Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yup, and Andy Jassy's infamous one-star review of The Everything Store on amazon.com. In one of the several passages where he talks about how Brad had it all wrong, here's a quote from Andy: "The vision document proposing the AWS business and outlining the initial set of services for AWS including our compute service (EC2) was finished and presented to the executive team in September 2003. I wrote the document and was lucky to have the help of several people in putting it together." This was about a year before Chris Pinkham moved to South Africa to build the initial version of EC2. Chris played an integral role in the definition, team building, and product building of EC2 despite leaving before EC2 was launched. Clearly, there's some bad blood here, but my thoughts. I want your thoughts, too. I just find this whole thing ridiculous, because of course, it doesn't matter. The most ridiculous thing is that what I think actually happened here, which is there were multiple teams working on multiple related things within the company, that's how Amazon prides itself on running, decentralized innovation. That was the whole point of this whole freaking exercise. Decentralize, let teams innovate, what’s Jeff say? Invent and Wander is the mantra of him and the company. I think that's what actually happened. The official version now of AWS history of it was all centrally planned, it was all in that 2003 document, that just seems silly to me and counterproductive. I agree. The other thing that becomes clear is, it's really not about the idea. It's about the execution. I know this is a trope. To make it a little bit more specific, it can be about the idea if you define the idea as the hundreds of micro ideas that comprise the main idea. But if you're saying that the idea is something articulated in a sentence, that's pretty much worthless. Maybe even in a vision doc, it's about the thousands of micro decisions you make while executing it and actually doing the work to execute it that ends up mattering. History is written by the victors, so we're seeing some of that play out here. The other thing that's very clear, as Andy Jassy is just a brilliant strategist and fantastic leader. Of course, someone like him in the organization would end up actually running it. I don't even know why there's dispute over, well, it was my idea. It's like, well, who cares? Who's going to end up turning this thing into a world-changing business? You had that great playbook theme and takeaway from the amazon.com episode that I think you posted as a clip on Twitter and LinkedIn that went so viral. People who were originally Amazon employees loved it, which was your idea that Amazon was a pathfinding algorithm.…

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