Rauch: AWS started as e-commerce APIs, not spare hardware capacity
Guillermo Rauch · Guillermo Rauch: Why Software Development Will Never Be the Same · Jun 26, 2025 · at 37:32
Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, discusses the history of Amazon Web Services (AWS) during a podcast interview with FirstMark GP Matt Turck.
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“A lot of people believe that AWS started out because it had spare hardware. If you listen to the AWS episode on the acquired podcast, the story is actually way more interesting. The reason that it's called Amazon web services. Is that there was a hypothesis in the world that when APIs and web services started coming out, people were going to create mashups of applications. Remember even the term mashup? That was like a big principle of web two point O. And so Amazon believed that they needed to create a web services for amazon.com inventory and products, et cetera. And that was going to be Amazon Web Services.”
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