'Transparent', Amazon

We weren’t expecting to run into Jay Carney, former White House Press Secretary to President Obama, at the Amazon Red Carpet for Transparent at The US Naval Memorial auditorium in downtown Washington, DC last week. His wife Claire Shipman (co-author of The Confidence Code) was simultaneously being honored at the Japanese Residence by Nobuko Sasae for her third forum on women, a dialogue that seeks to empower young professional women. However, since Jay is the senior vice president for global corporate affairs for Amazon, he was at the screening. “We’re two working parents,” Carney told Hollywood on the Potomac. “It’s hard. I wish I were getting to see her event.”

We asked Carney what it was like to transition from the White House to corporate. “When I left the White House, I was lucky enough to be able to take some time to try to figure out what I really wanted to do. If you had told me as I was leaving that I was going to go work for a company, just one company, I probably would have said, ‘I doubt it.’ I thought I wanted to be more independent doing a variety of things, but after a while I realized that one of the things I liked the most about my White House experiences is they’re different from my journalism experiences. I was on a team and part of something that had nothing to do with me. It was much bigger than me and much bigger than any one person. You can’t replicate the White House experience, there’s nothing like it, but the thing I really like about Amazon is the diversity of what we do.”