YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Selipsky

lines on the record: 89
first: 2023-08-08
most recent: 2023-08-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And that way it gets 100 of their attention. And so we really have general managers of many, many little businesses or product areas where they own both development as well as product management, those types of functions. And when that's unified under a single leader, they can move way faster than if we had some big monolithic functional structure. Now on the go-to-market side, you don't want to go to show up at customers with 200 individual services. And so on the go-to-market side, we're much more structured around, hey, we're going to have sales and field organizations and those will be organized either by industry vertical or by geography. And within those, we'll have account owners. And then we have various experts that we can bring in for different products or different types of technical topics. But we always sort of have an account owner as the lead into the account, if we will, so we can present as much as possible one face of AW.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do you mean it's a choice? Well, you choose how fast you're gonna move. And there's a bunch of inputs that go into that choice and how you organize and how many and what types of people you have, what senior leadership insists on from their teams. There's a whole series of things that go into being fast. One of them is organization. And so we've chosen to have what we often call separable teams. So we want teams to be as independent as possible. Now, of course, teams do have dependencies on each other, but you can have more or you can have fewer. And we choose to kind of factor and refactor and refactor teams as much as possible so that they're as autonomous as possible. They own as much of their own fate as possible. And another key concept is to be single-threaded. So if you take an existing, successful business, a leader of that business, and you give that person a new project to work on, almost inevitably it gets starved out because they've got a revenue stream and a business.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our product side, we've always and continue to be very decentralized, I'll say we optimize for innovation and for speed. And speed is one of these unsung heroes of business. I think people dramatically underestimate the importance and the power of speed. And they're also very fatalistic about it. People say, well, I hear customers all the time saying, well, we're just not a fast company. We're not capable of being nimble. And I tell them, speed. Is a choice”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The top things. In a minority of cases, it meant that we just didn't have enough of the skill sets that we needed for a particular area, in which case we would say, hey, this thing over here is not our highest priority right now, and those skill sets are not really transferable. So unfortunately, those will be some roles that we'll eliminate. And then we'll go net higher. We still have open positions we're hiring for in the areas that are highest priority to us where we don't have the existing skills on staff.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, it was not to minimize in terms of any one human being, but it was small as a percentage of our overall workforce. We basically made the decision in terms of how can we get more efficient while at the same time being confident that we still have tons of innovative potential kind of sitting here in our four walls. We've tried to get increasingly clear on what are our real priorities. We've done so many things for so long as we've grown so quickly. I think anytime you're in that situation, it really pays to every once in a while take a step back and say, what are our top priorities? What are the services which matter most to customers or the countries in the world? And in many cases, we just move people and move teams around to get focused this year on our most important priorities. Not because the nice to-haves aren't nice to have or not because they're bad ideas, but just because we decided to focus on.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first, let me say that anytime you're eliminating roles, it's incredibly painful and it's people's lives that you're dealing with and their livelihoods and it involves their families, needless to say. And we take it very seriously. We understand the impact that it has on people. So I don't want to minimize that in any way, shape or form. AWS has grown extremely rapidly in the number of employees that we have on board. If you just look at 2020 to, I'll say end of 2022, AWS added many tens of thousands of employees. And then earlier this year, as we just looked at, just the overall economic uncertainty and the macroeconomic climate and also our real desire to get ourselves focused on our most important priorities. We did end up doing small single digit percentage layoff or reduction of roles.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who can really communicate about this in a way that maybe somebody else on the team can't? And you've learned to kind of listen for those voices in the room and to try and encourage and solicit those voices in the room. And it's not a love fest. I mean, there will be challenges and I will push and ask people to justify and defend what they're saying. But we want to have that clash of ideas, if you will. And that's very, very important to me to help us hopefully get to alignment or if we can't get to alignment, at least get to a place where whoever the senior decision makers are going to be able to make a call with as much knowledge as possible.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that way we know that we're about to go embark on building something which we can at least have a good shot of being remarkable for our customers. So that's probably the center of how we make the decision making. I think another piece for me personally is to hear a lot of voices. I really like to assimilate a lot of different points of view. I don't take for granted that the most senior people who are closest to me are always going to have the best ideas or always have the most piercing perspectives on something. And so, you know, when we get in these rooms and review PRFAQs, it's a written document. Everybody reads it. And so everybody's now in the same. It's a level playing field. Everybody has the same information as opposed to a PowerPoint presentation where I don't it out to you a little bit at a time. And so you can get a product marketing specialist.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just routinely kind of Keep that customer perspective right in the center of the room as we are making decisions. The way we do that is this working backwards process. So anytime we are going to build something, not just a big news service, but even a mid-sized feature for an existing service, we actually write a press release before a developer starts coding, we can't describe in plain language what is delightful and breakthrough about this thing that we want to build for a customer, then why on earth would we waste the time to go build it? And you also iron out all sorts of misunderstandings between teams. Are we building this for developers? Are we building it for IT staff? Is this for line of business users? How high in the stack are we going to build it? Is it going to be built on our primitive services? Do we need new technology? So it's a press release and then it's a detailed FAQ behind that press release. And we'll do that in tens or hundreds of times per year.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or you might like your customers, which is good, or you might love your customers, and people think that's truly customer focused. What I've learned is that you don't measure this on the emotional scale and that truly the most customer obsessed things you can do are twofold. One, to deeply, deeply understand your customers in ways that most companies don't take the time to do. Sure, they send out a survey or have a product manager talk to a few customers, but they don't deeply understand exactly what problems their customers have and exactly what they think of what you've built so far. And then the second part, and this is actually harder than the first, is to take that understanding and actually keep it at the center of your decision making. It's so easy. You have all this customer understanding, and then when you go to price something, you go, oh, well, what's profit maximizing for me? What do I need? I've just seen at so many companies.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we use those leadership principles in hiring. So if I'm doing an interview loop, I might be assigned, insist on the highest standards or think big or learn and be curious. And so I'll actually interview for that leadership principle. And so it really becomes part of the daily vernacular, part of the vocabulary of being at Amazon. And so they are incredibly important. If I had to pick one, the core of what Amazon is truly is the leadership principle of customer obsession. And so to get to your question, the way I think we and I, certainly speaking for myself, make decisions is to always put work backwards from the customer, always start with, by the way, people misunderstand. I've learned that people mean different things when they say customer focus or we say customer obsession. I think a lot of people think that the way you exhibit that is on the emotional scale.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a difficult question to answer in the abstract, but let me give it a shot. You mentioned the Amazon leadership principles, and we have 16 of them, and it's not plaquware or HRWare. I sometimes call it the operating system of Amazon.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Providers, they thought they had a database business, or they thought they had a storage business, but instead I'm an AI company who does this completely different thing. I'm looking at the world orthogonally. And she used to be intensely paranoid about the startup who may or may not even yet exist, who's going to come at a problem differently and solve a problem from a perspective that heaven forbid we be blind to because we have an existing business. I think that is a way bigger existential threat than the big companies that we know about and can peer out there and see.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some startup who maybe was born recently or maybe hasn't even born yet. And so none of us, none of us know about it, come at these problems differently. I personally talk a lot about not wanting to act like an incumbent. We always want to act like an insurgent. And incumbents worry about what they have and worry about how to protect it. And insurgents think about what's possible for customers? How can we possibly delight them in ways that they're not being delighted today? And let's go do it regardless of what it takes. Incumbents manage math and ratios and insurgents manage either product or customers. And so we try and get as many people as possible focused on product and focused on customers, not focused on delegation and managing ratios. You can see with all the innovation and change happening in the AI space that any one of these companies could wake up and decide, hey, you know, Amazon or any of the other big cloud.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And again, while perfection is the only goal, we know we will never actually be statistically 100.0% perfect anytime we have a service issue. It's incredibly painful for us because it's painful for our customers. But again, empirically, if you look at the third-party measurements, we have the highest uptime of any of the major cloud providers and others over the past couple months have had some very notable multi-day service disruptions, which has never happened in the history. of AWS. And it's because we're architected differently. So what we are not all the same. We have the broadest and deepest set of capabilities. And that's why we are significantly larger than those other cloud providers. Whereas the competition, if you will, coming from besides those providers, I think you're seeing with AI that it's always just around the corner. You could very easily see”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first thing I'll say is that the large cloud service providers are not all the same. And that's really a misnomer. And we've got robust competition in our segment. As we should, by the way, it's good for our customers. And frankly, it's good for us, makes us better. But we're not all the same. So you just look at our track records. We are more secure than the other clouds. We do have fewer of the types of problems that you've seen reported. And by the way, we're not cocky about that, and security is not something everyone be complacent about. And, you know, you never know what's going to happen tomorrow. But empirically, we've just been more secure because of the approaches we take and the level of effort that we put into it. Secondly, it's incredibly important that we have absolutely stellar operational excellence and reliability.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Young So, your general pitch for AWS here is very familiar, right? You should not run so many of your own computers. Give that to us. You can scale up and down. That'll reduce your risk. It'll make you more innovative. You could probably glue some version of that pitch to Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. And I know there are differences, and I do want to talk about them, but that's the general shape of the big companies. When you think about the competitive set, Where are the disruptive competitors to your cloud business now? Where are the small companies that are doing things you're not doing in different ways? Do you see that emerging yet or are we still the three giants kind of running over everything?”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go back to the maybe the cloud is 10% penetrated into IT, then, well, where's the other 90%? And some of it is going from a small percentage to a large percentage in existing customers. Some of it's new customers. Of course, there are countries which are not as far along in their cloud adoption as the US is. And even the U.S. is still early along. So again, I think people look at the size of business that we are and how quickly we've grown. And they say, well, it must be highly mature. There can't be much more ahead. And it's not true. And that's because the overall market, again, this segment is just so vast. So it's still very early days in the club. You know, so much of the innovation is behind us. I predict we'll look back in 10 years and say, do you remember back in 2023 when everything was so young and it was so early back then? Can you believe X, Y, Z? I mean, we are no.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm always so tempted to ask these questions because my Twitter feed or X feed, I suppose, during an NFL game is full of people who already know what AWS is. And they're all saying, who is in the market for AWS? Who isn't already aware of AWS? But it seems like you're still reaching new people.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to be safer. And those are the types of messages which we think come home and then can say, hey, wait, I work at this business. If AWS can do that for the NFL, or if AWS can do that for Formula One, let's think about maybe what it could do for my business. But again, we try wherever possible to really link it in with the use cases related to that part.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, you know, so we've got a separation of the receiver from the defender. We've got probability of catch. This is making for a better NFL experience. And then really importantly, we're partnering tightly with the NFL on player safety. And we've got over 300 sensors on the football field and players body. And we're looking at things like weather and the field itself and the equipment. And the NFL is going to be using all this analytical capability that we're helping them build to reduce concussions, reduce knee injuries, and just make it safer for their athletes. And those are the types of stories we want to tell. So we don't just want to say, oh, AWS exists. We want to say, here's what AWS means for you who's watching this football game. It means you get a better experience and it means you can understand that these athletes who are playing a pretty violent sport at times are going to”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The quarterbacks can't tell. We did test, and the quarterbacks thought they could tell which football it's at the chips, and”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the NFL. So we have this whole series of capabilities around next gen stats. And the NFL is really innovating to provide its customers with incredibly interesting data. We've even got chipped inside of the footballs now.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies and CIOs of government agencies and everyone in between. And so you reach different people in different ways and in different places. And I think we probably do a lot less broad scale advertising per square inch, if you will, of our company than a lot of other companies do because I do think it's very easy to misspend and to waste a lot of money on that. But we do think that certain messages with certain media partners aimed at certain of our customers that advertising and awareness building is useful. But one thing I'll say is we rarely, not always, not never, like airport advertising is just kind of airport advertising. But if you look at some of these partnerships we have there, they're not just media spend. They're very much attached to use cases. So with the NFL, we're not just advertising with the NFL. We're innovating.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We look very careful at all of our spent. Amazon's very frugal company overall. AWS is no different as part of that. We're a big enough business now that we have many different types of customers. We have very technical developers who were our first customers and was still the lifeblood of AWS in many ways. And we also have CEOs of Fortune 50.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This concept of not having to be bound by all that stuff you'd have to buy, it changes people's mindsets. We see in company after company, because we've seen it at Amazon too, but in customer after customer people telling us, yeah, we just start spinning stuff up, we spin stuff down, we run experiments, we understand that some of them are going to fail. And what happens next is that people inside the company get more innovative. And so the company becomes more innovative. And if the company becomes more innovative, that's the same as saying the culture of the company is changing. And so when I talk about transformation, yeah, I guess maybe it is a code word. It's a code word for you reduce the penalties for failure. You increase the ability to innovate, and you actually get more great new breakthrough ideas per person, per month than you used to get before. And that's a cultural change inside of our customers, which they find to be incredibly powerful.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. So it used to be that you would have to either have your own data center or rent space in somebody else's data center. You'd have to have physical servers in that data center. You had to have networking into that data center. And then there was a bunch of software on those physical servers, whether it's databases, storage software, applications like websites or genomics analysis or financial Monte Carlo simulations, whatever it is, you run all that software on that stack that you'd built. And so the first big revolution of the cloud is AWS basically replaced that. And so now you just brought your own applications like those Monte Carlo simulations or your pharmaceutical compound analysis or whatever it is. And you just ran those up there in somewhere. And that somewhere is the cloud, which is why it kind of came to be known as the cloud, because it didn't really, you didn't really care where it happened. And that's what AWS pioneered.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you say IT, I'm very curious about that phrase in particular. I think most people listening to this show here you say IT and their brains go to the people who provision their laptops or their mouse is broken or the printers don't work. You're talking about IT in a much different capacity, right? In the I'm starting a business that business is on the internet in order to run that business, I need to run some code on a computer. That computer needs to be provisioned, maintained, service, upgraded, and Amazon should do that work so you can focus on the code that's running on the computer.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Been saying it for a long time, you know, different people hear different things, and we may be better or less good at amplifying certain messages. But I think it's resonating with people now. And part of the reason is because, look, we're still early in the cloud journey. So I don't know which analysts report to believe, but we're probably, you know, call a 10 or 15% of IT has now moved to the cloud. And people think it must be more than that because, you know, we're an 88 billion dollar a year revenue business now, and there are other cloud providers as well. And they're like, oh, these are huge businesses. So it must have already happened. But IT is so huge. It is several trillion dollars a year of spend that it's easy to quickly see that most of the migration has yet to happen.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See, that's a new version of the pitch, right? You should not buy a bunch of computers and servers. You should rent them from Amazon or some other cloud provider just as you need them and scale up and down is your workloads. That's like the old pitch, right? That's 20 years of that pitch that's coming. That has revolutionized the internet. It's revolutionized the number of businesses. The idea that it reduces the penalty for failure, that's a new tournament. Is that your turn? Is that how you have been thinking about it? Or is that something that's developed in the market over time?”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, with the cloud model, you just turn stuff on and you turn stuff off. So, what happens is you get rapid experimentation. So when I talk about transformation, it's not a buzzword. It is about, for example, a specific concept of reducing the penalties for failure.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In less than 30 minutes. And again, pharmaceutical after pharmaceutical will tell you that they have improved and shortened their time to market with using AWS and the cloud model. So that is a very specific example. If you have to buy a lot of CapEx for a big project, spend a lot of money, you've spent it, you're not getting it back. It's sitting on your premises. You feel like you have to succeed. The penalties for failure become huge. And so you have people who, even if things are not going well, It's very hard to shut things down just a little more time. And things take a long time because nobody wants to admit failure.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's hopefully if we're doing our job well, it's speaking to the reality of what's happening. Because, I mean, if you go talk to our customers who are important, they are transforming specific pieces of what they're doing. And we just get detailed about what that means. But I think it speaks to them. It's not code. I would call it shorthand. It's shorthand for the transformations that they're seeing. So let me give you a very specific example. So I give you a ton of pharmaceutical companies who used to have scientists well-paid scientists who it would take 12 to 20 weeks to obtain servers, capital expenditure, actual physical servers to do their research. And they would sit around, wait and be inefficient waiting. With this elastic computing model that AWS pioneered, you can have that.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we started, we talked a lot about the IT benefits. We talked a lot about the muck or the undeferentiated heavy lifting of IT as we used to call it. And we don't really talk about that so much anymore because I think what the world's really figured out is as much as anything what AWS and the cloud enables you to do is to really transform the way that your organization operates. I think we've really become a part of the fabric, not only of how the internet operates, but of really one of the driving forces to how companies want to reshape and transform themselves.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a lot to discuss. I was looking at the timeline here. Depending on how you count, AWS is coming up on 20 years. It's 19 years old since the first press release Amazon issued with the words web services in it. And it is now the most profitable part of Amazon. It is leading the charge into a lot of areas, including AI. You were on the early part of that ride. You left to go be the CEO of a company called Tableau. You came back as CEO in 2021. How do you think about AWS now?”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The best AI chips right now are made by NVIDIA, which made a big bet on using its GPU tech for AI a while back. Its A100, and in particular H100 GPUs, are the state of the art, and they're hard to get, even for companies like AWS. That means everyone is trying to make their own chips to meet the demand, and AWS has two of those called Trainium and Inferentia, which Adam and I talk about. Adam Slipsky, CEO of AWS. Here we go. Adam Slipsky, you are the CEO of Amazon Web Services or AWS, it's commonly known. Welcome to Dakota.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI, of course, but it has some challenges. OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, has an exclusive deal with Microsoft for cloud services. Google, which has similarly made a huge bet on AI, obviously runs its own cloud services and sells access to Google's models exclusively through them. So AWS has to be great at everything else, and it still has to compete for the hardware necessary to run these AI models, which is in short supply across the industry. Adam and I got into all of it and into the weeds of what it means to be an AI provider at scale. This is all pretty uncharted territory, so this conversation got deep. On the flip side, I couldn't resist asking Adam about how AWS advertises in the airports and with the NFL. Is there anyone in the world who needs AWS who doesn't already know about it? This is my favorite question to ask enterprise software CEOs, and I gotta say Adam's answer here was pretty good. A few notes before we start, since we didn't talk about AI hardware in depth for a minute,”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the start. He joined AWS in 2005 and became CEO in 2021 when former AWS CEO Andy Jassy took over for Jeff Bezos, a CEO of Amazon itself. It's a long time to be focused on cloud services, but pay attention to how excited Adam is about the prospect of yet more growth for AWS. Even with big competitors like Microsoft and Google in the mix, he told me that only 10% of his potential customers have made the jump to the cloud. That's a lot of room to grow, and I wanted to know where Adam thinks that growth will come from. And importantly, what will keep AWS competitive is the word cloud starts to mean everything and nothing. The answer there, of course, involved AI. Now, I'm gearing up to co host the Code Conference in September this year, and that means I'm spending a lot of time thinking about AI in general. And Adam was a great person to help me think through some of these concepts. AWS is going big.”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Lai Patel, editor in chief of the Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Adam Solipsky. He's the CEO of Amazon Web Services, or as most people know it, AWS. AWS is quite a story. It started as an experiment almost 20 years ago. Amazon was trying to sell its excess server capacity, and people really doubted the move. Why on earth was an online bookstore trying to sell cloud services? But now AWS is the largest cloud services provider in the world, and it's the most profitable segment of Amazon, generating more than $22 billion in sales last quarter alone. By some estimates, AWS powers roughly one-third of the entire global internet, and on the rare occasion an AWS cluster goes down, an unfathomable number of platforms, websites, and services feel it, as do hundreds of millions of people. Now, Adam was there almost”
2023-08-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · There's no AI without the cloud, says AWS CEO Adam Selipsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT