After more than two decades at Amazon, Greg Hart — most recently head of worldwide video and a member of Jeff Bezos’s senior leadership team — is leaving the ecommerce giant for a new gig.
Hart has been hired as chief product officer of Compass, a venture-backed company that provides online tools and services to real-estate agents.
At Amazon, Hart oversaw the company’s global streaming video business, leading Prime Video’s global business, product, engineering, marketing, distribution and sports rights teams. Before taking on the role heading Prime Video in 2017, he led the development and launch of Amazon Echo and the Alexa cloud service. He first joined Amazon in 1997.
An Amazon rep declined to comment on Hart’s exit. The company last month tapped Mike Hopkins, former chairman of Sony Pictures Television and ex-CEO of Hulu, as SVP of Prime Video and Amazon Studios. Hart had reported up to Hopkins; going forward, Hart’s direct reports will report directly to Hopkins.
In his new role at Compass, Hart reports to founder and CEO Robert Reffkin. Hart be responsible for all aspects of Compass’s integrated product offering, overseeing the company’s team of product managers, user researchers and product marketers.
Hart will work alongside CTO Joseph Sirosh, formerly Microsoft’s chief technology officer of AI who joined Compass in 2018.
Hart, in a statement provided by Compass, said, “The company truly views agents as customers and has made it their mission to provide these customers with services and software necessary to take their business to the next level in today’s digital economy. This customer-first approach to product development has been central to my own career, so the opportunity to better serve this massive customer group is the natural next step for me.”
Compass’s engineering team has tripled in size over the last year, according to the company. “Integrating these important pieces requires a leader who knows how to create products that people love while at the same time is comfortable with the challenges of operating at massive scale,” Reffkin said in announcing the hire. “Greg Hart is that type of leader and someone who we could not be more excited to collaborate with as we continue to work towards our mission of helping everyone find their place in the world.”
Hart began his Amazon career in books and then he then moved on to product management roles in music, gaming, video, DVDs, software and artificial intelligence. From 2009-11, he served as VP and technical adviser to the CEO as an informal chief of staff to Bezos.
Compass says its service is used by over 15,000 real estate agents across more than 100 U.S. cities, who were responsible for over $88 billion in real-estate transactions last year. Founded in 2012, the New York-based company has raised more than $1.5 billion to date from investors including SoftBank Group, Fidelity, IVP, Advance Publications, Dragoneer Investment Group, and Salesforce.com founder/CEO Marc Benioff.
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