Talk:Joy Covey/Archives/2013

Joy Covey...
I believe the importance of this article deserves to be kept up. Covey was the first financial officer of Amazon, a global business, which is important prior to the history of Amazon. And, she also earned over $500 million dollars for the business within a 4-year period.

ActorBoss (talk) 17:25, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Notability is not inherited. That means that Covey is not notable simply because of her association with Amazon (a notable company).  Being the CFO (or any officer) of a notable company does not automatically confer notability on that person.  There is also a lack of perspective here - every company raises money from investors prior to IPOs and then raises more money through said IPO.  There is nothing to indicate that what she did is at all outside the scope of what her job description required her to do.  Even Jeff Bezos' article is not based solely on his activity with Amazon. MSJapan (talk) 19:31, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

I also see absolutely nothing here that makes this woman notable. It is not that somehow without clear specifics she allegedly dropped out of high school at age 15 and "attended" Harvard Law that just appears to be lacking a number of details that not one article mentioning that clears up. Her work at Amazon was just that her job. What she did was nothing that was outside the scope of her job title, so that alone does not make her notable. I find too much left out of her story and too little to justify her page. IntelBusinessMan (talk) 21:33, 21 September 2013 (UTC)


 * There's actually a fair amount of prior material to draw from, and that's just from a cursory google search (using the custom time range feature, of course). There are more than a few interviews and articles about her from a decade ago (specifically, from before Wikipedia existed), so while I wouldn't consider her the most notable individual I think there is certainly enough material to discount the page entirely. Human.v2.0 (talk) 23:18, 24 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Well, no major additions have been made based on any of that information, so we sort of have a koan: If there's an article with no proof of notability in it, and nobody cares to fix it, is it worth keeping? In all seriousness, however, having looked at some of that material (the Harvard Law and Forbes sources in particular), there is nothing that indicates that she was doing anything not in her job description.  She might have been good at convincing folks to invest, but that doesn't make her notable in her own right.  There are already non-relevant sources on the first page of that search, as well as LinkedIn and the WP article here. MSJapan (talk) 15:47, 25 September 2013 (UTC)


 * To be fair, this article has only been around for five days and the discussion to remove it started after one with no apparent research at all into the articles I linked. Also, your argument is more based on the entry not stating notability/broader sources than an inherent lack of them.  She obviously performed her job "exceptionally enough" to be included in a top 30 list at least once.  I think that the main flaw is that she's a modern-day individual who's major events all took place briefly before Wikipedia existed; if this entry had been created a year ago I don't think there would be so much debate as compared to a stub created after her death with sources mostly created due to her death. Human.v2.0 (talk) 20:33, 25 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Actually, that's got nothing to do with it - you are trying to cite a lack of WP:RECENTISM as a reason to keep, when in fact the issue is that there isn't any substantive material there. When Wikipedia existed or not is irrelevant - we've got articles on plenty of people who accomplished things prior to its existence.  CFOs are, by and large, not notable people.  Who was Jack Welch's CFO?  Richard Branson?  Steve Jobs?  I'm sure they are mentioned somewhere, but they are not the focus of the companies they work for at all, and their names don't immediately come to mind, do they?  Also, the list you are referring to is a "Power 50" of women in 1999, and many of them are CEOs (like Sherry Lansing and Carly Fiorina), not CFOs.  I'm also not entirely sure, having looked at that Forbes source, that I particularly consider it useful, as it's snippets about the mothers of some of the Power 50 that year, not the Power 50 themselves. MSJapan (talk) 03:39, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

joy covey death
i am joy's sister and agree that the article is too short and misleading, so here goes. joy did drop out of high school at 15, when she fell in love with a man from clovis, california named sam catalano. after missing too many flights and being flunked in her freshman year, even though she got straight A's on her tests (due to not being in school at least 50% of the time), my parents gave up and let her move in with him and his parents and sister. the catalano family was a prominent one, and owned grocery stores called "country boy market"...joy briefly worked as a grocery clerk part-time and attended clovis west high school in her sophomore year. she and sam married when she was just 16, and my parents had to consent. she was bored in school, and studied for and passed the GED exam. she and sam moved to fresno and she started fresno state university. she finished in 2.5 years with a 4.0 in accounting and got hired by arthur young & co., cpas. joy was a prodigy with an IQ of 173! at the tender age of 19, she scored #2 in the nation on the CPA exam. when she was 20, she and sam separated and she moved to orange county and transferred to the AY office there. eventually she was accepted at the harvard JD/MBA program and moved to cambridge. in 1989 she graduated and made law review and was a baker scholar in the business school. she briefly worked at wasserstein, perella in new york but detested investment banking and moved back to the bay area where she landed a job at digidesign as controller. in 1992, she was briefly married to mark jones, a real estate developer, and by that time was CFO. joy participated in the IPO and later moved back to the boston area when digidesign was acquired by avid technology. there she met anesthesiologist lee gerstein, who worked at the famous lahey clinic. hating the frigid winters of boston, joy took lee with her when she moved back home and interviewed with jeff bezos only reluctantly, as amazon was located in rainy seattle. she couldn't stop talking about it, and lee eventually prodded her to take the job...jeff bezos agreed to a commuting arrangement, but joy later relocated due to the heavy work load. joy and lee married in the winter of 1998 in utah in a snowmobile wedding. in 2000 she cashed out her options and retired to her woodside home in california to focus on travel and family...joy had tired of the crazy internet pace and longed to get back to her "extreme sports" and more adventurous pursuits. she and lee had a son, tyler, in 2004 and divorced several years later. joy was a dedicated environmentalist, and became treasurer for the natural resources defense counsel (NRDC). she was also a devoted mother and she and tyler were inseparable, traveling to exotic locales such as costa rica, panama and alaska. they also did rescue work for animals, with joy piloting her own plane to rescue an orphaned grizzly cub in alaska and a grey wolf in st. louis. her favorite activities were skiing, windsurfing, and cycling. it was the latter that would claim her life on sept 18th, 2013, when she hit a delivery van that abruptly cut her off along highway 35 in woodside, en route home to pick up her beloved tyler from school. her injuries were so severe she died at the scene. we are heartbroken. how is she special/notable enough to make the list in wikipedia? because she was a very special woman who accomplished amazing things for someone so young and someone of her caliber comes along very rarely in this world...she was a prodigy, a visionary and pioneer in the internet world who, with jeff bezos, created a powerhouse company out of a little online bookseller called "amazon.com," an environmentalist serving as treasurer of nrdc. joy covey...an amazon in her own right.

judy collinsJudilee325 (talk) 10:50, 9 December 2013 (UTC)