During Greg Hart’s monotonous college job of folding t-shirts and jeans at Nordstrom, he never imagined that one day he’d be right-hand man to one of the most notable CEOs in the world—or even be an executive himself.
But after landing a job at Amazon in the late 1990s—when it was a bookstore-focused startup—Hart started his steep climb up the corporate ladder. In 2009, he had worked his way up to Jeff Bezos’ technical advisor, a chief-of-staff-equivalent role internally known as “the shadow.”
Now, as a new CEO of Coursera, Hart is taking the lessons he learned sitting next to the now third-richest man in the world (with a net worth of $241 billion) to transform the world of educational technology. That includes, he says, being someone who is always willing to be curious and to listen to your gut—even if the data might not back you up.
“One of the things that Jeff would regularly say is when the data and the anecdotes don’t align, trust the anecdotes,” Hart tells Fortune. “Because it probably means that you’re either measuring the wrong thing in the data, or that the data is telling you something that you’re just not seeing yet.”
This mantra would prove especially relevant in Hart’s life after he was tapped to lead Amazon’s creation of Alexa—a level of success he hopes to emulate at Coursera.
“(Coursera) is one of the leaders in the edtech space, certainly,” Hart says. “But hasn’t yet achieved what I would call the true breakout success that I was fortunate to have seen when I was at Amazon.”
Reshaping edtech with lessons learned from Amazon and Alexa
While serving as technical advisor, Hart was asked to turn Bezos’ two-sentence idea for the implementation of virtual assistant technology into a product found in consumers’ homes, later known as Alexa.
With little background in hardware or software, Hart recalls being hesitant: “Why am I the right person to tackle this challenge?”
“He (Bezos) was unbelievably gracious. He said, ‘you’ll do fine, you’ll figure it out,’” Hart says.
Now with more than 600 million Alexa devices sold, it’s clear Hart did figure it out—in part thanks to the belief Bezos instilled in his subordinates. That lesson is one Hart says was critical in making Amazon grow from a bookstore to an e-commerce conglomerate.
“Pushing decisions down as close to the customer as possible was certainly something that I learned from Jeff,” he says. “The fewer decisions that have to go to the CEO, the faster the organization will move.”
Moving quickly will likely play in Coursera’s favor considering the rapidly changing world of education, including AI’s intersection with skill development.
One of Coursera’s biggest competitors, 2U (which also owns edX), filed for bankruptcy last year and became a private company. Coursera’s public performance hasn’t been spectacular, either. Its share price currently sits at about $8.50, a far cry from its 2022 IPO at about $45.
But in the next five years, a predicted 1 billion people will gain internet access, according to Bloomberg, and thus would have access to Coursera’s thousands of online learning opportunities, that include partnerships with both industry and universities including Google, Microsoft, and IBM as well as Stanford University, University of Michigan, and University of Pennsylvania.
“There is a huge opportunity for Coursera, not just to serve all the people who are online today and give them access to world class education so they can transform their lives, but also to do that for the population that will come online,” Hart says.
Hart’s advice for Gen Z: Optimize for learning—and ask why
For young people looking to push their careers up the corporate ladder and emulate a jump from Nordstrom to Amazon,Hart’s advice is simple: Focus on learning—not on a flashy job title or cushy salary.
“Don’t optimize for titles, don’t optimize for salary, optimize for learning. And if you do that in the long run, it will benefit you,” he tells Fortune.
And while that advice may sound on-brand coming from the CEO of an education company, treating your career like a marathon, not a sprint, and spending time discovering your broader interests is a mantra echoed by other business leaders, including Hart’s former coworker, Andy Jassy.
“I have a 21-year-old son and a 24-year-old daughter, and one of the things I see with them and their peers is they all feel like they have to know what they want to do for their life at that age,” Jassy, the current Amazon CEO, said on the podcast, How Leaders Lead with David Novak. “And I really don’t believe that’s true.”
“I tried a lot of things, and I think that early on it’s just as important to learn what you don’t want to do as what you want to do, because it actually helps you figure out what you want to do,” Jassy added.
And while Jassy admits career success involves an element of luck and may include multiple setbacks, remaining persistent is what ultimately might land you a shot at the corner office.
“I feel like my journey or adventure was a lot of luck, and I think maybe one of the things I did best was not overthink it,” Jassy added to Novak.
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