CEO of Amazon Web Services: Cloud, GenAI, two pizza rule and customer obsession.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to podcast in good company. I'm nicotian, the C E. O of the norwegian.

So in this forecast, I talk to the leaders or some of the largest companies we invest in so that you can learn what we own and meet these impressive leaders. Today I am speaking to adam celik, C. E.

O of amazon web services, the largest cloud provider in the world. We own over one percent of amazon. This translates to eighty billion the region owner, or over eight point one billion U.

S. dollars. This means that each norwegian owns fifteen thousand coroner in this company.

Most of the internet is run on cloud services, but how does the cloud work? How do I protect IT? And how is A W S. Compete with microsoft, google?

Now the cloud is the backbones of everything digital, and you control a third of these markets. Now you go customer such as net fix, apple, NASA, C I A, tesla, spotify and so warm. So just to kick off with the basic, what is the cloud?

Uh, the cloud is essentially the ability for companies of all sizes, all types to run all their infrastructure in a way that feels infinite and like IT has no specific place. That's why that you have the metaphor of the cloud. So customers, companies used to have data centres, uh, they would buy a rent.

The data centres that buy servers, they d hike up networking, uh, they'd worry about keeping those servers up and running. And when A W S launched two thousand and six and pioneer of the cloud, all of a sudden there was an illusion of infinite capacity, like you could just tap into compute capacity. You could tap into storage capacity. And I didn't matter to where I was or how IT work. You just have to concentrate on serving your customers, building your applications, instead of worrying about, uh uh a uh, about I T infrastructure.

So how much the little I T in the world is now in the cloud.

So it's hard to know exactly, but i'd estimate probably summer in the realm of ten percent of I T has moved to the cloud and people think it's a lot higher than that because we've been a lot of dollars that have moved to the cloud. But they forget that there are a lot of IT dollars spent in the world. There's maybe several trillion dollars of I T spent per year. And so are even though a lot of dollars of moved were probably still only in the know ten fifteen percent range, and the damage is a huge amount of workloads that are still gonna moving to the cloud for years to come. So actually were very early in this cloud migration.

Stupid question, but how do you actually move the data to the cloud? I assume you don't transfer IT through wifi.

Well, it's it's not a stupid question. It's a very important question. And that he moves a lot of different ways. Um depends on how much data you have and where you are.

Um sometimes people just transfer data uh across the internet, uh just from uh the service that they have have across the internet. But often when we have big organizations with a lot of data, um IT requires um you know higher through put to get the data up into the cloud. And also you you really want to be careful about about security and privacy.

So uh many of our customers set up uh uh a dedicated connections, essentially a direct connect uh of a private connection to A U S. That can be again, just like all other aspects of the cloud that can be scaled up or scaled down to whatever size IT needs to be and will be securely transfering. Uh, data over those your private encysted direct connections to us.

Now you've been very important in the started a world because you enable companies to kick off with a business without making huge investments in IT. sure. So what are some the ventures that you have backed?

Uh, it's a you write it's uh when A W started, IT was really with a vision of enabling anybody, even a kid in a college dorm, to have access to the same, you powerful, a compute infrastructure that even the largest companies, the largest surprises in the world had. And so that what that really meant was developers and a really meant a lot of startups. And to this day, startups are still, you kind of deep, deep in the DNA of who we think we are.

So in the early days, h there are countries like netflix, uh, airbnb, pinter, rest. Of course, there are no longer considered startups. Those are all enterprises now, but they were all startups.

And then later on, cam companies like like stripe and crowd strike again, big companies now who who used to be startups and um we were still added. So if you look at unicorns, the startups who worth over a billion dollars, over eighty percent of the world's u corns. Run on A W S. And is a great, great privilege to work with all of those innovators.

wow. Well, now if we take these data sectors, there means, right, tell us about one of the bigger ones, I mean.

and how large are they? Well, A W S um is built from an infrastructure perspective on this conceptive regions, which is really, really important. So we have thirty two independent infrastructure regions around the world, uh, many in the U S.

And canada. A U K. Many in the E U um, australia, india, china, japan, korea. Uh etat ta so thirty two in full flood regions around the world.

And each of those regions has you multiple what we call availabilities zone. Each one has at least three availabilities zones per region. And that's a really, really important set of concepts because IT provides incredible resilience for customers. So each region is built to Operate independently.

And if you have any kind of problem in one region, it's not going to a affect you in another region and even inside of a region, if you architect so that your are your resources run inside of multiple availabilities sounds h inside of a region, they are also built to a to be available separately, you know, not to fail for the same reasons. And so our customers can build very, very highly resilient uh, applications with very high a high up time and a each each availabilities zone could be just one data center. It's usually a pretty large data center or availabilities zone could actually be uh A A conglomeration of a number of big data centers, all put together at all. Depends on how much customer demand we have in the region for for those workload. But we have a very large you very scale worldwide infrastructure.

So let's say you and I would jump in a car and will go and visit a big one. How big is IT?

You're going to see a whole series of data centers。 You're going to be hard to find, by the way, we don't advertise them and put our names on them. Security is is more important than than marketing, but know we can have data centers with many, many, many thousands of servers in them.

So we open the door, you and I, we go into the center, what do we see? What's what's in there?

What to start with? By the way, we will have trouble getting in. So my badge, my employee badge won't work at the data centers because I don't need to go inside of them every day. I would have to get special permission. And uh, in our very security conscious uh, customers, you want to know that they're uh extremely effective uh, security controls, but physical as well as virtual controls.

But assuming we get permission and we actually go inside and we have to get past physical barriers to get inside while to get past in a significant security to go inside, we wouldn't be allowed in to any sensitive area. But if we just pretend for a moment that we are a we would see you know many, many banks of of servers and uh really just a small number of human beings who are absolutely essential for keeping those service running, for a replacing any servers uh or disproves, for example, with or or power supplies with with issues and IT would look hopefully very clean and very orderly. Hopefully would look very boring because when everything's Operating very smoothly, there is actually nothing to see which is the best day of affairs.

Yeah, now I assume that when C I, I trust you with the data, it's probably pretty secure. How much does the data demand change during the year or during the week? I mean, something like black friday when there is huge retailer mom, what kind of fluctuates are you seeing overall?

Uh overall uh, A W S has uh actually very smooth demand patterns. And uh, that's uh an effect of the scale at which we Operate. And that's one of the huge advantages we we offer our customers.

So um if you're a retailer, as you looked to um in the the december holiday season or black friday leading up to IT, you're going have a huge Spike. If you're a tax company, the us, you can have a huge Spike in April when taxes are do. If you're a news organization, you probably have a big Spike in the first thing in the morning um maybe at lunch time.

H etra um and basically with the scale which made A U S uh Operates where were over a ninety billion dollar a year revenue organization, again with us um thirty two full infrastructure regions around the world. Um we essentially aggregate all of that demand. So when one company has high demand, another has low and then they they flip.

And so that makes our infrastructure very, very efficient and lowers our cost structure because we're making high utils ation all of all of the infrastructure resources. And that internal allows us to charge really low Prices for customers and to keep keep dropping Prices to customers. We've lowered Prices over one hundred and twenty times in the past seventeen years since we launched, but really our ability to to manage all those peaks and valleys for customers, uh throughout the course of their day, their week, their month, their year um is is one of the benefits that we provide to them.

And so just for the listener, we have all of our Operations in the cloud with you guys. We pay roughly seventy million awesome on corona year for that service. Now you were one of the pioneers in the in the cloud services, but now you have competitors such as microsoft, google, and they have been gaining ground and actually are growing slightly less than you. So how are you competing with them? How do you win or lose business?

Well, i'm we've that robust competition for a long time as we should, by the way. And I like to say, if you look to your left and you look to your right, you don't see anybody next to you. You may have dramatically over estimated the attractiveness of your market segment.

Uh, and IT is IT is a fast growing and attractive segment. And so customers appropriately have have a lot of choices, which we think is is good for customers. And by the way, I think at the end of the day, is good for us. That keeps us sharper n make sure that we we keep our focus on a really what we need to do to to delight customers.

So I think that A W S, as you eluded to, uh, was the pioneer of the cloud we launched in two thousand and six and um lots of folk scratched their heads and said, what does this have to do with selling books? I can I can tell you how many times I got asked that question and of course the answers is that has nothing to do with selling books. But the technology that we build to sell books has everything to do with our exposing that same technology for many, many other organizations to use.

But because they came from amazon that some people said, oh, there just a bookseller and you know, nobody use this and then start up began using and they said, well, no enterprise will ever use IT. And the enterprise has started using IT. They said, well, nobody ever run mission critical applications on a and uh then we started doing things like a power ing netflix and a controlling nasas mars rover 用 S U V size vehicles on the service。 Mars people started to get the idea that mission critical workloads were indeed running in the cloud.

And so I think we just proved ourself over a number of years, uh, we also move very, very fast uh on product innovative and is probably five to seven years a before uh other countries really started to come out with even vegal a competitive offerings. And our founder, jeff bazas, has actually publicly called that five to seven years heads start the largest gift in business history. Now I have no idea if that's true or not, but it's just interesting concept. What does this me that what he means that we had five to seven years to build a large array of really powerful, really important services, uh, to gain traction, uh, to get a customer base, most importantly, to gain knowledge, to gain experience about what I took to Operate really, really well in this new business.

But why were the other people so slow?

I think because we are so threatened to their business model. They didn't want to believe that if you look at the old guard of technology companies, particularly software company, in some cases of hardware companies for thirty or forty years, um they they overcharged customers, they intentionally locked them in. So they made IT hard to leave.

And we really offered a completely new model of you're not having to commit um being able to uh elastically use as much as little as you want to see your Prices go down continuously, not going up continuously, all while being highly available, highly secure and and highly reliable um and so really threatening to those high Prices and high margins by by these other technology companies. And so IT was easier to find excuses to dismiss us is not knowing what we were doing rather than to see the enormous customer value that was being created. Now at some point, IT became obvious and inevitable to see how customers were voting.

And of course, with other customers get into uh um this market segment. And you know over time, you give IT enough years and you you know technology company there, they're absolutely other a other offerings out there. And you know we we try not to be not even to understand what competitors are doing, but we still to the day if focus the vast, vast majority of our time, our effort or mental energy on being customer obsessed and figuring out in what customers needs to do is supposed to having a competitively driven strategy.

How does artificial intelligence change the landscape? Are all the language models now trained in the cloud?

I, I think A, I is what to start. The A, I is enabled by the cloud. I mean, really in the long run, if you look at the a amount of compute sources which required, but train uh these models as well as to run inference or or or run these models in production, um the uh the the capacity requirements and and therefore the the potential costs um can be really enormous.

And um those will happen in the class because the economics and the ah the the capacity availability will be much, much higher in the cloud than elsewhere. So I really view generate of A I and A I in general as the next big, big thing that is happening in the cloud. Now it's not just one thing.

I mean, general A I is going to fundamentally change many, many technologies will fundamental impact probably every application the U. N. I.

Interact with, both in our professional and our personal lives. So it's fundamental, but it's not a it's not a different thing. That is the next huge thing that will happen in the cloud, and it's very much tied to your data.

tragic. So we have all of these are companies who have build data platforms on A W S. And have vast amounts of data in the cloud. And that data is what helps them differentiate with gender of ai. There are there are these models there. But what you got to do to bring your data to the models, whether it's your customer service data, your investor data, uh, your uh medical research data, whatever IT is and and use that data to your advantage, you using these new powerful a large language models and uh helping companies to really marry together, they are data and their gender. The eye strategies, we think is what's going to unlock uh, the real power, the real value.

And is that why you now invest billions in anthropic, which is competing with .

open a eye yeah open a anthropic um use data. U S. From the very beginning when they are founded A A few years ago. And um as our relationship with them is deepened, I I think that we provided a really great opportunity for them to um to get access to massive amounts of computer capacity, which they need to train their claude models are now cloud to, which is a really leading edge model as good as anything in the world and at the same time, the really smart people.

And we saw that there was an opportunity to collaborate with them and have them help us to optimize and improve um the the hardware, the the custom design ships that a of U S uh designed. And um we decided to deem that partnership together and is one element of IT. We also did invest a into anthropic.

It's a tight partnership, is a special partnership. Anthropic um now uses A U S. Is is a primary cloud provider. And I think we'll be partner together for a long time to come.

You got competitors in the U S. In china, but no european competitor. Why is europe so slow hair?

Um I I think it's true that if you just look in a globally um the largest public cloud providers have been us space companies and as you said um especially inside of china um chinese based companies um but are there are your smaller european based competitors as well? And I think you know it's very dynamic and a quickly moving space.

And I think through opportunities for for companies from from all countries, if they got great value proposition to um um to gain market segment share. So you know for now, this is the way it's played out. But you know we ve I think we all need to stay very alert. Well.

you're very diplomatic out. But when we look at many different industries, europe is a bit behind an innovation in technology and someone. Now why do you think IT is because when I look into some way your business principles, you have words like big hosts and so on, and these are not vary european slogans. Well.

part of the great number of european companies with their systems integration like cap, gi, whether suffer companies like usage in the U. K. That I just sook with last week.

And I see a lot of innovation are happening in europe. I think you know a lots been written and said about how venture capital works and how uh how much funding happens of companies uh, in the U. S.

And I think a lot of the VC are are looking more interactions these days. So I think there's there good chance that of the innovation continues to to grow in flourish. And a lot of different countries around the world, you know, india is another place where people really looking at looking at for innovation to come out of. So again, I think it's very dynamic, and I think we've been great conditions for for technical innovation in the us for sure, but I think you'll in other countries over time as well.

Now these data centres are very energy intensive. How do you plan for a more sustainable future?

That is an incredibly important that is of the most in which important topics that we could touch on. So a amazon is taking a very public pledge to be um next to a carbon across all of amazon retail A W S everything by twenty forty, which is ten years ahead of the paris accords and is a very a big bold public commitment.

We did a publicly instead of privately because we wanted to both put a forcing function on ourselves, Frankly, because it's difficult as well as to really caddies and help inspire other organizations, other companies to join us in a helping to fight a fight. Climate change. We have over four hundred other organizations, including many large companies who have signed on the climate pledge.

So what we're really gratified by that now we can't just wait to twenty forty, and we have a lot of interm goals along the way, one of which is to be a hundred percent renewable energy powered by twenty twenty five. Now obviously, that is just around the corner. And a the good news is we are ready over ninety percent renewable energy powered across all of amazon.

But a huge part of that uh of course comes from um A U S. Data centers. So were already a ninety percent on our way to one hundred percent.

And one of the big ways we do that is by being at the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy on earth over the past three years and um it's with the long term funding for wind farms, solar projects around the world um including you know the first offshore wind in japan project and many others like IT. It's also really important that we innovate to just use less energy period. And I mentioned custom design chips a lot a while ago.

So the first eight of us we still only buy a lot of a lot of chips for our service from a lot of really great partners. But in addition, uh for a number of years now, A W S has actually designed its own chips, uh, which customers can use and you know different different services, virtual servers. And that general purpose chip is called graviton. Our graviton based uh uh chip um actually consume sixty percent less power, the equivalent equivalent chips that our customers use. So simply by moving into the cloud and then moving onto our graviton based capacity, customers can to reduce their energy can to sixty percent。

If you look at the chips that you buy, how much do you now develop yourself? And how much are you still dependent on the likes of me?

I think it's a big mix have in a classical x 5， a chip architecture with great partners with intel, uh with A M D H in the G P U space, with great partners with video of a very tight relationship with invidia. So we we continue to to buy and use an enormous quantities of chips from all of those all of those companies. And and I don't I don't forsee any change in that uh, in the foreseeable future.

How could quantum computing change your business?

Um I think quantum computing is is is a potentially very disruptive, very exciting. Is also, I think a lot of I know and. Is years away. So we are we are investing in quantum now, uh both internally inside of amazon as well as we are a funded a lot of research at a places like harvard university uh cw poli um uh call tag and will continue to do so.

I I think that um it's it's a proposition which you know in a number of years from now, uh could really be disruptive to uh to how computing is done. But there are is very, very early. There are a lot of unsolved questions which which need to be solved before IT becomes a viable technology scale.

But when IT is a viable technology, how is that will going to be different? What's going to be the main change?

Uh, the main change would be a the ability to do, you know, vastly a larger, more powerful of computing jobs at uh much faster and at much lower cost. I mean that is that is the dream. Um and I think there's a good chance the world gets there, but uh, there's still be a lot of scientific research as well as applied applied computer science to to make that happen.

And we're investing in IT. I know lot of other companies are as well. And I think it's a great a uh an area, great potential for the world. At the same time, as we keep that eye towards the the future, we're keeping the other eye on the technologies me today, uh to improve Price performance for our customers and in europe.

Ion, how do we stack up against china both on the A I side but also on quantum computing?

Quantive, it's too early to really answer that question. Um I think hard to know actually who's who's proceeding a wood pace. It's it's still very early on A I I mean again, to the best of my knowledge, i'll say, uh I think that uh h the U S. In the western world is is proceeding really well. I think that um you know there are great, great leaders in the airspace.

And what I really like is that some of them are are big companies like amazon and some of them are very, very Young startups like anthropic or or stability AI or AI twenty one all of humor or or great H A W S started partners or are hugging face is another one. And um is I think that mix is really important for innovation, having the resources of big companies, along with the fresh thinking of of a very Young smaller companies. And so I think that the the U.

S. In the world world is is very well position. I think we have lot of questions around not only where the technology will go, but how you think about responsibility AI and ethical AI and make sure that these capabilities are used in the right way. We're busy at work, as you can imagine in all of those areas. You technical out there in the mark with customers as well as very intently with regulators and policymakers.

Do you think the tech companies are able to self regulate? A I uh.

I think tech companies is very important. The tech companies you participate very vocally in the discussion, I don't think IT will only be tech company is self regulating. I think that a IT will be partially up to governments and potentially multination organizations to provide guidance and to provide regulatory frameworks.

And I think countries should um have a voice and saying, here's how we want AI to proceed inside of our our country. And I think that um tech companies have a lot of experience were the ones with the technology and with the customers. So we have really important voices in their conversation, and we're helping very actively to shape those conversations.

You I was at the White house this summer when president biden announced his voluntary commitments around AI, which about seven companies signed up for. Later this week, I will be in in the U. K, the A, I, safety summit that the U K. Government is putting on what you have a lot of world leaders at. And um we're we're devoting the time in the resources to participating in those forms, participating in those discussions.

And I think that industry needs to come together, along with academia as well as policymakers and regulators, to figure out with this powerful set of new technologies, how we can ensure you are safe, responsible use with a lot of visibility into IT worth the same time. And this is essential, not squashing innovation. We've got to let countries keep on innovating, particularly as some of the countries, some of the countries you mentioned, uh, are probably not going to worry so much. We're going to keep on innovating. And so we have to make sure that our our countries and our companies keep on innovating unfathered as well.

Talking about innovation, you are also launching a satellite network to provide broadband a kin to what starling is doing. So what is IT? You launch a few satellites.

You're looking at several thousands of them eventually. So, so what is that? What do this is going to do?

Well, the a IT is very exciting. You are referred to project type with the key and uh it's a whole satellite capability being launched actually by a sister division to A W S is being spearheaded by another part of amazon um although A W S partners are very closely with them. So uh we will over the next several years have several thousand uh L O low earth orbit satellites uh up around earth.

Um just a few weeks ago, we launched our first two test satellites, which was a very exciting milestone. Uh the tests have gone really well um really as well, Better than than what one could have hoped. And so those teams are going to a keep pressing forward.

You're really urgently is and relentlessly and as fast as possible um getting the first production satellite up a next year and then moving into a commercial availability for customers after that. Um and the the first in primary mission of project piper was to provide internet access to unserved and underserved uh people around the world. And there are billions of those people who either unserved or underserved.

And i'm really excited for that mission. I think over the next several years, it's going to be really exciting, rob, so early in that journey. But amazon takes a very long term view of most things, and we think it'll an amazing set of offerings for customers for many years to come.

So that's a great place to vivid to your corporate culture because you are one of the longest term thinking companies. I know what kind of time frame you Operate within when you plan.

Yeah, it's try. I do you think that's one of the um most distinguishing things about amazon as we do tend to take for uh, long term views in our planning horizon. It's such it's such a tool for us.

It's it's so powerful because instead looking at things on a you know ninety day cycles are quarterly basis. And we're thinking about know what we do three, five, ten years from now to serve customers really well and to create great businesses for ourselves and make make decisions based on those critters. And a lot of companies um choose not to have that long term viewpoint, and I I think it's very limiting.

But what is IT that makes people think short term?

I I think um there's a lot of investor sentiment around in a earnings in the U S, for example, and there's tremendous pressure. I I I think that if you have a culture where um you know you care a lot about um uh the optic short term optics, uh and you uh you just don't focus yourself as much on creating a long, long term value for customers, then you can end up in that trap.

Now i'm not saying short term results don't matter, you know they do and a have having targets and and hitting them matters. But um you're really building building a business for the long term is what matters the most. I think we're done a good job over time about try to run a good business in the short term a while really building an enormous value .

for the long term. Well, sakon from OpenAI said that long term thinking is a competitive vantage. Few people do IT. What are some of the longest term investments you made an amazon.

Well, we've talked about caper. You know that a that probably started called five years ago and a, it's where we're just at the exciting stage of starting to launch satellites, and it'll be another couple years before that full conStellation is is up. So uh, that is a very capital intensive for sure and and long term proposition.

Uh, I think we've been talking for the past a thirty or forty minutes about A A really good example, which is AWS if you go back in time, um yeah amazon was was mainly A A retailer. I had a few retail categories and then there was a crazy idea about uh turning amazon inside out, offering up the guts of amazon uh, for other companies to use. And uh, a lot of people didn't understand that.

Other people thought I was crazy and I was definitely a long term proposition because IT requires A A nona building all of the software services that we that we offer customers today around compute and storage and database and machine learning and A I and call center Operations and everything in between. Uh but also a spending all of the the capital is required for the data centers and the servers and all the infrastructure that we've really discussed. And um yeah we knew would take years uh for to become um a big business and and a profitable business. But at the same time, we believed and still believe that in time in the forest of time, IT could be the biggest business that amazon has.

It's probably the majority of the value of your company now isn't IT. If you look at the whole amazon.

hard, hard to say. I think that all of the piece of amazon worked very well together. I leave you to the to the investment community to try and sort out in which pieces are are worth what.

But we see many, many companies now who want to do business with all of the different areas of amazon. So your automotive of companies who wanted do business for that of us and integrate our our devices and entertainment systems into the vehicles and supply amazon with uh with electric delivery vehicles. And that's just the automotive industry. So I think all the pieces of vate of amazon work very, very well together.

But also amazon retail business switch, where the whole thing started was running for ages and negative of and very thin margins, right?

Well, certainly in the early days, jeff became very, I think, well known for the montreal of get big fast. There was really a term here at amazon, and that proceeded my time here at the company, by the way. But I think that was that was a really big thing, and the company really believed that achieving that scale in retail was gonna really, really important.

And IT would help Price, IT would help customer selection and IT would help convenience and delivery speeds if they could get big, fast and. And they did. And again, that took that took a very long term perspective instead of just you know, worrying about the very, very short term.

And as a result, you know the retail business has been great. You IT is a retail business and obviously retail businesses, you know um you have to be a appropriately cost conscious those folks voice on a great job of really investing for the future will also be really, really efficient. And um it's been a it's been great partner with them and see the results that theyve achieved.

A little company ies say they are have focus now you really are customer focused. How can we see that?

So it's a great question because you write everybody does say their customer focused. And um I think that a lot of people think that customer focus is somehow an emotional attribute. Uh and on this emotional scale, you'll go from maybe disliking your customers.

We could all point a few, a few companies who don't seem to like their customers very much to maybe liking your customers. And then the highest on that scale would be, you know loving your customers. And I think in my opinion, that is not what customer obsession is really about, although I think loving your customers is a good thing.

But at amazon, and I think the reason why we actually ask to cost from obsessed, I think that what that means is two things. One, understanding customers at an a sibly deep level, a level that is hard to achieve, a level that takes effort continuously. And most companies, simply, you don't go through all of the energy, don't expand the energy and go through the effort required to understand, you know, on each one of their services, each use case, case.

What do customers really need for me? What real problems do they have? And then as hard as that is, that actually turns out to be the the easier of the two things.

The second is to ensure that every important decision you make is taken from the customer perspective. I've seen a lot of companies you know outside of here who they actually stand a fair amount about the customers. But when they decide to buy something, it's just about profit maxi za.

Or if they decide whether to build something, it's about, well, you can we afford to build IT and they kind of drop the customer perspective outside the door, you know, for some wear reason. And I think you have to have the discipline to say, we not only have all this knowledge about what customers really need, we are going to bring IT into the room and make sure that we are basing our decision around that. And you see that embody itself in a lot of different ways to amazon.

It's not just talk, it's not just a philosophy. One example is um we have this this fairly well known mechanism called the a press release slash FAQ process P R FAQ. What that means is that before we before we build anything of substance, a new service, a new ATS feature, we will actually write a full press release along with a full FAQ.

Doesn't matter whether we ever actually issue that press release or not. Um the idea being that you need to be able to describe in in, in detail why were your building matters, how it's going to delight customers or why would you bother to waste engineers time on IT. And that we call that are working backwards process. And it's a process that we actually got a number of customers who have seen, loved and and adopted, and we actually go into workshops with the a number of our customers to teach that technique is very powerful. A lot of our customers really uh uh a grasped IT.

It's interesting. I spoke to some of the people who were in charge of the selection of AWS a partner. And as you can imagine, we are a government entity entirely. So these processes are really thorough and can take a long time as they should. But one of the really different, different changing factors was that I was very likely to us that you really cared about us as a client and that spirit has endured off in the contract and you guys have really delivered so well.

That seems so basic. It's important RAID of U. S. I, my teams, all the your job is to go form long term trusted relationships and the business part will take care of for itself.

If you do that, I think so much springs from that. And people get really caught up and their on short term, uh, concerns that it's easy to forget that. And we try here to make sure that .

we don't you have some radical leadership principles which are publicly known. What is the most important one for you?

This is like choosing between your children. It's it's just not it's not fair. We have we have sixteen leadership principles.

They are not just in some manual, they are alive and well. I sometimes call them the Operating system of amazon or or the central nervous system. Uh, customer obsession is vital for sure. I I think the another one, which is absolutely core is invent and simplify, and that's really about innovating and also embodies principle that innovating doesn't mean just making things more complicated. IT means a uh, making them more powerful but also more simple and a we've always tried to move very fast as the company.

In fact, one of the reasons why AWS was founded was because amazon wanted to move faster and they wanted to create the shared layer of infrastructure services all the other teams of amazon could worry about. Their customers are not about infrastructure. And so we've I think we've built in many, many mechanisms to to move fast.

We we hire people who like to build, who are innovative. We organize for speed. A lot of people think speed is prior day. We think speed as a choice. And so we organize ourselves, but culturally as well as unit, just our teams themselves, to be able to innovate, be able to do IT really, really quickly. And so I think that invented simplify is incredibly important for customers, and it's actually been a huge advantage for amazon in the market segments were in as well.

You have something called a two pizza team.

What is that? So two pizza team. So, uh, the concept of that is aware of possible. You should have a team no larger than can be fed with two pizzas.

And uh, we've had a lot of teams that amazon over the years who actually are two pizza teams. And even when you know with our scale, uh you obviously have teams that they grow larger than that. And um we very often try to reactor or slice uh teams up to create even smaller, more nimble teams.

Um but even where we don't actually do that, it's it's the concept that's alive and well and the concept is you stay small stage number and very, very importantly, you know control your destiny. You know don't don't take dependencies. We don't have to on many other teams you know figure out how to uh be able to to to own your own progress, uh overcome your own obstacles and make rapid progress for customers.

What special about the meeting culture in amazon?

What we do do something which is unusual uh which is we we pretty much never use uh powerpoint to run an internal meeting um so for most internal meetings, uh somebody writes uh a narrative, uh A A document and uh IT can be short or could be up to six pages, no longer than six pages. And when we come to meeting the first thing we do, we say hello and we also didn't read.

So we might spend the first fifteen to thirty minutes of the meeting simply reading. And when everybody's finishing the document, there's no presentation. Somebody just is, okay, what questions do we have? And it's it's it's an incredibly powerful mechanism is to me is one of the the most powerful ways to uh uh h to move the business forward because IT creates real understanding with with with powerpoint bullets. It's it's so easy to be on the surface. Um it's so easy.

Also do not get through the material because uh, you just interrupt the presenter with the narrative you were forced IT is very obvious if if you have not thought through a problem problem deeply with a four page or six page a narrative um so you you have to have debt, the thought you have to have been able to layout all the issues are to have a good conversation. And in addition, it's very egalitarian by the end of reading the document. Everybody has the same information.

Nobody is special knowledge. And then uh anybody in the room, regardless of who they are um can ask questions and uh it's all from the same fact base. And so it's been a one of the most to me personally, one of the most amazing mechanisms that i've seen that amazon to really help create deep understanding, to make decisions, to move our businesses forward.

Moving on to leadership. What is the most chAllenging part of being the C E O.

A, W S? Uh, I would say, well, I sometimes joke that I I have I fear that I wake up in the morning and somebody, you'll tell me that I work at a big company. Now, I guess I do happen to work in a big company, but I never wanted to feel that way.

I never want our customers to feel that way. And um you know there's this concept of of insurgents versus in combs and insurgents don't mind disrupting insurgents, you know just want to create new things and want to create value. And in convents want to preserve value and worry about what they really have instead of worrying about what they can build for customers.

And I think you know very easy as you grow larger and you have revenue streams and you have businesses to slip into that and combine and mentality. And I think one of the most important jobs I have as a leader is to try remind everybody at date of us that IT is still day one. IT is very, very early in the cloud journey um that there's way more work to do than we have already done and that, uh, our customers demand and expect us to be innovating on their behalf. It's our job to do that and figure out how to create a good business for ourselves along the way, not to figure out how to create a good business and bring customers along with us. And I think you've got to have a lot of leadership, a lot of cultural mechanisms to continuously remind in everybody across what is now a pretty scale and pretty sizable team about, you know, how we believe we want to Operate and how we want our world to work.

You spend a few years outside amazon as A C E O of tabo. When you came back, how has your leadership changed? And also, how does your leadership changed with age .

and experience? I think that over time, partially, as you say, from agent experience and and partially from just being up to step away, a Operating in a different environment, getting a new look on the world. Um I think one thing i've really tried to focus on over the past few years is. Leading with empathy and some people confused, by the way, empathy with sympathy very different to me. Empathy means understanding, understanding.

So an understanding where people come from, understanding why they're saying what they're saying, instead of just focusing on the words coming out of somebody's mouth, trying to go back a step and understand you, are they saying this because they are worried about a program, but they saying this, you know what? What's going on or what's going on, the person in the human being where where they coming from? And in order to do that, i've tried to really, really focus as obviously that may sound, i've tried to really, really hard to focus on listening war over the past few years.

Can empathy be learned? Is IT an acquired skill?

absolutely. I think IT starts with your listening skill. So i've figured out over the past few years that I don't learn that much when I talk, and then I learned a lot more when I listen. So I think there they're very tactical things, very tangible things, I should say, like, like listening.

And would your wife agree to this?

On some days, on my Better day and maybe maybe not on all date, but good question. So I I think absolutely can be learned, like to think that i've gotten Better, not perfect, but Better and Better this over the years. And I think if you have empathy and really start and really listen and understand where people are coming from, that loves you to be.

You really open and honest. And I in return, and you know, I my personal leadership style, I I tried to really be an open and honest and transparent and let people understand what i'm thinking and why am thinking IT. And um I think that they really resonates with with most people.

If if they feel that you've brought them along the discussion, you've brought them along the decision process, you've had a voice, they've been heard. There's there's been thoughtful discussion. I've had many examples where i've had to make a decision, which in a lot of people disagree with.

And i've found that in the vast majority of cases, they don't like the fact we've decided to something that, that they wouldn't decided. But they're okay with IT. They're okay with that because of the process. They're okay because they feel respected, because they feel listen to and they trust that their leaders are um even if not always you know in complete agreement with them, that they have the uh best intentions and that they're going through thoughtful ll appropriate process.

How do you deal with stress?

stress? What's stress? Now we were in a very, very privileged, credible business.

I've incredible position. I'm very, very lucky. But IT is fast. Pato, of course, there their stress I think in a couple ways, one of which is at work, having a really, really good team and and knowing that I I can talk to the people in my team.

People used to tell me all the CEO job is very lonely. I've never found IT lonely. I think that's a choice.

And I don't find IT lonely because, uh, my senior leaders know what's going on. I don't keep things inside my own head. I share with them um they help me.

They make my ideas Better. They bring new ideas, which uh usually Better than mine. And we really Operate as a team, and I think that reduces my personal stress at work.

And then I think it's really important to set boundaries and to have time for h whatever IT is is important to you um for me, you know my families really important. Spending time with the families important. Um there's also some sporting things I love to do.

I love to water ski in the summer. I love to play tennessee around. And 一个 的 康。 About time for those things to to stay whole and to stay healthy.

Do you read?

I don't read nearly as much as I would like to um I I do read but um unfortunately this particular stage is a little more epithetic. I do love read. I've been been a life long rater since I was a little kid.

We have tens of thousands of Young people listen to this. What is your advice to them?

I think advice to Young people um well, I wish there is probably lot of advice I should have been given when I was Young. So what to choose? I would say maybe two things um one is um try to remember that you have a long life who play in a long career and and I think people early in their career are measured themselves against their there appears that they went to university with, that they started a job with and you know whether you do something twelve months earlier or later than I do, you know really doesn't matter.

What matters is the experience you again, so just gain experience, build skills, you know do things which you can see could be valuable to you down the line. And I promise that you if you gain those skills, that really won't matter that you know twenty years from now um that I had some promotion six months before you did um so just take that long term view about skill building. And the second thing i'd say, and I really wish that, you know I learned this earlier in my career, is this concept of being vocally self critical.

And most people are able to, very quickly, critic some boy's shirt a, whether they like the coffee or drinking that day, but when, when, when the camera turns on themselves, uh, they lose that objectivity because IT is painful and makes you insecure. And I think if you can understand what you're really good at, you're not so good at what you really want to work on. If you have the clarity of understanding, uh, it's the old age. You can't manage what you can't measure. And if you can't serve, understand yourself, how can you really hope to to know what to work on and I think if you can just be objective uh with yourself about what the things you want to work on on no matter how good you actually are other things um that is an incredibly powerful skill.

Well, it's been really great talking to you. We've been investing in amazon for more than twenty years, and we are just so grateful for all the value that you have created. And also thank you for running our Operations up in the cloud.

Well, it's it's a privilege, uh, we love working with you. We love working with all of our customers. Uh, we have an incredibly passionate a team, and we're just getting started, so will keep going fantastic.

Thank you so much.