Bettina Stix is Amazon’s Director of Disaster Relief, Food Security & Education, and Amazon Community Impact. She joined Amazon in 1999. Her career at Amazon started as a books editor. She led international website teams for both Germany and France, and was responsible for global policy in Customer Service and the worldwide expansion and benefits for Amazon Prime. In 2017, she started Disaster Relief as part of Amazon’s newly formed Amazon in the Community team.

• Amazon’s disaster relief efforts  
• Amazon has delivered 25 million relief items since 2017—here’s how we’re ready to help when natural disasters strike 
• How Amazon is helping flood-impacted communities across central Texas
• How Amazon is helping communities impacted by the California wildfires

John Shegerian: Do you have a suggestion for a Rockstar Impact Podcast guest? Go to impactpodcast.com and just click, be a guest, to recommend someone today. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cyber security focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps, and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so excited to have with us today Bettina Stix. She’s the head of disaster relief for Amazon. Welcome, Bettina, to the Impact Podcast.

Bettina Stix: Hi, John. Thank you for having me.

John: It’s an honor to have you on. We’ve never covered this critical topic of disaster relief before, so it’s going to be our first turn in 17 years covering this topic. I’m so happy that you’re here to go into this important topic. But before we get there, I want you to share a little bit about another important topic, your background. How did you get on this journey? Where did you grow up? And who’s inspired you along the way?

Bettina: Sure. Well, you probably will hear this more during the podcast. I did not grow up in the United States. I actually grew up in Germany. In a very small town, relatively small town, 100,000 people. And my parents settled there because that’s where my dad’s work was. None of us were from there. And we can go into more history of my family later if you’re interested, also related to the work. I’ve always been interested in history and literature in school. And that’s what I ended up studying, really, without a firm plan of what I wanted to be later in life. My father, who studied to be a lawyer, ended up inventing food, instant products for a big food company. He always said, like, it’s more important to enjoy learning than what you learn about. So life is a learning journey. It’s about being curious connecting the dots of how to innovate with what you got, how to solve problems.

John: What did dad invent that we would know? Like, what type of food? Like, give us an instant food that dad…

Bettina: Oh, my God. So my dad, you find this still sometimes in shelves and the East Coast, I’ve seen it. It’s a product that is an instant spaghetti product. So you can make your like how you do Chinese noodle soup?

John: Yeah.

Bettina: It’s for Italian noodle soups. It’s called Spaghetti Ria and it’s same as for risotto. He came up with that. There’s a whole story around that, too, how he saw me eat Korean noodle soup as a student. And he said, we should do this. [inaudible]

John: He was inspired by that. So he came up with another type of another noodle an instant format. Wow.

Bettina: Innovation is half copying and half mirroring. And so you’ll hear about that, too, because this is basically how disaster relief works as well. [crosstalk] So really, I always followed my passion. So I kind of I thought I knew I wanted to read. I knew I liked history. So I did that. And my first career ended up being a journalist. And so as fate wanted it, I ended up in Seattle as a correspondent for a German radio station and interviewed Jeff, Jeff Bezos, [inaudible] that is in 1998 for a German radio station. He had just acquired a German company that sold stuff over the Internet via not Internet or forgot, God forbid, over the TV screen, something that was like a little text on the bottom and then you could hit one [crosstalk] product. And so he bought them and turned it into amazon.te and I was fortunate enough to be in Seattle, be interested in the company, which was a tiny startup, and then interview him basically for 60 minutes, just like Barbara Walters did. But Jeff Bezos is just such an inspiring visionary. He caught my attention immediately, especially when he said, “Oh at Amazon, we will have infinite shelf space for books and customers can have any book within a day.” That project prospect just changed my life. As a college student, I had to sometimes order a book and it would take six months for it to arrive or I had to travel to other state libraries to read something that I couldn’t get in my school library. So as somebody who was into books, I thought like, “Can there be any innovation that’s better than that? Best idea ever.” So I knocked at Amazon’s doors in Germany and eventually they hired me and the rest is me being at Amazon.

John: Wait a second. You knocked on Amazon’s doors. Bettina, you had friends in high places at Amazon. Let’s be honest.

Bettina: Well, he was in the U.S. and I knocked at the German doors [crosstalk]

John: Okay, okay, fair enough.

Bettina: And I was fortunate enough when the company was smaller to also still have meetings over the years with Jeff.
But in general it’s not about having friends in high places.

John: I’m teasing you. I’m only teasing you with good spirit, but seriously, to another note, how was it, what was the feeling when you interviewed him? When you finished the interview and were walking out of the room, what did you take away? What was the lasting part of the inspirational message that you got from Jeff that stayed with you when you walked out of that room and has stayed with you since?

Bettina: Well, he said, “It’s the Kitty Hawk state of e-commerce.” So first of all…

John: He was right. He was right.

Bettina: …my English then was not as good. And I thought like, “What did he say?” And I had my tape recorder and I played it back, I was like, “What did he say?” And he said, “Kitty Hawk.” I finally realized what he meant was the American way of the first flight

John: Right.

Bettina: Okay, we’re at the beginning and you have heard Jeff probably since talk about it’s day one, day one thing we say at Amazon. And coming from a place where I will work in an institution at a radio station where nothing ever changes. It’s always the same, ideas get like smiled upon, but if they don’t come from above, they’re not good ideas. You know, all of this felt so fresh and right. That was the right problem for me to solve. So this is how I felt like there’s only one place where I want to go right now. And back then nobody knew how to do e-commerce.

John: That’s such an exciting, you’re so right 1998, that was the year Google was started. So I mean, that was the beginning of times, like you said, that was the Kitty Hawk of the internet. That’s so cool.

Bettina: And then I also traveled to Santa Clara to talk to Yahoo. Remember that company?

John: Of course. So they scraped what was then the internet to tag things so that people could find it in that search. So that’s how old I am, John.

John: Bettina, so when was the interview? And when did you start working for Amazon in Germany?

Bettina: So the interview was sometime in April 98 and I started in January 99.

John: So you’ve been with Amazon since January of 99?

Bettina: Correct.

John: Almost Kitty Hawk times, almost Kitty Hawk times.

Bettina: Definitely Bettina’s Kitty Hawk times.

John: That’s awesome, that’s wonderful. And then how long did you work in the German office until you moved to the [crosstalk] Seattle office?

Bettina: Seattle office. Yeah, so there was not a straight line. I first worked in Germany, I started as a book editor, and I ended up leaving after 4 years there when I was then the website manager, as we called it, of amazon.te. In these 4 years we went from books to music, to a couple of video, and then a couple of consumer products. So I did everything from reviewing books, talking to editors of publishing houses in Germany, to then eventually kind of figuring out how to project manage and web develop and design a whole website. Because back then, it was not just like one stack of technology, we all had our like special little projects around that. I must have done a good job, they sent me to France, and I got to live in Paris for 2 years. Before then going to Seattle and did this then for more websites than just the German one. So all of our international websites. And I’ll tell you in a moment, a little bit of a really, really crucible moment I had at that time, in 2004-ish, that was. Then I spent some time in customer service after that, where I learned what all the customers are saying, how are our customers thinking about us. And then I spent 8 and a half years in Prime. I launched many countries for Prime, and basically spent most of my time really going around the company and saying like, “What are you doing for Prime members? What can you add as value to Prime members.” And so we came like the benefit set that you see today, or Prime Day, those were all times that things that launched while I was in Prime.

John: I’m a happy Prime member, and I’ve been one, and I’m not ever giving up my Prime membership. So you’re talking to the choir here. I love your Prime product. It’s great.

Bettina: See, John, that was the best time about being in Prime, that people like you, wherever I will go, cocktail, wine [inaudible] the party, they would say like, “Where do you work?” I said like, “Amazon Prime,” and everybody just would love that product

John: It’s a great product.

Bettina: And so my mission is just like, everybody should love how Amazon does disaster relief and helps their communities. It’s such a great way to put everything that Amazon is great at to good use, just like Primus, it puts everything [crosstalk]

John: I love that concept. But before we get to talk about disaster, first of all, you didn’t tell me what you were doing in Paris for Amazon. What were you doing back at Paris?


Bettina: I drink a lot of wine.

John: That’s awesome.

Bettina: No, I did basically the same job I did in Germany, but for the French website.

John: Okay.

Bettina: Which it’s a good challenge to go to another country and really try to figure out how to work. I can only recommend that for everybody. And now there’s not just like one country, every country has a different culture. As a global company, that was probably one of my biggest learning is just to see how what works in one country does not necessarily work in another.

John: True. Being a curious person, though, and but coming from a relatively small town in Germany, was it exciting to live in such a cosmopolitan city and country as Paris, France?

Bettina: It was my plan since I was 18 to live in France when I was in my 30s and so I have.

John: Wow. You know, Bettina, I’ve had a lot of guests, probably close to 2000 guests in 17 years. You have some cool, cool beginning stories. You have some cool Kitty Hawk stories. That’s all I know.

Bettina: It’s just because I’m so old, you know?

John: I don’t know. Okay, so where are we now? So you get the job and you come to California, no Seattle.

Bettina: So I’m Prime at the Seattle, it’s still Seattle.

John: Yeah, okay.

Bettina: But that’s fine. I wish we had California weather sometimes, but no.

John: That’s it. That’s okay.

Bettina: But yeah, so I was in Prime in 2015. I’ve been with the company now for 16, 17 years. And I was really kind of like thinking about what I wanted to do next in my life. My sister was terminally ill at that point but she was a leadership development person. And she said, like, “Why don’t you go on this retreat? It’s going to be good for you.” And so it was a mountain retreat in Morocco. And in that retreat, I really learned what I’m really passionate about. It was kind of like not the retreat I expected. It was half alcoholic, anonymous for workaholics like me, like we would sit in a circle discuss a lot of things.

John: Confess.

Bettina: And confess but what it was really about, it’s like trying to get out what you’re hungry for in life, really going back to kind of like, what I’m good at, what I really want to drive.
And I figured it out. And it was to give back to the communities with what I am uniquely good at.

John: Was that retreat with strangers, all strangers?

Bettina: All strangers, no Amazon people, I was the only Amazon person there. But it was really nice, because you learn from other experiences. And the people that guided the retreat were really careful to kind of sort of like, help you find your inner self a little bit, but also kind of facilitate this mentorship with others, which I quite frankly, had for the first time in my life. Mentors are so important and I always thought I could figure it all out myself until I did this retreat, and that changed a lot. But it brought back a memory of what really, where I really, really felt I had this like, moment of absolute joy and passion at Amazon. I love my job, don’t get me wrong, I love many things about working at Amazon. But my true self came out when on December 26, 2004, so what is that now 21 years ago. Tsunami happened in the Indian Ocean. I don’t know if you remember that.

John: I remember.

Bettina: Submarine, earthquake, tsunami wave over multiple islands in the Indian Ocean killed 250 million people. I was in the office because I don’t know, I wasn’t with my family because I was in Seattle.

John: Because you’re a workaholic. You’re a confessed workaholic.

Bettina: Yeah, I like my job. But also I was new in Seattle, and family wasn’t here. So I thought like, might as well go in, in Germany, that’s actually a holiday, but I was here. Two software developers called me and said, “Bettina, we hear you’re responsible for the international websites.” I said, “Yes.” They said, “You may have heard it yesterday, the tsunami happened.” So it must have been the 27th. “The tsunami happened, we put a button on the Amazon homepage, where we modified some Amazon software. And now customers can donate to the Red Cross in the cause for this disaster. Can you help us figure out how to do this for the international websites?” So I did. And I called together a team of software developers that could quickly modify and temper, scrappy some code. We had conversations with our global affairs people to reach the Red Cross, we created content. It took us one country after another. Back then, we had the UK, Germany, France, and Japan, I believe. So we launched in these consecutively over 3 to 4 days. Didn’t sleep much. But our customers donated $15 million. I felt never more alive it was really so motivating to see everyone wanted to say, yes to do something. Everybody wanted to help at Amazon. It felt like I stood on the shoulders of a big, big giant technology, our employees, and Amazon customers. And I thought, like, if I can make the world to give $15 million by just not sleeping for 3 days, I’m in. And so I remember that, that retreat brought that out. And so I thought, what if Amazon put everything that they’re good at, especially our ability to deliver to customers exactly what they need, very fast? What if we put everything that we had to use and provide a disaster relief for our communities?

John: What a gift, what a gift. And what a gift your sister gave you. What a gift. So, now that you did the retreat, and you knew what made you feel alive? How did you make a formal proposal? And who did you make it to, to be able to create a whole new division at Amazon?

Bettina: Yeah, so, I was so convinced, I went to my vice president at the time, Greg Reilly, and said, “I think I know what I’m in the world for. This is what I’m hungry…” I had to declare it to somebody like [crosstalk] And he looks at me and he said, “I think you found your North Star.” And so he encouraged me to use a process that we use at Amazon. It’s called a working backwards document. What it is, basically, is you write a fictitious press release. And then you write another 5 pages of frequently asked questions where you answer things like, “Who’s your customer? Why do you want to do this? Why is this urgent? Why should Amazon do that? How much will it cost us?” All of these questions. And anybody can write one, and anybody theoretically can show them to anybody. I had the great pleasure of being through my job connected to people that I’ve been working with for Prime, which always been a high priority issue. And so I started blind emailing people, basically, “Hi, how are you doing?” But for some reason at Amazon, people really listen when they see something. And so this momentum build up about people, I was really surprised how much it touched people that we at Amazon could do something in disaster relief. And this whole proposal was built on conversations that I had with nonprofit leaders of first responders. And that showed just a critical gap like, think about this. When a disaster strikes, a really bad disaster strikes, you can be as prepared as you want, you need some relief items fast to go into the places you want, you need to help those responders fast. And that is always a little bit of a chaotic or like, it’s kind of like an orchestra that you need to orchestrate as a relief organization. “Oh, who do I call for tarps? Oh, and then who can transport these tarps over? Or who can I call to give me radios so my first responders can respond? My first responders have a better mesh network for a wildfire?” There’s program coordinators that go crazy over all of these demands. And so I said, like, “Well, what if it is as easy as placing an order on Amazon?” So that was the idea. “What if we can put the full might of our operations, of our logistics, of anything that our customers appreciate to good use? “

John: The technology.

Bettina: Technology. So I wrote up this proposal. And yeah, I actually [crosstalk].

John: What year was this? What year did you write this?

Bettina: It was 2016.

John: Okay.

Bettina: So then my now boss, Drew Herdener, who is our Global Affairs, Communication and Impact President, he said, like, “You know what? That is a good proposal. Let’s go and show this make this, make this happen.” And so I got a really, really small team, just like 2 people and me, and we started. And so I had no idea what I’m… We’re like, “This is a great idea. Where do we start?” I called the Red Cross, said, “I’m here.” They’re like, “Well, we already have a lot of contacts into Amazon.” And I was like, “Well, work with me. Here’s what we’re going to do. No, not this way.” But they were super interested. And so we created these connections. And I said, like, “Well, how can we make it happen more often to donate, have customers donate?” But that didn’t end up being the core of our proposal. The core of our proposal ended up being, we can deliver things fast and we can deliver exactly what we want to our customers, not what they didn’t ask for, because that is oftentimes. As you know you work in this business you, you do a lot to recycle things that have second use. Those items oftentimes are not the right items in a disaster when you need the best quality, mass amounts you have to plan for that. So we preposition, we transport, we figure out what technology kits could look like that help our partners so that they on the ground are the best prepared for disaster. Because guess what? If you are there faster, you save the community’s recovery time. This is the social impact podcast and the impact that comes from doing these things fast is, people’s houses are not getting more destroyed through rain, people stay healthy, people get over their experiences faster because they find comfort in the shelter and have the items that they need. All of this has a compounding impact of just becoming more resilient and recover faster.

John: Bettina, for our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Bettina Stix with us today. She’s the head of disaster relief for Amazon. To find Bettina and all of her wonderful colleagues doing amazing work in the disaster space, please go to amazon.com. There’ll also be special links in our show notes directing you directly to all of the great work and recovery efforts that Bettina leads in disaster relief at amazon.com. Bettina, you mentioned age and I’m older than you probably. I’m 62, I’m going to be 63 in a couple months. And I don’t know if it’s technology, the democratization of the news because of technology and everybody’s a reporter now. Whoever has a cell phone is really a reporter. But it seems as though, or I don’t know if it’s climate change, or I don’t know if it’s some combination thereof, but it seems as though the acceleration of disasters has been more than I remember as a young person. And the visibility of the disasters for sure has been amplified massively in recent times. So to me, this great proposal that you made and this work that you embarked on at Amazon is so impactful and so important. I would love you to share how it’s done. Like you said, you have so many assets at your disposal. Talk a little bit about what your logistics and response and how that really sets you apart from other disaster relief organizations.

Bettina: Yeah, I wouldn’t say so much sets us apart, but kind of like what gap are we feeling. Like what do we really do for the communities? And the critical aspect that we try to address is, be prepared for a disaster beyond what relief organizations and responders can take on. So the Red Cross or firefighters or state organizations they all prepare for disasters. But we found out that preparing for a recurring set of disasters, look back 2017, there were 3 hurricanes within three months, 3 in really quick succession. First, Harvey, which just had like, I think it’s an eighth anniversary, flooded Texas, nobody thought that would happen. And Puerto Rico getting hit twice from Irma and Maria and Florida getting hit. Huge, massive L5 hurricanes taking the roofs off of houses in quick succession just showed that mass care is super important. And it also showed that we need to bring this stuff fast. So in the beginning, we scrambled. Our operations were, what do you need, Red Cross? What do you need, Save the Children? What do you guys need on the ground? And they’re like, “Go away, go away. Every disaster is different. We’ll talk to you in 72 hours.” And over years, it became a way stronger cooperation. We asked them, “So what would help you for 2 consecutive disasters?” Because we’ve seen them over the years last year, Helene and Milton. And I like, “We just don’t have enough capacity to pre-position things.” So we developed the system. We now have 15 hubs across the world where we store items for our closest relief partners and for anybody that contacts us in the disaster as a relief organization and needs help that we have sort of like over their years learned are always needed. So think about things like, I mentioned them before, tarps. You can use a tarp as a roof, as floor, as wall, as bag, as you can use it to transport debris or bring in goods. It’s super versatile, super needed. And on the other side of the spectrum, things that really help our disaster relief partners, we have a shelter kit for the Red Cross. In that shelter kit, we have everything from a microwave to a to blankets, to like a first aid kit, pens, paper, stuff like that wrapped up so that a shelter manager can just say like, “Oh, pallet is here, let’s open tarp.” That makes it so much easy for a place like the Red Cross to just concentrate on the human aspects and helping the people, than spending all their time divvying out what needs to get done. And so these 15 hubs, we set ourselves goals around this. We want to be able to, in any big disaster, to deliver the items within 72 hours of the ask being made, which usually is a couple of days after a disaster has struck when the relief organizations really understand what’s going on on the ground, what do they need to do for the population, and then we’re ready. And they get it as fast as we can get it to them.

John: Bettina, I don’t mean to be ignorant, but what qualifies as a disaster that needs response from your team?

Bettina: That’s a really good question. We get that actually relatively often because disasters come in small and big ways. The first thing to know is like the smallest incident, the smallest flood in your house can be a disaster for you. So none of these are to be belittled or small and minimized.

John: Right, minimized.

Bettina: And as long as there’s good infrastructure there, people can help themselves. So we concentrate on big natural disasters, anything from an earthquake, which we can’t really forecast those well, to weather related incidents. So floods, wind storms, obviously hurricane, typhoons, cyclones, what have you around the world, and wildfires.
Those are our main events. But we’ve also over the years also helped in the global pandemic because when PPE equipment runs out that’s a disaster.

John: That’s a disaster.

Bettina: And so over the years, we’ve also kind of like started to see working communities help themselves quicker. And what’s really needed is that somebody closer to them in the community helps them sift through their needs and contacts us and acts quickly without our big help versus, “Oh, my God, Puerto Rico got hit, we need to fly an airplane,” or the Bahamas in Hurricane Dorian, where we flew 3 planes, where our customers want to participate where there’s just a massive attention and need because the attention is there because the need is big. So then we really try to master everything that Amazon is good at.

John: How talk a little about predictability. One, as you said, weather related events are somewhat more predictable than, of course, absolute acts of God and over such as earthquakes. Back in 2017-18, how would you prepare for hurricane season back then? Now, fast forward to 2025, when AI has become pretty much ubiquitous or becoming ubiquitous in our lives, how is AI helping you to prepare for hurricane season and other weather related events, as opposed to pre-ubiquity of AI?

Bettina: Yeah, so like before 2017, we wouldn’t prepare, so that’s for sure but since 2017, we have gathered data from our non-profits. Even without a big, sophisticated usage of AI, we got smarter about what to pre-position. [inaudible] Sort of, for example, in the Japan earthquake that happened like December, a year ago. Is that…?

John: Right, [inaudible] yeah.

Bettina: Yeah, we had just like a way to get winter coats out because we knew earthquakes can strike at any time in the day, and so we made sure we can bring them quickly to the population. When we have a wildfire, we know in a wildfire, you need different things, PPE equipment, gloves, masks, and stuff like that, so that data it sounds like common sense when I say that, but it is over the years, through communications with firefighting organizations really, what do they have and where do they run out of. Those are things we need to assess and then get better and better at it. We have Amazon in general, for all reasons, also for our business. We want to be better and better in understanding how bad will an event become. So, we have a meteorologist. I recently spoke to him and he said, “I get the question often, how is AI helping a meteorologist?” You know what he said? He said, “Well, guess what? If there is one area where we use AI since a long, long time and really deep analytics and machine learning, it is weather, because it has so many inputs in order to get right, there’s so much data to churn through. This is a perfect place for AI.” So, weather departments [inaudible] National Weather Service, other weather services, they’re using obviously a lot for this predictability. We try to use it as much as we can in the future to really help us replenish. Or hopefully our AWS technology will help us better support in the technology parts. Think about a couple of things that we did in the last couple of years. We would help firefighters fly drones or first responders fly drones, so that they can use the technology in the cloud to look at imagery for search and rescue. It’s a big deal if you have a drone analyze an area first, instead of having to hike in and see what it is. We use things like power, devices, batteries, and connectivity, so others can use AI in the cloud. So, we’re going to be really mindful about how can we help you best fill a gap, so you have better opportunity to help yourself.

John: At any one given time, like for today, let’s just take today as a slice of life in Bettina Stix, how many disasters is your team working on at any one given time on a regular basis?

Bettina: So, they, well, at the moment, I think it’s quiet.

John: Okay, good. That’s good.

Bettina: But we’re watching, there’s already something brewing again, and there are a couple of hurricanes in the Pacific, in the Atlantic, something is brewing, if you follow the National Hurricane Center. And then there’s 2 sort of milder storms in the Pacific that are not near people. But we’re always [crosstalk] prepared to act. In India, at the moment, we had, there were 2 floods recently that needed attention. An activation can go anything from like, “Oh, it’s small,” and we only have to help for a couple of days, to kind of activation stretching over a couple of weeks.

John: Bettina, in every industry, and in every expertise, there’s some very solid truths that always hold for time immemorial as true. Tell me one of, if not the biggest myth about preparation for disasters that you could debunk for our audience.

Bettina: Sorry, you were breaking up at the end for me. [crosstalk]

John: You’re explaining the different truths about disasters, and how important it is in terms of service, and different items that you need to fill, different gaps that you need to fill, the voids you need to fill. Talk about myths. Those like me, are not in the disaster relief business, but watch disasters unfold, and sit there and say, “How come we weren’t more prepared?” Such as, I’ll give an example, California, the fires earlier this year in the Palisades, saying, “How in the first world, in a world-class city like Los Angeles, what went wrong? How were…?” And I’ll come up with my own theories, but I’m not an expert. You’re an expert. Talk a little bit about some of the myths, or biggest myth, when it comes to disaster preparation, and what should we understand is really fact, and what’s really fictional, or a myth.

Bettina: Yeah this is probably what you just mentioned, is a little bit of my pet peeve. People are thinking that communities are not preparing, or that communities sit there and wait for a disaster to happen. You have no idea how well prepared they are, or how how much they spend year long on preparing for something like that to happen. If you’ve ever been in a disaster, John, were you in Hurricane Sandy in New York?

John: I was. I’m glad you brought that up. My wife and I were both there for Hurricane Sandy, and it was quite scary, I got to tell you.

Bettina: Yeah, so everybody is scared in a disaster. So imagine, what these first responders, what stress they’re under to do everything right. What a city is under, making split-second decisions whether to evacuate or not. Remember this. In Florida, every year, people are wondering why people are not evacuating, because it is a judgment call until the last minute. You can go off here, or better off there. I think people are underestimating how scary disasters are, and how much they affect the humans on the ground, and how much capacity they have to then spread out and help others. So this is why, really, we find it super important to be there and react to their demands, because there’s always something unpredictable that they haven’t planned for, or that even if they plan for the worst-case scenario, is not going. I mean, who would have thought in the LA wildfires, that after there’s a big fire in the Palisade, a couple of hours later, another one would start in Altadena. Like, if you’ve been on TV, “You’re like, this is ridiculous.” It’s too much for any given organization to solve that problem. There’s so many ways you can mitigate and prepare, and we should do all of the above. In a wildfire, you need to cut your bushes and make sure no sparks can fly. But you also have to have your emergency kit ready. The best thing we all can do is prepare ourselves, and then prepare those that help others as quickly as possible. As I said, recovery is really where the rubber hits the road, where if you’re not fast, communities don’t recover fast enough. And then in the world that we’re in, they may get hit by the next disaster and not even be ready for that.

John: Got it. How hard is it, level of difficulty, to get supplies and, as you say, fill voids for those who are in that crisis of a disaster zone? How hard is it to get them the supplies or materials they need to survive the disaster and, as you said, recover from the disaster?

Bettina: Well, it depends definitely on the disaster and the partners that work there have good protocols. You said, like, help me understand how a disaster works and what happens. The first 72 hours are oftentimes just search and rescue and assessment. Think of you in Hurricane Sandy, storm went over the city, power out everywhere.

John: Subways were flooded.

Bettina: Subways were flooded and icy cold flooded.

John: Right.

Bettina: So you got to go in and kind of see what is working, what is not working. The community of disaster responders kind of builds up the structure and communication is really important between all instances. I still remember these pictures from Hurricane Sandy where people would offer, “We have power, charge your phone here.” Remember those?

John: Oh, yeah. [inaudible]

Bettina: So this is what kind of fascinates me and gives me so much hope in human mankind, how we all are our best human beings in disasters and try to help each other. But that happens in the first 72 hours. And then people get an overview, get a plan, have assessed the damage, maybe assess the human toll. And then they can say, “Okay, here…” In preparation, obviously, they see a couple of those things already, but sometimes it’s a moving target. If you wanted to build shelters to be ready in Helene and Milton, you would have moved your shelter 8 times because these storms just move. Who would have thought it would hit Asheville? Who would have thought it would kind of start a torrent river? Not in the wildest scenario has anybody thought this could happen. And then you have to stem up things quickly. And so this is what we did, for example, in Asheville, when the food bank was washed away. We had some people on the ground and we learned through Feeding America which is the food bank association that kind of like is the head organization for a lot of food banks. We heard that the Mana Food Bank, which has contacted them with a cell phone with one signal and said, “Well, washed away. We need food. We don’t know how to get that.” We we said, “Oh, then Asheville, we send somebody by.” They had a temporary shelter built up so that they have power and connectivity, so they can start their spreadsheet and they can start communicating what they need and supply chain would flow. So you’ve got to figure out in these moments what’s really the best angle to help the communities.

John: Understood. You’ve now been doing this for 8 years or so. Talk a little bit about some of your favorite stories of meeting the moment and helping the people through the disaster and then helping the recovery efforts that you’re the most proud of. Some of your favorite examples of the great work that you and your colleagues and Amazon are doing with other disaster relief organizations around the world.

Bettina: Yeah. Well, maybe I’ll give you one of my personal ones that went to my heart and then I’ll tell you maybe some of our biggest ones that I kind of like keep in my mind because they brought the entire company together.

John: Okay.

Bettina: So when I was more active and pull up your sleeves and be hands on and when our team was just like me and 2 people, we all took the calls from organizations and we were all on call. Now we’re a little bit more organized ourselves. And so I got a call from the Red Cross. This was a wildfire in the Sonoma Napa area. There was a whole neighborhood in Santa Maria being surprised overnight by a fire and wiped out 11,000 structures, if I remember correctly. But lots of people became homeless overnight and everything destroyed ashes, just ashes. They had to flee with nothing on their back. And the Red Cross calls and says, “Do you guys have sifters?” And I’m like, “What is a sifter?” Like, “Pardon, I’m not a native speaker. Explain to me what a sifter is.” And they said, “Like in the gold rush, you use these sieves to find gold in the river. Does Amazon have them?” So I looked up catalog. Sure enough, we had them and we had them on the West Coast because guess what? There’s still gold digging going on.

John: What?

Bettina: And so I called the buyer for these items and said, “Can I get these sifters that we have in these 3 Fulfillment Centers? Can I send them out?” This was before we had the hubs and were organized And he said, “Sure, take them all, take them all.” And so I kind of removed the inventory, like scrappy tools and whatnot, put it on a truck, went there, was there in a couple of hours. So later I asked the Red Cross, “Why do you need these sifters so urgently?” And said, like, “You know what? We give them out to people that go back to their houses to see if anything is left. So that way they can find jewelry maybe something that has not been destroyed by the fire, something that gives them back some [crosstalk]”

John: Connection to their life.

Bettina: Yeah. I told this story to this buyer who let me remove all of the inventory. So a couple of months later, another wildfire happens. Another big one, another town really heavily impacted. He calls me and he says, like, I’ve already pre-ordered another 7,000 sifters so you can have them if they ask. The power of our employees and how they are behind it is just wonderful. As I said, like, you stand just on the shoulders of all of these people who want to make it right. So that was my personal favorite story.

John: I like it. And I just want to pause you there for a second. You grew this. This was your idea. You proposed it. Your boss loved it. You sold it together. How big is the organization? Now you have the 15 centers around the world. How many wonderful Amazon colleagues are part of this disaster relief?

Bettina: At any given time I would say hundreds. But and not counting the volunteers and the LA wildfires, we had 8,000 people volunteer. But we have, say a core team of 8 people around the world. And they usually support it then by another 10 people that help them closer support. But if you put it all together people that work in the Fulfillment Center to help when we need to get stuff of our disaster relief hub shelves, bring them together, pack them up, pack a plane, fly to the Bahamas, help coordinate the flight, help coordinate anything you easily end up having hundreds of people.

John: Yes. And so at Amazon locations all around the world. You have people now.

Bettina: We do. And our hubs are also strategically placed where we know disasters may happen. So we have a few in India, in Australia and in Japan, as well as a big one in Europe. We have 2 here in the U.S., 3 in North America, 1in Mexico, one in California for the wildfires and one in Atlanta where we can serve the entire hurricane season region.

John: Bettina, you’re a very humble person. You really were one of the first people on the ground that helped build Amazon from their Kitty Hawk days to today. So your technological journey and success story itself is more than impressive. Now, what you’re doing in impact and disaster relief is also unbelievably important. And I’m so grateful for that work. What gets you excited now? I mean, you’ve been on fascinating journeys at Amazon, making impact on the world and making the world a better place. What gets you out of bed and what are you excited about now in the months and years ahead, given the fascinating position you’ve created at Amazon?

Bettina: So, John, my answer is going to be Jeff’s answer. It’s still day one. There’s so much more we can do.

John: I love it.

Bettina: No, I truly believe it. Like, if you just think, look at Amazon, we have this leadership principle. Number one is customer obsession, we obsess over our customer, we listen to them, daily we’re in conversations with them. They give us so much input of… And my lens is always, what can we do to really turn all of the research, all of the development, all of the investment that Amazon does for its regular customers? How can we turn this into a use for our communities? It’s so exciting to see how the company stands behind that. So it’s much more things I could talk to you about, how we’re trying to distribute food to food insecure families or how we’re helping students, especially in underserved communities, be successful.

John: Talk about that for a second. We talked about it, Rothia.
Talk about what you do in terms of inspiring students. That’s very important and that’s near and dear to my heart as well. Share a little bit about that for a second.

Bettina: Yeah, and that I could talk about a whole another podcast.

John: We will. I’m going to hold you to that.

Bettina: But there have been studies in recent years, in the last five years, that showed kids want to be prepared for the jobs of the future. They just don’t know what they are. And then they may not have the infrastructure for them to actually start somewhere. So let’s start with the first one.
Like how do kids learn about what professions exist? From their parents, by who they’re around, by social media, maybe teachers, maybe doctors. So remember, like think back in your days, what did you want to become?

John: A veterinarian because I was around horses and around other veterinarians. So I wanted to become what I was around. There you go. Probably never thought you would run a recycling company.

John: Not a million years.

Bettina: Or a podcast. [crosstalk] Because those problems didn’t even exist back then. And so how do we prepare young students for the jobs of the future? Well, we show them careers, similar like you do it with your podcast guests. Like what are careers that they could pursue? How do you get there? What do you need to know for that? For example, we make little career tours that teachers can show. So they teach you, “Oh, how do you stream a video, a live video? and then we go around and we show them professions. What does the coordinator do? [inaudible] What’s the cameraman doing? How our services kind of working together to encrypt, load and load balance all of the data and information? How does it land real time on your phone? And all of the professions that happen in between. Teachers like it. The kids tell us, they do a little click at the end and tell us whether or not they now like to learn more about these professions. We call it intent to persist. And so they click on this. We know they’re interested. We know the content is interesting. So we’re trying to grow that as one of the programs of how we talk about education.

John: That’s so wonderful. Bettina, like you said, we could talk about so much more of the work that you do. And I’m going to have you back on the show to continue this discussion. For our listeners and viewers to find Bettina and all of her colleagues and all the work they’re doing in disaster relief. That’s so impactful and important. Please go to Amazon.com. We’ll give specific links to some of the disaster relief success stories and projects that they’ve worked on over the years in our show notes. Bettina, thank you for the generosity of your time today. What I’ve realized during this conversation is the world really needs more of you. So I hope other young people listen to the show and they decide to follow your wonderful and important path. Thank you for not only your time today, more important, thank you for making the world a better place.

Bettina: Thank you, John. It was a pleasure talking to you.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.