David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It's a convenient narrative. It's also a little bit odd that this idea could come from someone who wasn't in the muck. It's actually a really good interview that Andy does with Harvard i-Lab in 2013. That's on YouTube. They're talking about the origin of AWS. I think the topic is intrapreneurship at companies, which is my God, the most disgusting word of all time. Andy in the talk, he's like, well, we had to decide, as part of this vision document and the discussion around it, how do we launch this? Do we pick just one service, one IT primitive, and launch with that? Or do we put together a whole bunch of things and launch them all together? He says what they ended up doing was they got a tiger team together of the 10 best technical minds inside the company. They deconstructed all the major web services, web applications of today, amazon.com itself, Google, eBay, he doesn't mention them by name, but I assume the other big web services of the time, big web applications, and then figured out what you would need to re architect those services based on this new cloud IT primitive infrastructure. They come up with a list. They decide you need storage, you need compute, you need databases, and you need a content distribution network, like what Akamai was to be able to recreate any internet service of scale. I love that you say ‘was,’ like what Akamai was.…

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