Before he was CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy wanted to be a sportscaster.

“I liked sports a lot, I'm very passionate about sports, so I tried to find a way to be involved in sports,” Jassy said during a fireside chat at Amazon's “Bring Your Parents to Work Day” at the company's Seattle headquarters. During college, he landed a summer job at the local Fox affiliate in New York, working on a show called Good Day New York that was two months from its first broadcast. “It was like a startup. And I loved the experience.”

He worked there for three summers, getting to go out with camera crews to cover Mets batting practice and New York Rangers practices. He was really attracted to sports and television, but he later found that he was equally attracted to the entrepreneurship of being on this new show that was about to go on the air. At the time, he decided sportscasting was his future, so he sent his resume reel to 200 small TV markets across the country.

Sometimes younger people think that they should start at the very top. And if you work hard and do well, you'll get there, but it's useful to learn at the beginning.

“I got only two offers, in very remote places,” he said. “I couldn't really pull the trigger on going there.”

He took a job as a production assistant at ABC Sports instead, “which effectively ended my on-air hopes, because back then there weren't a lot of options, and not too many people went from production to on air.”

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