David Glick – 20 year Amazon veteran turned CTO #87

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is David Glick.

David Glick is the CTO of the FLEXE fulfillment technology platform. 

Before FLEXE, he spent nearly 20 years at Amazon, including five years as the VP of Fulfillment Technology, where he oversaw the development and functionality of the technology within Amazon’s fulfillment centers, as well as the technology for Amazon’s transportation

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A note from Grant

If you’ve ever wondered what the technology behind the scenes of some of today’s largest retailers looks like, you’re going to want to tune in as we catch up with Dave Glick, the CTO of Flexe, a warehousing and logistics company. 

After getting his PhD from UNC Chapel Hill (Go Heels) in physics — I think this is our 3rd physicist turned technologist — Dave spent 20 years at Amazon building out their fulfillment and transportation systems, amongst a variety of other roles throughout the company, before leaving to join Flexe as their Chief Technology Officer. 

When Dave is not making sure your order arrives on time, he holds down several advisory and humanitarian roles, including being a board member for Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking. 

-Grant Ingersoll

Quotes

“I ended up having to deal with pricing errors. We went through the process of setting prices on promotions automatically and manually. And what we found was that every time a human was involved, defects were injected.”

“We were able to reduce pricing errors by 90 percent year over year.”

“Put the engineer close to the customer. Thats the number 1 piece of advice I’d have for an engineering leader.”

“You’re basically automating the walking. If you think about automating the robot arm that picks an item out of a bin, that is a super hard problem, and no one has ever cracked the code at scale for that. But if you think about picking up a 300 pound pod and bringing it to a human, that is super easy. Robots are really good at that.”

—David Glick

Additional Resources

Learn more about FLEXE – https://www.flexe.com/

You can find more resources in the show notes
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