The longtime Amazon executive who helped lead the company’s grocery business has just assumed the new role of the first chief operating officer of London’s event management software provider Hopin.
After working for the tech giant for more than 16 years, Gao left Amazon this summer. She has held multiple positions at Amazon, including serving as a technical consultant to Jeff Bezos from July 2018 to January 2020. Bezos’ previous “shadows” include Andy Jassy, the former CEO of Amazon Web Services, who replaced Bezos as the company’s CEO last month; Amit Agarwal, who runs Amazon India; and others. Gao is the second woman appointed to this position.
Gao is one of several Amazon executives who left this year because Jassy took over the CEO position from Bezos. Other notable departures include Charlie Bell, a cloud computing veteran who has worked for Amazon for 23 years and a member of its senior leadership team. He reportedly worked at competitor Microsoft; Steve Kessel, who leads Amazon’s physical store business; And Jeff Wilk, the former CEO of Amazon Global Consumers.
Over the past 18 months, Hopin has achieved tremendous growth, with more than 100,000 organizations using its technology and 800 employees in 47 countries.
“Wei brought incredible technical and operational leadership experience during his tenure at Amazon,” Hoping CEO Johnny Boufarhat (Johnny Boufarhat) wrote LinkedIn“She will help shape Hopin’s continuous innovation and provide scalable operations so that we can continue to build the best shared experience platform for our customers.”