
Jeff Bezos at YC Startup School 2008 [video] - theCricketer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKfFHuouzA
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hn_throwaway_99
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](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

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whoisjuan
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.

~~~
josh2600
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.

~~~
whoisjuan
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.

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

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cowmix
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."

~~~
collinf
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."

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brianm
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](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...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-ec2-reserved-instances/)).

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 :-)

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theWheez
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.

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rexreed
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.

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wodenokoto
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.

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notthingnill
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.

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simonebrunozzi
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.

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

