Amazon Web Services
also referred to as: aws
part of Amazon
31 statements across 8 episodes · 18 bullish · 4 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Oct 19, 2021 by Ben Gilbert · said 287 times in 38 episodes since 2021 · across every show →
Mentions by year
brought up most by David Rosenthal (162), Ben Gilbert (102), Steve Ballmer (7), Ben Thompson (7), Christina Cacioppo (3), Sam Bankman-Fried (1), Packy McCormick (1), Mario Gabriele (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 27 mentions in 7 episodes 4 per episode
- Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- TSMC · Acquired
- 10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 20 mentions in 6 episodes 3 per episode
- Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- Hermès (Audio) · Acquired
- Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired
- Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- Starbucks (with Howard Schultz) · Acquired
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 17 mentions in 6 episodes 3 per episode
2022 215 mentions in 15 episodes 14 per episode
- Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- Amazon.com · Acquired
- Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- Arena Show Part I: Idea Dinner + YC Continuity · Acquired
- Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories · Acquired
- Qualcomm · Acquired
- Walmart · Acquired
- 7 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 8 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
Everything said about Amazon Web Services, oldest first
Oct 19, 2021 neutral
Gilbert: Spinning out AWS from Amazon would be value-neutral
“So I'm of the opinion that it, it's indifferent with Amazon. Like, I don't think that there's any value that's being like, first of all, we know the size of both businesses. I don't think the, that it's them both being under one umbrella is creating drag for e…”
Oct 19, 2021 negative
May 12, 2022 bullish
Jun 20, 2022 positive
Jun 20, 2022 positive
Aug 30, 2022 positive
Andrew Marks: Amazon proves great founders trump static business models
“And so he sort of talks about the primacy of business model over management, but I think Amazon's a great example of the opposite because You could have never dreamed that if you owned Amazon when the story was about growing as a retailer, you could have never…”
Sep 6, 2022 positive
Sep 6, 2022 neutral
Gilbert: Massive AWS data center investments drove Amazon free cash flow negative
“They just invested so much in building out new data centers for AWS, they actually took Amazon cash flow negative. Their free cash flow is massively negative over the last 12 months because of these continued, unbelievably large investments.”
Sep 6, 2022
Sep 6, 2022 positive
Gilbert: Targeting startups as a beachhead was key to AWS's success
“This is probably one of the biggest keys to success or sort of playbook Themes for why AWS became successful. They realized how perfect this was for startups. They realized how hard it would be for large enterprises to just wholesale move over. They realized t…”
Sep 6, 2022 neutral
Gilbert: Enterprise cloud providers must maintain failed services to protect customer trust
“When you launch a service for enterprise customers, it is really hard to kill it. You burn customer trust, and actually, if you think about what's the bigger risk, burning the trust and losing that customer in all their future revenue, or having to maintain ki…”
Sep 6, 2022 neutral
Sep 6, 2022 negative
Gilbert: Two-pizza teams caused AWS to launch a fragmented alphabet soup
“The other thing where they're sort of a victim of their own success is the Amazon two pizza team thing led them to launch all these different services. Rather than having a cohesive product strategy, AWS has kind of been alphabet soup.”
Sep 6, 2022 positive
Rosenthal: AWS was built to scale, not to monetize excess seasonal capacity
“The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity. Actually, within two months after launch, AWS would have already burned through the excess amazon.com capacity. Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itsel…”
Sep 6, 2022 positive
Rosenthal: Building with web primitives makes the internet the operating system
“Andy would later say, this is a great quote, and this is absolutely true. He says, if you believe developers will build applications from scratch using web services as primitive building blocks, Then the operating system becomes the internet. And that's so tru…”
Sep 6, 2022
Sep 6, 2022 bullish
Sep 6, 2022 positive
Gilbert: AWS operating profit exceeds Amazon retail despite being 15% of revenue
“AWS's revenue is only about 15% the size of Amazon's massive retail business, but their profits, or the operating income, to be specific, from AWS Are in total the same, if not more than their e-commerce store. I think it's the case that every year since 2015,…”
Sep 6, 2022 neutral
Sep 6, 2022 positive
Gilbert: AWS succeeded by launching unopinionated infrastructure primitives
“They truly were unopinionated about this as a platform. They said, we're going to launch with primitives. It's the most basic story. That's the most basic compute. It's the most basic way to host your databases. It's the most basic CDN. And we can't wait to se…”
Sep 6, 2022 bullish
Sep 6, 2022 negative
Sep 6, 2022 neutral
Rosenthal: Original 2002 AWS was an Associates catalog API, not cloud infrastructure
“This is called Amazon Web Services, but it is not. Cloud-based IT infrastructure. It's other developers using the amazon.com product catalog, and indeed it lives. Amazon Web Services lives within the Amazon Associates program, and that is run by a guy named Co…”
Sep 6, 2022 bullish
Gilbert: Data gravity gives AWS an ML moat over Google's superior models
“What's becoming clearer to me is the machine learning capabilities that Amazon has need to be good, but they actually don't need to be as good as Google's. Because here's sort of the strategy with machine learning. You're gonna use whatever ML is available wit…”
Sep 6, 2022 positive
Sep 6, 2022 negative
Gilbert: Microsoft and Google initially missed the cloud wave via PaaS
“And the unfortunate thing for Microsoft and for Google, who really started at this platform as a service layer, was you basically didn't get the startups because you didn't have a mature platform yet that people were excited to build on and understood how to b…”
Sep 6, 2022 bullish
Sep 6, 2022 positive
Sep 6, 2023 neutral
Cloud instances cost $30 hourly for A100s and $100 hourly for H100s
“You can get access to a DGX server. That's eight A 100 for about 30 bucks an hour, or you can go over to AWS and get a P five dot 48 X large instance, which is eight H 100, which I believe is an HGX server for about a hundred dollars an hour.”
Jul 22, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Meta Built a Hyperscaler-Sized Data Center Footprint Exclusively for Internal Use
“They now last year spent twenty-eight billion dollars in capex, which you should mostly read as data centers. They operate a Hyper-scaler-sized data center footprint, give or take. You know, you think AWS, Azure, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. Meta is the fourth…”