work in today.

Ian Royer (08:52)
Thank you so much. So we have a lot of pioneers here, if you've if you're hearing that. we're gonna go over to Brandon. tell us a little bit about what you do at Amazon and how are we squaring the circle off about sustainable communities.

Brandon Oyer (09:04)
So all the physical buildings that power AWS that run all the services, we bring the power and water there. And I've been in building physical infrastructure my entire career. I started out in the United States Navy. I've operated nuclear power plants under the water, ran submarines, refueled reactors right over here in Bremerton, moved nuclear warheads up in Bangor. lots of mission critical work for the early part of my career and then got out into the private non regulated energy space.

And now I've been in Amazon f