Mentions personal use of Brad Stone's excellent books. Mentions personal use of PBS Frontline documentary.

Transcript context

…But everybody also needed to be on the Internet, and the Internet runs on AWS. Today, we're going to tell that story. It's funny. As we did the research, there's no Everything Store book dedicated to AWS. There are a lot of very disparate resources and stories out there. There actually are quite a few conflicting and competing stories about what the true origin is of AWS. You might say it has a cloudy origin. See what we did there? 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.…

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