[Music] hi everyone and Welcome to our podcast in Good Company I'm Nicola tangan and leader of the Norwegian so weal fund today we are recording from New York and we are recording with the CEO of Amazon web services AWS AWS the world leader in cloud computing we own more than 1% of Amazon translating into 80 billion Norwegian coroner or more than 15,000 croner per Norwegian most of the internet is now run in the cloud super interesting competition heating up with Google and Microsoft really new strong players listening to this really interesting podcast and learn more about Amazon's fantastic cor culture tune in now um the cloud is the backbone of everything digital it's kind of where most of the data exists and um AWS or Amazon web services dominates with more than a a third of the market and you got customers such as NASA Apple CIA Netflix Tesla Spotify and MIM we are a very very happy customer so uh just to kind of kick off with uh with the basics there what is the cloud uh the cloud is essentially the ability for companies of all sizes all types to run all of their infrastructure in a way that feels infinite and like it has no specific place that's why that you have the metaphor of the cloud so customers uh companies used to have data centers uh they would buy or rent the data centers they'd buy servers they'd hook up networking uh they'd worry about uh keeping those uh servers up and running and when AWS uh launched in 2006 and Pioneer at the cloud all of a sudden there was this illusion of infinite capacity like you could just tap into compute capacity you could tap into storage capacity and it didn't matter to you where it was or how it worked you just had to concentrate on serving your customers building your applications instead of worrying about uh uh uh about it infrastructure how much of the total it in the world is now in the cloud you know it's it's hard to know exactly but um I'd estimate probably somewhere in the realm of 10% of it has moved to the cloud and if people think it's a lot higher than that because there have been a lot of dollars that have moved to the cloud but they forget that there are a lot of it dollars spent in the world there's maybe several trillion dollars of it spent per year and so uh even though a lot of dollars have moved we're probably still only in the you know 10 15% range and that means there's a a huge amount of uh workloads that are still going to be moving to the cloud for years to come so actually we're very early In This Cloud migration stupid question how do you actually move the data to the cloud I mean I I assume we don't just transfer it through Wi-Fi well it's it's not a stupid question at all it's it's a very important question and uh data moves a lot of different ways um it depends on how much data you have and where you are um sometimes people just transfer data across the internet uh just from uh the servers that they have have right across the internet but often when we have you know big organizations with a lot of data um it requires um you know higher throughput to get the data up into the cloud and also you really want to be careful about uh about security and privacy so uh many of our customers set up uh a dedicated connections essentially a direct connect uh over a private connection to AWS and that can be again just like all other aspects of the cloud that can be scaled up or scaled down to whatever size it needs to be and we'll be securely transferring uh data over those you private encrypted direct connections to us no you've been very important in kind of the startup world because you enabled companies to kind of kick off with a business bus without making huge investments in in it structure so what are some of the what are some of the ventures that you have backed and and been the ear border of uh it's you're right it's when AWS started it was really with a vision of enabling you anybody even a kid in a college dorm room to have access to the same you know powerful uh compute infrastructure that even the largest uh companies the largest Enterprises in the world had and so that what that really meant was Developers and it really meant a lot of startups and uh to this day startups are still you know kind of deep uh deep in the DNA of who we think we are so in the early days uh there were uh companies like Netflix uh Airbnb Pinterest of course they're no longer considered startups those are all Enterprises now but they were all startups and then later on came companies like uh like stripe and crowd strike again big companies now who uh who used to be startups and uh we we're still at it so if you look at unicorns the uh startups who are worth over a billion dollars over 80% of the world's unicorns run on AWS and it's a great great privilege to work with all of those innovators wow well done now if we take these data centers they are immense right um if you take tell us about one of the bigger ones I mean how large are they well uh AWS um is is built from an infrastructure perspective on this concept of regions which is really really important so we have 32 independent infrastructure regions around the world uh many in the US and Canada uh UK many in the EU um Australia India China Japan Korea uh etc etc so 32 you know full-fledged regions around the world and each of those regions has you know multiple what we call availability zones each one has at least three availability zones per region and that's a really really important set of of Concepts because it provides incredible resilience for customers so each region is built to operate independently uh if you have any kind of problem in one region it's not going to uh affect you in another region and even inside of a region if you architect so that your uh your resources run inside of multiple availability zones uh inside of a region they're also built to uh to to be available separately you know not to fail uh for the same reasons and so uh our customers can build very very highly resilient uh applications with very high uh high uptime and uh you each each availability Zone could be just one data center it's usually a pretty large data center or an availability Zone could actually be you know a conglomeration of of a number of Big Data Centers all put together it all depends on how much customer demand we have in the region for uh for those workloads but we have a very large you know very scaled uh worldwide infrastructure so let's now you and I we jump in a car and we'll go and visit a big one how big is it uh you're going to see a whole series of data centers they're going to be hard to find by the way we don't advertise them and put our names on them uh you know security is more important than uh than marketing uh but you know we we we can have data centers with uh you know many many many thousands of servers in them okay so we open the door you and I we going into the center what what do we see what's in there well to start with by the way we'll have trouble getting in so my badge my employee badge won't work at the data centers because I don't need to go inside of them every day I would have to get special permission and uh you know our very security conscious uh customers you know want to know that there are uh extremely effective uh security controls both physical as well as virtual controls but assuming we get permission and we actually go inside uh we'll have to get past you know physical barriers to get inside we'll have to get past you know significant security to go inside uh we wouldn't be allowed in to any sensitive area but if if we just pretend uh for a moment that we are uh we'd see you know many many banks of of servers and uh really just a small number of human beings who are absolutely essential for keeping those servers running for uh replacing any servers uh or disc drives for example with or or power supplies with with issues and uh it would look uh uh hopefully very clean and very orderly hopefully it would look very boring because when everything's operating very smoothly there's actually nothing to see which is the best state of affairs no I assume that uh when CIA and NASA trust you with the data it's uh it's probably pretty secure now how much does those are strong endorsements which have been U quite uh quite gratifying how much does uh the data demand um change during during the year or during the week I mean something like um Black Friday uh when there was huge retail demand what kind of fluctuations are you seeing uh overall uh AWS has actually very smooth demand pattern pns and uh that's uh an effect of the scale at which we operate and that's one of the huge advantages we we offer our customers so uh if you're a retailer as you alluded to um in the the December holiday season or Black Friday leading up to it you're going to have a huge Spike if you're a tax company in the US you're G to have a huge spike in April when taxes are due if you're a news organization you probably have a big spike you know first thing in the morning uh and maybe at lunchtime etc etc um and basically with the scale at which AWS operates we're we're over 90 billion a year Revenue organization again with those um 32 full infrastructure regions around the world um we we essentially aggregate all of that demand so when one company has high demand another has low and then they they flip and so that makes our infrastructure very uh very efficient and uh lowers our cost structure because we're making high utilization all of all of the uh infrastructure resources and that in turn allows us to uh charge really low prices for customers and to keep keep dropping prices to customers we've lowered prices over 120 times uh in the past 17 years since we launched but really our ability to to manage all those Peaks and valleys for customers uh throughout the course of their day their week their month their year um is one of the benefits that we provide to them and so just for for The Listener we have all of our operations in the cloud with you guys we pay roughly 70 million Norwegian Groner per year for um for that service now you are you were one of the Pioneers in um in cloud services but you know have competitors such as Microsoft Google and they have uh been gaining ground um and are actually uh growing slightly faster than you for the moment so what um how are you competing with these people what is uh how do you win or lose business well I we've had robust competition uh for a long time as we should by the way and uh i' like to say if you look to your left and you look to your right and you don't see anybody next to you you may have dramatically overestimated the attractiveness of your Market segment uh and it is a it is a fast growing and attractive segment and so um customers appropriately have have a lot of choices which we think is is good for customers and by the way I think at the end of the day is good for us it keeps us sharper and makes sure that we we keep our focus on uh really what we need to do to to Delight customers so I I think that AWS as you alluded to uh was the pioneer of the cloud we launched in 2006 and um lots of folks scratched their heads and said what is this have to do with selling books I can't I can't tell you how many times I got asked that question and of course the answer is it has nothing to do with selling books but the technology that we built to sell books has everything to do with our exposing that same technology for uh many many other organizations to use but because it came from Amazon that some people said oh they're just a book seller and you know nobody will use this and then startups began using it and they said well no Enterprise will ever use it and then Enterprises started using it and they said well nobody will ever run Mission critical applications on it and uh then we started doing things like uh powering Netflix and uh controlling uh NASA's Mars Rover you know SUV sized vehicles on the surface of Mars and people started to get the idea that mission critical workloads were indeed running in the cloud and so I think we just proved oursel over a number of years uh we also moved very very fast uh on product Innovation and it was probably five to seven years uh before uh other companies really started to come out with even vaguely uh you know competitive uh offerings and uh our founder Jeff Bezos has actually publicly called that 5 to seven year Head Start the largest gift in business history now I have no idea if that's true or not but it's just an interesting concept why were the other people slow I think because we were so threatening to their business model they didn't want to believe it if you look at the Old Guard of technology companies particularly software companies uh in some cases Hardware companies for 30 or 40 years um they uh they overcharged customers uh they intentionally locked them in so they made it hard to leave and uh we really offered a completely new model of not having to commit um being able to uh elastically you use as much or as little as you want uh to see your prices go down continuously not going up continuously all while being highly available highly secure and and highly reliable um and so it was it was really threatening to those high prices and high margins by by these other uh technology companies and so it was easier to find excuses to dismiss us as not knowing what we were doing rather than to see the enormous customer value that was being created now at some point it it it became obvious and inevitable uh to see how customers were voting and of course we had other customers get into uh this this Market segment and you know over time you give it enough years and you're you know a competent technology company there there absolutely other um other offerings out there and um you know we we try not to be naive and to understand what competitors are doing but we still to this day you focus the vast vast majority of our time our effort our mental energy on uh being customer obsessed and figuring out you what customers need us to do as opposed to having a competitively driven strategy how does AI change artificial intelligence change um the landscape um are all the language models now trained in the cloud I I I think AI is well to start with AI is enabled by the cloud I mean really in the long run if you look at the uh the amount of compute resources which are required both to train uh these models as well as to run inference or or or run these models in production um the uh the the capacity requirements and and therefore the the potential costs uh can can be really enormous and uh those will happen in the cloud because the economics and the uh the capacity availability will be much much higher in the cloud than elsewhere so I really view uh generative Ai and and AI in general as uh the next big big thing that is happening in the cloud now it's not just one thing uh I mean generative AI is going to you know fundamentally change you know many many technologies will fundamentally impact probably every application that you and I interact with both in our professional and our personal lives so it's fundamental but it's not a it's not a different thing it is the next huge thing that will happen in the cloud and uh it's very much tied to your data strategy so we have all of these uh uh companies who have uh built data platforms on AWS and have vast amounts of data in the cloud and that data is what helps them differentiate with generative AI there all there are these models there but what you've got to do is bring your data to the models whether it's your customer service data your investor data uh your uh uh medical research data you know whatever it is and and use that data to your advantage you using these new powerful uh large language models and uh helping companies to really marry together their data and their gener of AI strategies we think is what's going to unlock uh the real power the real value and that's why you are now investing billions in anthropic which is competing with open AI with Google and so yeah o um anthropic um used AWS from the very beginning when they were founded a few years ago and uh as our relationship with them has deepened um I I think that we provided a really great opportunity for them to um to get access to massive amounts of compute capacity which they need to train their claw models they're now in Claud 2 which is a a really Leading Edge model it's as good as anything in the world and at the same time uh they're really smart people and we saw that there was an opportunity to collaborate with them and have them uh help us to optimize and improve um uh the the hardware the uh the the custom design chips that AWS um uh designs and uh we decided to deepen that partnership together and as one element of it we also did invest uh uh into to anthropic so it's a type partnership it's a special partnership anthropic um now uses AWS as it's a primary cloud provider and I think we'll be partnering together for a long time to come you got competitors in the US and in China but um no European competitors why why has Europe been so slow here um I I think it's true that if you just look you know globally um uh the the largest uh public Cloud providers um have been us-based companies and as you said um especially inside of China um chinese-based companies um but there are uh there are e you know smaller european-based competitors as well and um I think uh you know it's very Dynamic and a quickly moving space and I think there are opportunities for for companies from um uh from all countries if they got a great value proposition to uh um to uh gain Market segment shares so you know for now this is the way it's played out but uh you know we I I think uh we all need to stay very alert well you're very uh you're very diplomatic Adam but uh you know we look at many different Industries and Europe uh is a bit behind in innovation in technology and so on um why do you think it is I mean I look at some of your I look at some of your business principles you have things like think big bias for Action these are not very European slogans well we we we partner with a great number of European companies whether it's systems integrators like Cap Gemini um whether it's software companies like uh Sage uh in the UK that I just spoke with last week and I see a lot of innovation uh happening in Europe um I I think you know A lot's been written and said about uh how Venture Capital works and how uh how much funding you know happens of companies uh in the US and I think a lot of the VCS are are looking more internationally these days so I think there's there's a good chance that the Innovation continues to to grow and flourish in a lot of different countries around the world uh you know India is another place where people are really looking uh looking at for Innovation to come out of um so again I think it's very Dynamic and um I think there have been great conditions for for technical innovation in the US for sure uh but I think you'll see it in other countries over time as well now these centers are very energy intensive how do you uh plan for a more sustainable future well that is an incredibly important it is is one of the most uh in important topics um that we could touch on so uh Amazon has taken a very public uh pledge to be um netser carbon across all of Amazon retail AWS everything uh by 2040 uh which is 10 years ahead of the Paris Accords and is a very you big bold uh public commitment we did it publicly instead of privately because we wanted to uh both put a forcing function on ourselves frankly because it's difficult as well as to really catalyze and help Inspire other organizations other companies to join us in uh uh helping to fight uh fight climate change we have over 400 other organizations including many large companies who have signed on to the climate pledge so we're really gratified by that now we can't just wait till 20 240 and we have a lot of interim uh goals along the way one of which is to be 100% renewable energy powered by 2025 now obviously that is just around the corner and uh the good news is we already over 90% renewable energy powered across all of Amazon but a huge part of that of course comes from um AWS data centers so we're already at 90% on our way to 100% And one of the big ways we do that is by being the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy on Earth over the past three years and uh it's we've we've uh uh done long-term funding for wind farms for solar projects around the world um including cluding you know the first offshore wind in Japan project and uh many others like it it's also really important that we innovate to just use less energy period And I mentioned Custom Design chips a little while ago so uh the first uh AWS we certainly buy a lot of a lot of chips for our servers from a lot of really great Partners but in addition uh for a number of years now AWS has actually designed its own chips uh which customers can use and you know different different servers virtual servers and uh that general purpose chip is called graviton our graviton based uh um chip um actually consumes 60% less power than equivalent equivalent chips that our customers use so simply by moving into the cloud and then moving onto our graviton based capacity uh customers can you know uh reduce their energy consumption by up to 60% if you look at Adam if you look at the chips that you that you buy the value of all the chips how much do you now develop yourself and how much are you still dependent on the likes of Nvidia I I I think it's a big mix um you know we we have in the kind of classical x86 based uh chip architecture we're great partners with Intel uh with AMD uh in the GPU space uh we're great partners with Nvidia and have a very tight relationship with Nvidia um so we we continue to uh to buy and use you know enormous quantities of chips from all of those uh all of those companies and and I don't I don't foresee any change in that uh in the foreseeable future how could Quant Computing change your business I I think Quantum Computing is is is uh potentially you know very disruptive very exciting is also I think a lot of unknowns and is is years away so we're we're investing in Quantum now uh both internally inside of Amazon as well as we've U funded a lot of research at uh uh places like uh Harvard University uh calply um uh Caltech and uh continue to do so I I I think that um it it's uh a proposition which you know in a number of years from now uh could really be disruptive to uh to how Computing is done uh but there a lot it's very very early there are a lot of Unsolved questions which which need to be solved before it becomes a viable technology at scale but when it is a viable um technology how is the world going to look different what's the what's the main change well the main change would be uh the ability to do you know vastly uh larger more powerful uh Computing jobs at uh much faster and at much lower cost I mean that is the that is the dream um and uh I think there's a good chance that the world gets there but uh there's still has to be a lot of of scientific research as well as uh applied um applied computer science to to make that happen and we're investing in it I know a lot of other companies are as well and uh I think it's a great uh uh uh an area of great potential for the world but uh at the same time as we uh keep that eye towards the the future uh we're keeping the other eye on the Technologies we need today uh to improve price performance for our customers and in your mind how do we stti up against China both on the AI but then also on Quantum Computing um well on Quantum I'd say it's it's it's too early to really answer that question uh I think it's it's it's hard to know um actually who's who's proceeding at what pace it's it's still very early uh on AI uh I mean again to the best of my knowledge I'll say uh I think that uh the US and the Western world is is proceeding really well I think that um you know there are great great leaders uh in the AI space and what I really like is that some of them are are big companies like Amazon um and some of them are very very young startups like anthropic you or cohere or stability AI or AI 21 all of whom are are great uh AWS startup Partners or hugging face is another one and uh it's I think that mix is really important for Innovation having the resources of big companies along with the fresh thinking of of of very young uh smaller companies and so I think that uh uh the the US and the Western world is is very well positioned I think we have a lot of questions around not only where the technology will go but how you think about responsible Ai and ethical Ai and making sure that um these capabilities are used in the right way and uh we're we're we're busy at work um as you can imagine imagine in in in all of those areas you know technical uh out there in the market with customers as well as uh very intently with um regulators and policy makers do you think the tech companies are able to self-regulate AI uh I think tech companies it's very important the tech companies you know participate very vocally in the discussion I don't think it'll only be tech companies self-regulating I think that uh it will be uh partially up to governments and potentially multinational organizations uh to provide guidance and to provide regulatory Frameworks and I think countries should um have a voice in saying here's how we want AI to proceed inside of our our country and I think that um tech companies have a lot of experience we're the ones with the technology and with the customers so we have really important voices in that conversation and we're helping very actively to shape those conversations you know I was at the White House this summer uh when President Biden announced uh his voluntary commitments around AI which about seven companies signed up for um later this week I'll will be in the in the UK at the uh AI safety Summit that the UK government uh is putting on which will have a lot of uh world leaders that and uh we're we're devoting the time and the resources to participating in those forums participating in those discussions and I think that industry needs to come together along with Academia as well as policy makers and Regulators uh to figure out with this powerful set of new technologies uh how we can uh ensure you know safe responsible uh uh use with a lot of visibility into it where at the same time and this is essential not squashing Innovation we've got to let companies keep on innovating uh particularly as some of the companies you uh some of the countries you mentioned uh are probably not going to worry so much are going to keep on innovating uh and so we have to make sure that our our countries and our companies keep on innovating unfettered as well talking about Innovation you are also launching um a satellite uh Network uh to provide Broadband akin to uh what starlink is doing so what is this tell you you launched a few satellites you are looking at several thousand of them eventually what is what is this going to do to uh to AWS well it is very exciting you're referring to project Kyper with a K and uh it's a whole satellite capability being launched actually by a sister division to AWS it's it's being spearheaded by another part of Amazon although AWS Partners very closely with them so uh we will over the next uh several years have several thousand uh Leo or low earth orbit satellites uh up around Earth um just a few weeks ago we launched our first two test satellites which was a very exciting Milestone uh those tests have gone really well um really as well or better than than what one could have hoped and so uh those teams are going to uh keep pressing forward you really urgently and relentlessly and as fast as possible um getting the first production satellites up uh next year and then moving into a commercial availability for customers after that um and the the first and primary mission of project Kyper was to provide internet access to unserved and underserved uh people around the world and there are billions of those people who are either unserved or underserved and uh I'm really excited for that mission I think over the next several years it's going to be really exciting we're obviously still early in that Journey but uh Amazon takes a very you know long-term view of most things and uh we think it'll be an amazing set of offerings for customers for many years to come so that's a a great place to uh to Pivot uh to your Copa culture um because you are one of the longest term thinking companies I know um what kind of time frame do you do you operate within when you plan yeah it it's true I do think that's one of the um most distinguishing things about Amazon is we we do tend to take very uh long-term views in our planning Horizons and uh it it's such a it's such a tool for us it's it's so powerful because instead of looking at things on a you know a 90day cycle as a quarterly basis you we're thinking about you know what can we do three five 10 years from now to serve customers really well and to create great businesses for ourselves and to make make decisions based on those criteria a lot of companies um choose not to have that long-term Viewpoint I I think it's very limiting what is it that make people shortterm I I think um there's a lot of investor sentiment around you know quarterly uh earnings in the US for example and there's tremendous pressure and I I I think that if you have a culture where um you know you care a lot about um uh the Optics short-term Optics uh and you uh you just don't Focus yourself as much on creating long longterm value for customers then you kind of end up in that trap now I'm not saying short-term results don't matter you know they do and uh you know having having targets and and hitting them you know matters but um you really building building a business for the long term is what matters the most and I think we've done a good job over time about you know trying to run a good business in the short term uh while really building you know enormous value for the long term Sam wman from open AI said that uh long-term thinking is a competitive advantage because so few people do it so so what are some of the longest term investments you made at Amazon well we've talked about Kyper and uh you know that uh that probably started call it five years ago and uh it's we're we're just at this exciting stage of starting to launch satellites and it'll be another couple years before that full constellation is is up so uh that is very Capital intensive for sure and and long-term proposition uh I think we've been talking for the past uh 30 or 40 minutes about uh a really good example which is AWS so if if you go back in time um you know Amazon was was you know mainly a retailer had a few retail categories and then there was this crazy idea about uh you know turning Amazon Inside Out offering up the guts of Amazon uh for other companies to use and a lot of people didn't understand it other people uh thought it was crazy and it was definitely a long-term proposition because it requires a uh not only building all of the software services that we that we offer customers today around compute and storage and database and machine learning and Ai and uh call center operations and everything in between uh but also uh spending all of the the capital you required for the the data centers and the servers and all that infrastructure that we've already discussed and um you know we knew it would it would take years uh for it to become um a big business and and a profitable business but at the same time it we believed and still believe that in time in the fullness of time it could be the biggest business that Amazon has well it's probably it's probably the the majority of the value of your company now isn't it hard to say I think that all the pieces of Amazon work very well together I leave it to the uh to the investment Community to try and sort out you know which pieces are uh are worth what but uh we we see many many companies now who want to B do business with all of the different areas of Amazon so you know Automotive companies who want to do business with AWS and integr our our devices and entertainment systems into the vehicles and Supply Amazon with uh uh with electric um delivery vehicles and that's just the automotive industry so I think all the pieces of a of Amazon work very very well together but also Amazon uh retail business which is where the whole thing started what it was running for ages on like negative and way for thin margins right really investing in building building size and scale well certainly in the early days uh Jeff became very I think well known for the Mantra of get big fast that was you know really a term here at Amazon and that preceded my time here at the company by the way but uh I think that was that was a really big thing and uh the company really believed that you know achieving that scale in retail was going to be really really important and it would help price it would help customer selection and it would help convenience and delivery speeds if they could uh get big fast and and they did and again that took that took a very long-term perspective instead of just you know worrying about uh uh the very very short term uh and as a result you know the retail business has been great you know it is a retail business and obviously you retail businesses um you know uh uh you have to be uh appropriately cost conscious those folks have always done a great job of really investing for the future while also you know being being really really efficient and uh it's it's been um uh it's been great to partner with them and see the results that they've achieved a lot of companies say that they are customer focused now you really are customer focused how can we see that so it's a great question because you're right everybody does say they're customer focused and um I think that a lot of people think that customer focus is somehow an emotional attribute uh and on this emotional scale you'll go from you know maybe disliking your customers we could all point to a few custo a few companies who don't seem to like their customers very much to maybe liking your customers and then the highest on that scale would be you know loving your customer and I I think uh in my opinion um that is not what customer Obsession uh is really about although I think loving your customers is a good thing but at Amazon and I think the reason why uh we actually are so customer obsessed I think that what it means is two things one understanding customers at an incredibly deep level a level that is hard to achieve a level that takes effort continuously and most companies simply you know don't go through all of the energy don't expand the energy and go through the effort required to understand you know on each one of their services each use cases case what do customers really need from you what are what real problems do they have and then uh as hard as that is that actually turns out to be the the easier of the two things this the second is to ensure that every important decision you make is taken from that customer perspective I've seen a lot of companies you know outside of here who they actually understand a fair amount about the customers but then when they decide to price something it's just about profit maximization or if they decide whether to build something it's about well you know can we afford to build it and they kind of drop the customer perspective outside the door you know for some weird reason and I think you have to have the discipline to say we not only have all this knowledge about what customers really need we're were going to bring it into the room and make sure that we're basing our decision around that and you see that embody itself in a lot of different ways at Amazon it's not just talk it's not just a philosophy one example is um we have this this fairly well-known mechanism called a a press release FAQ process prfq what that means is that uh before we before we build anything of substance a new service um a new AWS feature we'll actually write a full press release along with a full FAQ doesn't matter whether we ever actually issue that press release or not uh and the idea being that you need to be able to describe in in in detail why what your building matters how it's going to Delight customers or why would you bother to waste your engineers time on it and that we call that our working backwards process and it's a process that we've actually got a number of customers who have seen loved and and adopted and we actually um go and into workshops with a number of our customers to to teach that technique it's it's very powerful a lot of our customers have really uh uh grasped it I spoke to some of the people who were in um in charge of the selection of you as a partner and um and you can imagine where a Public Service Company um these uh these processes are really thorough and takes a long time really one of one of the really differentiating factors was that it was very very clear to us that you really cared about us as a client and that he would endure after you know we had signed the contract and and you guys have really delivered so it just seems so basic uh it's so important for AWS you know I tell my teams all the time that you're job is to go form long-term trusted relationships and uh the business part will take care of itself if you do that I I think so much Springs from that and uh people get really caught up in their own short-term uh concerns that it's easy to forget that and we try here to make sure that we don't you have some really cool um leadership principles which are you know publicly known what is the most important one for you this is like choosing between your children it's it's just not it's not fair we have um we have 16 leadership principles that they're uh not just in some manual they're alive and well uh I sometimes call them the operating system of of Amazon or or the central nervous system uh customer obsession is vital for sure uh I I think the uh another one which is absolutely core is invent and simplify and uh that's really about innovating and also uh embodies the principle that um innovating doesn't mean just making things more complicated it means uh uh making them more powerful but also more simple and uh uh you know we we've always tried to you know move very fast as a company in fact one of the reasons why AWS was founded was because Amazon wanted to move faster and they wanted to create the shared layer of infrastructure services so all the other teams at Amazon could worry about their customers and not about infrastructure and uh so we've I think we've built in many many mechanisms to to move fast we we hire people who like to build who are Innovative we organize for Speed uh a lot of people think speed is pre-ordained we think speed is a choice and so we organize ourselves both culturally as well as you know just our teams themselves to be able to innovate and to be able to do it really really quickly and so I I think that invent and simplify uh is incredibly important for customers and it's actually been a huge Advantage for Amazon uh in the market segments we're in as well you have something called a two pizam what is that so a two Pizza team so uh the concept of that is you know wherever possible you should have a team no larger than can be fed with two pizzas and uh we've had a lot of teams at Amazon over the years who actually are two Pizza teams and even when you know with our scale uh you obviously have teams that uh that grow larger than that and uh we very often try and refactor or slice those uh those teams up to create even smaller more Nimble teams um but even where we don't do that it's it's the concept that's alive and well and the concept is you know stay small stay Nimble and very very importantly you know control your destiny uh you know don't don't take dependencies where you don't have to on many other teams you know figure out how to uh be able to to to own your own progress uh overcome your own obstacles and make rapid progress for customers what's special with the meeting culture at Amazon well we do do something which is um unusual uh which is we uh we pretty much never use uh PowerPoint to run an internal meeting um so for most internal meetings uh somebody writes uh a narrative a a document and uh it could be short or it could be up to six pages no longer than six pages and when we come into a meeting the first thing we do is say hello and then we all sit down and read so we might spend the first 15 to 30 minutes of a meeting simply reading and when everybody's finished reading the document there's no presentation um somebody just says okay what questions do we have and uh it's it's it's an incredibly powerful mechanism it's to me it is one of like the most powerful ways to uh uh to move the business forward because it creates real understanding with with uh with PowerPoint bullets it's it's so easy to be on the surface um it's so easy also to not get through the material because uh you just interrupt the presenter with the narrative you were force it is very obvious if you've if you have not thought through a problem problem deeply with a four-page or a six-page uh uh narrative um so you you you have to have depth of thought you have to have been able to lay out all the issues uh to have a good conversation and in addition it's very egalitarian by the end of reading the document everybody has the same information you know nobody has special knowledge and then uh anybody in the room regardless of who they are um can ask questions and uh it's all from the same fact base and so it's been uh one of the most to me personally one of the most amazing mechanisms that I've seen at Amazon uh to really help uh create deep understanding to make decisions and to move our businesses forward moving on to uh to your leadership what's the most challenging part of uh being the co AWS uh I would say well I sometimes joke that I uh I have uh I fear that I'll wake up in the morning and and somebody will tell me that I work at a big company now I yes I I do happen to work at a big company but I never want it to feel that way I never want our customers to feel that way and um you know there's this Con concept of of insurgents versus incumbents and you know insurgents don't mind disrupting insurgents you know just want to create new things and want to create value and incumbents um want to preserve value and worry about what they already have instead of worrying about what they can build for customers and I think um you know it's very easy as you grow larger and you have revenue streams and you have businesses to slip into that incumbent mentality and I think one of the most important jobs I have as a leader is to try and remind everybody at AWS that it is still day one it is very very early in the cloud Journey um that uh there's way more work to do than we have already done and that uh our customers you know demand and expect us to be innovating on their behalf it's our job to do that and figure out how to create a good business for ourselves along the way not to figure out you know how to create a good business and bring customers along with us and I think you got to have a lot of leadership a lot of cultural mechanisms to continuously remind you know everybody across what is now a pretty scaled and pretty sizable team about you know how we believe we want to operate and how we want our world to work you spent a few years outside um Amazon as a CEO of Tableau when when you came back um how how has your leadership changed and also how how does your leadership change with with age and experience I I think that uh over time partially as you say from age and experience and and partially from just being able to step away and uh operating in a different environment and get getting a new look uh on uh on the world uh I think one thing I've really tried to focus on over the past few years is um uh leading with empathy and um some people can use by the way empathy with sympathy very different to me empathy means understanding understanding so and understanding where people come from understanding why they're saying what they're saying instead of just focusing on the words coming out of somebody's mouth trying to go back a step and understand you know are they saying this because they're worried about a program are they saying this you know what what's going on or or what's going on with the person the human being where where are they coming from and uh in order to do that I've tried to really really focus as obvious as it may sound I've tried really really hard to focus on listening more over the past few years can empathy be learned is it an acquired skill absolutely I think it starts with your listening skills so I've figured out over the past few years that um I don't learn that much when I talk and then I learn a lot more when I listen so I I think they're they're very tactical things very tangible things I should say like like listening would your wife agree to this on some days on my better day maybe maybe not on all days but good question um so I I think absolutely it can be learned I like to think that um you know I've gotten better uh not perfect but better and better at this over the years and I think um if you have empathy and and really start and really listen and understand where people are coming from U that allows you to be you know really open and honest and and uh in return and you know I my personal leadership style I I I try to really be uh you open and honest and transparent and let people understand what I'm thinking and why I'm thinking it and um I I think that that really resonates with with most people if if they feel that you've brought them along the discussion that you've brought them along the decision process uh they've had a voice they've been heard there's there's been thoughtful discussion I've had many examples where I've had to make a decision which you know a lot of people disagree with and I found that in the vast majority of cases they don't like the fact that we've decided you know something that that they wouldn't have decided but they're okay with it they're okay with it because of the process they're okay because they feel respected because they feel listened to and they trust uh that their leaders are um even if not always you know in complete agreement with them that they have the uh best intentions and that they're uh they're going through a thoughtful appropriate process how do you deal with stress stress what stress no we we're in a very uh I'm very privileged we're in incredible uh business I have an incredible position I'm I'm very very lucky but U it is fast-paced of of course there's there's stress U I think in a couple ways one of which is at work having a really really good team and and knowing that I can uh I can talk to the people in my team um people used to tell me oh the CEO job is very lonely I I've never found it lonely I think that's a choice and I don't find it lonely because uh my senior leaders know what's going on I don't keep things inside my own head I share with them um they they help me they make my ideas better they bring new ideas which are um you know usually better than mine and uh we really operate as a team and I think that reduces my personal stress of work and then I think it's really important to set boundaries and to have time for uh whatever it is that's important to you um for me you know my family is really important spending time with the family is important um there's also some sporting things I love to do I love to water ski in the summer I love to play tennis year round and um you got to carve out time for those things to to stay whole and to stay healthy do you read I don't read nearly as much as I would like to uh I I do read but uh unfortunately at this particular stage it's little more episodic but I do love to read and I've been been a lifelong reader since I was a little kid what is your advice to young people we have tens of thousands of them listening to this uh I think advice to young people um well I wish there's probably a lot of advice I should have been given when I was young so uh what to choose I would say maybe two things um one is um try and remember that you have a long life hopefully and a long career and and I think people early in their career are measuring themselves against their their peers that they went to University with or that they started a job with and you know whether you do something 12 months earlier or later than I do you know it really doesn't matter what matters is the experience you gain so just gain experience build skills you know do things which you can see uh could be valuable to you you know down the line and I promise that um you know if you gain those skills it really won't matter that you know 20 years from now um that I had some promotion six months before you did um so just take that long-term view about skill building and the second thing I'd say and I really wish that um you know I'd learned this earlier in my career is this concept of being um vocally self-critical and uh most people are able to you know very quickly uh uh critique somebody's shirt uh whether they like the coffee they're drinking that day but when uh when when the camera turns on themselves uh they lose that objectivity because it's it's it's painful and it makes you insecure and I think if you can understand what you're really good at what you're not so good at uh what you really want to work on if you have that Clarity of understanding uh it's the old attitude you can't manage what you can't measure and if you can't sort of understand yourself how can you really hope to to know what to work on and I think if you can just be objective uh with yourself about what the things you want to work on are no matter how good you actually are at other things um that is an incredibly powerful skill yeah well it's been really great um talking to you we've been investing in in Amazon for more than 20 years we are uh just so uh grateful for all the value you've created and and also thank you for running our operations up in the CL out well it's a it's a privilege uh we love working with you we love working with all of our customers uh we've got an incredibly passionate team and uh we're just getting started so we'll keep going fantastic thank you so much