Amazon
includes Amazon Web Services, Amazon Kindle, Amazon Alexa, Amazon S3, Amazon Prime, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Polly, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Basics, Amazon EC2, Amazon Echo, Amazon Reviews
49 statements across 21 episodes · 14 bullish · 12 bearish · 21 people on the record · first statement Jun 1, 2017 by Jason Kilar · said 405 times in 88 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Dr. Werner Vogels (44), Craig Cannon (32), Jason Kilar (29), Kyle Corbitt (25), Ryan Petersen (22), Michael Babineau (13), Brian Donohue (13), Blake Scholl (13)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 24 mentions in 8 episodes 3 per episode
- Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban · Y Combinator
- Zynga Founder: Consumer Is Not Investible Right Now - Thats Why You Should Build It · Y Combinator
- The Age Of The 40-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Here · Y Combinator
- The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here · Y Combinator
- AI Is Unlocking Millions Of New Builders · Y Combinator
- How Two French Engineers In New York Built The Company That Monitors The Entire Cloud · Y Combinator
- How The Best Companies Defend Against Mediocrity And Rot · Y Combinator
- The Future Of Brain-Computer Interfaces · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 28 mentions in 9 episodes 3 per episode
- Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era · Y Combinator
- Legendary Consumer VC Predicts The Future Of AI Products · Y Combinator
- How Zepto Became India’s Fastest Growing Startup · Y Combinator
- How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience) · Y Combinator
- Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search · Y Combinator
- How Amplitude Went From Skeptics to “All In” on AI · Y Combinator
- Why Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto · Y Combinator
- From A Pivot To Building A $9.6 Billion Payroll Company · Y Combinator
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
2023 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
2022 12 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- How To Compete With Amazon and Google · Y Combinator
- Simple Products That Became Big Companies – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
- How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas | Startup School · Y Combinator
- Save Your Startup During an Economic Downturn · Y Combinator
- Don't Make These Hiring Mistakes · Y Combinator
- Things That Don't Scale, The Software Edition – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2019 44 mentions in 12 episodes 4 per episode
- Analyzing Billions of Transactions to Understand Consumer Behavior - Michael Babineau and Kevin Hale · Y Combinator
- Camille Fournier on Managing Technical Teams · Y Combinator
- Vidit Aatrey on Building Meesho, India's Top Reselling Platform, with Adora Cheung · Y Combinator
- HubSpot CEO and Cofounder Brian Halligan with Wufoo Cofounder Kevin Hale · Y Combinator
- Cory Doctorow and Joe Betts-Lacroix on Adversarial Interoperability · Y Combinator
- Advice on Organizing and Running Growth Teams from Dan Hockenmaier and Gustaf Alströmer · Y Combinator
- A CS Education That's Free Until You Get a Job - Austen Allred of Lambda School · Y Combinator
- Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 193 mentions in 29 episodes 7 per episode
- A Conversation with Werner Vogels · Y Combinator
- Ryan Petersen on Building Flexport, a Modern Freight Forwarder · Y Combinator
- Brian Donohue on Operating Instapaper Through an Acquisition · Y Combinator
- Fermat's Library Cofounders João Batalha and Luís Batalha · Y Combinator
- Breaking Down HackerRank's Survey of 40,000 Developers with Vivek Ravisankar · Y Combinator
- Startup Technology - Technical Founder Advice · Y Combinator
- Peter Reinhardt on Finding Product Market Fit at Segment · Y Combinator
- Elad Gil Shares Advice from the High Growth Handbook, a Guide to Scaling Startups · Y Combinator
- 21 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 94 mentions in 16 episodes 6 per episode
- Scaling Culture | Jason Kilar, former Hulu CEO · Y Combinator
- Spotting Ecommerce Trends in Shipping Data - Laura Behrens Wu · Y Combinator
- Artist Lauren McCarthy Will Be Your Home's Brain · Y Combinator
- IPFS, CoinList, and the Filecoin ICO with Juan Benet and Dalton Caldwell · Y Combinator
- The Challenges a Repeat Founder Faces - Tikhon Bernstam · Y Combinator
- The Technical Advisor for Silicon Valley on HBO: Ed McManus · Y Combinator
- Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman · Y Combinator
- Microbes, Robots, and Ambition - Robin Sloan on His Novel Sourdough · Y Combinator
- 8 more episodes that year, every mention in 2017 →
Everything said about Amazon, oldest first
Jun 1, 2017
Jun 1, 2017 positive
Kilar: Celebrating the destruction of bureaucracy is essential when scaling
“When you're scaling a company, Bureaucracy, which is bad process, creeps in each and every day, and to be able to have mechanisms that celebrate the destruction of bureaucracy that's just as important as things that celebrate frugality”
Jun 1, 2017 positive
Jun 1, 2017 positive
Jun 1, 2017
Kilar: Relying on good intentions at scale guarantees organizational failure
“When you're, as Sam and Reed were saying, when you're a team of 30, good intentions are good enough. But when you're a team of a thousand or 10,000 or 300 plus thousand, as the case is with Amazon right now, Good intentions are a recipe for disaster, and certa…”
Jun 23, 2017 negative
Alströmer: Websites Should Never Automatically Log Users Out For Better Growth
“If you have a website, and you have people come to your website, and you have accounts, don't log them out. Just like, keep people logging for as long as you can. There's really no benefit in automatically logging people out after, after a couple of months, af…”
Jul 1, 2017 bullish
Benet: Decentralized storage nodes will beat AWS on unit economics
“Our bet there is that yes, that there's a whole bunch of places and cases where Certain individuals or groups in the world have access to either really cheap storage or storage that's positioned well in the network that is kind of like, you know, somewhere bet…”
Sep 4, 2017 neutral
Laura Behrens Wu: Amazon is a transactional utility, not an emotional brand
“I think Amazon is great for generic purchases, but It's really, like, you don't see Amazon making funny jokes on Twitter as a corporate account. Like, you don't see anyone tagging Amazon in their Instagram posts. It's just that people in their free time don't …”
Sep 4, 2017 positive
Laura Behrens Wu: E-commerce brands should match Amazon's free return policies
“What I do admire about Amazon is whenever something is not right, they will give you a free item. They will give you free returns. And that's made me very happy in the past. And I would just recommend e-commerce stores to do the same unless they're seeing abus…”
Sep 4, 2017 neutral
Laura Behrens Wu: Shippo's ideal customer avoids Amazon to control brand experience
“So a normal customer of ours, they're an e-commerce store that's, they sell products that are differentiated. They have their own brand. They don't want to sell their products on Amazon. They want to own their own brand experience, sell through their own e-com…”
Sep 4, 2017 neutral
Laura Behrens Wu: Amazon Prime conditions buyers to abandon carts over shipping
“The reason why people care about shipping today is that shipping directly affects conversion rates. So it's no longer just a means to an end to get your item from A to B. E-commerce stores they needed to be able to convert their customers because customers are…”
Sep 4, 2017 neutral
Laura Behrens Wu: E-commerce success requires differentiation and storytelling to beat Amazon
“All you have to do is find or make a product that is differentiated enough so that it's not like out there on Amazon or somewhere else where people can undercut you in terms of price. And then you need to build an emotional connection with your customer. I thi…”
Sep 4, 2017 bearish
Laura Behrens Wu: Selling on Amazon cannibalizes independent direct-to-consumer brands
“What I'm seeing or what I hear from friends who run e-commerce stores is, They have tried Amazon as a channel, but it's basically just cannibalizing themselves. And it's not, they prefer to keep their own brands or to be able to manage their own brands on thei…”
Mar 30, 2018 neutral
Ravisankar: Interview Street should have focused on 2-3 companies first
“I think we should have focused on, you know what, we're just going to focus on these two companies, mock interviews, right, versus Any tech company anywhere in the world, and we were scrambling for interviewers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, all over. We shou…”
Mar 30, 2018 neutral
Ravisankar: Student debt and visas create startup inertia for master's grads
“You do two years of masters, then you do two to three years of working in different companies to pay back the loan, and there's all of these visa things. And by the time you want to start, you're already, I don't know, close to five, six years invested in this…”
May 4, 2018 bullish
Mitchell: Renters increasingly demand frictionless, Amazon-style apartment leasing experiences
“More and more tenants are going to, they don't want to feel like they're applying for a mortgage to lease an apartment. They, you know, the same experience that they have with, you know, buying something on Amazon is the same experience that they want to have …”
Jul 27, 2018 bearish
Gil: Copying Amazon's low-price strategy is often a fallacy
“And I think one of the big fallacies in Silicon Valley is everybody thinks that they're Amazon and they basically say every business model should be Amazon's, which is I'm going to charge as low of a price as possible so I can get as much market share as possi…”
Jul 27, 2018 bullish
Gil: A subset of current crypto projects will become massive like Amazon
“And then in parallel, I think there's things that exist today that are sort of the Amazons of crypto that are gonna be massive in their own right and already exists. You know, maybe it's Bitcoin, maybe it's Ethereum, maybe it's a privacy token like Monero, Zca…”
Aug 30, 2018 bullish
Petersen sold his Amazon stock right before it 4x'd to buy a house
“I sold my Amazon stock two years ago when I bought a house, and I literally, I was crying out. Maybe not literally, but I was like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever done. Why am I selling this stock? My house is up 10%, and my Amazon, Amazon's up like four …”
Aug 30, 2018
Aug 30, 2018 negative
Amazon made a critical error by competing against its third-party vendors
“I think platforms should be neutral. And so the idea that you compete with your vendors, to me, you've got a business needs to keep its, All of its major stakeholders happy. Yeah. And your vendors are one of your key stakeholders. If you don't treat them like …”
Aug 30, 2018
Aug 30, 2018 negative
Sep 8, 2018 bullish
Garg: The company cracking food personalization will win the sector long-term
“I still today think that the power of personalization, what Amazon brings to e-commerce and what Netflix and Spotify bring to movies and music. That level of personalization has not taken off in food. And just like Google with search, the company that cracks i…”
Sep 8, 2018
Garg: Gobble's Series B was hindered by Amazon-Whole Foods and Blue Apron
“Last year for our Series B, I had a very difficult time raising money. Like, it all looks fantastic, and there's lots of news and videos, but it, like, took every ounce of my being. It was the hardest fundraising, and it's because Amazon acquired Whole Foods, …”
Sep 27, 2018 bullish
Oct 24, 2018 neutral
Buchheit: Building mega-scale companies requires riding exponential shifts, not just working harder
“It, I don't think it's that you're smarter necessarily. It helps to be smart. It isn't that you're harder working. Like there's a limit to how hard you can work. What I think necessarily to get to that point, you're sitting on top of a big exponential change i…”
Nov 11, 2018 negative
Nov 11, 2018
Werner Vogels: Major investments must materially move the Amazon balance sheet
“Then at Amazon you have to rule that if you do that, If it's going to be successful, it needs to be successful in a way that has significant impact on the Amazon balance sheet. Now, it's not that we're interested in another, let's say, ah, that sounds coy, but…”
Nov 11, 2018 negative
Werner Vogels: Early startups failed due to physical IT infrastructure costs
“So most of those companies that were initially successful around the Amazon catalog
All failed.
And they didn't fail because they didn't have great ideas.
They failed because they couldn't get their IT staff ready, or get the money to actually do, do, do, d…”
Nov 11, 2018
Werner Vogels: A CTO drives major programs and commercializes internal technology
“Mostly the role of a CTO is to drive really big programs and think about sort of what is the technology that we need for the future to be able to be on solid footing as a business? Or in the case of Amazon, what are the kind of unique technologies that we've d…”
Nov 11, 2018 positive
Werner Vogels: Amazon accepts duplication and technical debt to maximize speed
“At Amazon, moving fast and innovating fast, and having a very long pipeline of experiments, that's the more and most important thing, so you're willing to allow duplication to happen, you're allowed to create technical debt, as long as you know that you have t…”
Nov 11, 2018
Werner Vogels: Median latency is useless; engineers must optimize the 99th percentile
“A medium latency of, let's say, 1.2 seconds off your webpage to your customers doesn't say anything. Just says that 50% of your customers have a worse experience. You need to know how much worse. And then, from an engineer, so for example, the 99 percentile or…”
Nov 11, 2018
Nov 11, 2018 neutral
Werner Vogels: Fast provisioning fails to stop engineers hoarding server capacity
“And apparently just an hour to get capacity is not enough. It's not a good enough incentive to sort of release stuff again. So we needed to go to a model, first of all, where you could take engineers out of the loop, and where you could have business rules to …”
Nov 11, 2018 positive
Werner Vogels: Amazon was a technology company, not a retailer
“One glimpse in that kitchen, however, and I realized that this is a massive technology operation. It's not a retailer. It's a technology company. And operating at a scale that I had never seen before. Definitely not at other companies that I'd consulted for.”
Nov 11, 2018 negative
Nov 11, 2018 negative
Werner Vogels: Hierarchy is unnatural; fast-moving companies should remove structure
“There's a very unique culture at Amazon, I think, that works really well for fast-moving companies, and that is to have, to build your teams as independent as possible, to remove as much hierarchy and structure from your organization as that is possible.
Hier…”
Feb 15, 2019 neutral
May 29, 2019 neutral
May 29, 2019 neutral
Nov 27, 2019 negative
Betts-Lacroix: Amazon's surveillance monopoly will be entrenched by police partnerships
“Or Amazon is now involved in video surveillance on the, at the behest, as you were saying, of police forces all over the country. And that's a situation where they have this creeping, growing monopoly power but it's going to be likely enshrined or ennobled, as…”
Apr 8, 2022 negative
May 6, 2022 positive
Seibel: Amazon succeeded by strictly accepting its low-margin reality
“This is one of the dirty little secrets behind Amazon. They've always known that they were in a low margin business, and they've always run their company that way. And I'm sure they were so tempted to look at a Google or a Facebook and say, why don't we do tho…”
Jun 27, 2025 neutral
Green: Amazon has a retail ceiling due to specialized shopping demand
“Amazon, it's the juggernaut of retail. Probably everybody in America has an Amazon account and shops on Amazon. We don't shop for everything on Amazon. We don't want to shop for everything on Amazon. So, you know, there is a cap. I think to the market share th…”
Jul 11, 2025 negative
Srinivas: Google's ad model disincentivizes providing direct search answers
“If you get direct answers to these questions with booking links right there, how are you going to mint money from booking and Expedia and Kayak and like, you know, all like same, same, same thing for shopping. How are you going to take money from Amazon and li…”
Jul 24, 2026 bullish
Pomel: Established companies initially dismissed Amazon's cloud as an unusable toy
“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…”
Jul 28, 2026
Scholl: Jeff Bezos passed on Boom's 2015 seed round
“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…”