Charlie Kindel, a Microsoft veteran who joined Amazon five years ago and founded the Alexa Smart Home division, says he's leaving the company to take a break
Taylor Soper / GeekWire :
Context & Ripple Effects
Charlie Kindel came to Amazon from Microsoft five years ago and built the Alexa Smart Home division from zero; his exit lands a year after Mike George's retirement handed the broader Alexa and Echo franchise to Tom Taylor, meaning two of the division's founding architects have now stepped away within twelve months.
What makes the departure worth tracking is where these leaders resurface: by August, Kindel had joined Control4 as an SVP, taking Alexa-era smart home expertise into a rival automation vendor. He is also an early data point in a longer exodus that later claims both Gregg Zehr and Tom Taylor in 2022, alongside Jeff Blackburn and Lab126's Lindo St. Angel.
First-order effects
- Amazon's Alexa Smart Home division operates without its founder, adding a leadership vacancy on top of the Alexa-wide transition already underway since George's retirement.
Second-order effects
- Kindel's move to Control4 turns an Amazon builder into a competitor's executive, transferring hard-won voice-and-smart-home integration knowledge directly into the luxury automation market.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Blackburn, Zehr, Taylor, and St. Angel all follow in later years — Amazon's devices organization faces a structural drain of founding-generation institutional memory, forcing it to rebuild rather than inherit the expertise behind Echo and Alexa.
The trend: Amazon's Alexa and hardware leadership is steadily cycling out its founding generation, redistributing that expertise across the wider smart-home industry.