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Kurt Zumwalt

Amazon executive opens doors for UW MBAs

MBA alumnus Kurt Zumwalt has a job to envy: he manages a global portfolio for Amazon.com worth more than 1.3 billion dollars. Between his responsibilities investing short and long-term assets, coordinating banking relationships, overseeing insurance and foreign exchange hedging, he still makes time to mentor finance-minded UW MBA students. In the two years that Zumwalt has worked for Amazon.com, he has personally mentored three students and hired three treasury interns in addition to helping other students gain access to the fast-growing company. Four finance interns accepted full-time positions at Amazon last year and Zumwalt expects others will soon follow. “What separates UW MBAs from others is that UW students are very well-rounded. They have some marketing, some accounting and statistics as well as management knowledge and they are willing to work hard,” he emphasized. “I want to hire people who can solve complex issues and UW students are willing to do the research and have conversations with others to work out solutions — at Amazon the capability to work with people, negotiate and compromise is very important.”

Zumwalt has created opportunities for UW students throughout his career. As an MBA intern at Microsoft, he worked to establish a stronger conduit between the company’s treasury and investor relations departments and the UW MBA Program. “Before I graduated, I presented three UW candidates for Microsoft to consider for finance internships and all three were hired,” Zumwalt stated. One of those students was George Zinn, who started as a treasury intern in 1996 and has since advanced to corporate vice president and treasurer.

With the number of UW alumni in high-profile positions rising, Zumwalt is pleased to see that the visibility of the UW MBA has grown over the past 10 years. “I see there’s a higher caliber of students who are coming out of the program and I think the prestige of the UW MBA has really increased — it’s a self-fulfilling cycle.”