Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
54 published records
01 / commitment
“In particular, this was not anything new because of everything we are going to talk about on this whole separate episode today.”
02 / recommendation
“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.”
03 / recommendation
“I watched every single re:Invent keynote to prepare for this, which I will tell you, that is a lot of IT conference keynote watching.”
04 / belief
“Andy, I think, has said on recent earnings calls, hey, we're going to be moving back towards profitability.”
05 / belief
“Go through the maze, hit a dead end, backtrack a step or two, go take another path. I think that actually is also how AWS launched.”
06 / belief
“We're moving all of it to AWS. I believe Netflix is still to this day, I think, 100% on AWS.”
07 / belief
“Jeff loves it, the board loves it, the S-Team loves it, and it gets approved. I think all that actually happened or happened in some way, shape, or form.”
08 / belief
“A work in progress. I think, justifiably so, this has been an AWS love fest. We've heaped so much praise on them.”
09 / belief
“I think, fairly recently, within the last five years before this, he had considered a career in the sports industry.”
10 / uncertainty
“I don't know how intentional it was in the moment, but it became something that later on would become hugely important to them, which is that they truly were unopinionated about this as a platform.”
11 / belief
“In 2014, Jeff Bezos wrote the annual memo that comes out, a letter to shareholders and said, "I believe that AWS’s market size is unconstrained.”
12 / belief
“I agree. The other thing that becomes clear is, it's really not about the idea. It's about the execution.”
13 / evaluation
“When projects don't work, you're not stuck with legacy leftover infrastructure from things that don't work.”
14 / uncertainty
“Then Ben and David talked for three hours, and now I don't know what it is anymore.”
15 / uncertainty
“The IP also doesn't really lend itself well to serials. I don't know. Maybe that's not true.”
16 / belief
“You're going to go lead within Amazon? Andy's probably happy he didn't leave Amazon, I think.”
17 / belief
“I think his line is, at first, it was that nobody thought you could run a real application.”
18 / belief
“I think story number four is basically right, too, but three and four are the same.”
19 / belief
“I think Microsoft and Google both wanted to build something that they thought would be an amazing business model and something that was very clever to them as technologists.”
20 / belief
“When the "AWS IPO," which I think Ben Thompson coined that term. It happened in 2015.”
21 / belief
“Their IoT offering, Greengrass. I think IoT just didn't pan out the way that everyone wanted it to.”
22 / belief
“I think before launching something when you're at Amazon's scale, and now that they are the trusted partner of all these IT departments, you've got these security things, operational things, SLA guarantees that they're fully committed to.”
23 / belief
“For sure. I remember first reading (I think) the PHP book that they put out. When Web 2.”
24 / uncertainty
“I don't know what Google's advertising margins are, but that business probably runs at, I guess it depends if you put sales above the line or below the line, but 80% gross margins.”
25 / belief
“I think there is something important to learn about what AWS is, about Amazon, and about Amazon culture in all of these.”
26 / belief
“Now we'll transition from number two to number three together, but what I think is so important about number two, even though it leads to AWS, that is the creation of AWS but not the AWS we know and love, it's this idea of Web 2.”
27 / belief
“I think people today have heard AWS so many times that they forget that it's a little bit of a misnomer.”
28 / belief
“I think in that interview, if it wasn't that one, it's another one around that time, he talks about people say, Reed, you compete with amazon.”
29 / belief
“I think, actually, what's going on here is, it comes all the way full circle that Amazon is offering Platform as a Service offerings at this point and telling customers, hey, you could just keep using our primitive building blocks, but actually, what you should be doing to take advantage of the full power of the cloud, to run these Lambda functions, or to take advantage of these proprietary databases that are way faster, is to pay us a little bit more margin and take advantage of cloud native things.”
30 / belief
“I think network economies is the only one that AWS doesn't have, but index is off the charts on the other four—counter positioning, scale economies, switching costs, and branding.”
31 / belief
“I think there's this interesting, obvious first beachhead of customers that are at startups.”
32 / belief
“If I were looking at this problem of my technical, infrastructure to grind to a halt, we can't ship anything, communication is so hard in the company, the natural thing to do, and I think what most companies would do and did try to do at this point in time, is, okay, we got to improve our communication.”
33 / belief
“I thought they were on the path starting (I think) in 2015–2016 is when they really started actually becoming free cash flow positive and growing that year over a year.”
34 / commitment
“Where he leaves Tatooine and comes back—I won't spoil things too much—with very, very major characters, where Obi Wan has interactions with them and big material fights that totally would change the character dynamic and the level of import put on his character on Tatooine in a way where it feels like it cheapened the canon to date by this existing.”
35 / belief
“Andy does write this doc, he does take over AWS, he absolutely builds and leads AWS from what it was, which was very different into what it is today. I think there's a little more to the story, too.”
36 / belief
“How crazy is this? They had already built their own, in the last three years, basically cloud internally in order to stream video, which was originally, I think, stream through Silverlight.”
37 / belief
“I think the topic is intrapreneurship at companies, which is my God, the most disgusting word of all time.”
38 / belief
“S3 launches in March 2006. EC2 launches a few months later, I think, in beta in August 2006.”
39 / belief
“The market sizes, I think I said 120 billion earlier, but I think that's being conservative and growing at 30% per year with no end in sight of this thing, continuing to compound at that rate.”
40 / belief
“Academically, thinking around this was in process. I think Amazon is really the first company that did this in practice.”
41 / belief
“I think, illustrates pretty heavily your point about once you decide to put all of your enterprise data into a database hosted in some specific vendor's cloud, there's pretty meaningful lock in there.”
42 / belief
“One of the things that I think to most people—was to me before doing the research here—is vastly under-appreciated about AWS is people think about EC2, S3, Infrastructure as a Service, compute, storage, networking, and all that.”
43 / uncertainty
“I don't know about 100%, but yes, they're still an enormous customer. Reed Hastings was actually the very first guest interviewed on stage at the first re:Invent in 2012.”
44 / belief
“I think that's got to be like a catchphrase on Acquired that we should incorporate.”
45 / preference
“I'm only interested in the ones people are making fun of, because the whole point of venture capital is seeking these crazy asymmetric longtail returns.”
46 / evaluation
“I do think people are totally willing to pay up at this point, because they just view it as this will cost us less in the long-term than if we make the wrong technology choice and then need to move again.”
47 / evaluation
“Because the fixed costs are so enormous, you amortize them across a huge customer base, you're rewarded for that massive scale, and for making these ungodly large investments, for the first time, they just invested so much in building out new data centers for AWS.”
48 / evaluation
“Yeah, let's start with power, because I think AWS is actually one of the best case studies in power of all time.”
49 / prediction
“I think other people may have evaluated this business model in theory, but Amazon was the one that was practically in a position to do it and actually realize the scale economies, or I should say, economies of scale that would lead to the scale economy's power.”
50 / evaluation
“Once they start doing that, and obviously, before Steve Yegge writes his rant and publishes on the Internet, they start realizing, okay, they are parts of this where it may make sense to start being external-facing, because once we get this stuff right, and we've toiled around in the darkness so much trying to get this stuff, right, and I don't think it's helping our customers at all, maybe there are other people out there who are experiencing the same blunt force trauma just trying to keep their infrastructure up and modern.”
51 / evaluation
“Yup. I will say, I think a tailwind for Microsoft has been multi-cloud. This idea that, hey, you don't want vendor lock in, so you really should have some redundancy or spread out your infrastructure across multiple cloud providers.”
52 / evaluation
“When Linux came out and you could do the stuff that you used to need Unix workstations for on an open-source operating system, then everything changed, because you can go buy a whole bunch of different hardware, put Linux on it, and then write your own applications.”
53 / evaluation
“Whereas it would have taken you years, and years, and years, and years, I don't know the better part of a century, to actually upload it over the wide area network, over the Internet. That, I think, illustrates pretty heavily your point about once you decide to put all of your enterprise data into a database hosted in some specific vendor's cloud, there's pretty meaningful lock in there.”
54 / recommendation
“Indeed, Amazon Web Services lives within the Amazon Associates Program. That is run by a guy named Collin Brier, which is very, very fun, because Collin goes on to do many things, including recently co-authoring the book, Working Backwards, which is a great book we used for a source in both this episode and the previous episode on amazon.”