Jeff Bezos at YC Startup School 2008 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos at YC Startup School 2008 [video]

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171 pointstheCricketer31 comments

One thing I think is so extraordinary about Jeff Bezos is his uncanny technical prescience despite not really being a technologist. For example, the famous Steve Yegge "platforms rant" blog post [1] about how Bezos basically made a company-wide edict for microservices was very much ahead of its time. Similarly, the vision of cloud computing was much more advanced and early than any of its competitors. Considering this came from a company that already had a huge business of selling things, I think this technical foresight is pretty remarkable.

[1] https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

I believe the cloud computing vision came from Andy Jassy. In fact he wrote the original six pager for AWS.

Equally impressive since Jassy isn't really a technologist either.

I hate this language of “so and so isn’t a technologist”. You don’t need to understand how a compiler works or grok segfaults to see the future.

It’s obvious if you’re running a big data center yourself that you’d rather pay someone else to do that, it’s just that no one wanted to take on that operational burden because it’s a pain. It doesn’t take a technologist to realize that arbitraging pain is where you make money. Everything after that is execution.

There are plenty of people who see the future who aren’t coders, they just usually can’t execute.

Yeah, but it's hard to identify those people until their useful business lifespan is half over. Technologists are at least assumed to have some idea of the possibilities; plenty of "visionaries" come up with unworkable visions that we conveniently forget about in hindsight, because they were bad visions of the future.

I disagree with this. The vision wasn't a simple economic statement on why "we should rent out our unused server capacity". It was vastly more complex than that. It included technical details on how it should be approached and how to leverage and scale their existing infrastructure. It also laid down the ground for EC2 and S3 as foundational services.

Perhaps my error was saying that Jassy isn't a technologist. He is 100% a technologist and has an incredible ability to absorb and understand very complex technical topics. He just isn't a technologist by training or by trade. He simply has an innate technical ability to such extent that his first job at Amazon was being a technical liaison to Jeff Bezos.

Also VPC networking + patents show how advanced these guys are.

I think the confusion is largely between computer science, information systems, system sciences and management. Which are overlapping fields, but not necessarily practiced as such.

Interesting, Sean O Sullivan who coined the phrase cloud, was a business analyst at compaq.

>>"I believe the cloud computing vision came from Andy Jassy...Equally impressive since Jassy isn't really a technologist either."

And it shows that he's not a technologist. No plan B for when it rains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC2AZAxBQAo

(to be fair 51% of US people https://www.businessinsider.com/people-think-stormy-weather-... believe that too)

;)

Jeff's original request for S3 was, as I recall, along the lines of "We need malloc() for the Internet."

What was the malloc's original usecase? Storing logs?

Manual memory allocation in the C programming language.

Sigh, seriously, though. Some people tell me they used to store the Clickstream logs on S3 initially, because FTP was so unreliable.

Anyway, I don't expect Jeff Barr to answer that question, although I'd be happy if he did.

When you start to get an executive-height perspective, you begin to see jam-ups that normal people don't see for several years. You can conceptually articulate the fix/need and let the real engineers hammer out the implementation. The same applies for tech, financial and social trend-lines.

This is anecdotal, but I used to work at a large (Fortune 500) financial company. The CEO had no engineering experience, but every year they would do an annual summit of the goals of the company. Over 50% of the talk every year, they would drill down pretty deep into technical topics, I was always amazed that at that level he actually knew enough to be able to describe complex data engineering topics and machine learning models. Even if it was rehearsed, I always came off the talks super impressed with their ability to talk at that detail.

Also, Bezos was a Computer Science major and a developer for 4 years after graduation.

This is off a bit, he's pretty technical, BS in Electrical Engineering and CS from Princeton. And his pre Amazon jobs were managing technical projects at D.E. Shaw and Bankers Trust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

+summa cum laude

So the opposite of "not really a technologist"?

Not sure where some of these ideas even come from. I constantly see some version of "Musk isn't really engineer" on here as well. I guess having credible degree's and starting billion dollar++ tech companies doesn't quite cut it for the harsh critiques on Hackernews.

I feel that AWS suites Jeff more so than selling and shipping material goods.

Jeff speaks with deep comprehension and enthusiasm regarding AWS, I've never heard him do such a thing for customer experience, and the more abstract and nuance issues of strategic marketing, branding, mindshare yada yada.

I'm not at all surprised to hear him say in retrospect that they will eventually be an 'AWS company'.

Bezos quotes an article about AWS, "..in fact Amazon's real business down the line will be its cloud services. Amazon will be like a bookstore that sells cocaine out the back door. Book will just be a front."

Source article here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazons-cloud-computing-will-s...

Another point I recently heard, and I can't recall the exact quote off my head but it was along the lines of: "Amazon at this point is really just a cloud company that is using it's cloud earnings to subsidize its other business arms to grow to a big enough scale where it can choke out all other competitors."

I was lucky enough to be in the audience for this, and have long wondered (and generally believed) if the questions at https://youtu.be/6nKfFHuouzA?t=2025 lead to reserved instances. The timing was right (reserved instances appeared in early 2009 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-ec2-reserved-ins...).

Jeff ruminates on the problem a bit, and you can all but see the model come out by the time Jeff finishes answering the followup question :-)

That he thinks it would be interesting to a "subset of users" is kind of amusing :-)

Wow, you're right! Definitely sounds like something that Bezos hadn't given much thought to (or enough to have had a response), this is a cool observation.

Side note, why don't these videos show the slide content? That's just as useful, if not moreso, than seeing a video of the person speaking. You can hear the person without seeing them, but you can't hear the slides without seeing them, even if they're being described. A simple split screen with slides on one side and video on the other would work. Or even a picture-in-picture with the speaker. The top comment on the YouTube video has some real snark in reference to what I thought was a legitimate criticism of what would make this video much better.

You usually have picture in picture solution in mind when recording. One view of the speaker and a second view of the slides.

Maybe the slides was meant to be shared along with the video, or they were shared, b ut only with YC attendants.

Seems to be on purpose to not share sensitive data.

In Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World, Tim Harford describe the strategy of the initial period of Amazon, and compare Bezos with Erwin Rommel, the desert Fox.

Wow, the memories. I joined AWS in 2008 as a tech evangelist (left in 2014), and many of these metrics I still remember to this day.

I am actually curious if what AWS does, to show relatively clear numbers on the business, is a common practice.

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