David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It is true. As we were doing the research note, of course, David and I read both of Brad Stone's excellent books, I watched the PBS Frontline documentary, which of course, is a very specific angle that they're trying to take on the company. When you read any of these Amazon analysis pieces, they're like 95% about the retail business. They'll talk about things like the relationship with employees and the big New York Times piece that came out in 2015. They'll talk about the relationship with the warehouse workers, or was this good for the world? Everyone indexes on that which is important and deserves all the attention it's got, but almost none of these spend a material amount of time on AWS other than mostly an apocryphal founding story, which is not even really how it happened. We identified you're referring to one origin story of AWS. We identified not one, not two, not three, but four separate origin stories. We're going to tell them all here. I think there is something important to learn about what AWS is, about Amazon, and about Amazon culture in all of these. Let's start with the first and most obviously, untrue one, which is ironically also the one that the layperson believes the most. Yes, because it's tempting. It's like an, oh. It's too convenient.…

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