Amazon Web Services, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Amazon Web Services comes up
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 29:04 Ben Gilbert Also, very funny to interview Matt Garman from AWS at his own event.
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 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
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 3:26:38 Ben Gilbert So this kind of becomes one of the pillars of their strategy is you want multi-cloud?
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 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
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 0:47 Ben Gilbert They make the chips for a whole bunch of other fabless companies like Qualcomm, AMD, Broadcom, and hyperscalers like AWS.
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 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
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 3:46:03 Ben Gilbert We are platform as a service, which was distinctly different than AWS, which was we are infrastructure as a service.
- ▶ 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.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 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
- ▶ 26:31 Ben Gilbert This actually reminds me a bit of our episode on Amazon and AWS on how companies can take
Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 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.
Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:39:44 Ben Gilbert Crusoe is a cloud infrastructure provider, just like AWS and Azure, that is 100% purpose-built for AI training and inference.
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 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,…
- ▶ 1:43:49 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.
- ▶ 1:54:49 Ben Gilbert We've got market size unconstrained with the original AWS logo.
Enron · Acquired
- ▶ 3:31:11 Ben Gilbert You can get a market size unconstrained shirt in two different variations with the original AWS logo inspired design.
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 12:41 Ben Gilbert But almost none of these spend a material amount of time on AWS other than
- ▶ 18:23 Ben Gilbert How is Amazon supposed to serve their AWS customers if all of them are on excess capacity during Q four at all?
- ▶ 18:32 Ben Gilbert and I just took a dependency and all of my streaming is happening on AWS.
- ▶ 29:18 Ben Gilbert And that was just within Amazon Associates at this point, because the whole point in this origin story, the scope of the ambition of AWS was to make available assets of Amazon.com to our affiliates, to Amazon Associates, who want to…
- ▶ 30:30 Ben Gilbert And I think people today have heard AWS so many times that they sort of forget that it's a little bit of a misnomer.
- ▶ 30:38 Ben Gilbert It's still called Amazon Web Services, but
- ▶ 30:41 Ben Gilbert The vast majority of what is happening when customers are paying the ludicrous amount of revenue to Amazon to access AWS is not web services.
- ▶ 1:00:50 Ben Gilbert Andy right away took over the publishing of images via the Amazon Associates API, that sort of fledgling AWS.
- ▶ 1:19:41 Ben Gilbert So no joke, David, every month I get a bill from AWS for like 71 cents and I have no idea what old project it was for, but it's one of these things where it's like it's priced so dynamically.
- ▶ 1:20:02 Ben Gilbert But because it was an abandoned project for which I do not know what the email address to log into AWS is from whatever team I was working on, I kind of just don't care.
- ▶ 1:22:34 Ben Gilbert Themes for why AWS became successful.
- ▶ 1:22:50 Ben Gilbert But for startups who were building something from scratch, who could go on to become 50 plus billion dollar companies, my god, let's get them on AWS.
- ▶ 1:23:02 Ben Gilbert I mean, I remember the first time I met Dave Chappelle, who was doing developer evangelism for AWS early with Jeff Barr and so many other folks there.
- ▶ 1:23:10 Ben Gilbert It was just a breath of fresh air where every happy hour you went to, there were AWS people who were giving you tons of free credits, who were helping introduce you to other people for your startup.
- ▶ 1:23:28 Ben Gilbert Obvious default that you would build on AWS because it felt so ingrained with how you make startups is you start an AWS account for the thing that you're going to build.
- ▶ 1:24:36 Ben Gilbert So I think there's this interesting, obvious first beachhead of customers that are startups, but when you think about the enterprise adoption and how eventually now, you know, your bank's application is on AWS and everything is moving to…
- ▶ 1:29:13 Ben Gilbert Now, AWS in its earliest days, let's call it the first couple years, was really startup focused.
- ▶ 1:29:45 Ben Gilbert So very quickly, AWS could serve these two markets of startups and the lift and shift enterprise.
- ▶ 1:32:03 Ben Gilbert Actually, we're going to use AWS instead.
- ▶ 1:32:51 Ben Gilbert But the Netflix one, I mean, a lot of people were afraid to use AWS early on because they felt like they didn't want to do business with Amazon if they were a retailer, or they didn't want to do business with Amazon if they were in video,…
- ▶ 1:33:07 Ben Gilbert Matter of factly and so forcefully was him saying, you can trust that AWS is different than Amazon.
- ▶ 1:37:05 Ben Gilbert And they start directly attacking Microsoft too, because I think Microsoft went from in the early days, someone where Amazon looked at them more as a partner, like we're happy to run Microsoft stuff on your AWS instances.
- ▶ 1:39:47 Ben Gilbert And they just totally did not recognize the magical thing they had in front of them, which was all the customers and all the distribution who over the next five years would slowly dribble out and start their new stuff on AWS while…
- ▶ 1:45:04 Ben Gilbert Their first big contracts were with universities doing research and running effectively like their supercomputer loads on AWS.
- ▶ 1:53:34 Ben Gilbert Well, in 2014, Jeff Bezos wrote a memo, the annual memo that comes out to letter to shareholders, and said that quote, I believe that AWS is market size unconstrained.
- ▶ 1:53:48 Ben Gilbert That was the point at which it was a year before they broke out AWS's financials, and I think it was a six billion dollar run rate business.
- ▶ 1:56:30 Ben Gilbert Senior Vice President of AWS.
- ▶ 1:59:35 Ben Gilbert AWS makes 90 plus percent gross margins on their bandwidth charges.
- ▶ 2:01:21 Ben Gilbert You're gonna run your ML on AWS.
- ▶ 2:02:16 Ben Gilbert It stores data in AWS and other public clouds, and it is its own fifty billion dollar company.
- ▶ 2:02:48 Ben Gilbert It's probably AWS's biggest failure.
- ▶ 2:03:31 Ben Gilbert And it's funny that the playbook that Snowflake ran is pretty similar to the playbook that AWS ran when they were just S three and EC two serving individual developers.
- ▶ 2:04:51 Ben Gilbert Rather than having a cohesive product strategy, AWS has kind of been alphabet soup.
- ▶ 2:04:57 Ben Gilbert And I haven't logged into the AWS dashboard in a while, but it used to just be so overwhelming.
- ▶ 2:05:59 Ben Gilbert And AWS keeps launching even more new, new services now to provide those guardrails and say, well, if you use
- ▶ 2:11:15 Ben Gilbert Yeah, let's start with power, because I think AWS is actually one of the best case studies in power of all time.
- ▶ 2:11:40 Ben Gilbert David, when AWS broke out their financials, they were at, did you say, 19%?
- ▶ 2:11:50 Ben Gilbert Now they're at 30%.
- ▶ 2:11:52 Ben Gilbert They've gotten more profitable when the landscape got more competitive.
- ▶ 2:15:31 Ben Gilbert I mean, by being the leader at this point, they're just winning.
- ▶ 2:19:56 Ben Gilbert They have spun up something where you can sort of build your applications in the cloud now, but I assume it's all just white labeled AWS or Microsoft.
- ▶ 2:20:09 Ben Gilbert I do know Facebook uses AWS.
- ▶ 2:20:20 Ben Gilbert But then they also use AWS for some stuff.
- ▶ 2:21:40 Ben Gilbert They just invested so much in building out new data centers for AWS, they actually took Amazon cash flow negative.
- ▶ 2:25:01 Ben Gilbert Well, AWS sort of has the same thing going on where it's the ASML machines are much more scarce than the servers that AWS is buying, but it's unbelievably helpful for AWS to win market share so they can
- ▶ 2:25:47 Ben Gilbert So then here's a sort of thing that is unfortunate about AWS relative to the amazon.com business.
- ▶ 2:26:48 Ben Gilbert Incredible business model, the negative cash conversion cycle thing that they have in the retail business in AWS.
- ▶ 2:27:25 Ben Gilbert All right, another one I had is, I was reading from friends of the show, Tegas, they had this great transcript that I was reading from a former AWS business development person on, uh, kind of the obsession around multi-cloud, and it got me…
- ▶ 2:28:19 Ben Gilbert In the most recent AWS keynote, they announced a bunch of services which are AWS cloud services that run in your data center, where Amazon employees come and install servers and maintain servers in your data center.
- ▶ 2:32:03 Ben Gilbert But yeah, this is the year after he makes the market-sized unconstrained comment about AWS.
- ▶ 2:32:58 Ben Gilbert AWS is a venture bet in their portfolio that they own 100% of.
- ▶ 2:34:41 Ben Gilbert Well, AWS is different.
- ▶ 2:35:22 Ben Gilbert They launched something in 2013 called AppStream to run mobile apps in the cloud, but the commitment to maintaining these things is just completely different in AWS than in the consumer business, and the biggest illustration is SimpleDB.
- ▶ 2:36:13 Ben Gilbert Here's probably the most interesting way to think about, and actually, I'm gonna stretch this out from just AWS and talk about all of Amazon.
- ▶ 2:37:57 Ben Gilbert Continue operating the way that they have and continue finding more AWS's, or at some point they need to realize, oh, there's the edge of the TAM.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 2:56 Ben Gilbert In Amazon Web Services, and we'll save that for our next episode.
- ▶ 2:29:03 Ben Gilbert What if Jeff still owns a percent of Google, whether Google Cloud wins or whether AWS wins?
- ▶ 3:14:14 Ben Gilbert There's a lot more to talk about here before we get into AWS, but I think, um,
- ▶ 3:46:31 Ben Gilbert They are financing the business entirely with Float until, of course, we'll get to AWS, and now they can actually finance it a lot more with just straight up operating income.
- ▶ 3:59:53 Ben Gilbert They never broke AWS out.
- ▶ 4:10:46 Ben Gilbert Although Echo, to me, falls under AWS, but maybe not.
- ▶ 4:11:47 Ben Gilbert And of course, AWS would still come, their market cap would absolutely explode.
- ▶ 4:11:54 Ben Gilbert They've turned on the ability, especially with AWS, to get very profitable in the future.
- ▶ 4:22:13 Ben Gilbert Man, I cannot wait to dive into AWS research.
Walmart · Acquired
- ▶ 2:58:10 Ben Gilbert And it's a little bit of a deceptive graph because part of it is AWS.
The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories · Acquired
- ▶ 46:54 Ben Gilbert Like, AWS got probably a five-year lead on cloud by piling people on the plane from Seattle, going down to the Bay Area, evangelizing like crazy to all these startups.
- ▶ 1:04:02 Ben Gilbert As we talked about earlier, you could argue they still wouldn't be profitable today if it weren't for AWS,
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