The Power of Curiosity
Summary
No, curiosity doesn’t kill the cat. In this session, Wei will share her career journey and how curiosity played a central role in her career transition decisions, in how she built highly innovative teams, and in giving her the courage to explore unknown territories. The conversation will help you understand the power of curiosity, and how to draw from that to become a better leader, to empower others around you, and to open up new possibilities.
Speakers
Wei Gao brings 20+ years operating leadership across product, technology and business operations. She was most recently the Chief Operating Officer at Hopin, the leading shared experiences platform that enables immersive and interactive connection from anywhere.
Prior to Hopin, Wei was Vice President of Amazon Grocery and served as Technical Advisor to Jeff Bezos. In her nearly 16 years at Amazon, Wei delivered significant improvements to customer experience and business performance in eCommerce, Kindle, Supply Chain Technologies, and Amazon Grocery. She drove significant business performance improvements, oversaw large scale digital transformation, and built high performing innovative organizations. Wei is now a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group.
Wei is a member of the Pacific Science Center Board, and the Board of Visitors at the School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Wei was an executive advisor of the Asians-at-Amazon affinity group, and in 2019 was recognized as “Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Tech” by the National Diversity Council.
Wei received her bachelor’s degree in Finance from the Nankai University and her master’s degree in Information Science from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Chris Pruett is the CTO and Co-Founder of Jam — a new way to listen to and share bite-sized audio. Delivered daily via text, Jams entertain curious minds in just a few minutes. Prior to Jam, he spent 9.5 years at LinkedIn, leading full-stack teams of 500+ engineers, where he transformed all parts of the consumer product, from the native mobile and web applications to the distributed systems that power the core platforms (feed, messaging, search, profile, notifications).
