YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Garman

lines on the record: 76
first: 2025-01-13
most recent: 2025-01-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, in some ways it's a much stronger carrot. If the pitch is, hey, run the exact same thing that you're doing, but do it a little bit more efficiently and a little bit less expensively, that is less of a value proposition than if you can do something that hasn't been possible before. And so I think that's why many of the workloads that you've seen move to the cloud already are the super scalable ones or the ones where they need lots of compute or the ones where they have a really large footprint because they see like the wins are enormous for those type of customers. For a server running in a basement of a hospital, maybe they can save a little bit of money or maybe they can save a little bit of IT work or whatever, but it's the value proposition may not be there unless we can really deliver a lot of value. You're not going to be able to get a lot of the value that's promised from AI from a server running in your basement. It's just not possible, right? That the technology won't be there. The hardware won't be there. The models won't live there, et cetera. And so it's, in many ways, I think it's a tailwind.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're talking about still trying to get customers to come use cloud services step one, move some of your compute out of the basement of the hospital and into the cloud. And a lot of companies aren't there yet. And it seems like you perceive that there's still opportunity there. Then we're going to, in a minute, we're going to talk about AI, which is the absolute cutting edge of how do we even run these companies? What do these computers even do? How does the cost work out? How are you structuring the organization to deal with that split? Don't have your own servers in the basement versus turn your decision making over to some agentic AI system that we're going to run for you.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Opportunity where we can go add value together. And so I think our partnership with Verizon is great. We look at how we can go add value together. And over time, we'd love for more of the broader network because you look globally and you're starting to see other telcos start to lean into this model of, okay, maybe more of the core can be run in AWS. And then maybe so that part is, okay, that can be run in central data centers. And so we're starting to see more core. And then you think about can the RAN be run in AWS? Maybe, yeah, it can. And actually, they're starting to see that piece in there. And so, you know, I think it'll be a transition over time. But I do think that as we add more value there and show that we can give programmability to their networks, that we can show that their scale to the networks, that you can actually show benefits on patching and other things like that where there's a lot more flexibility there. I think you'll see more and more telcos leaning into cloud-based deployments.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Verizon was a little bit different. It was actually a partnership with us where we were talking about potentially selling some of that compute space together at the edge. And I think that technology is probably a little bit ahead. And I still think that there's an interesting eventual win there. But I think the idea was a little bit of ahead of the technology of like really low latency compute at the edge, mostly because a lot of that latency was taken up just in the network. And so it's hard to get that benefit of a small latency gap. But I think a lot of, look, if you go back 15 years, many companies were thinking that they would just go offer the cloud. Like it looked like it was easy, right? And then they said, oh, it's just a hosting thing. I have a data center. I can sell that. And so I think most companies today outside of the handful of three, four companies that are really in the space don't really think that they can go provide a real cloud offering. Like it's hard. And particularly, you know, there's niche offerings that you can offer in particular slices. But I think increasingly we view, and together, we view this as a partnership.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Contrast that to the other telcos when Verizon was launching 5G, for example, they told me that they were going to build a competitor to AWS because they needed the compute at the edge to run the network anyway, and they might as well just sell the excess capacity in their data centers to customers and say it would have a lower latency or whatever you get from being very much at the edge. Did that pan out? Or are you saying, okay, that didn't work and I can go conquest those customers now? I can go get Verizon or AT&T or whoever else on the network.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every minute of the day in real time. Let me ask you about telco for one second just because telco has long been a particularly fascination of mine. Dish obviously started from scratch. They announced very loudly that they were going to use AWS as their cloud provider, that they wanted to do all the compute they needed to do for 5G and all that stuff to run that network in the cloud.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can really dive in and understand that. And we find that that connection point is actually quite valuable, even if people know that AWS exists already.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, look, you can make that argument for lots of ads too. Like, who doesn't know that Coca-Cola exists, but you still see Coca-Cola ads? And so some of it is keeping it top of mind. Some of it is also, you know, I think if you think about the advertising that we do with together with some of the sports networks, whether it's NFL or F1 or others, a lot of what that does is to help connect the dots. You may know that AWS exists, but helping see that in a context that you understand, which is football or F1 or Bundesliga or whatever the sport is, how we're helping do analytics for that sport, it really is one of those things that helps customers connect the dots. And so it's not just an ad that says, hey, AWS exists, but it is connecting those dots that says, okay, if we're able to do analytics that can see how fast a football player can run or see what the chances that an F1 car can pass, it really helps customers just connect the dots as to where we might be able to help their business to. And it also opens the door for us to do that next deep dive where we can.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think your observation about companies leaning more into SaaS is super interesting, and it's why they're such a focus for us. And so it's why we focus on deep partnerships of how do we make sure that AWS is the best place to run SAP? It's the best place to run Workday. It's the best place to run ServiceNow. It's the best place to run, keep going down the list, right? And so those SaaS ISVs have always been a really important customer base for us. And increasingly, you see us build capabilities that make AWS even more powerful for SaaS vendors. And so just at ReInvent, we announced a capability called Q Business Index where you can basically have all of your SaaS data pulled together in a single index that's owned by the enterprise and controlled by the enterprise. But you can share across SaaS products. And so I think there's things like that.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Traditional telco networks, and there's a handful of customers like the dishes of the world who have kind of thought about and have moved to building because they got to start from zero and have built it in the cloud and get the benefits of that agility. But most haven't, right? And so there's a lot of, think about all of the compute that happens in a hospital today is mostly in the hospital, right? And those are just examples of where there's an enormous amount of compute that could take advantage of these broad scale cloud systems that still haven't yet moved there. So there's a huge amount of potential in those additional businesses. There's also just, as you think about new customers, every single year, there's a huge number of startups that are jumping, that are created from scratch, and they all start in the cloud too. So there's still lots of greenfield opportunity for us.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True, and I think that it's probably subtlety in there. So I'll take a couple of those one at a time. Number one, we do have a lot of large customers that are running in AWS in the cloud today. And a huge number of them still have massive amounts of their estate on premise. And so there's a huge amount of growth for there. You can even take our largest customers, many of them only have 10, 20, 30, 40 percent of their workloads in the cloud. And so there's a massive amount of growth just helping them get to 70 or 80 percent or whatever that number is going to be. And doesn't even presume you get to 100. And so I think there's a huge amount of business there. I think there's a huge amount of business in customers that only have 1% or rounding to zero of their estate in the cloud because they're still running on-prem workloads and whether it's IT or core business pieces. And some of it is just they're running in a data centers. Some of that is the workloads haven't yet moved to a cloud world think telco networks broadly, right? Most telco networks still run in”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask about that piece of the puzzle just where the next new customer comes from. Obviously, when you started at AWS, they were all new customers. Now, most huge companies, they at least have an idea of what they might do with the cloud, whether or not they're using AWS or something else. We have a lot of CEOs who come on here and say, look, I need to have multiple clouds so that I can go do rate negotiations with all of them. Fine. There is a new class of companies, I think, that assumes they don't need any software support. They're just going to go hire a bunch of SaaS vendors and it'll just run their business and they use the SaaS products however they want to use them. It seems very unlikely that they will become AWS customers themselves, right? Because they've outsourced a bunch of business functionality to a bunch of other software vendors. And I'm just wondering that that's a new class of potential customer, right? Well, that kind of business didn't exist until kind of recently.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Corners to where when the business is twice as big as it is today, how do we make sure that we continue to execute and run as fast as possible?”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a great way, how do we think about continuously innovating across many different paths? And as you think about, we have to really innovate along our core. What's important, like the thing that got us here around compute and databases and storage and networking, but we also have to innovate around AI. We have to innovate around some higher level capabilities. We have to innovate around analytics. And we have to innovate around helping customers who maybe are less technically savvy take advantage of the cloud where they may not be at Netflix level sophistication, which is obviously a very sophisticated technology team, but want to take advantage of some of the cloud capabilities. And I think we're continuing to think about how do we keep pushing that envelope on helping more and more customers take advantage of what we have. And I think one of the things that I spend a lot of time thinking about is how do we organize so that our teams don't lose agility and speed as we get bigger? That's some of where I'm thinking about. And it's nothing that's broken today, but I think it's kind of looking around.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a couple things that I'm thinking about. One, I have been here for 18 years, so I've been fortunate to learn a lot of the different parts of the business and seen it from the early days until we are now. And I think over 18 years, we've grown to be $110 billion business grown at 19%. So that's great. And we're just at the early stages of what that business can be. And so I'm pushing the teams consistently to think about how do we innovate faster? How do we think bigger? And how do we support our customers? And as we think about the potential of AWS being $200 billion or $300 billion or $500 billion business or whatever size it gets to, you know, I think we continuously just want to think about what are the organizational structures, what are the mechanisms we use, what are the ways we supported customers that worked to get us to $100 billion and may not work at $200 or $300 billion. And I think some of that is just thinking about how do we scale at that and how do we think about supporting customers in a great way? How do we think about scaling our service?”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got to get the CEO of Dawn Detector on the show. That is a fascinating service across the board. Let me ask the Dakota questions because I think this theme of we are going to be more reliant on cloud infrastructure for compute in the world of AI, and that's got to get to all the people and hopefully make everybody some money and generate some useful products and services. That's the theme. And I think whether or not we can strain people punching each other and whether or not we can stream AI, the problems there are in the general sense the same. But I want to ask the Dakota questions first so we can I can understand how you are solving these problems having been at AWS for so long. So you are taking it for Adam who is on about just a little over a year ago he stepped down about six months ago. You took over. You've been there a long time. You started as the first product manager of AWS, which is a pretty wild place to begin a career and end up as a CEO. How are you thinking about AWS, the organization right now?”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More back in the day when we were scaling and learning back in 2007 and 2008, where we kind of were learning how to scale there. I think we today we're often at a broad scale. And so everything, you know, lots of things on the internet and lots of things around the world run on AWS. And we usually run pretty reliably. Less than it used to, for sure.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First time we probably did Prime Day. We probably had issues across that too of just people hitting the website and other things. So the first time you do events like this, it's a learning process. And so I think it's probably overstating to say that to re-architect the whole internet. I think, but it really is that key spike where a lot of applications are just not, particularly when you own the infrastructure.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think in particular, there's a couple things around that that are challenging, right? By the way, it's like, it's a super hard thing that they did. Number one is their first time doing a big, like scaled live stream like that. And so the first time is actually what's hard. Other people have done that before. We will stream Thursday night football and other places like that that have figured out how to do things like that, but it's not the first time, right? And so it's the, I am very, I'm sure that the next time I think they have a Christmas Day game, they'll probably work out some of those kinks and figure that piece out. And so the first time you do it, you'll find those bottlenecks. And it's true about any compute system where you have an order of magnitude more and they obviously have shows that have streamed more, but they're spread across more time, right? And so it's this single spike up where everybody comes in a 30 minute window. And if it's outside of what you plan for, right, if they plan for, I don't know if their numbers were, but 150 million and they got 180 million, it was outside of what I think they thought their upper limit was. And we've seen this before in AWS, and we've seen this in Amazon.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're staying as real fancy, right? They've got boxes and ISPs and everything. I was just curious because what we're about to talk about in a huge way is how providers like AWS can meet just the growing demand for compute everywhere and then get it to the people who need it. And it feels like most people in 2024 take video streaming for granted, but it's still pretty hard.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You got to ask Ted about the piece I think about that where they were stressed was they do run their own CDN. And so you can ask Ted about that too, but that's the part of it that was really stressed is the CDN part of that is really the part that they, and they have, Netflix has their own homegrown CDN that they use, and that's the part that I think was stressed. So I don't know the details of exactly where they were running into barriers, but it wasn't in their AWS infrastructure. It was in the Netflix controlled part of their infrastructure.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, it's a Jake Paul. I want to start with Jake Paul. My understanding is Netflix is like the prototypical AWS customer, right? They start an AWS, they made a big bet on AWS. They're still the customer, right? They haven't left AWS.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am very excited to talk to you. You're like a perfect decoder guest. You were, I believe, the first product manager at AWS. You started as an intern, and now you're the CEO. We have a lot of listeners who want to be on that journey. So there's lots to talk to you about just in that. You're also the new CEO. We had your predecessor, Adam Slipsky, just a little over a year ago, you're six months on the job. So there's a lot of decoder stuff in there, just how we're changing the organization, how you're thinking about it. And then obviously we're going to talk about AI. It's going to happen. I hope you're ready for it.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investment that's going into it. Matt's answers to both of these things were pretty candid. It's clear that Matt and Amazon are far more focused on how AI technology turns into real products and services that people want to use and less about what Matt calls puffery in the press. One note before we start, we recorded this episode just for the holidays. So I asked Matt about Netflix, one of AWS's biggest customers, and whether it would hold up while streaming live events, especially the NFL games it was set to air on Christmas Day. Turns out Netflix did just fine with those, but the answers were pretty interesting, so we left them in. Matt still checks in on his big customers, even as CEO. Okay, AWS CEO Matt Garmin, here we go. Garmin, you're the CEO of Amazon Web Services. Welcome to Dakota.”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'll hear Matt say that most companies are In the cloud, and the opportunity remains massive for AWS, even though it's been the market leader for years. Product manager or an aspiring product manager Catch Matt talking about these things exactly like the PM he was from the start. Only now with the broad view from the CEO chair. Acquiring new customers isn't really the”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patella, editor in chief of the Virge, and Decoder is my show about Big Ideas and Other Problems. Welcome to A New Year. We're starting 2025 off with a good one. Today I'm talking to Matt Garmin, the CEO. On web services. Matt's actually the new CS. He just took over last June. You might recall that we had his predecessor Adam Salepsky on the show just over a year ago. That makes this episode terrific Dakota. Since I love”
2025-01-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT