Dr. Werner Vogels
VP & CTO, Amazon · 1 appearance on the record.
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As Amazon's CTO since 2005, Dr. Werner Vogels played a foundational role in shaping the company's architecture and the development of Amazon Web Services. Before Amazon, he was a distributed systems researcher at Cornell University and earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
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2 assertions · 1 opinion · 13 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
Everything Dr. Werner Vogels said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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…”
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…”
Werner Vogels: Engineer-led product development results in pure technology, not actual products
“If you're a heavy technology company, lots of engineering, there's a risk that the engineers get in charge. Yeah? If they get in charge, you do not necessarily build products, you build technology.”
Werner Vogels: Mercenary and missionary startups require fundamentally different tech architectures
“Jeff often makes the distinction between mercenaries and missionaries. Yeah? Mercenaries are the startup founders that are in it for the money. Yeah? And missionaries are the ones that are in it for the love of the product. Yeah? I want to build this product, …”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Werner Vogels: 95% of AWS features are direct customer requests
“About 95% of features and services that we deliver are in response to direct requests from our customers.”
Werner Vogels: Continuous deployment is far more secure than massive code reviews
“Now, I honestly believe continuous deployment actually is better from a security point of view, because in the past you would write 50,000 lines of code, Security team would come in, would review it, would bless it, and they had no clue what they were doing. T…”
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.”
Werner Vogels: 10x growth requires revisiting almost all processes and technologies
“In essence, we go from order of magnitude growth. You have to revisit almost everything that you do, whether it's your processes, but also your technologies.”
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…”
Werner Vogels: VP of Engineering manages people, CTO drives technology strategy
“The VP of engineering every morning wakes up thinking, do I have the absolute best team?
Is my team in the best position to deliver what they need to deliver?
It's a people person.
Yeah, I'm really thinking about making sure that your engineer's in the righ…”
Werner Vogels: Shared engineering resources make development organizations move slower
“Shared resources are the thing that sort of make you move slower.”
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 …”
Werner Vogels: Retrofitting security into a growing product is a massive nightmare
“I think the only way, if you actually build your new business without security in mind, it will be very hard to retrofit it into it. Yeah, and so, you will have a nightmare, let's say, two, three years down the road, when you become successful and you grow, an…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| A Conversation with Werner Vogels · Y Combinator | Nov 11, 2018 | 47m |