Bill Carr

Bill Carr is a strategic business leader who has spent his career at the forefront of tech innovation. He is a former top-level executive at Amazon, where he worked for more than 15 years – much of it in the early aughts during the company’s period of unmatched innovation – launching and managing Amazon’s global digital music and video businesses, including Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios.

Exclusively represented by Leading Authorities’ speakers bureau, Carr is the co-author of Working Backwards, along with former Amazon executive Colin Bryar, which provides an insider’s breakdown of Amazon’s approach to culture, leadership, and best practices. In the book as well as in his talks, he offers unprecedented access to the Amazon way – illuminating how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles and company culture focused on customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence were instrumental in creating four key Amazon businesses: Kindle, Amazon Prime, Prime Video, and Amazon Web Services. Taking audiences inside the room, Carr demonstrates how the principles and practices key to “Being Amazonian” can be scaled and applied to any organization.

Carr joined Amazon in 1999 – five years after its founding – and spent the next 15 years as part of Amazon’s senior leadership team as the company grew from a domestic (US-only) seller of books to a global, multi-dimensional powerhouse and innovator. As Amazon’s vice president of digital media, he built and oversaw a team of more than a thousand employees including engineering, product, marketing, business development, content acquisition, design, and the TV and movie development teams at Amazon Studios. Under Carr’s leadership, Amazon’s digital media business grew into a global operation exceeding $1 billion in revenue as the company pushed to compete with Apple, Netflix, and Hulu.

After Amazon, Carr was the entrepreneur in residence at Maveron, LLC, an early-stage, consumer-only venture capital firm. He then served as the COO of OfferUp, the largest mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers in the U.S, where he worked to improve operations and user experience.

Currently, Carr is the co-founder of Working Backwards, LLC, where he coaches and advises executives at both early stages and established companies around the globe, helping them to implement the management practices developed at Amazon. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Colby College and an MBA from Emory University.

Read More »