Yugank Modgill

Early in my Amazon career, I made a common management mistake—I spent too much time on small decisions and very little time on big ones. Small decisions are much easier to make than big decisions. They give leaders the illusion of productivity because it feels better to make more decisions per unit of time. But high levels of activity do not necessarily produce better results. Big, challenging bets are what fundamentally changed Amazon, not little actions. In my first few years, my team and I maintained a spreadsheet with a long list of retail merchandising features we wanted to add to our website, like buy-one-get-one-free, discounts for bundles, etc. At the time, these seemed critical to unlocking growth and matching the capabilities of brick-and-mortar retailers who were outselling us. Those things brought in some extra revenue, which was great, but none of them fundamentally changed the business. Basically, Amazon didn’t become Amazon because of a BOGO feature. What blew Amazon through the roof were the big bets: building Prime, creating Kindle, launching AWS. These were decisions with real stakes. They were hard, risky, and they took years to pay off. But, they made all the difference between what Amazon was then and what Amazon is now. When I coach leaders now, I ask, “If this project goes well, what’s the upside? A million dollars? Ten million? A hundred million?” The estimates will always be wrong, but the order of magnitude tells you where to focus. If everything on your roadmap caps out at a 1% impact, then you’ll get 1% growth at best. If you want 10x, you need to make 10x bets. The challenge is that big decisions are hard. They require risk, investment of scarce resources, long-term thinking, and sustained effort. They don’t come with short-term gratification. It feels like nothing’s happening for months or even years. The job of an executive is to make a few big, high-quality decisions each year and drive their execution. This is what will define the success of the business. Spending most of your time on small things feels productive in the moment, but it is actually the best way to make sure the business stagnates in the long run.

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India has abundant expertise across every domain - logistics operators, subject matter experts, local service providers, etc. What's scarce isn't capability. It's the systems that coordinate this capability at scale. Most companies see this fragmentation and default to vertical integration: build everything in-house, own all capabilities, control every aspect of delivery. This works if you have unlimited capital and time. Most companies have neither. But there's an alternative approach that we've noticed two of our portcos execute remarkably well, in completely different industries - 1. When Meesho looked at India's logistics, and they saw thousands of fragmented local operators. Instead of building warehouses and delivery fleets, they built Valmo - an orchestration platform coordinating existing partners. Individual pilots with smartphones earn sustainable incomes, small hub operators build viable businesses, and Meesho gets coverage across 15,000+ pin codes at 12% lower cost than traditional third-party-logistics. 2. Entri saw similar fragmentation in education. India has abundant teaching expertise already running offline/online programs. Entri partners with them for content while owning demand generation, platform infra, quality monitoring, and placements. This allows them to launch new categories in weeks and scale across languages without the capital intensity of building in-house teams for every vertical. If I had to pull a common thread, it's that in fragmented markets like India, the orchestration layer often matters more than asset ownership. Coordinate what exists rather than rebuilding from scratch.

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After nearly a decade-long innings at Amazon, today I’m wrapping up one of the most formative chapters of my career. What I’m taking with me is a toolkit of learnings that fundamentally reshaped how I think, operate, and lead. 1. Unlearning is a superpower. My first year felt like switching from pace to spin mid-run-up—documents over PPTs, inputs over outputs, mechanisms over fixes. It pushed me to question habits I assumed were “normal” and rebuild my approach from the ground up. 2. Mechanisms > intent. Good intentions don’t scale—systems do. Amazon’s discipline of codifying problems, getting to true root causes, and building mechanisms that prevent repeat errors taught me to trust structured thinking over memory or goodwill. It’s a muscle I’ll rely on everywhere. 3. Customer obsession is not a slogan; it’s a lens. Every decision, debate, and doc centered on one question: “What’s right for the customer?” In the early days, we faced multiple moments where customer experience and financial impact collided—and customer experience won. Every single time. That clarity rewires how you make decisions. 4. Treat mistakes as data, nothing more. One of my earliest reviews cemented this. We documented a multi-million miss and the mechanism to ensure it never happened again. I walked in bracing for a grilling. Instead—silence. No blame, no theatrics. If there’s no value to add, move on. That mindset unlocks both psychological safety and speed. 5. Leaders raise the standard quietly. The best leaders I worked with didn’t just direct—they elevated thinking. In one meeting, when a team hesitated to commit to a tough idea, a leader simply asked, “What needs to be true for this to happen?” And then rolled up their sleeves to help make those conditions real. 6. Teams are your real competitive advantage. Somewhere along the journey, it became clear that the only way to achieve more was through the team—the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. My teams took every challenge head-on, had the tough conversations without flinching, and celebrated wins—big and small—with equal energy. I may have walked in feeling like a cultural misfit, but I’m walking out with an Amazonian mindset that will stay with me for life. I’m deeply thankful to those who wittingly and unwittingly mentored me along the way — Kapil Hathi, Harsh Goyal, Manish Bajoria, Gaurav Jain, Dipro Chatterjee, Rahat Patel, Dr Karuna Shankar Pande On to the next innings—grateful, grounded, and carrying these learnings forward.

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Five people I promoted to Director at Amazon are now SVPs or higher in top companies. Here’s a list of them and how they got there. Getting to Director helped launch these executive careers: Ameesh Paleja – VP at Google, now EVP at Capital One. Promoted from Sr. Manager to Director while working on the Amazon Appstore. Kamlesh Talreja – VP at Goldman Sachs, now SVP at Capital One. Sr. Manager to Director on the Amazon Appstore. Jason Vogrinec – VP at Microsoft, EVP at Lyft. Another Sr. Manager to Director promotion from my Appstore team. Miguel Roque – COO, CTO, and now President of Bezos Academy. Became a Director creating Amazon Coins and Merch by Amazon on my team. Mike Minton – VP and now Chief Monetization Officer at Twitch. Followed me from Amazon to Twitch and became a Director on my team there. How they got promoted: 1) They formed a partnership with me (their manager). In simple terms, they worked hard to make our team successful, and I worked hard to make sure they were recognized with a promotion. We both upheld our ends of “the deal.” 2) They stuck with the process through adversity. Ameesh, Kamlesh, and Miguel all hit snags that delayed their intended promotions by weeks or months. They stuck with it when it was hard. 3) They took on dirty tasks when needed. Ameesh moved to open a new remote office; Kamlesh moved from Seattle to Bangalore to do the same. Mike—who we mostly called Minton—won the trust of a skeptical Twitch org that viewed Amazonians as clueless outsiders. They did what was needed, even when it sucked. Important: a) These are not the only people—just five really clear examples. b) Each of these individuals earned their promotions and continued growing. I don’t claim responsibility for their careers, but I do claim that I was a supportive guide through the promotion process that helped launch them into executive roles. c) There are no women on this list. This reflects the heavily male-dominated nature of Amazon 10 to 15 years ago. I’ve supported many women in their careers, but few have reached positions as high as the ones mentioned here in part because of time. I worked with more female leaders later in my Amazon career. Getting promoted quickly matters because the faster you move up, the sooner you’re exposed to higher-level challenges and executive leadership. That gives you a better shot at going further over the course of your career. I’ve been teaching people how to get promoted into executive roles for more than 15 years. And I’m teaching it again starting this weekend. I have a few more seats available if you would like to join: https://buff.ly/nnC2LGG? Who have you seen shoot forward in their careers? How did they do it?

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During my 15 years at Amazon, I interviewed hundreds of candidates. One shift I had to make was abandoning interview questions that were hypothetical, case or modeling questions, or in any way not behavioral. There are two problems with hypotheticals: 1) They tell you how a candidate will think, but not how they will behave, manage, and lead. 2) They introduce bias because the interviewer tends to have either a single or a small range of “correct” answers in mind. Here are two of my favorite hypothetical or modeling questions that I asked during my first few years at Amazon, along with their benefits and drawbacks. 1. Imagine that you are the Product Manager of a new idea for a subscription service called Amazon Prime. The way it will work is, for $49 a month, customers get free two-day shipping on every order. Prior to launch, the CFO asks you to prepare a financial model to measure the expected impact of Prime. Describe the model you would build, including the metrics and your assumptions. 2. If you were the CEO of Amazon, tell me about the most important changes or improvements you would make to grow revenue and profitability. The point of the first question was to determine the analytical capabilities of the candidate. I was looking to see how facile they were with constructing a model designed to measure the impact of new product, feature or promotion. One of the keys was for them to identify specific metrics that would change, such as average order size, frequency of shopping visits, number or breadth of product categories shopped, etc. I found it useful to see candidates talk about the importance of various metrics for this analysis. But, one of the problems with this question was that I knew the “right” answer, which was to compare the average (or by segment for extra credit) customer frequency of purchase and the corresponding total gross profit dollars before Prime vs after Prime. The handful of candidates able to zero in on this would get my highest marks. I gave people credit if they were close and their framework was logical and detail-oriented, but there was no way I would hire someone who flubbed it. The second question differed in that I was assessing a candidate’s ability to identify the right problems and opportunities. It was also a test to see how much they had studied Amazon in advance of the interview. In retrospect, this question was pretty useless. Almost everyone answered with “…I would improve personalization” and/or “…I would reduce the clutter on the home page.” If everyone gives nearly the same (bad) answer, then the question is a waste of time. And just like the first question, I was biased in my assessment of the “correct” answer based on my insider knowledge. Behavioral questions, on the other hand, reduce bias and give the candidate the ability to describe their past work where THEY possessed the requisite insider information to make good decisions. (cont. in comments)

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Eggoz Raises $20 Mn Series C Led By Gaja Capital; Claims to hit its EBITDA Breakeven In Q4 FY25, Revenue Up 76% YoY To INR 130 Cr FY25 https://lnkd.in/gd9j68rp Abhishek Negi Aditya Singh #Eggoz #funding #D2Cbrands #Agritech #EBITDAbreakeven #Revenuegrowth #Indianstartups #consumerbrands #GajaCapital

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10 Years at Amazon. Trust me no free Prime membership 😂. But what I did earn: a few colored lanyards, great friends, & some hard earned lessons that helped me navigate work & life across continents, re-orgs, & time zones. 10 learnings from my #Day1 journey: — 1. Know urself before chasing the next shiny thing Not everyone needs to be a PM or jump into Tech just ’cause it sounds cool. Reflect, ask for feedback, & check if the role fits u — not just ur LinkedIn profile. I’ve seen people chase roles like buying Taylor Swift tickets w/o knowing the lyrics looks cool until it starts. 2. Understand ur manager They hold the keys to ur growth (& ur vacation approvals). So interview them to understand What keeps them up at night? How do they define success? Ur alignment with them determines whether u will thrive or just survive. 3. LPs are more than buzzwords Here, LPs are like air — u don’t see them, but they’re everywhere. Debating product strategy? LPs. Promotion bar raiser? LPs. Explaining “Frugality” to ur spouse during a weekend Costco run? Still LPs. 4. Health is not a badge of hustle Red eyes from late nights aren’t leadership signals. Working 16 hrs a day isn’t a promotion strategy. If ur calendar has space for 1:1s, it has space for a 5PM walk too. It’s ROI positive trust me. 5. Promotions are a milestone, not the mission They’re like an OP1 goal: ambitious, well documented, and somehow always “needs more alignment.” U’ve hit goals,shared crisp docs, & still land in “not this cycle.” So sharpen your skills & double down on growth. Make the title chase you — not the other way around. 6. Embrace the chaos (it’s inevitable) One week ur leading a launch, the next due to a re-org the project gets deprioritized. I’ve gone from “Great job!” to “We need to pivot this entirely” in one meeting. Adaptability isn’t just a skill it’s survival gear. So lace up, lean in, & yes be water, the kind that doesn’t spill during a re-org. 7. Time is the great leveller Whether ur a VP or a new hire in onboarding, we all get 24 hrs. Use them wisely at work & beyond. Put down the laptop sometimes. That Netflix show? Sometimes just as necessary as the doc review. 8. Start with the end The doc culture here taught me to picture a clear end goal not just for work, but for life too. When u know what ur optimizing for, it’s easier to say no to things that don’t serve outcome. 9. Confidence ≠ competence U’ll meet folks who sound like they invented AWS & can’t explain what it stands for. Meanwhile, ur fact-checking every sentence in ur doc like it’s going to the White House. Don’t get distracted steady delivery & thoughtful decisions win. 10. Don’t take urself too seriously. Take the work seriously, yes. But laugh at urself. Keep perspective. Engage with people. One time, I accidentally shared a doc titled “Final_v7_ThisTimeForReal” with my skip manager. He replied: “Bold of u to assume.” Lesson learned: always version ur docs & ur ego. — #10Years #Amazon #Day1

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Recko | A Stripe company's $150M acquisition proved that India Talent can build world class software. Here are the top learnings from my podcast with Saurya, Co-founder, Recko: 1. Recko was founded in 2017 by Saurya and Prashant to fix the complex and broken process of financial reconciliation in fast-growing B2C companies like Flipkart and Blinkit. 2. Getting the product off the ground was really tough. Early customers openly said they didn’t need it, and investors thought the idea was pointless. Recko was trying to build in a new category where there were no benchmarks or clear paths to follow. 3. Their first big break came from Myntra, who reached out just when Recko was down to their last $500. Over the next 3 to 4 months, they worked closely with Myntra’s finance team to solve huge reconciliation problems involving millions of data rows. That work earned them the credibility to build the product. 4. Indian VCs passed on Recko for several reasons: Lack of investor-focus on B2B during 2017-18 , the perception that back-office products were unsexy and the pressure for fast hockey stick growth. In some cases, even customers denied they had the problem Recko was solving, which confused potential investors further. 5. Saurya shares that India’s B2B ecosystem has “over-indexed” on cost advantages and marketing-heavy models. But to truly compete globally and reach higher valuations, companies should start with a solid product that offers real value through Tech and product superiority, not just by being cheaper. 6. For early-stage B2B startups, the most important metrics is not ARR, but product shape & product usage- how often the product is used and how critical it is to the workflow of the business. If your product becomes part of a company’s core workflow, it’s much harder for them to stop using it- even if it’s tough to sell at first. 7. Stripe's acquisition of Recko was primarily a product acceleration and product suite completion strategy. With financial operations closely tied to payments, Recko brought deep expertise in that space- something Stripe's customers were already asking for. 8. Recko was acquired at a 75X revenue multiple of $2 million ARR - A result of the product's unique strength, very specific domain knowledge, and "thickness" in its product layer. This contrasts with companies offering easily replicable solutions or operating in crowded, benchmarked categories, which give them lesser leverage in acquisitions. 9. The acquisition process took about six months, with four of those months spent on intense due diligence. Founders must manage conflicting expectations from investors and employees while maintaining highly confidential communication throughout. 10. Saurya advises founders to prioritize long-term relationships over attempting to "squeeze the last drop" of money during an acquisition, as future collaborations are likely. 

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Interesting to see Uber India take a page from Brex's playbook. One of the key drivers of stickiness for Brex's card is allowing users to accumulate rewards on their work spends, and leveraging them to subsidise their personal spends. This is one of the key unsaid and unadvertised value prop for employees to use Brex card. Same reason for success of HDFC Bank SmartBuy, and why employees prefer to pay for work travel using their personal credit cards, if given a choice. Recently launched Uber One in India is leveraging the same core insight, where a user gains rewards on work travel, and leverages them to subsidise personal travel. Win-win for both Uber and user.

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Agilitas x Virat Kohli partnership is one of the masterstroke deals I have seen in recent times. Virat invests 40 CR in Agilitas for a 1.94% stake, putting Agilitas’s valuation around 2000 CR. 📈 In turn, Agilitas acquires one8world, making Virat a co-founder and shareholder. They now get two very important growth levers: ⬇️ 1. A powerful manufacturing (via Mochiko Shoes - a 600 CR+ footwear brand that Agilitas acquired in 2008 ), 2. India’s biggest athlete — exclusively aligned. Easily becomes a 4000 CR revenue brand in the next 5 years. Footwear + retail scale requires capital — but this partnership compresses customer acquisition, product cycles, and brand-building like few others. Even Virat said in his podcast with Abhishek Ganguly, the co-founder of Agilitas that, “I didn’t want a brand deal… I wanted to build something that outlives me.” And Abhishek said something even beautiful - “An ambition to build from India but be globally relevant.” This isn’t marketing. This is legacy building with shared skin in the game. And that is how startups work - shared ambition with one goal (to make the company big) and food (read stake) in the table for everyone! A company that can be built in the long term with culture, capital, and conviction aligned. This might be the first time in India, where an athlete joins hands with a sport company to re-imagine and build the sport ecosystem of India - truly revolutionalising the game with a clear vision. 🙌

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Suggestions for H1B friends who are already their in US and not immediately affected by this 100K H1B fee: You are not safe just because you don't immediately need a renewal or travel outside of US. Companies will eventually make policies that impact all H1Bs. . You are lucky as you have some time to execute the below suggestions to come out ahead, while you still can: - Dispose all your assets in the US while there is still time. Do NOT delay this. - Start with hard assets like houses. Dont wait to maximise the profit. US housing market can collapse any time and H1B sell off can trigger it. The first movers will get out fine. Accept the first good offer you get and move to a small rental. Sell off useless furniture. - If your family members are dependents, send them back to India asap. Schooling can be worked out. - Buy an apartment or plot of land in India if you don't have one already. - Sell off expensive cars and get a used cheap car. - Move money from US stock market and invest in Gold ETFs in India. Unlike US ETFs, Indian ETFs have equivalent physical gold. This will protect your investment from US-INR conversion volatility. - Get out of crypto. Holding crypto while in India is going to be a regulatory hassle. - Avoid paying for expensive tuition in the US if your kids are not US citizens or expected to be GC holders by the time they graduate. There are good private colleges in India they can go to. - Apply for a role in GCC in India if your company has an Indian GCC or apply for roles in Dubai or Singapore or other GCCs in India. Being stuck in the US with no path to GC and unable to change jobs or visit your family is mental torture. Don't prolong the suffering. Wisdom is knowing when to cut the losses. .

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I keep seeing articles like these, where Amazon say that fulfilling D2C orders is akin to Amazon Web Services: they already have the network, capacity, and know-how, so why not let them do it for you? But that’s the wrong comparison. If you’re a brand, letting Amazon handle your fulfillment is more like a drug: short-term highs, long-term consequences. Don’t get me wrong, I get the challenge. Customers want their packages fast. It’s (too) expensive to do it on your own. Turning to Amazon lets you meet the customer expectation. Conversion rate goes up instantly, and all is well. But the long-term picture isn’t so rosy. Now Amazon know what your customers are buying. Immediately, they start recommending similar products on Amazon instead of the online store. When products are really successful, they create an Amazon version for a fraction of the price. Ultimately, tools like Buy with Prime and MCF are for the benefit of Amazon, not the brands. It’s a highly strategic move to pull more people from brands to Amazon, and take share from independent ecom brands in the process. I get that it’s a really tough decision that operators have to make. Just think we should call it what it is.

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I'm incredibly proud to see Amazon Future Engineer expanding with 500 new scholarships for female engineering students across India. Watching our first cohort of scholars graduate with 80% securing roles at Fortune 500 companies reinforces our commitment to building a diverse tech workforce. Many of these talented young women are first-generation college graduates from smaller cities, demonstrating the tremendous potential that exists when barriers to education are removed. Since 2022, we have awarded 1,700 scholarships providing financial support, mentorship, and real-world experience. This isn't just about creating engineers, it's about developing the next generation of tech leaders who will shape India's digital future. Learn more - https://lnkd.in/gSewgt6p #AmazonFutureEngineer #WomenInTech #DiversityAndInclusion #TechForGood Kriti Ashok Prateek Agarwal

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I was talking to my friend Parul Singh about how too much VC money can be detrimental. I have been working with pre-seed/seed/A at and with companies for the last 20+ years and I have observed first hand that the saying “constraints breeds creativity” is true. In my experience, a company with 18 months of runway gets much more done in the second nine months than the first. 🪹 Pre-seed Companies: When you are in the “idea maze” (coined by Andreessen Horowitz) or “drunken walk” having too much money does not necessarily speed up progress. Of course you may need some money for founder living expenses but having a larger team wandering through the "idea maze" together doesn't necessarily make the journey go faster. There is a certain level of founder reflection that has to happen while navigating the “idea maze” and too many distractions (people, money) makes it hard. I teach an entrepreneurship class  (LeanLaunchpad) every year. Out of the eight teams we have navigating the “idea maze”, about half will test and land on a reasonable idea in just ten weeks (including a simple MVP and even some paid POCs). Total budget: zero. With the multitude of AI tools, time to PMF is accelerating. Check out https://lnkd.in/guM7Ymn9 (AI companies revenue >10x SaaS companies). 🌱 Seed Companies: When you are going from the “idea maze” to “product market fit” and are trying to first build a product that a few customers love and second build a way to acquire these customers efficiently, having too much money can actually be counterproductive. Why? Because too much money often translates to wasting time on things that don’t matter: you are not forced to focus on the features that are absolutely critical, you can spend in non-efficient marketing methods (skipping the crafting of the product-growth loop) and you can afford to over hire or to keep the wrong people onboard. 🅰️ Series A Companies: Post product market fit, when it is time to scale, money is absolutely critical. However there is one common failure mode: the “fake Series As”, the As that get overpriced without really having reached product-market fit. Take a seed in a hot space, a small team that has grown revenue to a few $100Ks or maybe even a million in just six months. There is little data on actual revenue stickiness or whether the founder-led sales motion can be replicated efficiently. There is a lot of competition to invest in the company and they end up raising $20M+ series A.  The founder feels confident, they are stretched-thin and they hire a bunch of folks. There is pressure to scale but the machine is not built yet (the product is not quite there, they can’t figure out how to get to customers efficiently) and things unravel. Venture money is like carbs: quality over quantity (not all money is equal); take in moderation (constraints bread creativity) and if you compete in endurance sports, you might need more carbs to perform well (if you are growing, you will need the cash).

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