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MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Join hosts Joseph Itaya and Anika Jackson as they dive into conversations with leaders and changemakers shaping the future of digital media. Each episode explores the frontier of multimedia, artificial intelligence, marketing, branding, and communication, spotlighting how emerging digital trends and technologies are transforming industries across the globe.
MEDIASCAPE is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. This online master’s program is 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.
MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
From Amazon to Axon: A Tech Leader's Journey with Trevor Nolan
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.
Digital media takes many forms. There's the artistic side of digital media, like movies and music and art, and then there's the transactional side, you know, delivering data, points of interest, different latitude and longitude associations, historical, across digital media. You'll find that it's pretty diverse, it's global in nature and it has a pretty significant impact across many facets of our lives.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world. Hi everybody and welcome to this week's episode of Mediascape. And we're really blessed to be with a good friend, friend of our program, friend to our students and one of the leaders, quite frankly, in tech across multiple industries. This is Trevor Nolan, who's with us. Thanks so much, trevor, for being with us today. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Trevor was most recently spending a big chunk of his life and career at Amazon and we're going to talk about that. He's also recently transitioned into a new role at a new company called Axon, but there was a whole host of pretty interesting and winding experiences that came before that, trevor, running a candle company and a few others. But before we lead into Amazon, could you quickly take us through some of the important stops on your journey through tech and business before you got to Amazon?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So I started my sort of early adult life thinking I wanted to be a doctor. So I studied pre-medicine, focused on biochemistry, and I got a degree in Spanish because I thought I could serve a greater patient population by being bilingual. And, you know, after several years realized I didn't want to follow that path and I pivoted to a career in private equity. So I worked for a private equity firm in San Francisco and then moved to a venture capital firm focused on biotech and medtech deals and then slowly worked into like media, media tech and software, and I spent roughly five years in that side of my career. And then I went into an operating role at a startup company called VoiceFox Technologies, which was really focused on essentially what Amazon had to do with Alexa, which was how do you create conversational, voice driven experiences to simplify things that were traditionally, you know, a keyboard and mouse, like gestural interfaces. And so I joined that company, was really young, I was sort of the CFO controller, moved on to run business development and sort of on the sales side as we looked at partnering with automotive manufacturers and and different media companies. And then I went from there and I moved to Microsoft where I spent five years leading a few different things. One was the transition from Windows Live to Bing and I was leading a bunch of work around Bing Maps and sort of mapping technologies and how do you think about the earth and how humans interact with the earth. And then moved into delivering media into cars. So we built the first interface like application interface and cars. So Toyota launched what they called being connected car and we had, you know, the ability to make dinner reservations and get directions all these things that seem pretty trivial today, but you know they were pretty cool at the time.
Speaker 1:And then I was involved with philanthropy in Seattle called Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and spent a bunch of time working with them to raise funds for a bunch of different cancer research initiatives. And I got pulled away by actually a company that Jeff Bezos was the largest investor in, which made glass blown candle holders in Seattle, and it was a company with a mission to give back. They're one of the first companies to give a percentage of revenue back to charities that help people to heal and I was really driven by the mission and it's actually a really cool, cool product company is called glassy baby and I was there for, you know about a year and I got pulled back to another Jeff Bezos company which is called Amazon, to go and help run the technology licensing across all of the hardware that Amazon was building. So at the time it was Kindle.
Speaker 1:Alexa hadn't come out yet we were building this thing called Fire Phone, which didn't do very well, had just launched Fire TV, and so there was a bunch of work around enabling technologies across those different hardware platforms. And so there was a bunch of work around enabling technologies across those different hardware platforms. And then also, you know how do you interact with, like the what was not called hyperscalers then, but you know the hyperscalers, like the Microsoft's and Google's of the world, to enable better experiences across these devices and hardware ecosystems. And so went there and ended up staying for 11 years, until about four weeks ago so, and had an interesting role I can jump into. You know, if you want me to go through details around what I did over the last 11 years, I'm happy to do that, but that's kind of how I got to where I am today.
Speaker 2:That's exactly where I wanted to go, to be honest, because when we met and you said you know, you gave me this amazing sentence which I'd love for you to say again about you were working with connected hardware technologies globally. So say that better than than I'm saying it right now, so that we can try to wrap our minds around the sophistication of what that really means.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think and this goes back to you know what digital media is. To me it's the idea that so every single device that Amazon has built and or owns and uses every day across their entire global ecosystem, whether it's delivery vehicles delivering packages you know the company delivers 16 million packages a day. It's actually prime day right now. I think the company will deliver 200 million packages over the next three days, like it's pretty significant volume. You think about all the Alexa queries. You think about every locker, every you know locker where you pick up packages Prime Air, our Project Kuiper, which is the satellite low-earth orbit satellite installation that is launching Anything that is a connected device Kindles, zoox, which is the autonomous RoboTax that Amazon's launching later this year All of those devices are connected to the cloud and to some sort of network.
Speaker 1:The network could be satellite, it could be cellular, it could be Wi-Fi, lora, bluetooth, any of those networks, and in many cases it's converged where you're sort of utilizing what's best based on cost or efficiency. And so I led a team that essentially managed all of the connections of all of those devices globally. And you know we're talking trillions of transactions on a weekly basis and petabytes of data on a monthly basis. All of it was running through the centralized connectivity team to ensure that packages were being delivered, that vehicles were being driven safely, that books were able to be downloaded to Kindle devices, and so I thought a lot about how do we sort of manage that network globally to ensure that customers are delighted every day.
Speaker 2:Cybersecurity is one of the things that's blinking in my head with like a neon buzzer of how in the world did you? I'm sure that that was one of the most dangerous, exciting, important things that you were thinking about. Can you talk about the cybersecurity and how?
Speaker 1:I mean, that's not your background, but so, so fortunately, we lean. There's two pieces. No, no, manage the security piece. On the connectivity side, we leaned on you know all these different networks, so you think of the Verizon, 18tt, mobiles of the World, you know Doit to Telecom, vodafone and others. Like their encryption across their network and their security protocols are what help us on the connectivity side to ensure that you know that things are operating appropriately and there's safeguards in place. You know there are certainly people who do things that are nefarious and there are safeguards in place to watch for those.
Speaker 1:And you think about across everything that Amazon was doing, so with AWS safeguards, with our network provider partner safeguards. You know we had a pretty solid cybersecurity strategy in place and I didn't have to build that on my own. I was able to rely on my, you know, internal and external partners for that. And we, you know, there were certainly instances I think back to, like, when I was doing a bunch of things I work around Alexa communications and even, you know, people-to-people communications. So the ability to make a phone call over an Alexa device for free, which is, you know, available today, like that was an area ripe for, you know, for cyber issues and we spent a bunch of time internally ensuring that we were able to capture the bad actors, or at least notice bad acting, and also working closely with our external communications providers and network providers to make sure that if and when someone was misbehaving, it was quickly, you know, handled.
Speaker 2:Incredible. In your career you've done a whole bunch of work around partnerships and business development and as I look at your resume and I look at your background, I mean some of the partnerships that you've developed and that your team has developed are really world-class. A plus partnerships do you think that it's any easier? Might be the wrong word, but like, what's the difference between? You know, when you're at the stage of your career, where you are, you know you're working at like the biggest company in the world and probably every single brand wants to talk to you. You know how is that different slash more complicated from when you're earlier in your career, as many of our students are and they're like thinking, hey, how can I do some BD, how can I develop some partnerships with companies? That when you're not the biggest name in the game? You know how is that different?
Speaker 1:You've seen both sides it's very different. It comes down to and I think this is where we're gonna have this interesting debate around AI as a society is like relationships are critical and your network is critical, and so I think being able to figure out a way into a business that you want to partner with without a connection is hard, and so you need to find, you need to find, like the set, the two degrees of separation to get there, and you know whether it's through your professors in university or through your family or through you know, just like brute force networking. That's what I ended up finding was the most effective. Like I would literally go to you know industry events and walk around and meet people and talk to people about the things that I was working on. And you know if you, if you think of it like even like a VC and a fund, like if you, if you hit one out of 10, you're like you know you're doing pretty well, and so for me that's early on. It was. I was really.
Speaker 1:I spent a ton of time networking and I think it's easier today because of platforms like LinkedIn and the ability to connect. The two degrees of separation is just much smaller today, but 20 years ago it was not, and so I faced the uphill battle of just going out and brute force networking At Amazon and Microsoft. It was obviously, like you said, much easier. I think, you know every company at least, would talk to us and there were senior level relationships, like CEO level relationships that you could quickly leverage to like, build connections, and then those would trickle down to the right people, and so there was much less friction. I think in my new role I'm sort of in like, in between like it's. You know, I'm in an established company but it's certainly not an Amazon or a Microsoft, and so it'll be interesting to see how that works. But I also, you know, I'll continue to leverage the network I've built over the last 20 years to ensure that I'm able to talk to these people, and I think that's already coming to fruition for me.
Speaker 2:All right, fantastic. I really appreciate what you just said about the importance of building those relationships. There are some things that really are universal, no matter what country you're in, what culture you're in, what phase of your career that you're in, and we talk about that in our program a lot how important that is to just very simply be good to people and then stay in touch with them as much and as often as you can. I want to switch gears, though. I want to ask you about project management, because I think about the kinds of projects I was teaching class last night our capstone class and we were talking about how castles are made of individual stones, and the metaphor that I think of is that if a company is a castle if Amazon or Axon or Apple are castles it's made up of these individual blocks called projects, and being a project manager is so many things, and I want to just ask you to talk about that.
Speaker 2:You know from ideating a new project and then taking it and building a coalition of support and then saying, okay, what are our KPIs? Et cetera, et cetera. But I'd love to hear from you about this whole concept of project management. You've probably been part of the ideation process and then going and leading these huge, game-changing, world-changing projects that have far reach and significance and very high stakes. Yeah, could you just talk a little bit about that philosophy? I know that this is. You could write multiple books on this, and so I'm just gonna ask you to pare it down into the high level.
Speaker 1:It's a pretty famous it's called the working backwards process and I'll sort of quickly go through what that means. But it's like in the end, what do you want the world to see that you're creating and how do you want it to be perceived? And so you, you write a press release for your. You know your new product you think about, you know how is the press going to respond? Like what do you want the headlines to be? What are the dreaded headlines? Sort of think about it like what are the dreaded headlines? Sort of think about it like very high level. Like okay, we want to build this thing that does X, y and Z. We hope it's received by the press like this, we hope they don't say this. And like how are we going to make it? How are we going to ensure that these things happen? And so that's like that's step number one, like what is the big vision for your, whatever you're building? And then, once you sort of do that, you go through the process of how am I going to solve for the potential roadblocks during that process? And so you do this whole working backwards effort until you get to like your minimum viable product buy-in from your senior team. Who's going to fund this? Because in life and in any business there are trade-offs. We have limited resources and you have to think about what are the trade-offs and what is the risk of those trade-offs and what is the opportunity of the trade-off, and so we spent a lot of time thinking about that and talking to senior leadership about that and once you get buy-in and approval to go do this, you should be pretty far along and understanding what key milestones you need to hit to meet your minimum viable product and you start to build.
Speaker 1:And the challenge is is, once you start to build, then you actually realize, like the reality of what you can actually get done, because a lot of it's, you know, pie in the sky.
Speaker 1:I call it rubber meets the clouds.
Speaker 1:There's the rubber meets the clouds moment and you spend a bunch of time on these, like ideating around things that you think sound great and you. But you're still up high in the sky and when rubber meets the road it's certainly a little bit different, like you run into things that you may not have anticipated. You have to make some trade offs that you may not have anticipated because things take longer, and so it's really becomes ultimately you go from this like working backwards. What I want the customer to see to, what are the trade-offs I'm gonna have to make and the priorities I'm gonna have to choose in order to deliver something that is gonna delight customers, and then knowing that over time, if it works at the minimum level, that I can continue to build on it. And so that's like on the project management side. It's deliver the value, pitch the executive team and get resourcing and then be sure you're really, really smart about the trade-offs you have to make and that you're working towards like a minimum viable product that's going to delight your customer.
Speaker 2:That last thing that you just said and that you said a minute ago. I wanted to ask you about it because you just said delight your customer. That last thing that you just said and that you said a minute ago. I wanted to ask you about it because you just said delight your customer. I've heard that word used, like at TikTok and some different places, but I never expected to hear it from somebody who's leading products at Amazon. To me, when I think about Amazon, I don't think about delight, I think about like, oh my gosh, these are amazingly functional tools that are going to help me be more efficient. But go into that just a little bit, because is that part of the process of thinking about a functional tool? But something that's also, you know, hitting and achieving the sense of euphoria and this emotional connection.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, so definitely. I mean, if you think about Amazon's, you know Amazon operates around, I think, like 14 leadership principles, and the number one leadership principle is customer obsession. It's like, how do you continue to delight customers? And the challenge is, is that and I think Jeff Bezos said something like this it's, you know, the novel thing that delights customers today quickly becomes what's expected, and you have to continue to ideate and innovate to create something new that continues to delight the customer. Like the idea of having packages delivered in two days or less. That was like incredible, right, like game changing. And now it's like you know table stakes, and so then it's like, well, let's have stuff delivered in an hour. And so stuff gets delivered in an hour. You're like, well, I want stuff right now, and so how do you? You know you sort of it becomes stat, quickly become status quo, and so the idea of of continuing to delight customers is really important.
Speaker 1:You know, I think Amazon, on the retail side, has done a lot of incredible things to delight customers. On the hardware side, it's the same. Like Alexa was was game changing and also price driven. Like there are a lot of things that you know Amazon puts out products that are typically less expensive than, let's say, apple. And you know I think it may come at some expense in terms of like. You know Apple's delight in terms of like, the physical appearance of the products and how the whole ecosystem works together, is one thing, but you know Amazon tries to delight in other ways and it may be price on the retail side. It's you know price selection and speed, and you know how do you think about maintaining those and delivering those things. That's how Amazon thought about delighting customers. I'm having a hard time not saying we because I don't work there anymore, but you know, 11 years of it ingrained, I'm still pretty passionate about what they do.
Speaker 2:Amazon started out famously as a company. To know what they do. Amazon started out famously as a company and I remember when this started I was living in Seattle and had just graduated from undergrad. Then girlfriend said there's this new company, and they're just, I can ship my used books and they'll ship used books to me. And I just thought to myself that'll never work. And it's amazing how Amazon evolved through the years.
Speaker 2:Here's my question Amazon maybe most famously ships physical products, but then there was this pivot into this massive digital media delivery system Music, all different forms of entertainment, yeah, books. It started with books E-books, right. Kindle, right, yeah, which they obviously also paired up with a physical product that I own and I love. And so can you just talk about on the digital media side, which is really you've spent a whole bunch of your time in your career not on the like lift, ship packages side, but a lot more of it sounds like it's been spent on the digital interactivity and connectivity side? Can you just talk about why it was so necessary for Amazon and how they've been able to continue over all these decades, to continue to have this amazing symbiosis between the hardware side and then the digital side, where many companies just go we're not, we're software, we're not even going to touch hardware, or vice versa.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Amazon sort of fell into the hardware business because of the need to do things and the desire to delight customers by doing things more quickly. And so Kindle was born from the idea that how do we create a device that allows us to deliver a book within 60 seconds or less, no matter where you are in the world? That was the working backwards process. Let's deliver a book on this piece of hardware in 60 seconds or less, no matter where you are in the world, and all you do is you open up this thing. You're like tap, tap the search button, search for your book. Six seconds later, you have a pretty incredible concept, right, and there's obviously a lot that went into building that, but it ultimately that's what the company launched with, and over time, the company continued to fall into those same sort of ideas.
Speaker 1:You look at Alexa's. You know was driven by the fact that how do we get people to engage with an ecosystem so they can shop more easily and and transact more easily on these devices? You look at what the company did with Fire TV and it's like we have all this video content, we have prime video, we have music content and we need a piece of hardware to help deliver that. You can have the TV manufacturers build these apps into their own app ecosystem. But ultimately we wanted to create the best experience for customers, and so we built devices that enabled that, and so that's how you know. The company ultimately fell into hardware. It was like a necessity, out of wanting to build the best products to deliver what we thought were world class services, but we didn't necessarily own the hardware.
Speaker 2:Just amazing, fell into hardware. Yeah Well, I mean mean, I'd love to ask you about you know what amazon's thinking about next? But we should probably switch gears now because, uh, you've made this transition in your career, in your life, and you decided to step into safety. When I think about the new company that you're now working for and the things that you're developing, it's about safety. So, yeah, give us and I had never heard of this company, even though I was aware of the things that you're developing. It's about safety. So, give us and I had never heard of this company, even though I was aware of the products Could you give us high level? What is Axon? What's the mission? Why did you go there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So Axon is a company that builds incredible technology to protect human life, builds incredible technology to protect human life. And they started out with the taser, actually, and the idea was like you don't want people shooting each other with bullets because there's not a great ending, and so how do we sort of control situations that are dangerous without ultimately killing someone, whether it's a police officer or a civilian or someone else? And so the idea was let's invent 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 going on. We know the taser was deployed, so let's create this sort of body camera. And so they invented the Bodymore camera.
Speaker 1:And ultimately the company continues to build like incredible technology for the public service sector, for police, for the military, and the idea and the mission, like I said, is to protect life. And there's a few things beneath that. One is they have a mission to obsolete the bullet, the idea that you know, no one uses a gun anymore, that I think tasers replace that, so there's no longer lethal force used, and that's really critical. Another is building a more fair and effective justice system. So, you know, today Axon owns what's called evidencecom and there's, I think, 200 billion pieces of evidence sitting inside that system and the ability to search and query and use AI to sort of evaluate situations that help make our justice system more fair and more effective and more efficient. I think is something that's important. Like you think of all the time that police officers have had to spend on, you know, going into court and you know, ensuring that justice was properly served when, let's say, evidence wasn't captured properly. There's a bunch of things that were happening that Axon is trying to solve to make the justice system more effective, and then, ultimately, the goal is, you know, protecting human life and saving lives.
Speaker 1:And so for me, the move was pretty easy because I'm super passionate about the mission. I love hardware, like I think you know, working on the hardware side is super interesting, like the things that we're working on. We've obviously launched, like we're working on, you know, drones as first responders, which, like how do you enable drones to get to a situation faster than a police officer Delights customers. It creates better public safety. So very cool hardware that we're developing and just around an incredible mission. And so for me to be able to come in and, like play a small part in the success of the company and even the impact to like human life was an easy move.
Speaker 2:Amazing At our program. One of our pillars relates to DEIA and that's a really multidimensional idea. I didn't even realize just how multidimensional it was when I first started teaching here at USC, but we really like to think about it, not just from hey, this is an altruistic idea. We're going to do these things for the right reasons. We're going to do them because they're for the public good and, frankly, that's good for the bottom line. I have a question. You know there are places in this country you know, as we think about diversity that are historically under-resourced and that can sometimes lead to, you know, higher gun violence. You know more situations of police interactions that end up on the news and you know, and some tragedies around that. But as you guys think about communities that are historically under-resourced, how do you think that the mission of Axon is going to be able to step into those situations and make a difference? You know, along the lines of this mission that you have yeah again.
Speaker 1:So I'm, you know I'm new to the company and I'm not an official spokesperson, so I'll.
Speaker 1:This is just my sort of thinking, going through and learning about the company and through my interview process and reading, you know, in the news, I think getting off like police officers back in the communities and spending less time in an office writing up notes from their interactions or from whether it's a traffic violation or a crime scene, like those things, the bureaucratic work takes a lot of time and Axon is certainly developing technologies like using AI.
Speaker 1:You can imagine, like all the data, all the digital media that comes from body cams and all these fleet vehicle recorders and drones there's a lot of data that's captured and being able to bring that together without a police officer having to do a lot of work and spend a bunch of time in the back office puts them back on the streets in the field to create a better public safety environment. And so I think, you know, in areas where there may be more crime, having more resources, you know, stopping that crime in a safer way, I think is really what Axon is trying to do and ultimately will create, you know, better, safer communities and give people more opportunities to live in a safer place. That's what I love about what the company is doing. It really is about creating equality in a safer environment as a function of just making things more efficient and using less lethal you know, force and less confrontational methods to approach people.
Speaker 2:Thank you for that, and I want to ask you about the storytelling side of things, as you're developing some of these projects and products, and it goes back to what you were talking about with Amazon, but now here, as it relates to Axon. As digital media managers, is that one of our jobs is to take a product, understand it well enough to be able to create stories and then deliver them to an audience so that that audience goes oh, I get it, I understand, I understand what that product is about, I understand the mission it's. It's actually more important than the product itself. So my question is it relates to Axon and as you think about the storytelling and as we think about gun violence that has, it doesn't seem to me like it should be so complicated, but for some reason it is.
Speaker 2:In this country it's pretty complicated. Some people, you know, probably think guns are fantastic for police officers to carry. Some people probably think no guns at all. Right, I've been to Japan, you've been to Japan. Police officers don't carry guns, and yet the idea of police officers only having tasers, that probably delights some people and it probably scares some people, might even make them mad. So, from a storytelling side, as you begin to put yourself in the shoes of, maybe, what our students might be thinking about or the audience and they hear about. Well, axon, what's the story and what is the picture that you feel it's important to paint so that people will understand this mission. The general public will understand this mission that you have and, with all of the ways that people have different points of view about this and different disagreements about the way that police officers should carry certain weapons or should enforce the law in these situations, from a storytelling side.
Speaker 1:So the way I operate and I think you know the way a lot of these companies Axon and Amazon operate, it really comes down to the data and so, like, how do you? To me, if you look at like one of axons, their moonshot goal and this is all public is to reduce gun related deaths between I think it's police and civilians by 50% by the next five years roughly seven years maybe. 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 from gun related deaths, whether that's from police. You know, if you look at the data, the data shows there is a problem. You know people are dying from gun related deaths, whether that's from police. You know civilian interactions or otherwise, and if you can use non lethal force to stop escalated situations and you have data to support the value of that.
Speaker 1:And to me it's like you look at pictures of all these people who have died because of these interactions and you know to me that you can tell a very compelling story using the data and images of people who you know, who could have been alive but are not because lethal force was used, and I think that paints a pretty obvious picture.
Speaker 1:I mean this it's not like this happens to people across the world and all different types of communities and getting people to understand the message that we don't need to use lethal force to solve situations, whether it's the police or otherwise, I think people can resonate with that Like death is very, final, very final. And so how do you tell that story that you can actually prevent that in a way that's effective and that the community can get around and that you know that police officers can still be safe? You know police officers don't want 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 police officers by having these non-lethal weapons and the benefit to the civilians for these being around? And doing that with data, I think, is a great way to sort of highlight the impact that it can have globally.
Speaker 2:Amazing Trevor, I want to ask you a couple more questions before we wrap up and being away from Axon for a second, although it relates to everything it is that you're doing. You know you've been in these leadership positions for an extremely long time, and could you just take us through one or two bullet points of what your philosophy of leadership is in these digital media units? You know, I'm sure, that you're working 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 around the world, coming from different cultures. Could you talk a little bit about digital media leadership and you know some of your key pillars of how you?
Speaker 1:approach that, like leadership, is really about having good mechanisms in place to ensure that you know people are making effective, timely, you know, and many times you know, autonomous decisions.
Speaker 1:That's really critical to me, like when I lead a team, is I want people to have autonomy to make decisions and you know to walk through one way or two way doors and nothing.
Speaker 1:If they make a mistake, we can go back One way. Doors are a little different, have mechanisms for those, but it's really about ensuring that people have the right mechanisms, know how to prioritize what they're working on relative to other. You know projects and, as a leader, knowing when to advocate for things and also knowing when to inquire. Like there are times when you sit back and you listen and you sort of you want to ensure that you're taking everyone's perspective and you know you're drawing the right conclusions and you're, you know, taking this sort of inquiry approach. And then the other side it's, you know, advocating for what you you believe is the right decision, based on all the input you have from multiple sources. And so I think, if I look at you know the mechanisms and then knowing when to ask questions and knowing when to sort of stand strong like that's how I like to lead.
Speaker 2:Mechanisms. I love that, well, and that's fantastic because if you have how many people work at, Amazon At Amazon 1.7 million Right. And how many people on your team let's just say the last team that you had at amazon how many folks were directly reporting to you?
Speaker 1:uh, five five directs, oh, only five. Okay, that's not sad. Amazon doesn't typically have more than five to six people that are directly reporting to it. It's, you know, you sort of partition out okay, all right, it's too hard to manage that big of a team with you know. Manage 15 multiple or 15 direct reports, right yeah.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I love and appreciate what you're saying about, about creating mechanisms that are repeatable, creating systems that people then there's some comfort in that. You know, people know and we see that you know, you and I sometimes talk about parenting. That's one of the best examples of leadership that a whole bunch of people around the world do yeah, okay, that is. And that a whole bunch of people around the world do yeah, okay, that is. And it's really important to make sure that expectations are set. People know.
Speaker 2:I like also your reference about the two-way door. That's really healthy, trevor. As we wrap up, the question that I always love to ask is not necessarily related to multimedia communications, leadership or any of those things, but it's more like if you had one piece of advice, something that you wish, maybe that you knew when you were younger, or maybe it's something that you try to instill as a value within your team, within your friends and family. Is there one piece of advice you know that's the Trevor Nolan North Star, the Polaris for Trevor Nolan that we could all have as a takeaway and put right our, put right here in our, in our pocket. Keep it close to our heart as we move forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I think there are a lot of things that I think guided me throughout my career, but what I found that I keep coming back to is just doing something that you're passionate about, and it could be you could be passionate about the cloud, or you could be passionate about AI, or you could be passionate about AI. You could be passionate about philanthropy work, and for me, it's like and I think I've landed it back at Axon, because I've always I've always wanted to work for very mission driven companies and you know Axon we talked about the mission at Axon, even at Amazon, like I was building, you know, and supporting communications solutions that save people's lives, like the ability to call 911 over Alexa was something that I worked on and like that was pretty game changing. You think about if you can. You know I've fallen.
Speaker 1:This sort of I've fallen and I can't get up in an AI driven world was something I was really passionate about. And like I look at my life and what where I've had the most joy in my career is through jobs that I've been passionate about, and so to me, it's do something you're passionate about, work really hard, think outside the box and try to be inventive in an area. There's always something better you can go do in an area that you're passionate about that no one else has thought about. If you find that small thing or even big thing, just go after it, because people always get excited about delighting customers and you know that would be my piece of advice.
Speaker 2:Trevor, thank you so much for joining us and spending some of your time and sharing this wisdom and distilling it down into words that we can all understand, even though I know that there's a cloud of sophistication and complexity behind it. So, thank you, I really appreciate that, and you're a friend of ours, we're a friend of yours and we believe in your mission and what you're doing. Thank you for being with us today.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:All right, everybody. See you next time on Mediascape. To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.
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