Amazon

“That will probably be one of the smallest compute deals that will happen in, in our future.”

“So whether it was Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, All people who build ARM-based server chips, they were all on board, and I think the ultimate proof point was when we announced the product last March, we had Jensen, we had Ronnie Boker, we had Amin, we had…”

“What I'm telling you is that the anecdotes typically show you that your metric is incomplete, that it's not capturing some part of the customer's experience that actually matters, and both the metric is right and the customer is right. The metric is just incom…”

“The only people capable of financing a state-of-the-art frontier model in the United States of America has been the hyperscalers themselves. The only reason Entropic and OpenAI exist is because Microsoft, Google, and Amazon gave them enough money to play becau…”

“The only incumbents are only interested in what the other incumbents are doing. Microsoft is worried way more about what Amazon and Google are doing than anyone in a startup space.”

“A book's, Bought in a bookstore, discovered in a bookstore is a better book. Same book, but it's a better book. And also it's just nice and enjoyable. These are places in which people will want to continue to come.”

“There was this sort of obsession that people were coming into our stores and photographing books and then ordering them Amazon and, or coming in and choosing books and then downloading them on their Kindles. And it was, which just simply doesn't happen except …”

“AWS, contrary to sort of popular thought, was not spare Amazon capacity. Actually, it took a long time to get Amazon.com onto AWS, but the, what it drove was the understanding that we need to have a scalable, we can't be having so many meetings. Like, we need …”

“Given they have so many investments in the real world, their core business feels so impervious to AI for like the model version of AI. It will benefit from AI. But their moat feels deeper than anyone as far as their core business and their ability to just sort…”

“Their ultimate competitors are the hyperscalers, particularly Google and Amazon. So Google and Amazon aren't just building their own chips, but they're also looking to sell those chips externally.”

“The longer we have enough power, the more time Amazon has to make Trinium better. The more time Google has to make TPUs competitive from an efficiency standpoint. And if we get in a world where, this is a world where those margins seem very hard to sustain.”

“And then you have like duration mismatch between like the hard assets and the financing. So like the chip, depending if you look at meta or Amazon debate, whether it's a three year or five year depreciation, but it's, you know, called three, the debt, Amortize…”

“What we do know it will do is raise the cost of packages by about five dollars and 20 cents per package, and it will cost families 664 dollars more per year, and it puts something like 5000 jobs at risk.”

“When Jeff Bezos raised Amazon's first million bucks in ninety-five-ish, he took 60 meetings, he got 40 rejections, and he told every investor the same thing. He figured there was a 70% chance they would lose their entire investment.”

“Amazon and Google in some cases are far longer. I think Google has some that are 40 years. Amazon might too.”

“Even if down the road, like those two actually do make it out and you know, break out on their own and become two of the new you know, tech behemoths that are public companies, they will eventually obviously just have their own clouds. They're not going to be,…”

“There are gigantic tech partners like Snowflake and Databricks and Google and Amazon. They don't care about you when you're two people or 10 people or whatever.”

“I had lunch years ago, decades ago, with Jeff Bezos. I was invited to a lunch, and someone smarter than me said, what do you spend your time doing? And he said, 50% of my time is bums on seats. That's never left me.”

“And additionally, VLM also work closely with all the hardware vendors. So that means across like NVIDIA, AMD, Google, and Amazon, Intel, and a lot more, their newest chip will make sure VLM can run on them. And then a lot of cases they use VLM as a benchmark t…”

“In other words, because they're 70% of the Google Compute backlog, the 70% of the Amazon backlog.”

“In some ways I worry for Amazon, which is like, Heads I lose, tails I lose. It's like, if this all goes well and AGI happens, they're not well positioned for that. And then if it doesn't happen, they're kind of in the bath with everybody else on the capex that…”

“If we look at operating cash flow, not free cash flow, operating cash flow from Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon has reported accelerated from 28 to 32. There are some actually pretty big unusual items now, like these hyperscalers, they always seem to have, like, b…”

“You know, you can pull data now on a hex thread. That is basically what it would take a week, two weeks with an Amazon L seven, you know, a data scientist in 2017.”

“One of my very many failed investor pitches was in 2015 when Jeff Bezos passed on our seed round at Boom. And then he wrote the 2015 Amazon shareholder letter about how there's certain things that only big companies can do. And he cited airliners as one of the…”

“He was laughed at internally and laughed at by his board when he launched Amazon Web Services. He was laughed at by the world for e-commerce.”

“The premise for the company, which was let's bring Dev and Ops together into one platform was actually completely central to the explosion of the cloud. And we also completely underestimated the explosion of the cloud with, oh, that's interesting. There's this…”

“And the third thing Player almost always tends to be someone who says, great, I will help you both find something, trust the counterparty, and underwrite the risk on both transactions. Amazon. And usually, in the marketplace of, like, on the internet, the thir…”

“But I think a better way to deal with this problem is to not have the chain of command Like, to minimize the number of people who can say no, and only have people that you want and trust to do things.”

“And they have this program called Hands Off the Wheel, where they basically took past purchase data, things like what people bought, and what zip codes, and what season, and predicted how to stock their fulfillment centers with what products, when, and at what…”

“Yeah, so I came with the original adept folks, and when we came, we convinced leadership that in order to do frontier level research, we really needed to keep an operating model that was more like a startup. We needed to insulate our research and be able to fo…”

“Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. The most successful companies make the core progression to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets, a part of their founding narrative, just lik…”

“Every single company that buys NVIDIA chips and is spending a lot of money on NVIDIA chips is trying really hard to make these other, other chips work, whether it's in-house chips from Google or Amazon or even in OpenAI's case and potentially Anthropik's case.”

“I don't think I wouldn't call Microsoft now the second. I probably would rank them fourth now. I think you've seen Amazon step up pretty dramatically, and you've seen them at the frontier of a bunch of, you know, unique type of deals.”

“Increasingly, you basically look at Amazon or Microsoft, how many gigawatts they're building every quarter? Half of that is going to either both of them combined, right? Open AI and Anthropic.”

“It's actually becoming a pretty existential risk for NVIDIA because if they don't support the NeoClouds, they're at risk of basically seeing Google Amazon and others take tremendous market share on the silicon side, right? So you would see Tranium take, take m…”

“The bulk of these contracted loads, I think at the end of 25, we had like a 150 gigawatts the PPL, you know, in, in, in Pennsylvania. That's mostly Google and Amazon. They're the ones sort of scouting all of the utility markets and you know, putting deposits a…”

“Good leaders often are right. I think there's something very, very, very meaningful there. Like you have to be right. And if you're not, then you probably shouldn't be a founder.”

“Microsoft just announced a two and a half billion dollar investment to stand up in FDE, or Amazon is spending a billion dollars to create an FDE.”

“And remember, this is a company with an 18.7 billion dollars of revenue total. I mean, Amazon, it surpassed its market cap. Amazon has seven hundred fifty billion dollars in revenue. Like this is a company that's losing four billion dollars.”

“Amazon hosts Anthropics models in the, in what they call bedrock. This includes in all of the classified spaces. So if the NSA is using Anthropics models. It is running in AWS secret cloud or top secret cloud.”

“EBay could have been Amazon.”

“Microsoft historically has been pretty good about it too. More on the research side, Amazon is, is stellar and actually deploying a lot of this.”

“Then the information reported that Andy Jassy at Amazon had raised concerns with the senior administration officials about jailbreaking. The risk of jailbreaking fable and getting access to all of Anthropic.”

“When we started perplexity, we had like around 200,000 dollars worth of Amazon credits and GCP credits and Azure credits. That almost like together, cumulatively, this was worth like a million dollars in compute credits.”

“And in fact, Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the C staff used to be someone who'd been the tech assistant to Bezos.”

“If they just do absolutely nothing, Just absolutely nothing. Just sit there and run the business. Let their Amazon data center contract roll up. These guys will be generating 50 dollars a share of free cash flow per year.”

“Why Amazon was, you know, they had a big burn rate, but then Uber took it to a new level but now it's had an, they've added a zero.”

“You have a pretty safe bet that Google, Meta, Amazon Microsoft, Apple produce more profits than the entire telecoms industry.”

“Now we're getting more clarity that more than half of the backlog, hence probably the revenue too, Is coming from basically anthropic slash open AI. If you look at Google and Microsoft is more than half open AI. Amazon is more than half. So they invest with op…”

“Cigarette volume has been declining at seven, eight percent in US. And guess what, last five years? Altria has outperformed Mera. I think now Microsoft and Amazon last five years.”

“I worry that we're going to not get a seamless move into like a one single place where we can do all of this, like the sort of the pie in the sky version that you're talking about, where there's one tool, but instead we have to use like Three or four different…”

“And what they did was they signed deals with these carriers. They calculated the average book size, and they made a fixed cost deal where all the data sort of forever was included in the price of the hardware. You bought this thing for one time cost, and it ju…”

“We give it the task to train a face recognition model on us. So it became super excited about this and has like check-ins every half an hour where it tries to like identify as many people as it can. And it started offering us like, Hey, Axel I'll buy something…”

“I've seen people at Amazon actually tell Jeff Bezos, you run an evil company while working for it. Like, why are we evil? I had an all hands, a guy, you know, said, we seem to avoid taxes. Why are you such a tax dodger?”

“He went from making about 300,000 and making about three quarters of a million in one jump.”

“At Amazon, we had an ownership leadership principle, which is part of how Amazon runs. It has a set of principles. And at one point they were considering removing it and I led the fight to keep it. And some of the words in it That I helped create, say an owner…”

“Like my first team that built this version of prime video that failed at the demo was only seven people.”

“I'd rather pay to get two of something because I find when I force people to collaborate too soon, they gridlock and argue about priorities, and what I actually get is nothing. And so I'd rather pay for two Then get zero, and if we're so lucky as to get two wo…”

“He often said we need to be strategically patient, but tactically impatient. And what he meant by that was really valuable things take time to build.”

“Jeff hated PowerPoint and the famous story why it it's old now, but when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, They went and found the PowerPoint slide had been used to justify the launch. And this PowerPoint had like seven levels of nested bullets and the ti…”