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Published · transcript-backed

Speaker unverified: belief

31 Dec 2016 Acquired The Amazon IPO with original Amazon Board Member Tom Alberg

“I don’t think we thought we were kind of falling in a Microsoft model although I think from the beginning, everybody in Amazon recognized that Microsoft had the potential in the cloud to be the most important competitor in that as they have become.”

— Speaker unverified

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Speaker unverified
Attribution
Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
belief
Recorded
31 Dec 2016
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…I wanted to ask quickly. Obviously, this happened much later than the IPO story, but about AWS, the listeners to our show might also listen to Ben Thompson and James Allworth’s podcast, Exponent. On one of their recent shows, they were talking about platform mentality and the importance of that at Amazon and perhaps how much DNA came from Microsoft into Amazon in terms of thinking about AWS as a true platform. Ben showed you, they posit this great Bill Gates quote that a platform is when other participants on top of you realize the vast majority of the economics in the industry and you only collect a small percentage. It’s not like a high margin Google-like business. How much thinking on that level happened at Amazon during that creation? I don’t think we thought we were kind of falling in a Microsoft model although I think from the beginning, everybody in Amazon recognized that Microsoft had the potential in the cloud to be the most important competitor in that as they have become. But the difference in a way was platforms were somewhat considered static in the sense that you built a platform and then every couple of years you revised it or you sent out new software or machines. Internet was so much constant iteration. I have never heard this from Jeff earlier, but it seems to me with AWS the difference in a lot of ways, why it succeeded and had been able to take this lead and keep it partly was being first when others held back. But the constant iteration of AWS, it’s like revising your internet site. They had 600 new features this year or something. Well, in the old days, platforms didn’t do that. You came out with Windows 8 or 10 but it was 2 or 3 years of massive coding. So, I think the world even on that has changed a lot. Right. That’s a great point. One other question before we move out of trends and themes is, as you’re looking at companies that are pitching Madrona for investment in recent history, what are things that you learned from Amazon being so successful that you sort of look for at other companies as a pattern matching based on Amazon?…

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