Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Andy Jassy - Page 2

In the early 2000s, we were finding at Amazon that software development projects were taking us longer than we thought they should. We decided to build a set of infrastructure services to allow our retail business to move more quickly.

We don't think at all about how the AWS business complements the Amazon business from a financial overview perspective.

We have a lot of people in Seattle, but we also have a lot of people in Bellevue and it is where most of our growth will end up being.

A lot of companies really will only pursue businesses that are adjacent or look like an extension of their current business - which by the way is a completely rational strategy.

In our business, you have to be able to have access to capital.

Re: Invent is different from the typical technology-industry conference in that it's not a sales and marketing event, but about learning and education.

Netflix, despite the fact that they compete very aggressively with Prime Video on the Amazon side, they run everything on top of AWS and have for several years - same with Disney, Warner, Fox, HBO and Turner, they all run on AWS.

What I did know from having started businesses before Amazon, as well as from my time at Amazon, was that when you are trying to do something new, it's really a waste of energy to spend a lot of cycles wondering whether it's going to be a success or not.

AWS moves fast, listens to customers, and creates value on top of our already successful cloud-computing infrastructure. We're consistently thinking two to five years forward.

You can imagine all the things that people want in machine learning and artificial intelligence area that we're working on, that we'll continue to work on in the future.

When you have a sitting president who's willing to publicly show his disdain for a company and the leader of a company, it's very difficult for government agencies including the DOD to make an objective decision without fear of reprisal.

The company has been clear from the start that we try to serve customers long-term, and long-term investors are going to be more excited about Amazon than short-term investors.

You just can't learn certain lessons until you get to different elbows of the curve in scale. With a business that most estimate is several times the size of the next nine providers combined, we've learned certain lessons that you just can't learn until you get to that level of scale.

There is insatiable demand for AWS cloud services.

These are serious problems in all of our major cities: homelessness, education, there are are a number of them. And they require hard thinking and innovative solutions. But I think cities are so better off working with the business community towards joint solutions, rather than trying to tax them.

A lot of competitors of various Amazon businesses use AWS. We don't view that as a problem. We very consciously want any company, competitor or not, to use our infrastructure to build their business.

I remember in 2007, 2008, when we had the recession, there were all of these very gloomy emails sent from a lot of venture capitalists, saying, Don't expect to get funded.'

Customers will always be nervous about lock-in, and I think the experience they had particularly with a company like Oracle, where it's a really hard thing to get out of, and they're so hostile to their customers, that I think it's a concern for every enterprise.

What's different is with every successive year, as we launch a thousand plus features and services, we just have the capabilities to make it easier for the rest of the market to use us.

In the case of games, we have a belief that that could end up being the largest category in entertainment over a long period of time. Just look at what's happening in games and how social they've become.

When you need to make changes, even when people don't want to change, you have to pick the company up and change it, even if it means cannibalizing yourself.

I think you need a leadership team that is absolutely ravenous to get at the truth.

You have to know what your customers think about your product and where you sit, relatively speaking. You have to know what's working and what's not working.

Being successful right away is obviously less stressful, but when it takes longer, it's often sweeter.

We're much more focused on the long term than most companies.

If you're going to invest in something over a long period of time, that you believe is important and can change the company, you have to be strategically patient and tactically impatient.

For me, it was valuable just to be able to watch how Jeff operated every day, as well as his leaders and his direct reports.

I think our relationship with Seattle has had ups and downs frankly.

We started to consider what became Amazon Web Services between 2000 and 2003.

At Amazon, we are very careful about what big strategic bets we place, but the ones we make, we keep iterating until we find something that we think has resonance with customers.

Before, companies and startups had to lay up all this capital for data centers and servers, and take your scarce resource, which in most companies is engineers, and have them work on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure. What the cloud has done is completely flipped that model on its head so that you only pay for what you consume.

You have got to be maniacal and relentless - relentless and tenacious about getting to the truth.

Some businesses take off in the first year, and others take many years.

You can't just go careening toward your idea without checking in with customers and people who might use it and making sure you're on to something.

I think if you have a large group of people like we do - we have 1.2 million employees - it's almost like a small country.

You have to challenge people, often people who know a lot more about a subject than you do.

We always had a lot of optimism for this game, New World.' Customers really liked it; it tested really well.

I would say that things like the head tax in Seattle I think are super dangerous for cities to implement. What company is going to want to start - or move to or grow in - a city that penalizes them for hiring full-time employees?

At Amazon, with new initiatives, we don't look at something and say, 'Okay, it needs to hit this certain metric.' Because it's impossible to know whether somebody's going to respond to something really new and innovative.

You have to know what competitors are doing in your space.