October 8, 2025 • 37 mins
Trevor Nolan takes us behind the scenes of the digital infrastructure powering our connected world. Drawing from his 11-year career at Amazon and recent transition to Axon, he reveals the complex systems enabling everything from same-day package delivery to voice assistants that transform our homes.
The conversation explores how Amazon approaches hardware development not as a primary goal but as a necessary tool for delivering exceptional services. Kindle emerged from the desire to deliver books anywhere in 60 seconds, while Alexa aimed to create more natural shopping interfaces. This "falling into hardware" strategy has proven remarkably successful across Amazon's expanding ecosystem of connected devices.
Project management emerges as a critical theme, with Nolan explaining Amazon's distinctive "working backwards" methodology. Starting with hypothetical press releases and addressing potential roadblocks before determining minimum viable products, this disciplined approach enables teams to maintain customer focus while making necessary trade-offs during development. The goal? Continuous customer delight - a principle that drives innovation across Amazon's diverse product lines.
Perhaps most fascinating is Nolan's move to Axon, where technology takes on a profoundly human-centered mission: protecting life. As developers of tasers, body cameras, and evidence management systems, Axon aims to create safer communities by providing law enforcement with non-lethal alternatives and reducing administrative burdens. Their moonshot goal - reducing gun-related deaths between police and civilians by 50% within seven years - represents technology's potential to address critical societal challenges.
Whether you're interested in the infrastructure behind the digital services we use daily, seeking insights into project management at scale, or curious about technology's role in public safety, this episode offers valuable perspective from someone who's helped shape these transformative systems. What technologies might we create when we combine innovation with passion for improving lives?
This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Digital media takes many forms.
There's the artistic side ofdigital media, like movies and
music and art, and then there'sthe transactional side, you know
, delivering data, points ofinterest, different latitude and
longitude associations,historical, across digital media
.
You'll find that it's prettydiverse, it's global in nature
(00:27):
and it has a pretty significantimpact across many facets of our
lives.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital
changemakers, a speaker seriesand podcast brought to you by
USC Annenberg's Digital MediaManagement Program.
Join us as we unlock thesecrets to success in an
increasingly digital world.
Hi everybody and welcome tothis week's episode of
(00:57):
Mediascape.
And we're really blessed to bewith a good friend, friend of
our program, friend to ourstudents and one of the leaders,
quite frankly, in tech acrossmultiple industries.
This is Trevor Nolan, who'swith us.
Thanks so much, trevor, forbeing with us today.
Thank you for having me.
Happy to be here.
Trevor was most recentlyspending a big chunk of his life
(01:18):
and career at Amazon and we'regoing to talk about that.
He's also recently transitionedinto a new role at a new
company called Axon, but therewas a whole host of pretty
interesting and windingexperiences that came before
that, trevor, running a candlecompany and a few others.
But before we lead into Amazon,could you quickly take us
(01:42):
through some of the importantstops on your journey through
tech and business before you gotto Amazon?
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah, yeah.
So I started my sort of earlyadult life thinking I wanted to
be a doctor.
So I studied pre-medicine,focused on biochemistry, and I
got a degree in Spanish becauseI thought I could serve a
greater patient population bybeing bilingual.
And, you know, after severalyears realized I didn't want to
follow that path and I pivotedto a career in private equity.
(02:12):
So I worked for a privateequity firm in San Francisco and
then moved to a venture capitalfirm focused on biotech and
medtech deals and then slowlyworked into like media, media
tech and software, and I spentroughly five years in that side
of my career.
And then I went into anoperating role at a startup
company called VoiceFoxTechnologies, which was really
(02:35):
focused on essentially whatAmazon had to do with Alexa,
which was how do you createconversational, voice driven
experiences to simplify thingsthat were traditionally, you
know, a keyboard and mouse, likegestural interfaces.
And so I joined that company,was really young, I was sort of
the CFO controller, moved on torun business development and
(02:57):
sort of on the sales side as welooked at partnering with
automotive manufacturers and anddifferent media companies.
And then I went from there andI moved to Microsoft where I
spent five years leading a fewdifferent things.
One was the transition fromWindows Live to Bing and I was
leading a bunch of work aroundBing Maps and sort of mapping
technologies and how do youthink about the earth and how
(03:19):
humans interact with the earth.
And then moved into deliveringmedia into cars.
So we built the first interfacelike application interface and
cars.
So Toyota launched what theycalled being connected car and
we had, you know, the ability tomake dinner reservations and
get directions all these thingsthat seem pretty trivial today,
but you know they were prettycool at the time.
(03:41):
And then I was involved withphilanthropy in Seattle called
Fred Hutchinson Cancer ResearchCenter and spent a bunch of time
working with them to raisefunds for a bunch of different
cancer research initiatives.
And I got pulled away byactually a company that Jeff
Bezos was the largest investorin, which made glass blown
(04:02):
candle holders in Seattle, andit was a company with a mission
to give back.
They're one of the firstcompanies to give a percentage
of revenue back to charitiesthat help people to heal and I
was really driven by the missionand it's actually a really cool
, cool product company is calledglassy baby and I was there for
, you know about a year and Igot pulled back to another Jeff
(04:23):
Bezos company which is calledAmazon, to go and help run the
technology licensing across allof the hardware that Amazon was
building.
So at the time it was Kindle.
Alexa hadn't come out yet wewere building this thing called
Fire Phone, which didn't do verywell, had just launched Fire TV
, and so there was a bunch ofwork around enabling
(04:44):
technologies across thosedifferent hardware platforms.
And so there was a bunch ofwork around enabling
technologies across thosedifferent hardware platforms.
And then also, you know how doyou interact with, like the what
was not called hyperscalersthen, but you know the
hyperscalers, like theMicrosoft's and Google's of the
world, to enable betterexperiences across these devices
and hardware ecosystems.
And so went there and ended upstaying for 11 years, until
(05:04):
about four weeks ago so, and hadan interesting role I can jump
into.
You know, if you want me to gothrough details around what I
did over the last 11 years, I'mhappy to do that, but that's
kind of how I got to where I amtoday.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
That's exactly where I wanted to go, to be honest,
because when we met and you saidyou know, you gave me this
amazing sentence which I'd lovefor you to say again about you
were working with connectedhardware technologies globally.
So say that better than thanI'm saying it right now, so that
we can try to wrap our mindsaround the sophistication of
what that really means.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah.
So I think and this goes backto you know what digital media
is.
To me it's the idea that soevery single device that Amazon
has built and or owns and usesevery day across their entire
global ecosystem, whether it'sdelivery vehicles delivering
packages you know the companydelivers 16 million packages a
(05:57):
day.
It's actually prime day rightnow.
I think the company willdeliver 200 million packages
over the next three days, likeit's pretty significant volume.
You think about all the Alexaqueries.
You think about every locker,every you know locker where you
pick up packages Prime Air, ourProject Kuiper, which is the
satellite low-earth orbitsatellite installation that is
(06:19):
launching Anything that is aconnected device Kindles, zoox,
which is the autonomous RoboTaxthat Amazon's launching later
this year All of those devicesare connected to the cloud and
to some sort of network.
The network could be satellite,it could be cellular, it could
be Wi-Fi, lora, bluetooth, anyof those networks, and in many
(06:42):
cases it's converged whereyou're sort of utilizing what's
best based on cost or efficiency.
And so I led a team thatessentially managed all of the
connections of all of thosedevices globally.
And you know we're talkingtrillions of transactions on a
weekly basis and petabytes ofdata on a monthly basis.
(07:03):
All of it was running throughthe centralized connectivity
team to ensure that packageswere being delivered, that
vehicles were being drivensafely, that books were able to
be downloaded to Kindle devices,and so I thought a lot about
how do we sort of manage thatnetwork globally to ensure that
customers are delighted everyday.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Cybersecurity is one of the things that's blinking in
my head with like a neon buzzerof how in the world did you?
I'm sure that that was one ofthe most dangerous, exciting,
important things that you werethinking about.
Can you talk about thecybersecurity and how?
Speaker 1 (07:57):
I mean, that's not your background, but so, so
fortunately, we lean.
There's two pieces.
No, no, manage the securitypiece.
On the connectivity side, weleaned on you know all these
different networks, so you thinkof the Verizon, 18tt, mobiles
of the World, you know Doit toTelecom, vodafone and others.
Like their encryption acrosstheir network and their security
protocols are what help us onthe connectivity side to ensure
(08:21):
that you know that things areoperating appropriately and
there's safeguards in place.
You know there are certainlypeople who do things that are
nefarious and there aresafeguards in place to watch for
those.
And you think about acrosseverything that Amazon was doing
, so with AWS safeguards, withour network provider partner
safeguards.
You know we had a pretty solidcybersecurity strategy in place
(08:44):
and I didn't have to build thaton my own.
I was able to rely on my, youknow, internal and external
partners for that.
And we, you know, there werecertainly instances I think back
to, like, when I was doing abunch of things I work around
Alexa communications and even,you know, people-to-people
communications.
So the ability to make a phonecall over an Alexa device for
free, which is, you know,available today, like that was
an area ripe for, you know, forcyber issues and we spent a
(09:10):
bunch of time internallyensuring that we were able to
capture the bad actors, or atleast notice bad acting, and
also working closely with ourexternal communications
providers and network providersto make sure that if and when
someone was misbehaving, it wasquickly, you know, handled.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Incredible.
In your career you've done awhole bunch of work around
partnerships and businessdevelopment and as I look at
your resume and I look at yourbackground, I mean some of the
partnerships that you'vedeveloped and that your team has
developed are reallyworld-class.
A plus partnerships do youthink that it's any easier?
(09:50):
Might be the wrong word, butlike, what's the difference
between?
You know, when you're at thestage of your career, where you
are, you know you're working atlike the biggest company in the
world and probably every singlebrand wants to talk to you.
You know how is that differentslash more complicated from when
you're earlier in your career,as many of our students are and
they're like thinking, hey, howcan I do some BD, how can I
(10:12):
develop some partnerships withcompanies?
That when you're not thebiggest name in the game?
You know how is that different?
Speaker 1 (10:19):
You've seen both sides it's very different.
It comes down to and I thinkthis is where we're gonna have
this interesting debate aroundAI as a society is like
relationships are critical andyour network is critical, and so
I think being able to figureout a way into a business that
(10:40):
you want to partner with withouta connection is hard, and so
you need to find, you need tofind, like the set, the two
degrees of separation to getthere, and you know whether it's
through your professors inuniversity or through your
family or through you know, justlike brute force networking.
That's what I ended up findingwas the most effective.
(11:01):
Like I would literally go toyou know industry events and
walk around and meet people andtalk to people about the things
that I was working on.
And you know if you, if youthink of it like even like a VC
and a fund, like if you, if youhit one out of 10, you're like
you know you're doing prettywell, and so for me that's early
on.
(11:21):
It was.
I was really.
I spent a ton of time networkingand I think it's easier today
because of platforms likeLinkedIn and the ability to
connect.
The two degrees of separationis just much smaller today, but
20 years ago it was not, and soI faced the uphill battle of
just going out and brute forcenetworking At Amazon and
(11:49):
Microsoft.
It was obviously, like you said, much easier.
I think, you know every companyat least, would talk to us and
there were senior levelrelationships, like CEO level
relationships that you couldquickly leverage to like, build
connections, and then thosewould trickle down to the right
people, and so there was muchless friction.
I think in my new role I'm sortof in like, in between like
it's.
You know, I'm in an establishedcompany but it's certainly not
an Amazon or a Microsoft, and soit'll be interesting to see how
(12:11):
that works.
But I also, you know, I'llcontinue to leverage the network
I've built over the last 20years to ensure that I'm able to
talk to these people, and Ithink that's already coming to
fruition for me.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
All right, fantastic.
I really appreciate what youjust said about the importance
of building those relationships.
There are some things thatreally are universal, no matter
what country you're in, whatculture you're in, what phase of
your career that you're in, andwe talk about that in our
program a lot how important thatis to just very simply be good
to people and then stay in touchwith them as much and as often
(12:42):
as you can.
I want to switch gears, though.
I want to ask you about projectmanagement, because I think
about the kinds of projects Iwas teaching class last night
our capstone class and we weretalking about how castles are
made of individual stones, andthe metaphor that I think of is
that if a company is a castle ifAmazon or Axon or Apple are
(13:04):
castles it's made up of theseindividual blocks called
projects, and being a projectmanager is so many things, and I
want to just ask you to talkabout that.
You know from ideating a newproject and then taking it and
building a coalition of supportand then saying, okay, what are
our KPIs?
(13:24):
Et cetera, et cetera.
But I'd love to hear from youabout this whole concept of
project management.
You've probably been part ofthe ideation process and then
going and leading these huge,game-changing, world-changing
projects that have far reach andsignificance and very high
stakes.
Yeah, could you just talk alittle bit about that philosophy
(13:46):
?
I know that this is.
You could write multiple bookson this, and so I'm just gonna
ask you to pare it down into thehigh level.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
It's a pretty famous it's called the working
backwards process and I'll sortof quickly go through what that
means.
But it's like in the end, whatdo you want the world to see
that you're creating and how doyou want it to be perceived?
And so you, you write a pressrelease for your.
You know your new product youthink about, you know how is the
press going to respond?
Like what do you want theheadlines to be?
What are the dreaded headlines?
Sort of think about it likewhat are the dreaded headlines?
Sort of think about it likevery high level.
Like okay, we want to buildthis thing that does X, y and Z.
(14:29):
We hope it's received by thepress like this, we hope they
don't say this.
And like how are we going tomake it?
How are we going to ensure thatthese things happen?
And so that's like that's stepnumber one, like what is the big
vision for your, whateveryou're building?
And then, once you sort of dothat, you go through the process
of how am I going to solve forthe potential roadblocks during
(14:52):
that process?
And so you do this wholeworking backwards effort until
you get to like your minimumviable product buy-in from your
senior team.
Who's going to fund this?
Because in life and in anybusiness there are trade-offs.
(15:14):
We have limited resources andyou have to think about what are
the trade-offs and what is therisk of those trade-offs and
what is the opportunity of thetrade-off, and so we spent a lot
of time thinking about that andtalking to senior leadership
about that and once you getbuy-in and approval to go do
this, you should be pretty faralong and understanding what key
milestones you need to hit tomeet your minimum viable product
(15:34):
and you start to build.
And the challenge is is, onceyou start to build, then you
actually realize, like thereality of what you can actually
get done, because a lot of it's, you know, pie in the sky.
I call it rubber meets theclouds.
There's the rubber meets theclouds moment and you spend a
bunch of time on these, likeideating around things that you
think sound great and you.
(15:54):
But you're still up high in thesky and when rubber meets the
road it's certainly a little bitdifferent, like you run into
things that you may not haveanticipated.
You have to make some tradeoffs that you may not have
anticipated because things takelonger, and so it's really
becomes ultimately you go fromthis like working backwards.
What I want the customer to seeto, what are the trade-offs I'm
gonna have to make and thepriorities I'm gonna have to
(16:17):
choose in order to deliversomething that is gonna delight
customers, and then knowing thatover time, if it works at the
minimum level, that I cancontinue to build on it.
And so that's like on theproject management side.
It's deliver the value, pitchthe executive team and get
resourcing and then be sureyou're really, really smart
(16:38):
about the trade-offs you have tomake and that you're working
towards like a minimum viableproduct that's going to delight
your customer.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
That last thing that you just said and that you said
a minute ago.
I wanted to ask you about itbecause you just said delight
your customer.
That last thing that you justsaid and that you said a minute
ago.
I wanted to ask you about itbecause you just said delight
your customer.
I've heard that word used, likeat TikTok and some different
places, but I never expected tohear it from somebody who's
leading products at Amazon.
To me, when I think aboutAmazon, I don't think about
delight, I think about like, ohmy gosh, these are amazingly
(17:05):
functional tools that are goingto help me be more efficient.
But go into that just a littlebit, because is that part of the
process of thinking about afunctional tool?
But something that's also, youknow, hitting and achieving the
sense of euphoria and thisemotional connection.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah, no, so definitely.
I mean, if you think aboutAmazon's, you know Amazon
operates around, I think, like14 leadership principles, and
the number one leadershipprinciple is customer obsession.
It's like, how do you continueto delight customers?
And the challenge is, is thatand I think Jeff Bezos said
something like this it's, youknow, the novel thing that
delights customers today quicklybecomes what's expected, and
(17:45):
you have to continue to ideateand innovate to create something
new that continues to delightthe customer.
Like the idea of havingpackages delivered in two days
or less.
That was like incredible, right, like game changing.
And now it's like you knowtable stakes, and so then it's
like, well, let's have stuffdelivered in an hour.
And so stuff gets delivered inan hour.
(18:06):
You're like, well, I want stuffright now, and so how do you?
You know you sort of it becomesstat, quickly become status quo
, and so the idea of ofcontinuing to delight customers
is really important.
You know, I think Amazon, on theretail side, has done a lot of
incredible things to delightcustomers.
On the hardware side, it's thesame.
Like Alexa was was gamechanging and also price driven.
(18:28):
Like there are a lot of thingsthat you know Amazon puts out
products that are typically lessexpensive than, let's say,
apple.
And you know I think it maycome at some expense in terms of
like.
You know Apple's delight interms of like, the physical
appearance of the products andhow the whole ecosystem works
together, is one thing, but youknow Amazon tries to delight in
other ways and it may be priceon the retail side.
(18:48):
It's you know price selectionand speed, and you know how do
you think about maintainingthose and delivering those
things.
That's how Amazon thought aboutdelighting customers.
I'm having a hard time notsaying we because I don't work
there anymore, but you know, 11years of it ingrained, I'm still
pretty passionate about whatthey do.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Amazon started out famously as a company.
To know what they do.
Amazon started out famously asa company and I remember when
this started I was living inSeattle and had just graduated
from undergrad.
Then girlfriend said there'sthis new company, and they're
just, I can ship my used booksand they'll ship used books to
me.
And I just thought to myselfthat'll never work.
(19:25):
And it's amazing how Amazonevolved through the years.
Here's my question Amazon maybemost famously ships physical
products, but then there wasthis pivot into this massive
digital media delivery systemMusic, all different forms of
entertainment, yeah, books.
(19:46):
It started with books E-books,right.
Kindle, right, yeah, which theyobviously also paired up with a
physical product that I own andI love.
And so can you just talk abouton the digital media side, which
is really you've spent a wholebunch of your time in your
career not on the like lift,ship packages side, but a lot
(20:06):
more of it sounds like it's beenspent on the digital
interactivity and connectivityside?
Can you just talk about why itwas so necessary for Amazon and
how they've been able tocontinue over all these decades,
to continue to have thisamazing symbiosis between the
hardware side and then thedigital side, where many
companies just go we're not,we're software, we're not even
(20:28):
going to touch hardware, or viceversa.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah.
So Amazon sort of fell into thehardware business because of
the need to do things and thedesire to delight customers by
doing things more quickly.
And so Kindle was born from theidea that how do we create a
device that allows us to delivera book within 60 seconds or
less, no matter where you are inthe world?
(20:51):
That was the working backwardsprocess.
Let's deliver a book on thispiece of hardware in 60 seconds
or less, no matter where you arein the world, and all you do is
you open up this thing.
You're like tap, tap the searchbutton, search for your book.
Six seconds later, you have apretty incredible concept, right
, and there's obviously a lotthat went into building that,
(21:14):
but it ultimately that's whatthe company launched with, and
over time, the company continuedto fall into those same sort of
ideas.
You look at Alexa's.
You know was driven by the factthat how do we get people to
engage with an ecosystem so theycan shop more easily and and
transact more easily on thesedevices?
You look at what the companydid with Fire TV and it's like
we have all this video content,we have prime video, we have
(21:37):
music content and we need apiece of hardware to help
deliver that.
You can have the TVmanufacturers build these apps
into their own app ecosystem.
But ultimately we wanted tocreate the best experience for
customers, and so we builtdevices that enabled that, and
so that's how you know.
The company ultimately fellinto hardware.
(21:57):
It was like a necessity, out ofwanting to build the best
products to deliver what wethought were world class
services, but we didn'tnecessarily own the hardware.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Just amazing, fell into hardware.
Yeah Well, I mean mean, I'dlove to ask you about you know
what amazon's thinking aboutnext?
But we should probably switchgears now because, uh, you've
made this transition in yourcareer, in your life, and you
decided to step into safety.
When I think about the newcompany that you're now working
for and the things that you'redeveloping, it's about safety.
(22:26):
So, yeah, give us and I hadnever heard of this company,
even though I was aware of thethings that you're developing.
It's about safety.
So, give us and I had neverheard of this company, even
though I was aware of theproducts Could you give us high
level?
What is Axon?
What's the mission?
Why did you go there?
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Yeah, yeah.
So Axon is a company that buildsincredible technology to
protect human life, buildsincredible technology to protect
human life.
And they started out with thetaser, actually, and the idea
was like you don't want peopleshooting each other with bullets
because there's not a greatending, and so how do we sort of
(23:01):
control situations that aredangerous without ultimately
killing someone, whether it's apolice officer or a civilian or
someone else?
And so the idea was let'sinvent this.
We invented this taser.
Ultimately, it was like, well,what's happening in this
situation over time?
Like we can't see what's goingon.
We know the taser was deployed,so let's create this sort of
(23:22):
body camera.
And so they invented theBodymore camera.
And ultimately the companycontinues to build like
incredible technology for thepublic service sector, for
police, for the military, andthe idea and the mission, like I
said, is to protect life.
And there's a few thingsbeneath that.
One is they have a mission toobsolete the bullet, the idea
(23:44):
that you know, no one uses a gunanymore, that I think tasers
replace that, so there's nolonger lethal force used, and
that's really critical.
Another is building a more fairand effective justice system.
So, you know, today Axon ownswhat's called evidencecom and
there's, I think, 200 billionpieces of evidence sitting
(24:04):
inside that system and theability to search and query and
use AI to sort of evaluatesituations that help make our
justice system more fair andmore effective and more
efficient.
I think is something that'simportant.
Like you think of all the timethat police officers have had to
spend on, you know, going intocourt and you know, ensuring
(24:26):
that justice was properly servedwhen, let's say, evidence
wasn't captured properly.
There's a bunch of things thatwere happening that Axon is
trying to solve to make thejustice system more effective,
and then, ultimately, the goalis, you know, protecting human
life and saving lives.
And so for me, the move waspretty easy because I'm super
(24:47):
passionate about the mission.
I love hardware, like I thinkyou know, working on the
hardware side is superinteresting, like the things
that we're working on.
We've obviously launched, likewe're working on, you know,
drones as first responders,which, like how do you enable
drones to get to a situationfaster than a police officer
Delights customers.
It creates better public safety.
So very cool hardware thatwe're developing and just around
(25:11):
an incredible mission.
And so for me to be able tocome in and, like play a small
part in the success of thecompany and even the impact to
like human life was an easy move.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Amazing At our program.
One of our pillars relates toDEIA and that's a really
multidimensional idea.
I didn't even realize just howmultidimensional it was when I
first started teaching here atUSC, but we really like to think
about it, not just from hey,this is an altruistic idea.
We're going to do these thingsfor the right reasons.
We're going to do them becausethey're for the public good and,
(25:44):
frankly, that's good for thebottom line.
I have a question.
You know there are places inthis country you know, as we
think about diversity that arehistorically under-resourced and
that can sometimes lead to, youknow, higher gun violence.
You know more situations ofpolice interactions that end up
on the news and you know, andsome tragedies around that.
(26:05):
But as you guys think aboutcommunities that are
historically under-resourced,how do you think that the
mission of Axon is going to beable to step into those
situations and make a difference?
You know, along the lines ofthis mission that you have yeah
again.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
So I'm, you know I'm new to the company and I'm not
an official spokesperson, soI'll.
This is just my sort of thinking, going through and learning
about the company and through myinterview process and reading,
you know, in the news, I thinkgetting off like police officers
back in the communities andspending less time in an office
writing up notes from theirinteractions or from whether
(26:42):
it's a traffic violation or acrime scene, like those things,
the bureaucratic work takes alot of time and Axon is
certainly developingtechnologies like using AI.
You can imagine, like all thedata, all the digital media that
comes from body cams and allthese fleet vehicle recorders
and drones there's a lot of datathat's captured and being able
(27:07):
to bring that together without apolice officer having to do a
lot of work and spend a bunch oftime in the back office puts
them back on the streets in thefield to create a better public
safety environment.
And so I think, you know, inareas where there may be more
crime, having more resources,you know, stopping that crime in
(27:27):
a safer way, I think is reallywhat Axon is trying to do and
ultimately will create, you know, better, safer communities and
give people more opportunitiesto live in a safer place.
That's what I love about whatthe company is doing.
It really is about creatingequality in a safer environment
as a function of just makingthings more efficient and using
(27:47):
less lethal you know, force andless confrontational methods to
approach people.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Thank you for that, and I want to ask you about the
storytelling side of things, asyou're developing some of these
projects and products, and itgoes back to what you were
talking about with Amazon, butnow here, as it relates to Axon.
As digital media managers, isthat one of our jobs is to take
(28:21):
a product, understand it wellenough to be able to create
stories and then deliver them toan audience so that that
audience goes oh, I get it, Iunderstand, I understand what
that product is about, Iunderstand the mission it's.
It's actually more importantthan the product itself.
So my question is it relates toAxon and as you think about the
storytelling and as we thinkabout gun violence that has, it
(28:44):
doesn't seem to me like itshould be so complicated, but
for some reason it is.
In this country it's prettycomplicated.
Some people, you know, probablythink guns are fantastic for
police officers to carry.
Some people probably think noguns at all.
Right, I've been to Japan,you've been to Japan.
Police officers don't carryguns, and yet the idea of police
(29:05):
officers only having tasers,that probably delights some
people and it probably scaressome people, might even make
them mad.
So, from a storytelling side,as you begin to put yourself in
the shoes of, maybe, what ourstudents might be thinking about
or the audience and they hearabout.
Well, axon, what's the storyand what is the picture that you
feel it's important to paint sothat people will understand
(29:26):
this mission.
The general public willunderstand this mission that you
have and, with all of the waysthat people have different
points of view about this anddifferent disagreements about
the way that police officersshould carry certain weapons or
should enforce the law in thesesituations, from a storytelling
(29:46):
side.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
So the way I operate and I think you know the way a
lot of these companies Axon andAmazon operate, it really comes
down to the data and so, like,how do you?
To me, if you look at like oneof axons, their moonshot goal
and this is all public is toreduce gun related deaths
between I think it's police andcivilians by 50% by the next
(30:10):
five years roughly seven yearsmaybe.
And the idea is that you know,if you look at the data, the
data shows there is a problem.
You know people are dying fromgun related deaths, whether
that's from police.
You know, if you look at thedata, the data shows there is a
problem.
You know people are dying fromgun related deaths, whether
that's from police.
You know civilian interactionsor otherwise, and if you can use
non lethal force to stopescalated situations and you
(30:33):
have data to support the valueof that.
And to me it's like you look atpictures of all these people who
have died because of theseinteractions and you know to me
that you can tell a verycompelling story using the data
and images of people who youknow, who could have been alive
but are not because lethal forcewas used, and I think that
(30:54):
paints a pretty obvious picture.
I mean this it's not like thishappens to people across the
world and all different types ofcommunities and getting people
to understand the message thatwe don't need to use lethal
force to solve situations,whether it's the police or
otherwise, I think people canresonate with that Like death is
very, final, very final.
(31:21):
And so how do you tell thatstory that you can actually
prevent that in a way that'seffective and that the community
can get around and that youknow that police officers can
still be safe?
You know police officers don'twant to, they don't want to use
lethal force.
And so how do you, you know,tell a story that sort of
showcases the benefits to policeofficers by having these
non-lethal weapons and thebenefit to the civilians for
(31:41):
these being around?
And doing that with data, Ithink, is a great way to sort of
highlight the impact that itcan have globally.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Amazing Trevor, I want to ask you a couple more
questions before we wrap up andbeing away from Axon for a
second, although it relates toeverything it is that you're
doing.
You know you've been in theseleadership positions for an
extremely long time, and couldyou just take us through one or
two bullet points of what yourphilosophy of leadership is in
these digital media units?
(32:11):
You know, I'm sure, that you'reworking with people both
synchronously, asynchronously,people who are in the office
right there in your community,and then probably people who are
part of teams that are aroundthe world, coming from different
cultures.
Could you talk a little bitabout digital media leadership
and you know some of your keypillars of how you?
Speaker 1 (32:28):
approach that, like leadership, is really about
having good mechanisms in placeto ensure that you know people
are making effective, timely,you know, and many times you
know, autonomous decisions.
That's really critical to me,like when I lead a team, is I
(32:50):
want people to have autonomy tomake decisions and you know to
walk through one way or two waydoors and nothing.
If they make a mistake, we cango back One way.
Doors are a little different,have mechanisms for those, but
it's really about ensuring thatpeople have the right mechanisms
, know how to prioritize whatthey're working on relative to
other.
You know projects and, as aleader, knowing when to advocate
(33:13):
for things and also knowingwhen to inquire.
Like there are times when yousit back and you listen and you
sort of you want to ensure thatyou're taking everyone's
perspective and you know you'redrawing the right conclusions
and you're, you know, takingthis sort of inquiry approach.
And then the other side it's,you know, advocating for what
you you believe is the rightdecision, based on all the input
you have from multiple sources.
(33:35):
And so I think, if I look atyou know the mechanisms and then
knowing when to ask questionsand knowing when to sort of
stand strong like that's how Ilike to lead.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Mechanisms.
I love that, well, and that'sfantastic because if you have
how many people work at, AmazonAt Amazon 1.7 million Right.
And how many people on yourteam let's just say the last
team that you had at amazon howmany folks were directly
reporting to you?
Speaker 1 (34:01):
uh, five five directs , oh, only five.
Okay, that's not sad.
Amazon doesn't typically havemore than five to six people
that are directly reporting toit.
It's, you know, you sort ofpartition out okay, all right,
it's too hard to manage that bigof a team with you know.
Manage 15 multiple or 15 directreports, right yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
But, yeah, I love and appreciate what you're saying
about, about creating mechanismsthat are repeatable, creating
systems that people then there'ssome comfort in that.
You know, people know and wesee that you know, you and I
sometimes talk about parenting.
That's one of the best examplesof leadership that a whole
bunch of people around the worlddo yeah, okay, that is.
And that a whole bunch ofpeople around the world do yeah,
okay, that is.
And it's really important tomake sure that expectations are
set.
People know.
I like also your reference aboutthe two-way door.
(34:44):
That's really healthy, trevor.
As we wrap up, the questionthat I always love to ask is not
necessarily related tomultimedia communications,
leadership or any of thosethings, but it's more like if
you had one piece of advice,something that you wish, maybe
that you knew when you wereyounger, or maybe it's something
that you try to instill as avalue within your team, within
(35:05):
your friends and family.
Is there one piece of adviceyou know that's the Trevor Nolan
North Star, the Polaris forTrevor Nolan that we could all
have as a takeaway and put rightour, put right here in our, in
our pocket.
Keep it close to our heart aswe move forward.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Yeah, that's a good question.
You know, I think there are alot of things that I think
guided me throughout my career,but what I found that I keep
coming back to is just doingsomething that you're passionate
about, and it could be youcould be passionate about the
cloud, or you could bepassionate about AI, or you
could be passionate about AI.
You could be passionate aboutphilanthropy work, and for me,
it's like and I think I'velanded it back at Axon, because
(35:43):
I've always I've always wantedto work for very mission driven
companies and you know Axon wetalked about the mission at Axon
, even at Amazon, like I wasbuilding, you know, and
supporting communicationssolutions that save people's
lives, like the ability to call911 over Alexa was something
that I worked on and like thatwas pretty game changing.
You think about if you can.
You know I've fallen.
This sort of I've fallen and Ican't get up in an AI driven
(36:05):
world was something I was reallypassionate about.
And like I look at my life andwhat where I've had the most joy
in my career is through jobsthat I've been passionate about,
and so to me, it's do somethingyou're passionate about, work
really hard, think outside thebox and try to be inventive in
an area.
There's always something betteryou can go do in an area that
(36:26):
you're passionate about that noone else has thought about.
If you find that small thing oreven big thing, just go after
it, because people always getexcited about delighting
customers and you know thatwould be my piece of advice.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Trevor, thank you so much for joining us and spending
some of your time and sharingthis wisdom and distilling it
down into words that we can allunderstand, even though I know
that there's a cloud ofsophistication and complexity
behind it.
So, thank you, I reallyappreciate that, and you're a
friend of ours, we're a friendof yours and we believe in your
mission and what you're doing.
(37:00):
Thank you for being with ustoday.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Thank you for having me.
I enjoyed it.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
All right, everybody.
See you next time on Mediascape.
To learn more about the Masterof Science in Digital Media
Management program, visit us onthe web at dmmuscedu.
Digital media takes many forms.
There's the artistic side ofdigital media, like movies and
music and art, and then there'sthe transactional side, you know
, delivering data, points ofinterest, different latitude and
longitude associations,historical, across digital media
.
You'll find that it's prettydiverse, it's global in nature
(00:27):
and it has a pretty significantimpact across many facets of our
lives.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital
changemakers, a speaker seriesand podcast brought to you by
USC Annenberg's Digital MediaManagement Program.
Join us as we unlock thesecrets to success in an
increasingly digital world.
Hi everybody and welcome tothis week's episode of
(00:57):
Mediascape.
And we're really blessed to bewith a good friend, friend of
our program, friend to ourstudents and one of the leaders,
quite frankly, in tech acrossmultiple industries.
This is Trevor Nolan, who'swith us.
Thanks so much, trevor, forbeing with us today.
Thank you for having me.
Happy to be here.
Trevor was most recentlyspending a big chunk of his life
(01:18):
and career at Amazon and we'regoing to talk about that.
He's also recently transitionedinto a new role at a new
company called Axon, but therewas a whole host of pretty
interesting and windingexperiences that came before
that, trevor, running a candlecompany and a few others.
But before we lead into Amazon,could you quickly take us
(01:42):
through some of the importantstops on your journey through
tech and business before you gotto Amazon?
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah, yeah.
So I started my sort of earlyadult life thinking I wanted to
be a doctor.
So I studied pre-medicine,focused on biochemistry, and I
got a degree in Spanish becauseI thought I could serve a
greater patient population bybeing bilingual.
And, you know, after severalyears realized I didn't want to
follow that path and I pivotedto a career in private equity.
(02:12):
So I worked for a privateequity firm in San Francisco and
then moved to a venture capitalfirm focused on biotech and
medtech deals and then slowlyworked into like media, media
tech and software, and I spentroughly five years in that side
of my career.
And then I went into anoperating role at a startup
company called VoiceFoxTechnologies, which was really
(02:35):
focused on essentially whatAmazon had to do with Alexa,
which was how do you createconversational, voice driven
experiences to simplify thingsthat were traditionally, you
know, a keyboard and mouse, likegestural interfaces.
And so I joined that company,was really young, I was sort of
the CFO controller, moved on torun business development and
(02:57):
sort of on the sales side as welooked at partnering with
automotive manufacturers and anddifferent media companies.
And then I went from there andI moved to Microsoft where I
spent five years leading a fewdifferent things.
One was the transition fromWindows Live to Bing and I was
leading a bunch of work aroundBing Maps and sort of mapping
technologies and how do youthink about the earth and how
(03:19):
humans interact with the earth.
And then moved into deliveringmedia into cars.
So we built the first interfacelike application interface and
cars.
So Toyota launched what theycalled being connected car and
we had, you know, the ability tomake dinner reservations and
get directions all these thingsthat seem pretty trivial today,
but you know they were prettycool at the time.
(03:41):
And then I was involved withphilanthropy in Seattle called
Fred Hutchinson Cancer ResearchCenter and spent a bunch of time
working with them to raisefunds for a bunch of different
cancer research initiatives.
And I got pulled away byactually a company that Jeff
Bezos was the largest investorin, which made glass blown
(04:02):
candle holders in Seattle, andit was a company with a mission
to give back.
They're one of the firstcompanies to give a percentage
of revenue back to charitiesthat help people to heal and I
was really driven by the missionand it's actually a really cool
, cool product company is calledglassy baby and I was there for
, you know about a year and Igot pulled back to another Jeff
(04:23):
Bezos company which is calledAmazon, to go and help run the
technology licensing across allof the hardware that Amazon was
building.
So at the time it was Kindle.
Alexa hadn't come out yet wewere building this thing called
Fire Phone, which didn't do verywell, had just launched Fire TV
, and so there was a bunch ofwork around enabling
(04:44):
technologies across thosedifferent hardware platforms.
And so there was a bunch ofwork around enabling
technologies across thosedifferent hardware platforms.
And then also, you know how doyou interact with, like the what
was not called hyperscalersthen, but you know the
hyperscalers, like theMicrosoft's and Google's of the
world, to enable betterexperiences across these devices
and hardware ecosystems.
And so went there and ended upstaying for 11 years, until
(05:04):
about four weeks ago so, and hadan interesting role I can jump
into.
You know, if you want me to gothrough details around what I
did over the last 11 years, I'mhappy to do that, but that's
kind of how I got to where I amtoday.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
That's exactly where I wanted to go, to be honest,
because when we met and you saidyou know, you gave me this
amazing sentence which I'd lovefor you to say again about you
were working with connectedhardware technologies globally.
So say that better than thanI'm saying it right now, so that
we can try to wrap our mindsaround the sophistication of
what that really means.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah.
So I think and this goes backto you know what digital media
is.
To me it's the idea that soevery single device that Amazon
has built and or owns and usesevery day across their entire
global ecosystem, whether it'sdelivery vehicles delivering
packages you know the companydelivers 16 million packages a
(05:57):
day.
It's actually prime day rightnow.
I think the company willdeliver 200 million packages
over the next three days, likeit's pretty significant volume.
You think about all the Alexaqueries.
You think about every locker,every you know locker where you
pick up packages Prime Air, ourProject Kuiper, which is the
satellite low-earth orbitsatellite installation that is
(06:19):
launching Anything that is aconnected device Kindles, zoox,
which is the autonomous RoboTaxthat Amazon's launching later
this year All of those devicesare connected to the cloud and
to some sort of network.
The network could be satellite,it could be cellular, it could
be Wi-Fi, lora, bluetooth, anyof those networks, and in many
(06:42):
cases it's converged whereyou're sort of utilizing what's
best based on cost or efficiency.
And so I led a team thatessentially managed all of the
connections of all of thosedevices globally.
And you know we're talkingtrillions of transactions on a
weekly basis and petabytes ofdata on a monthly basis.
(07:03):
All of it was running throughthe centralized connectivity
team to ensure that packageswere being delivered, that
vehicles were being drivensafely, that books were able to
be downloaded to Kindle devices,and so I thought a lot about
how do we sort of manage thatnetwork globally to ensure that
customers are delighted everyday.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Cybersecurity is one of the things that's blinking in
my head with like a neon buzzerof how in the world did you?
I'm sure that that was one ofthe most dangerous, exciting,
important things that you werethinking about.
Can you talk about thecybersecurity and how?
Speaker 1 (07:57):
I mean, that's not your background, but so, so
fortunately, we lean.
There's two pieces.
No, no, manage the securitypiece.
On the connectivity side, weleaned on you know all these
different networks, so you thinkof the Verizon, 18tt, mobiles
of the World, you know Doit toTelecom, vodafone and others.
Like their encryption acrosstheir network and their security
protocols are what help us onthe connectivity side to ensure
(08:21):
that you know that things areoperating appropriately and
there's safeguards in place.
You know there are certainlypeople who do things that are
nefarious and there aresafeguards in place to watch for
those.
And you think about acrosseverything that Amazon was doing
, so with AWS safeguards, withour network provider partner
safeguards.
You know we had a pretty solidcybersecurity strategy in place
(08:44):
and I didn't have to build thaton my own.
I was able to rely on my, youknow, internal and external
partners for that.
And we, you know, there werecertainly instances I think back
to, like, when I was doing abunch of things I work around
Alexa communications and even,you know, people-to-people
communications.
So the ability to make a phonecall over an Alexa device for
free, which is, you know,available today, like that was
an area ripe for, you know, forcyber issues and we spent a
(09:10):
bunch of time internallyensuring that we were able to
capture the bad actors, or atleast notice bad acting, and
also working closely with ourexternal communications
providers and network providersto make sure that if and when
someone was misbehaving, it wasquickly, you know, handled.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Incredible.
In your career you've done awhole bunch of work around
partnerships and businessdevelopment and as I look at
your resume and I look at yourbackground, I mean some of the
partnerships that you'vedeveloped and that your team has
developed are reallyworld-class.
A plus partnerships do youthink that it's any easier?
(09:50):
Might be the wrong word, butlike, what's the difference
between?
You know, when you're at thestage of your career, where you
are, you know you're working atlike the biggest company in the
world and probably every singlebrand wants to talk to you.
You know how is that differentslash more complicated from when
you're earlier in your career,as many of our students are and
they're like thinking, hey, howcan I do some BD, how can I
(10:12):
develop some partnerships withcompanies?
That when you're not thebiggest name in the game?
You know how is that different?
Speaker 1 (10:19):
You've seen both sides it's very different.
It comes down to and I thinkthis is where we're gonna have
this interesting debate aroundAI as a society is like
relationships are critical andyour network is critical, and so
I think being able to figureout a way into a business that
(10:40):
you want to partner with withouta connection is hard, and so
you need to find, you need tofind, like the set, the two
degrees of separation to getthere, and you know whether it's
through your professors inuniversity or through your
family or through you know, justlike brute force networking.
That's what I ended up findingwas the most effective.
(11:01):
Like I would literally go toyou know industry events and
walk around and meet people andtalk to people about the things
that I was working on.
And you know if you, if youthink of it like even like a VC
and a fund, like if you, if youhit one out of 10, you're like
you know you're doing prettywell, and so for me that's early
on.
(11:21):
It was.
I was really.
I spent a ton of time networkingand I think it's easier today
because of platforms likeLinkedIn and the ability to
connect.
The two degrees of separationis just much smaller today, but
20 years ago it was not, and soI faced the uphill battle of
just going out and brute forcenetworking At Amazon and
(11:49):
Microsoft.
It was obviously, like you said, much easier.
I think, you know every companyat least, would talk to us and
there were senior levelrelationships, like CEO level
relationships that you couldquickly leverage to like, build
connections, and then thosewould trickle down to the right
people, and so there was muchless friction.
I think in my new role I'm sortof in like, in between like
it's.
You know, I'm in an establishedcompany but it's certainly not
an Amazon or a Microsoft, and soit'll be interesting to see how
(12:11):
that works.
But I also, you know, I'llcontinue to leverage the network
I've built over the last 20years to ensure that I'm able to
talk to these people, and Ithink that's already coming to
fruition for me.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
All right, fantastic.
I really appreciate what youjust said about the importance
of building those relationships.
There are some things thatreally are universal, no matter
what country you're in, whatculture you're in, what phase of
your career that you're in, andwe talk about that in our
program a lot how important thatis to just very simply be good
to people and then stay in touchwith them as much and as often
(12:42):
as you can.
I want to switch gears, though.
I want to ask you about projectmanagement, because I think
about the kinds of projects Iwas teaching class last night
our capstone class and we weretalking about how castles are
made of individual stones, andthe metaphor that I think of is
that if a company is a castle ifAmazon or Axon or Apple are
(13:04):
castles it's made up of theseindividual blocks called
projects, and being a projectmanager is so many things, and I
want to just ask you to talkabout that.
You know from ideating a newproject and then taking it and
building a coalition of supportand then saying, okay, what are
our KPIs?
(13:24):
Et cetera, et cetera.
But I'd love to hear from youabout this whole concept of
project management.
You've probably been part ofthe ideation process and then
going and leading these huge,game-changing, world-changing
projects that have far reach andsignificance and very high
stakes.
Yeah, could you just talk alittle bit about that philosophy
(13:46):
?
I know that this is.
You could write multiple bookson this, and so I'm just gonna
ask you to pare it down into thehigh level.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
It's a pretty famous it's called the working
backwards process and I'll sortof quickly go through what that
means.
But it's like in the end, whatdo you want the world to see
that you're creating and how doyou want it to be perceived?
And so you, you write a pressrelease for your.
You know your new product youthink about, you know how is the
press going to respond?
Like what do you want theheadlines to be?
What are the dreaded headlines?
Sort of think about it likewhat are the dreaded headlines?
Sort of think about it likevery high level.
Like okay, we want to buildthis thing that does X, y and Z.
(14:29):
We hope it's received by thepress like this, we hope they
don't say this.
And like how are we going tomake it?
How are we going to ensure thatthese things happen?
And so that's like that's stepnumber one, like what is the big
vision for your, whateveryou're building?
And then, once you sort of dothat, you go through the process
of how am I going to solve forthe potential roadblocks during
(14:52):
that process?
And so you do this wholeworking backwards effort until
you get to like your minimumviable product buy-in from your
senior team.
Who's going to fund this?
Because in life and in anybusiness there are trade-offs.
(15:14):
We have limited resources andyou have to think about what are
the trade-offs and what is therisk of those trade-offs and
what is the opportunity of thetrade-off, and so we spent a lot
of time thinking about that andtalking to senior leadership
about that and once you getbuy-in and approval to go do
this, you should be pretty faralong and understanding what key
milestones you need to hit tomeet your minimum viable product
(15:34):
and you start to build.
And the challenge is is, onceyou start to build, then you
actually realize, like thereality of what you can actually
get done, because a lot of it's, you know, pie in the sky.
I call it rubber meets theclouds.
There's the rubber meets theclouds moment and you spend a
bunch of time on these, likeideating around things that you
think sound great and you.
(15:54):
But you're still up high in thesky and when rubber meets the
road it's certainly a little bitdifferent, like you run into
things that you may not haveanticipated.
You have to make some tradeoffs that you may not have
anticipated because things takelonger, and so it's really
becomes ultimately you go fromthis like working backwards.
What I want the customer to seeto, what are the trade-offs I'm
gonna have to make and thepriorities I'm gonna have to
(16:17):
choose in order to deliversomething that is gonna delight
customers, and then knowing thatover time, if it works at the
minimum level, that I cancontinue to build on it.
And so that's like on theproject management side.
It's deliver the value, pitchthe executive team and get
resourcing and then be sureyou're really, really smart
(16:38):
about the trade-offs you have tomake and that you're working
towards like a minimum viableproduct that's going to delight
your customer.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
That last thing that you just said and that you said
a minute ago.
I wanted to ask you about itbecause you just said delight
your customer.
That last thing that you justsaid and that you said a minute
ago.
I wanted to ask you about itbecause you just said delight
your customer.
I've heard that word used, likeat TikTok and some different
places, but I never expected tohear it from somebody who's
leading products at Amazon.
To me, when I think aboutAmazon, I don't think about
delight, I think about like, ohmy gosh, these are amazingly
(17:05):
functional tools that are goingto help me be more efficient.
But go into that just a littlebit, because is that part of the
process of thinking about afunctional tool?
But something that's also, youknow, hitting and achieving the
sense of euphoria and thisemotional connection.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah, no, so definitely.
I mean, if you think aboutAmazon's, you know Amazon
operates around, I think, like14 leadership principles, and
the number one leadershipprinciple is customer obsession.
It's like, how do you continueto delight customers?
And the challenge is, is thatand I think Jeff Bezos said
something like this it's, youknow, the novel thing that
delights customers today quicklybecomes what's expected, and
(17:45):
you have to continue to ideateand innovate to create something
new that continues to delightthe customer.
Like the idea of havingpackages delivered in two days
or less.
That was like incredible, right, like game changing.
And now it's like you knowtable stakes, and so then it's
like, well, let's have stuffdelivered in an hour.
And so stuff gets delivered inan hour.
(18:06):
You're like, well, I want stuffright now, and so how do you?
You know you sort of it becomesstat, quickly become status quo
, and so the idea of ofcontinuing to delight customers
is really important.
You know, I think Amazon, on theretail side, has done a lot of
incredible things to delightcustomers.
On the hardware side, it's thesame.
Like Alexa was was gamechanging and also price driven.
(18:28):
Like there are a lot of thingsthat you know Amazon puts out
products that are typically lessexpensive than, let's say,
apple.
And you know I think it maycome at some expense in terms of
like.
You know Apple's delight interms of like, the physical
appearance of the products andhow the whole ecosystem works
together, is one thing, but youknow Amazon tries to delight in
other ways and it may be priceon the retail side.
(18:48):
It's you know price selectionand speed, and you know how do
you think about maintainingthose and delivering those
things.
That's how Amazon thought aboutdelighting customers.
I'm having a hard time notsaying we because I don't work
there anymore, but you know, 11years of it ingrained, I'm still
pretty passionate about whatthey do.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Amazon started out famously as a company.
To know what they do.
Amazon started out famously asa company and I remember when
this started I was living inSeattle and had just graduated
from undergrad.
Then girlfriend said there'sthis new company, and they're
just, I can ship my used booksand they'll ship used books to
me.
And I just thought to myselfthat'll never work.
(19:25):
And it's amazing how Amazonevolved through the years.
Here's my question Amazon maybemost famously ships physical
products, but then there wasthis pivot into this massive
digital media delivery systemMusic, all different forms of
entertainment, yeah, books.
(19:46):
It started with books E-books,right.
Kindle, right, yeah, which theyobviously also paired up with a
physical product that I own andI love.
And so can you just talk abouton the digital media side, which
is really you've spent a wholebunch of your time in your
career not on the like lift,ship packages side, but a lot
(20:06):
more of it sounds like it's beenspent on the digital
interactivity and connectivityside?
Can you just talk about why itwas so necessary for Amazon and
how they've been able tocontinue over all these decades,
to continue to have thisamazing symbiosis between the
hardware side and then thedigital side, where many
companies just go we're not,we're software, we're not even
(20:28):
going to touch hardware, or viceversa.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah.
So Amazon sort of fell into thehardware business because of
the need to do things and thedesire to delight customers by
doing things more quickly.
And so Kindle was born from theidea that how do we create a
device that allows us to delivera book within 60 seconds or
less, no matter where you are inthe world?
(20:51):
That was the working backwardsprocess.
Let's deliver a book on thispiece of hardware in 60 seconds
or less, no matter where you arein the world, and all you do is
you open up this thing.
You're like tap, tap the searchbutton, search for your book.
Six seconds later, you have apretty incredible concept, right
, and there's obviously a lotthat went into building that,
(21:14):
but it ultimately that's whatthe company launched with, and
over time, the company continuedto fall into those same sort of
ideas.
You look at Alexa's.
You know was driven by the factthat how do we get people to
engage with an ecosystem so theycan shop more easily and and
transact more easily on thesedevices?
You look at what the companydid with Fire TV and it's like
we have all this video content,we have prime video, we have
(21:37):
music content and we need apiece of hardware to help
deliver that.
You can have the TVmanufacturers build these apps
into their own app ecosystem.
But ultimately we wanted tocreate the best experience for
customers, and so we builtdevices that enabled that, and
so that's how you know.
The company ultimately fellinto hardware.
(21:57):
It was like a necessity, out ofwanting to build the best
products to deliver what wethought were world class
services, but we didn'tnecessarily own the hardware.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Just amazing, fell into hardware.
Yeah Well, I mean mean, I'dlove to ask you about you know
what amazon's thinking aboutnext?
But we should probably switchgears now because, uh, you've
made this transition in yourcareer, in your life, and you
decided to step into safety.
When I think about the newcompany that you're now working
for and the things that you'redeveloping, it's about safety.
(22:26):
So, yeah, give us and I hadnever heard of this company,
even though I was aware of thethings that you're developing.
It's about safety.
So, give us and I had neverheard of this company, even
though I was aware of theproducts Could you give us high
level?
What is Axon?
What's the mission?
Why did you go there?
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Yeah, yeah.
So Axon is a company that buildsincredible technology to
protect human life, buildsincredible technology to protect
human life.
And they started out with thetaser, actually, and the idea
was like you don't want peopleshooting each other with bullets
because there's not a greatending, and so how do we sort of
(23:01):
control situations that aredangerous without ultimately
killing someone, whether it's apolice officer or a civilian or
someone else?
And so the idea was let'sinvent this.
We invented this taser.
Ultimately, it was like, well,what's happening in this
situation over time?
Like we can't see what's goingon.
We know the taser was deployed,so let's create this sort of
(23:22):
body camera.
And so they invented theBodymore camera.
And ultimately the companycontinues to build like
incredible technology for thepublic service sector, for
police, for the military, andthe idea and the mission, like I
said, is to protect life.
And there's a few thingsbeneath that.
One is they have a mission toobsolete the bullet, the idea
(23:44):
that you know, no one uses a gunanymore, that I think tasers
replace that, so there's nolonger lethal force used, and
that's really critical.
Another is building a more fairand effective justice system.
So, you know, today Axon ownswhat's called evidencecom and
there's, I think, 200 billionpieces of evidence sitting
(24:04):
inside that system and theability to search and query and
use AI to sort of evaluatesituations that help make our
justice system more fair andmore effective and more
efficient.
I think is something that'simportant.
Like you think of all the timethat police officers have had to
spend on, you know, going intocourt and you know, ensuring
(24:26):
that justice was properly servedwhen, let's say, evidence
wasn't captured properly.
There's a bunch of things thatwere happening that Axon is
trying to solve to make thejustice system more effective,
and then, ultimately, the goalis, you know, protecting human
life and saving lives.
And so for me, the move waspretty easy because I'm super
(24:47):
passionate about the mission.
I love hardware, like I thinkyou know, working on the
hardware side is superinteresting, like the things
that we're working on.
We've obviously launched, likewe're working on, you know,
drones as first responders,which, like how do you enable
drones to get to a situationfaster than a police officer
Delights customers.
It creates better public safety.
So very cool hardware thatwe're developing and just around
(25:11):
an incredible mission.
And so for me to be able tocome in and, like play a small
part in the success of thecompany and even the impact to
like human life was an easy move.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Amazing At our program.
One of our pillars relates toDEIA and that's a really
multidimensional idea.
I didn't even realize just howmultidimensional it was when I
first started teaching here atUSC, but we really like to think
about it, not just from hey,this is an altruistic idea.
We're going to do these thingsfor the right reasons.
We're going to do them becausethey're for the public good and,
(25:44):
frankly, that's good for thebottom line.
I have a question.
You know there are places inthis country you know, as we
think about diversity that arehistorically under-resourced and
that can sometimes lead to, youknow, higher gun violence.
You know more situations ofpolice interactions that end up
on the news and you know, andsome tragedies around that.
(26:05):
But as you guys think aboutcommunities that are
historically under-resourced,how do you think that the
mission of Axon is going to beable to step into those
situations and make a difference?
You know, along the lines ofthis mission that you have yeah
again.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
So I'm, you know I'm new to the company and I'm not
an official spokesperson, soI'll.
This is just my sort of thinking, going through and learning
about the company and through myinterview process and reading,
you know, in the news, I thinkgetting off like police officers
back in the communities andspending less time in an office
writing up notes from theirinteractions or from whether
(26:42):
it's a traffic violation or acrime scene, like those things,
the bureaucratic work takes alot of time and Axon is
certainly developingtechnologies like using AI.
You can imagine, like all thedata, all the digital media that
comes from body cams and allthese fleet vehicle recorders
and drones there's a lot of datathat's captured and being able
(27:07):
to bring that together without apolice officer having to do a
lot of work and spend a bunch oftime in the back office puts
them back on the streets in thefield to create a better public
safety environment.
And so I think, you know, inareas where there may be more
crime, having more resources,you know, stopping that crime in
(27:27):
a safer way, I think is reallywhat Axon is trying to do and
ultimately will create, you know, better, safer communities and
give people more opportunitiesto live in a safer place.
That's what I love about whatthe company is doing.
It really is about creatingequality in a safer environment
as a function of just makingthings more efficient and using
(27:47):
less lethal you know, force andless confrontational methods to
approach people.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Thank you for that, and I want to ask you about the
storytelling side of things, asyou're developing some of these
projects and products, and itgoes back to what you were
talking about with Amazon, butnow here, as it relates to Axon.
As digital media managers, isthat one of our jobs is to take
(28:21):
a product, understand it wellenough to be able to create
stories and then deliver them toan audience so that that
audience goes oh, I get it, Iunderstand, I understand what
that product is about, Iunderstand the mission it's.
It's actually more importantthan the product itself.
So my question is it relates toAxon and as you think about the
storytelling and as we thinkabout gun violence that has, it
(28:44):
doesn't seem to me like itshould be so complicated, but
for some reason it is.
In this country it's prettycomplicated.
Some people, you know, probablythink guns are fantastic for
police officers to carry.
Some people probably think noguns at all.
Right, I've been to Japan,you've been to Japan.
Police officers don't carryguns, and yet the idea of police
(29:05):
officers only having tasers,that probably delights some
people and it probably scaressome people, might even make
them mad.
So, from a storytelling side,as you begin to put yourself in
the shoes of, maybe, what ourstudents might be thinking about
or the audience and they hearabout.
Well, axon, what's the storyand what is the picture that you
feel it's important to paint sothat people will understand
(29:26):
this mission.
The general public willunderstand this mission that you
have and, with all of the waysthat people have different
points of view about this anddifferent disagreements about
the way that police officersshould carry certain weapons or
should enforce the law in thesesituations, from a storytelling
(29:46):
side.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
So the way I operate and I think you know the way a
lot of these companies Axon andAmazon operate, it really comes
down to the data and so, like,how do you?
To me, if you look at like oneof axons, their moonshot goal
and this is all public is toreduce gun related deaths
between I think it's police andcivilians by 50% by the next
(30:10):
five years roughly seven yearsmaybe.
And the idea is that you know,if you look at the data, the
data shows there is a problem.
You know people are dying fromgun related deaths, whether
that's from police.
You know, if you look at thedata, the data shows there is a
problem.
You know people are dying fromgun related deaths, whether
that's from police.
You know civilian interactionsor otherwise, and if you can use
non lethal force to stopescalated situations and you
(30:33):
have data to support the valueof that.
And to me it's like you look atpictures of all these people who
have died because of theseinteractions and you know to me
that you can tell a verycompelling story using the data
and images of people who youknow, who could have been alive
but are not because lethal forcewas used, and I think that
(30:54):
paints a pretty obvious picture.
I mean this it's not like thishappens to people across the
world and all different types ofcommunities and getting people
to understand the message thatwe don't need to use lethal
force to solve situations,whether it's the police or
otherwise, I think people canresonate with that Like death is
very, final, very final.
(31:21):
And so how do you tell thatstory that you can actually
prevent that in a way that'seffective and that the community
can get around and that youknow that police officers can
still be safe?
You know police officers don'twant to, they don't want to use
lethal force.
And so how do you, you know,tell a story that sort of
showcases the benefits to policeofficers by having these
non-lethal weapons and thebenefit to the civilians for
(31:41):
these being around?
And doing that with data, Ithink, is a great way to sort of
highlight the impact that itcan have globally.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Amazing Trevor, I want to ask you a couple more
questions before we wrap up andbeing away from Axon for a
second, although it relates toeverything it is that you're
doing.
You know you've been in theseleadership positions for an
extremely long time, and couldyou just take us through one or
two bullet points of what yourphilosophy of leadership is in
these digital media units?
(32:11):
You know, I'm sure, that you'reworking with people both
synchronously, asynchronously,people who are in the office
right there in your community,and then probably people who are
part of teams that are aroundthe world, coming from different
cultures.
Could you talk a little bitabout digital media leadership
and you know some of your keypillars of how you?
Speaker 1 (32:28):
approach that, like leadership, is really about
having good mechanisms in placeto ensure that you know people
are making effective, timely,you know, and many times you
know, autonomous decisions.
That's really critical to me,like when I lead a team, is I
(32:50):
want people to have autonomy tomake decisions and you know to
walk through one way or two waydoors and nothing.
If they make a mistake, we cango back One way.
Doors are a little different,have mechanisms for those, but
it's really about ensuring thatpeople have the right mechanisms
, know how to prioritize whatthey're working on relative to
other.
You know projects and, as aleader, knowing when to advocate
(33:13):
for things and also knowingwhen to inquire.
Like there are times when yousit back and you listen and you
sort of you want to ensure thatyou're taking everyone's
perspective and you know you'redrawing the right conclusions
and you're, you know, takingthis sort of inquiry approach.
And then the other side it's,you know, advocating for what
you you believe is the rightdecision, based on all the input
you have from multiple sources.
(33:35):
And so I think, if I look atyou know the mechanisms and then
knowing when to ask questionsand knowing when to sort of
stand strong like that's how Ilike to lead.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Mechanisms.
I love that, well, and that'sfantastic because if you have
how many people work at, AmazonAt Amazon 1.7 million Right.
And how many people on yourteam let's just say the last
team that you had at amazon howmany folks were directly
reporting to you?
Speaker 1 (34:01):
uh, five five directs , oh, only five.
Okay, that's not sad.
Amazon doesn't typically havemore than five to six people
that are directly reporting toit.
It's, you know, you sort ofpartition out okay, all right,
it's too hard to manage that bigof a team with you know.
Manage 15 multiple or 15 directreports, right yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
But, yeah, I love and appreciate what you're saying
about, about creating mechanismsthat are repeatable, creating
systems that people then there'ssome comfort in that.
You know, people know and wesee that you know, you and I
sometimes talk about parenting.
That's one of the best examplesof leadership that a whole
bunch of people around the worlddo yeah, okay, that is.
And that a whole bunch ofpeople around the world do yeah,
okay, that is.
And it's really important tomake sure that expectations are
set.
People know.
I like also your reference aboutthe two-way door.
(34:44):
That's really healthy, trevor.
As we wrap up, the questionthat I always love to ask is not
necessarily related tomultimedia communications,
leadership or any of thosethings, but it's more like if
you had one piece of advice,something that you wish, maybe
that you knew when you wereyounger, or maybe it's something
that you try to instill as avalue within your team, within
(35:05):
your friends and family.
Is there one piece of adviceyou know that's the Trevor Nolan
North Star, the Polaris forTrevor Nolan that we could all
have as a takeaway and put rightour, put right here in our, in
our pocket.
Keep it close to our heart aswe move forward.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Yeah, that's a good question.
You know, I think there are alot of things that I think
guided me throughout my career,but what I found that I keep
coming back to is just doingsomething that you're passionate
about, and it could be youcould be passionate about the
cloud, or you could bepassionate about AI, or you
could be passionate about AI.
You could be passionate aboutphilanthropy work, and for me,
it's like and I think I'velanded it back at Axon, because
(35:43):
I've always I've always wantedto work for very mission driven
companies and you know Axon wetalked about the mission at Axon
, even at Amazon, like I wasbuilding, you know, and
supporting communicationssolutions that save people's
lives, like the ability to call911 over Alexa was something
that I worked on and like thatwas pretty game changing.
You think about if you can.
You know I've fallen.
This sort of I've fallen and Ican't get up in an AI driven
(36:05):
world was something I was reallypassionate about.
And like I look at my life andwhat where I've had the most joy
in my career is through jobsthat I've been passionate about,
and so to me, it's do somethingyou're passionate about, work
really hard, think outside thebox and try to be inventive in
an area.
There's always something betteryou can go do in an area that
(36:26):
you're passionate about that noone else has thought about.
If you find that small thing oreven big thing, just go after
it, because people always getexcited about delighting
customers and you know thatwould be my piece of advice.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Trevor, thank you so much for joining us and spending
some of your time and sharingthis wisdom and distilling it
down into words that we can allunderstand, even though I know
that there's a cloud ofsophistication and complexity
behind it.
So, thank you, I reallyappreciate that, and you're a
friend of ours, we're a friendof yours and we believe in your
mission and what you're doing.
(37:00):
Thank you for being with ustoday.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Thank you for having me.
I enjoyed it.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
All right, everybody.
See you next time on Mediascape.
To learn more about the Masterof Science in Digital Media
Management program, visit us onthe web at dmmuscedu.
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