Jason Weinstein.

• Date: 01 May 2020

Jason Weinstein first became interested in tax when he was working after college for the governor of New Jersey. "The governors office wanted to push through a package of tax reform. I only had tangential involvement in the whole thing, but it was my job to write the governor's briefing books, and I spent time trying to boil down a huge briefing paper on corporate taxes into a one-pager for a meeting he had. I found the briefing paper fascinating, and it made a ton of intuitive sense to me. When I got to law school, I knew I wanted to take some tax classes and see what it was like and then it took off from there," Weinstein explains.

Weinstein, now tax director, mergers and acquisitions and planning at Amazon, offers this description of working in the governors office: "You can grab whatever work you're willing to put the time into. It was a really mission-driven environment where you make no money, work a ton, and have constant pressure and scrutiny. Sounds awful when you write it...