Moving to a new city and starting a new job can be one of the most intimidating parts of building a career. You have to make new friends, rebuild your local network, and, in Andy Jassy’s case, find the best spots for Buffalo chicken wings.
Now the CEO of Amazon, Jassy was just another new hire when he relocated to Seattle to join the e-commerce startup in 1997. But he didn’t end up hanging around the watercooler or joining a company kickball league to make connections. Instead, he bonded with colleagues over food.
“We have an eating club that we started at Amazon when we first got to Seattle,” Jassy recalled on Capital Group’s Power of Advice podcast earlier this year.
“We didn’t know anybody, so we used to go for Buffalo wings every Tuesday night, and there were about a dozen of us at work that did this.”
What started as a weekly ritual at a local Seattle spot called the Wing Dome evolved into a full-blown competition. The event was eventually christened the Tatanka Bowl—a nod to the Lakota word for buffalo, used in the film Dances With Wolves—complete with “wing referees” who inspected bones for leftover meat and weigh-ins before and after the contest to track who had gained the most, according to a 2021 Vanity Fair profile.
As Jassy rose through Amazon’s ranks, he took the tradition with him. The wing-eating contest became a fixture at the company’s annual tech conference, AWS re:Invent, where Jassy has called it “world famous.” Jassy’s own performance set a high bar.
“I had 57 wings, and I really had difficulty standing when it was done.”
Fortune reached out to Amazon for further comment.
Jassy’s love for competitive chicken-wing eating may just be a quirky footnote in Amazon’s origin story, but it reflects something the 58-year-old executive has been deliberate about throughout his career: building relationships with the people around him, including outside the formality of the office.
In a letter to Amazon employees in 2024, Jassy cited “the people we work with” as one of the primary reasons he had stayed with the company for nearly three decades. The eating club was an early expression of that instinct—a low-stakes, recurring ritual that gave a small group of colleagues a reason to show up for one another every week.
That kind of intentional community-building matters, especially early in a career—but it’s something that many Gen Zers struggle to do. About 38% of young workers said networking makes them anxious, according to a survey conducted by Strand Partners for LinkedIn, with many avoiding it altogether because they don’t know where to start.
But the lesson from Jassy’s wing club isn’t the need to eat competitively in order to climb the corporate ladder—but rather that consistent and shared experiences can do far more for relationship-building than any formal networking event. Instead of trying to create the biggest LinkedIn network, focus on building genuine, long-term connections with a smaller group.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has made a similar point: “Seek to build a community—to make better choices in the people with whom you partner—that’s the only way to have greater long-term impact on the world,” he told executive coach Mark Thompson in 2015.
Strong relationships also tend to go hand-in-hand with finding work that genuinely excites you—something Jassy has emphasized in his own career advice.
“I really do believe it’s perhaps as important to figure out what you don’t want to do as what you want to do, because it actually helps you get more centered on what really makes you happy,” Jassy said last year.
“So don’t be afraid to try a lot of different things, and don’t let people tell you that whatever you’ve done—even if you’ve done it for a while—is what you must do. You have the opportunity to write your own story.”
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