Cloud Strategy in the AI Era with Matt Garman, CEO of AWS

**Matt Garman** (0:00)
I don't know how many times in the first couple of years I had to explain why a bookseller was offering compute services and storage services. There's not a lot of business opportunities that are as big as cloud computing and as potentially transformational. Our original AWS thesis was, we take care of the muck so you don't have to. I want my customers to want to run on us.

**Elad** (0:22)
Hi, listeners, and welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're talking to Matt Garman, who took over as CEO of AWS in May. Matt has been with AWS since it was a $0 billion business to today's $100 billion run rate business. Welcome, Matt.

**Sarah** (0:37)
Matt, thanks so much for joining us today. It's a real pleasure to have you. One thing that I think is really fascinating is you actually started on AWS in the very early days. It was just getting started, and you did that as an intern while you were getting your MBA. Can you tell us a little bit about both the origins of AWS as well as your own involvement with it?

**Matt Garman** (0:52)
Sure. So, it was in 2005 I did my business school internship at Amazon. And as we were looking around for projects, I had talked, actually at the time, to Andy Jassy. And he was telling me that he was starting a new business inside of Amazon that was technology focused, and he couldn't tell me about it before I started. I thought it sounded interesting, so I joined him and worked on that. And it was AWS pre-launch. I got to work on that as an intern. It was a super cool opportunity. I came back full-time, effectively, as the first product manager for AWS, and I'm now on year 18
Been working on the business the entire time, and it's a fascinating space. Even back then, we saw the potential of what AWS could be. Obviously, that was a startup inside of Amazon, and so we had visions of what we thought it could be, but there's a lot of hard work and some good luck and some things that have gone right for us, and a great team over the last couple of decades to go build AWS. And the fascinating thing today is, it's still in the very early stages of what the business can be. There's not a lot of business opportunities that are as big as cloud computing and as potentially transformational to every industry out there. And so, it's an exciting place to work, just as much as it was in 2005 when I was an intern, kind of writing the original business plan of who, when we first launched our services, which companies might possibly be interested in using these things.

**Sarah** (2:23)
What were the other projects that you were offered at the time?

**Matt Garman** (2:26)
I'd worked at startups before going to business school. And part of what I was looking for is I wanted to see how larger companies did new projects and kind of entrepreneurship, if you will, inside. So there's a couple of few technology companies that I looked at and was excited about Amazon. And there was a couple of other kind of retail businesses that, I mean, the internships were mostly in retail. And there's some new categories that they were starting up and things like that that could have been interesting. But I always also knew I wanted to go back to technology. So this was far and away. It's what convinced me to come to Amazon because it seems so exciting.

**Sarah** (3:02)
And how well fleshed out were the original plans? Because I ended up using AWS for my first startup in 2007 or 2008 And it was pretty new and there's a small subset of services at the time. And to be honest, at the time, Amazon wasn't thought of as deep of a technology company as it both was and is. And AWS was really kind of like, wow, Amazon is doing this thing that, at the time, you thought maybe it would be natural for Google or somebody else to have started with. And so I'm a little bit curious about that sort of early conception and road map and what was in place and what you added over time.

**Matt Garman** (3:35)
I don't know how many times in the first couple of years I had to explain why a bookseller was offering compute services and storage services. I think the approach that we took worked out to be one of the key pieces to our early success. I think if you look at some of those others like Google and later Microsoft, they kind of went at this space. First, we were the first ones out there that had anything like this.