Amy worked at Apple Softgoods as a Product Design Engineer, first as an intern (taking leave from Stanford undergrad) and then receiving a full-time return offer of approximately $150,000 total comp in late 2023.
What She Did
Amy worked on the FineWoven iPhone case. Her manager was Chris Peck (cpeck@apple.com). Her Apple email was amy_zhou2@apple.com.
In October 2022, she emailed Chris that David Kelley was giving away books at Stanford and she saw Chris's name inscribed in one. A small detail, but it connects two parts of her life: the Apple manager and the IDEO founder who taught her at Stanford.
The Decision
In late 2023, Amy had the Apple full-time offer in hand. She chose not to take it. She co-founded Taya instead.
Apple was the safety net she walked away from. A $150k job at the most valuable company in the world, working on physical products she cared about. She traded it for $6,500/month founder pay, no sleep, and a co-founder who would erase her contributions.
She also used the Apple offer as leverage to negotiate with Bilio, a Berkeley-based company. So she had at least two offers, chose neither, and went to build a startup.
Why It Matters
The Apple credential does real work in Amy's story. Elena's TechCrunch article mentions that Amy and Cinnamon "also worked previously at Apple." It is a quiet signal that Amy was hireable by Apple before she ever co-founded anything. But the more important signal is that she left voluntarily. Amy does not end up at startups because she cannot get hired elsewhere. She ends up there because she chooses them, which makes the cost of The Taya Era self-inflicted rather than circumstantial.
The FineWoven case also places Amy in Apple's physical product pipeline, not software. She was making tangible objects, which connects directly to Hardware Craft Night, the Stanford Product Realization Lab, the Stanford SHAPE Lab, and the basic fact that Amy likes making things you can hold.
The David Kelley Thread
David Kelley founded IDEO and created the concept of "design thinking." He was Amy's professor at Stanford. He gave away his own design books, and Amy found Chris Peck's name in one of them. This is a small world: Amy's Apple manager and her Stanford professor were connected through a book, and Amy was the one who noticed.
Kelley's design philosophy, that engineering should be human-centered and physical, runs through Amy's career from SHAPE Lab haptics research to Apple Softgoods to Taya's jewelry wearable to Vizcom's AI design tools. It is the throughline that makes Taking the Vizcom Job feel less like settling and more like returning.