After 23 years at Amazon, where he worked directly under founder Jeff Bezos and current CEO Andy Jassy, Greg Hart, now CEO of Coursera, a $1.35 billion online learning company riding the AI boom, says he has carried those leadership lessons into his role.
Back then, Amazon was still small, with around 200 employees. Bezos had personally interviewed almost everyone in the company. Hart was one of the few people Bezos had not hired himself. In an interview with Fortune, Hart recalled his personal metting with Bezos that kick-started his 23-year-long journey with the company, which is now an e-commerce giant.
Lessons from Bezos that stayed for life
According to Hart, one big influence was Bezos’s habit of interviewing every employee in the early days. Bezos wanted to make sure that as Amazon grew bigger, it never lost the passion, customer focus, high standards, and speed that defined its early days. This approach later showed up clearly in Bezos’ famous letter to shareholders, where he laid out Amazon’s leadership principles.
Today, Hart is the CEO of Coursera, an online learning platform valued at about $1.35 billion. When he took over, he set himself a big goal. He wanted to change the company from within and prepare it for the future, watching the demand for new skills explode.
And just when it was time for the artificial intelligence to take over the market, job seekers and working professionals rushed to add AI skills to their resumes. Coursera was ready for that moment.
A recent KPMG survey found that 74 percent of US CEOs say investing in AI is a top priority, even when the economy feels uncertain. Nearly 80 percent believe they are already ahead in using it.
Building a strong culture at Coursera
Hart wanted Coursera to have the same clarity as that of Amazon. He wanted the company to move faster and serve learners better. To do that, he believed culture had to come first. Coursera studied how successful companies define their values and leadership principles. Then the company created its own leadership mindsets, designed to fit its business and its history.
For Hart, strong cultural alignment is the foundation for real change. That focus on speed soon proved critical. As the AI boom changed what companies were looking for in employees, people rushed to learn new skills. “We looked at some of the most successful companies in the world, we looked at either their values or their principles … and we created our own that we felt were very specific to both our business and our history as a company.”
Today, Coursera offers more than 12,000 courses. Around 1,100 of them focus on generative AI. That number has grown by 44 percent in just one year. Generative AI is now the most popular topic on the platform.
A final lesson carried over from Amazon
One last lesson from Amazon has helped Hart prepare for the AI era. He believes focusing too much on results too early can be a mistake. Right now, his main goal is to get people using AI as much as possible and in as many ways as possible. Measuring exact results can come later. “My perspective is we just want to get a workforce that is using it as much as possible, in as many ways as possible. Over time, we’ll start to be much more focused on quantifying the impact on all of that,” Hart told Fortune. “If we focus myopically on that right now, I think we would miss the opportunity to have a far greater impact down the line.”
Hart says that if the company becomes too focused on numbers at this early stage, it could miss the chance to make a much bigger impact in the future.
Making meetings more meaningful
Hart also wanted to fix something many companies struggle with — unfocused all-hands meetings. Instead of trying to cover too much at once, Coursera meetings now focus on just one leadership mindset at a time. This idea also comes from Amazon.
Hart told Fortune that even if leaders think a message is clear, employees may miss it. And that’s why each month, one senior leader sends out an email with a short video explaining a single leadership mindset. The same idea is repeated during all-hands meetings, with real examples that make it easier to understand and remember.