Companies want these "passive job seekers, " as Ambras calls them, because "stellar people usually aren't in the job market, " says Pelago's Scholl.

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Furukawa then forgot about it until May, when he received an e-mail from Blake Scholl, director of product development at Pelago, a software development company in Seattle.

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Pelago was hiring, and Scholl wanted to meet Furukawa.

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The Amazon executive has been busy as a startup investor for several years now and his Bezos Expeditions investment fund has collected at least 14 startups to date, including Twitter, Pelago and Heartland Robotics, among others, records show.

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