Amazon Web Services, every mention

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every year anyone David Rosenthal 162Ben Gilbert 102Steve Ballmer 7Ben Thompson 7Christina Cacioppo 3Sam Bankman-Fried 1Packy McCormick 1Mario Gabriele 1Brinton Johns 1Andrew Marks 1

Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Amazon Web Services comes up

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10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired Dec 15, 2025 · 2 mentions

Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired Oct 27, 2025 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 33:13 Ben Gilbert And listeners, for anyone going to AWS reInvent, we will be there with the JP Morgan payments team.
  • ▶ 33:18 Ben Gilbert We're doing a big interview on stage with AWS CEO Matt Garman and more.

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired Oct 6, 2025 · 8 mentions

  • ▶ 1:06:43 David Rosenthal For lots of reasons, but even more so than any other given startup in the 2010 era, it's not like they can just go spin up an AWS instance and like build an app and deploy it to the app store.
  • ▶ 2:12:29 Ben Gilbert I wonder if they did talk to AWS at all about it.
  • ▶ 2:12:34 Ben Gilbert I hesitate to say it out loud, but I think AWS was actually in the very first investment with Elon in open AI.
  • ▶ 2:12:49 Ben Gilbert That AWS actually was in that nonprofit round.
  • ▶ 3:24:03 Ben Gilbert Super different than what AWS was doing at the time and what they're still doing today, which the whole world eventually realized was right, which is cloud should be infrastructure as a service.
  • ▶ 3:26:25 David Rosenthal So we can offer this tool a kind of counterposition against AWS and Azure.
  • ▶ 3:26:38 Ben Gilbert So this kind of becomes one of the pillars of their strategy is you want multi-cloud?
  • ▶ 3:32:03 David Rosenthal Maybe there will be TPUs in AWS or Azure someday, but I don't think they would have been able to start there.

Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired Aug 26, 2025 · 2 mentions

The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired Jun 2, 2025 · 7 mentions

Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired Apr 21, 2025 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 2:56:18 Ben Gilbert Some are on-prem at hospitals, some are in our cloud, some are on AWS, some are on Azure, but either way, there's all this interesting structured patient data that
  • ▶ 3:03:53 David Rosenthal It's kind of like the Jeff Bezos quote about AWS in the early days that he wanted to be like an irrational and irresponsible decision not to use AWS.

TSMC · Acquired Jan 21, 2025 · 4 mentions

Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired Dec 16, 2024 · 2 mentions

Meta (Audio) · Acquired Oct 28, 2024 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 5:27:29 Ben Gilbert You know, you think AWS, Azure, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.
  • ▶ 6:10:52 Ben Gilbert They're a AWS scale technology company, but they don't take outside customers, so they only have to build for their own internal use cases.

Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired Jul 22, 2024 · 9 mentions

  • ▶ 2:37:23 Ben Gilbert So back to Pilot, and speaking of Bill, we talk all the time on Acquired about one of his Seattle neighbors, Jeff Bezos, and the AWS-inspired axiom that startups should focus on what makes your beer taste better.
  • ▶ 3:21:14 David Rosenthal Yeah, Amazon can go from e-commerce to AWS.
  • ▶ 3:45:49 unnamed speaker AWS.
  • ▶ 3:46:03 Ben Gilbert We are platform as a service, which was distinctly different than AWS, which was we are infrastructure as a service.
  • ▶ 3:50:01 David Rosenthal On the other hand, the counterargument to that is, this is actually Microsoft's competitive advantage versus AWS.
  • ▶ 4:20:16 David Rosenthal Actually, I would say they had some of it in the development of Azure, because they could say to Fortune 500, we will do hybrid cloud with you, and we can be your trusted partner in a way that AWS couldn't.
  • ▶ 4:20:30 Ben Gilbert Counterposition against AWS.
  • ▶ 4:22:04 Ben Gilbert Yeah, the question is, did they become more trusted by the enterprise, where if you're offered the exact same service from Microsoft and AWS, are you more willing to pay Microsoft for it?
  • ▶ 4:50:01 Ben Gilbert Well, with that, you should check out our previous episode, Microsoft Volume One, if you've already heard that, check out our AWS episode.

Starbucks (with Howard Schultz) · Acquired Jun 4, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 2:08:58 David Rosenthal We talk all the time on Acquired about Jeff Bezos' AWS-inspired axiom that startups should focus on what makes your beer taste better.

Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired Apr 22, 2024 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 22:02 David Rosenthal There is a local startup coming out of the University of Washington called the Computer Center Corporation, or C-Cubed, and the business plan behind C-Cubed was that they were gonna get a bunch of decks, a bunch of PDP, eights, tens, 11,…
  • ▶ 2:24:39 Ben Gilbert Well, back to Pilot, and speaking of incredibly successful Seattle business people, we talk all the time on Acquired about Jeff Bezos' AWS-inspired axiom that startups should focus on what makes their beer taste better, i.e. only spend…

Hermès (Audio) · Acquired Feb 20, 2024 · 4 mentions

Holiday Special 2023 (Audio) · Acquired Dec 18, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 33:17 David Rosenthal At this rate, they're going to need to call up Andy Jassy and talk about some of those AWS bills.

Visa (Audio) · Acquired Nov 27, 2023 · 1 mention

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang · Acquired Oct 16, 2023 · 1 mention

Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired Sep 6, 2023 · 10 mentions

  • ▶ 25:19 David Rosenthal It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure.
  • ▶ 1:12:15 David Rosenthal This is AWS.
  • ▶ 1:22:19 Ben Gilbert I think Azure and AWS were where I looked.
  • ▶ 1:22:24 Ben Gilbert 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.
  • ▶ 1:26:02 David Rosenthal And even more for Nvidia, more important longer term, for enterprises that buy this, Nvidia now has a direct sales relationship with those companies, not necessarily intermediated by sales through Azure or Google or AWS, even though
  • ▶ 2:10:40 David Rosenthal But obviously Google is not going to be in AWS and Azure and Oracle and all the new cloud providers.
  • ▶ 2:21:30 Ben Gilbert So think back to our AWS episode.
  • ▶ 2:21:33 Ben Gilbert We talked a lot about how AWS is just locked in.
  • ▶ 2:23:26 David Rosenthal Yeah, there is a mile of distance, metaphorically, between like an Equinix and a AWS.
  • ▶ 2:25:51 David Rosenthal AWS is.

Costco (Audio) · Acquired Aug 21, 2023 · 2 mentions

Nike (Audio) · Acquired Jul 25, 2023 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 1:07:40 David Rosenthal So just like AWS and Azure,
  • ▶ 1:07:46 David Rosenthal So just like Phil Knight had the crazy idea of taking on Adidas with Blue Ribbon, Crusoe and its founders, Chase and Cully, had the crazy idea a few years ago that they could take on AWS and Azure.

Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired Dec 6, 2022 · 13 mentions

  • ▶ 1:40:26 Ben Gilbert David and I did seven hours of Amazon.com and then a big AWS episode, and our, I mean, at least my big takeaway was, it is day two, and day two is about becoming a profitable company where the big sell story of tomorrow is realized today,…
  • ▶ 1:42:24 David Rosenthal Do you think that applies to AWS too, or is that different?
  • ▶ 1:42:28 Ben Thompson Realistically, the challenge for AWS is number one, what's going to happen with the real dry up in startup formation and easy money in that space.
  • ▶ 1:42:40 Ben Thompson They're sort of the default choice for startups.
  • ▶ 1:43:30 Ben Thompson AWS is the Microsoft word of cloud providers in that they have an absolute absurd number of features and the interface is pretty terrible, but every single customer is completely dependent on one of those features.
  • ▶ 1:43:47 Ben Thompson And that actually ends up being their modes.
  • ▶ 1:43:49 Ben Gilbert We were researching the episode and we were talking to long-time AWS veterans to sort of understand the mental framework to talk about them today, and that became very clear that AWS doesn't deprecate features.
  • ▶ 1:44:00 Ben Gilbert Amazon will kill stuff, kill a Fire Phone, kill local delivery for food, they'll kill all kinds of stuff, but in AWS land, if a customer is depending on something, AWS's long-term enterprise value is determined by customers believing that…
  • ▶ 1:44:16 Ben Gilbert They don't deprecate services, even when those services end up flipping upside down on the unit economics, and they have to, like, maintain a costly service that they never figured out how to optimize.
  • ▶ 1:44:26 Ben Thompson Right, and every time a customer does something custom for AWS, it's a lock-in, right?
  • ▶ 1:44:57 Ben Thompson Well, Passport's not moving off AWS.
  • ▶ 1:45:31 Ben Thompson And Amazon doesn't WS obviously Microsoft is doing that with Azure and the Silicon Valley companies are just very, very bad at that.
  • ▶ 1:54:49 Ben Gilbert We've got market size unconstrained with the original AWS logo.

Enron · Acquired Nov 29, 2022 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 3:31:11 Ben Gilbert You can get a market size unconstrained shirt in two different variations with the original AWS logo inspired design.

Qualcomm · Acquired Nov 15, 2022 · 2 mentions

Benchmark Part I · Acquired Sep 28, 2022 · 7 mentions

  • ▶ 12:59 David Rosenthal It wasn't like you could just have an idea for a company, spin something up on AWS, put it on the internet, get distribution for free on social.
  • ▶ 1:19:10 David Rosenthal It's like the AWS episode and the like multiple origins of AWS.
  • ▶ 1:35:27 David Rosenthal The Jeff Bezos mega theme that we talk about all the time that we dove deep in the last episode on AWS of, you know, focus on what makes your beer taste better.
  • ▶ 2:10:27 David Rosenthal There was no AWS yet.
  • ▶ 2:17:30 David Rosenthal But now the interesting, there is this interregnum period, like it wasn't until after AWS that all this became possible, which wasn't until the mid 2000.
  • ▶ 2:42:01 David Rosenthal And he also got all of these new folks and Bill got what AWS meant for the industry and Series A investing and the difference between formation stage and seed investing and investing in data and traction.
  • ▶ 2:43:12 David Rosenthal That all of a sudden became true at that moment in time, thanks to AWS, thanks to the Facebook platform, and where you could now do these series A's, these still early stage quote unquote investments, where there was no product risk, there…

Amazon Web Services · Acquired Sep 6, 2022 · 13 mentions

  • ▶ 2:41 Ben Gilbert Well, listeners, of course, on our last episode, we talked about Amazon's retail business, and today we are talking about Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing pioneer, and those margin percentages that I just used are the real ones for…
  • ▶ 2:57 Ben Gilbert 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
  • ▶ 3:13 Ben Gilbert I think it's the case that every year since 2015, when they started breaking out AWS's financials, the total operating income from AWS has actually been bigger than the retail business.
  • ▶ 10:48 David Rosenthal So I don't even know what the right word is to use to describe AWS.
  • ▶ 10:57 David Rosenthal I don't think there's anything you can say that captures how big and how important AWS is.
  • ▶ 11:31 David Rosenthal But everybody also needed to be on the internet and the internet runs on AWS.
  • ▶ 11:41 David Rosenthal So there's no like everything store book dedicated to AWS.
  • ▶ 11:50 David Rosenthal And there actually are quite a few conflicting and competing stories about what the true origin is of AWS.
  • ▶ 12:41 Ben Gilbert But almost none of these spend a material amount of time on AWS other than
  • ▶ 12:51 David Rosenthal So we identify, you're referring to one origin story of AWS.
  • ▶ 12:56 David Rosenthal We identified not one, not two, not three, but four separate origin stories.
  • ▶ 13:04 David Rosenthal I think there is something important to learn about what AWS is and about Amazon and about Amazon culture in all of these.
  • ▶ 18:16 David Rosenthal It's not what we're talking about with AWS.
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