“We went from PowerPoint to shipping in 15 months.”
Aichatou Sar Evans known professionally as Aicha Evans, is the African-American Chief Executive Officer of Amazon’s self-driving car subsidiary Zoox. In June 2020, Evans led the acquisition of her company by Amazon for US$1.3 billion.
Patience paid off for Evans, a Chief New Era of Leadership Award winner, and for Zoox. She took on the role of the company’s first non-founder CEO in 2019, joining co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson and his teams in an enormous challenge: developing a smartphone-based robotaxi service and building a completely new kind of electric-powered robotic vehicle to service it.
Under her leadership, they’ve made dramatic progress. Within a year, she’d led an acquisition deal that allowed the company the time they needed to innovate. In 2020, Amazon bought Zoox for over $1 billion and in 2023, Zoox became the first company to operate a purpose-built robotaxi on public roads.
Their vehicles — which Evans lovingly describes as “cute” and “more like living rooms on wheels than cars” — are now meeting a series of ever higher bars for functionality and safety. Marking their tenth anniversary this summer, the company is in the process of scaling their engineering teams to ensure a successful commercial launch.
Evans says that while Amazon has allowed her teams at Zoox the autonomy they need to grow, the company’s leaders also “ask good questions” — a quality she deeply values. Asking good questions — and shaking up the status quo to solve big problems — is how the self-described disruptor rose up the ranks over 12 years in engineering management to become Chief Strategy Officer at Intel.
Her move to Zoox reflected a lifelong desire — instilled by her parents and developed through her work with an executive coach — to create what she calls “transformational technologies, those that will affect billions of people.”
Here, Evans shares some of her best advice for executives who are leading that transformation.
Technology Requires Trust
Raised in both Senegal and France, Evans says her father, who worked in telecommunications, helped her to see the world through the lens of engineering and technology.
Her mother, however, continually reminded her that technology is all about people; created in service of people and developed by people. Taking time to learn how to work with teams is essential, even for natural-born disruptors, she says. “If you’re asking questions and you’re making people uncomfortable,” her mother told her, “Find a way to make them comfortable.”
Learn from Success — and Failure
Diving into challenging positions — either by taking on new challenges within a large, established company, as she did repeatedly at Intel, or taking on the leadership of a small and relatively new one, as she did with Zoox — has yielded some key insights into both success and failure for Evans.
“How you handle both is very important,” she says.” With success it’s very important to remember that you don’t have a God-given right to it. It’s important to remain humble and continue pushing yourself. With failure, it’s important to remember ‘I didn’t get here by mistake’ and to ask what happened: Was it the wrong timing? The wrong assumption? Did I make a mistake? Bottle the trigger so that next time you’re in the same situation you can recognize it and do something about it.”
Meet People Where They Are Before Moving Forward
When asked what experiences have surprised her most about her tenure at Zoox, Evans has said that, on a professional level, building a company is much harder than she imagined. At Intel, she’d often complain about dealing with processes and bureaucracies. Then, two weeks after joining Zoox as CEO, she realized what she needed to do: “The thing I complained about, I have to be part of building it!”
On a personal level, she’s said “I’m a little bit more adaptable than I thought I was going to be. I’ve learned how to meet people where they are before going forward.”
Previously, as a self-described “rebel” in larger corporate settings, she’d take the position that “No, that’s not what’s happening; what’s happening is what I say is happening” versus taking the time to pause and to learn.
“It’s been actually pleasurable to go through that leadership journey and to still be learning” she says.
Make Time for a Coach
Evans credits much of her recent success — both in terms of professional growth and personal happiness — to her work with executive coach Marshall Goldsmith.
She now actively advocates for working with a coach and has developed a coaching program at Zoox. In coaching relationships, she emphasizes the power of taking the time to build intimacy and trust. “Find someone you feel comfortable sharing the worst part of yourself with,” she says. “Otherwise, you’re just getting a consultant and you won’t achieve the greatest potential possible.”
Among the most important pieces of leadership advice she’s received from a coach is to find the thread that connects all of your people with an unbreakable bond. “If you are going to do complex, meaningful things, it’s going to require many people of different backgrounds, expertise, and motivation,” she says. “Your job as a leader is to architect the intersection that will really motivate everyone to do what needs to get done.”
Create a Culture of Transparency
As Evans and her team look forward to putting passengers into their vehicles in the very near future, she continues to value the power of moving forward most effectively by fostering a culture of transparency. Everyone and anyone who sees a problem at Zoox is encouraged to point it out — and ask good questions — even if that means pausing production to address it.
“This is going to be a long journey,” Evans says, “We’re just at the beginning of a transformation — and safety permeates through everything that we do.”
Additional Sources: zoox.com , Media Avatar , Wikipedia
