David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Okay, so what you're telling me then is Bezos gets excited about this, Jassy starts working with him on it, they're basically translating this idea of the first little nugget that you planted is we should make sure that all of the APIs that we're making available internally, we should design them in mind as if they could be externally consumed at some point. But you haven't yet told me, how does some commercial offering eventually become available? And what is the commercial offering to third-party customers? All right, we're now in mid-2003. This has been this huge transformative project within Amazon over the last 18 months. Jassy has been working a lot on it as Jeff's TA. Jeff's like, okay, Andy, it's time for you to go back out into the company. You're done being my TA. You have to go become a leader of something within the company. It's almost like an echo of Jeff and David Shaw back at D.E. Shaw. They start thinking together like, okay, Andy, what are you going to do? What's the new thing? You're going to go lead within Amazon? Andy's probably happy he didn't leave Amazon, I think. They come together to this idea of, well, maybe there's an opportunity to take the API-based IT infrastructure that we're developing here and offer it to third-parties. The legend goes, Andy puts together a six-pager. This is the official Amazon legend. You can read about stuff about amazon.com…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.