Greg Hart

Greg Hart is the Amazon executive who, as Jeff Bezos’s technical advisor (“TA”), built the Echo and Alexa program — in Brad Stone’s telling in Amazon Unbound, “out of nothing more than a Bezos email and whiteboard drawing.” Hart is the one who first articulated the device’s pitch internally: “this little device, about the size of a Coke can, that would sit on your table and you could ask it natural language questions and it would be a smart assistant” — a vision that Yap’s VP of research recalled drew eye-rolls from half the speech-industry veterans on the team. Hart appears in Amazon Unbound as a concrete instance of the Bezos operating model: a trusted lieutenant who turns a founder’s sketch into a shipped product line.

Once the Alexa group had scaled, Hart left the division to help run Prime Video, reflecting that “the thing that I got up every day loving doing was the creation of Alexa” but that, with the group growing fast, “it was probably a better fit for another leader.” He is also listed among the cast of Amazon figures in The Everything Store.

Context: Greg Hart is a longtime Amazon executive who served as Jeff Bezos’s technical advisor and led the development of the Amazon Echo and Alexa, later running Prime Video and other businesses; he subsequently became COO and then CEO of Compass, the real-estate brokerage.

Where this appears

• Amazon Unbound — the TA who built Echo/Alexa from a Bezos email and whiteboard drawing, then moved to Prime Video
• The Everything Store — listed among the core Amazon people in the book’s cast