why from Las Vegas Nevada it's the queue covers AWS reinvent 2016 brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners now here your host John Fourier and Stu Mittleman he welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas for Amazon Web Services AWS reinvent 2016 their annual user developer conference I'm John furry with silicon angle Joe and Mike Coast give me a minute with boogie bond it's the cube our flagship program when we go out to the events and extract the signal noise and right now we have some really hot signal it's Andy jassie CEO of Amazon Web Services welcome back to the cube great to see you cube alumni three years in a row now you've been on the cube great to have you back keep the tradition going thanks for coming on it's great to be here and I wanted to congratulate you on your 29th birthday today I wish I'm eighteen actually you're gonna go that way I'll never get over eighteen okay appreciate that appreciate the merry Cammarata bringing the cake out for the team but what a birthday present for us to be at the cube this year because you guys have celebrate your 10 year birthday a little bit younger than I am but the world has changed in the past five years we sat down at your house and in your sports bar talked about the future and that's all on Silk'n angle comm and Forbes magazine calm but you guys have to set the agenda and 32,000 people up from 19,000 it's a significant uptick in attendance the enterprise cloud market is changing you guys are disrupting yeah your thoughts and on what's happened since Tuesday night with James Hamilton laying up a secret sauce of silicon brows back it's not being touched by anybody else efficiencies scale yeah well you know for us it's it's unbelievable to see how many people are here a reinvent I as I said in the keynote yesterday we weren't sure the first year that we could get 4,000 people to come so to have 32,000 people here and 50,000 more on our live streams for the keynotes it's just it's really inspiring and you know our teams spend most their time thinking about new new customer experiences new features new capabilities that enable our customers to build more for their customers and then operating the services and for our team to have a chance to be here with all of our customers for a week and just see how excited people are about what we're doing the platform I mean you really feel it when you're here it's a movement and it's a movement because it allows builders to build customer experiences much quicker than ever before and change their businesses you guys got a spy nose juice got some specific questions on some specific points but I want to get your thoughts on the Amazon what I call spring in your step for the first time at reinvent have seen some bravado but more you know confidence around thinking a position Vernor Vogel said a Mediate that sometimes doesn't understand things or hey why do I want to get a lower price by doubling upfront enough seeing the sales guy you mentioning a little bit of Oracle and but mainly it's the themes around the old garden and a new way so I want you to take a minute to explain your view on this new way this new environment because you're comparing interesting old ways of doing things how people buy from IP suppliers how technology is coded deployed and this new way where the game is all new ballgame everywhere scale changes in how people buy our changing it can you share your thoughts on this new way yeah well that's a I mean there's so much that we could share in that area but I you know I think that if you think about what's different about a company like Amazon and a business like AWS relative to the companies who've been providing infrastructure for the last few decades there are a lot of differences but I'll list a few you know the first is I think many companies talk about being customer focused very few walk and I think Amazon in every business including AWS is extraordinarily customer focused everything we do starts with the customer moves backwards from there 90% of our roadmap but what we build is driven by what customers tell us matters and the other 10% we try to listen to a customer's of trying to articulate and then read in between the lines and invent on their behalf I'd say most of the big technology companies the old guard our competitor focused and that could be a successful strategy they can wait and see what others are gonna do and then try to one-up them it's just not ours we tend to be customer focused second thing is we are pioneers you know we we hire builders who look at customer experiences and see what's wrong with them and then figure out how to reinvent them most of the old guard technology companies have lost their will and their DNA to invent and so they acquire most their innovation and that can work too but I think in a space as dynamic as the cloud which is the biggest technology shift in our lifetime you are much better off with the partner that has the most functionality that's iterating the fastest the most amount of customers the biggest ecosystem who's had the vision for how these things fit together from the start and then the third thing I'd say is that we are unusually long-term oriented you know I think one of the standard old guard tactics is that when a deal is to be done at the end of the quarter or the end of the year they show up at your doorstep and they harass you till you sign a deal only to be heard from again a few years from now well you actually need to sign a new deal that is not the way that we pursue our business we're trying to build a business and instead of customer relationships that lasts all of us and so we operate we treat customers we think long term and we iterate in a different way than you see the old guard do and you wrote the business case for creating AWS I think if somebody you know wrote the case study today they you talk about the flywheel you talk about the effect that scale has on your business I think many look at it is your scale and that flywheel allowed you to kind of compress margins in the industry overall well you know you know right the next business case that was scale let's kind of say if margin and you know you talked about how the race to zero wasn't it beyond kind of ancho piece of scale what is the advantage that you have with the experience and the scale and you know is there a new flywheel that goes beyond what we've been talking about well you know I think that there will be multiple successful players in this space because the market segments is something like AWS addresses are trillions of dollars worldwide but there are gonna be 30 it's gonna be a small handful and it's in part because scale really matters and in part because the amount of functionality that you need for people to choose you as their primary infrastructure technology platform is massive and we have a lot more functionality by a large amount than anybody else now I think that if you look at a couple of the key criteria and reasons that we've been successful one of them is that we just have iterated so quickly I mean I think that the rate at which we deliver new capabilities for customers is pretty unusual I mean every day on average customers wake up and they have three new capabilities they can take advantage of just by virtue of being on the platform but we're also on top of just delivering quickly we're innovating at a really rapid rate I mean look at what we did in building the no sequel database DynamoDB they would build look at what we did in building our own database engineer Aurora which is the fastest growing service in the history of AWS we just made Postgres compatible yesterday look at what we announced on the IOT side yesterday with green grass and with snowball edge look at what we did even with snowmobile where it's been impossible for companies to move large amounts of data look at how many instances we have and then look at us bringing FPGA instances to the client the pace of raw innovation on the AWS platform is very unusual and I think what that does that creates its own flywheel where because you don't have to spend a hundred million dollars upfront to buy an infrastructure platform you only pay for what you use when you make the choice of who you're gonna partner with is your primary infrastructure platform you want the platform the the most capability because it allows you not just to move your existing apps but to be able to launch new ones and any any imaginable business idea you have so one of the advantages Amazon has had both on that the dot-com side and now in the it beside it your data you've got a lot of information I think about what actually said that's part of a new flywheel that you're gonna be doing how much of that data is just what Amazon's gonna be able to drive and how much will that kind of spread to the ecosystem and your customers is there data exchanges or how do you look at data well we certainly have a lot of data and a lot of models and a lot of deep learning capabilities and we expose several of those to the AI services we housed yesterday but I think one of the significant flywheels you'll see over times that so many customers are storing their data inside of AWS because they love our storage services and our data stores that they're gonna want to use that data and they're gonna want to layer on top of it all kinds of analytics services whether it's batch whether it's you know various hadoop applications whether it's real-time processing of streaming data they're gonna want to run their data warehouse off of it and they're gonna want to run machine learning models as well as their AI models on top of it and even though I think loads and loads of companies will use the AI services that we've released yesterday I think a lot of the biggest machine learning that's gonna happen is company's own data companies have huge amounts of data that they want to get better signal from and a lot of that data lives on AWS and they're gonna use a lot of the analytics and machine learning tools that we have to get more value from it and you want to ask you specifically around the cloud competition we've said on the queue I think for you so at the first main event that we were here it's not a winner-take-all to winner take most the multi cloud conversations been going around and that's been kind of confusing people as well one of my goals this year at the reinvent was to look at the VCS dig deep once all the parties talk to entrepreneurs I wanted to find out from the canary in the coalmine the startups the developers what their their sense was they all love AWS because you you had a great service for them but now as the competition comes in Microsoft in particular spending a lot of dough trying to lure them in through their ecosystem Google mean they just have some tech not a lot of Salesforce these terms want to build their own sales forces and might not want to compete with Oracle or or Microsoft together monsters Salesforce massive commission incentives all kinds of mechanics that they're doing in the day and that product may or may not be as strong as you guys what's your message to that group of people that want to win with you what do you say to those guys on how do you look at that and what are the how do you respond to their feedback and what's the outlook for them because that's a big question of people's mind is I love Amazon I want to win with them but I might be lured by well you know I think if you look at the startup market segment the vast majority of startups continue you choose AWS as their provider and in fact you could argue an even larger share than before and the reasons are a few fold number one at the end of the day what startups want is they're trying to build incredible businesses and they're often trying to build businesses where the idea never existed before and to do that well you need the broadest functionality you can get Native US has much broader functionality with anybody else there's also a much larger ecosystem around our platform so if you actually want to use other software in your business you want to be able to use it on the infrastructure technology platform that you choose and again many more info system providers in the ad avails platform but they also are building applications where even though they're startups these security and the availability those applications are a big deal and there's just a lot more maturity in the AWS platform because we've been at it a lot longer you can't learn some of those lessons until you get two different elbows of the curve and as Gardner has said because AWS has several times the aggregate size so the next 14 providers combined we just have a different scale on a different set of lessons now we also help our startups and we go to market with our startups and we have get in front of our customers we have a lot of enterprise customers on the platform we're super interested in the new technology and the new offerings that our startups have and we continue to put them in front of saying at obviously Google obviously that's on the cube actually this morning Google doesn't really have a sales force now not known for customer engagement they're known for technology and I kind of hinted that Amazon doesn't have many sales guys but you do apparently a lot of simple you talk about the number how many sales people what's the field organization look like and he clarified that potential misconception that Amazon is just a self-service cloud well when we launched AWS in 2006 we had two sales people and in fact one of the first calls our first sales person made was to Tom McCaskill is the CEO SmugMug who has been just an incredible customer of AWS and provided so much valuable feedback and the ten and a half years we've been to the market but since then we have a very large field team I mean this is this is not a small team it's a very large field team with a lot of sellers and a lot of solutions architects and a large process yeah I mean it's it's it's you know we don't disclose the exact number but it's thousands it's it's a significant team sellers solutions architects professional services training certification it's a big team and we're continuing to grow at a very rapid rate yeah Andy you know that rapid rate is amazing to watch because you know you've spoken to us before about you look for builders you look for people that you know want challenges and keep learning I've talked to you know a few friends this week that have joined Amazon and they said the culture is different in a good way and I want you to talk about kind of that Amazon ethos there's you know a lot of companies have like mission statements you guys have leadership principles that are up on your website I hear they are you know quoted quite regularly you know in in daily life and it's you know very different can maybe there's a little bit of insight on that well 14 leadership principles and I think they've been the single most important reason that we have been able to scale as fast as we have and scale across the world the way we have without losing our culture and you know there are so many of the leadership principles that I think are really interesting you know one of them has to do with hiring and developing the best and we are really vigilant about not lowering the bar when you're trying to hire as many people as we are at Amazon and AW is a big temptation is just a lower the bar to allow you to move quickly and that's always a mistake when you're trying to build great products for customers I like you know I'll give you a couple the leadership principles I like one is the leadership principle that's being right a lot and when we first started when we rolled out the leadership principles people thought being right a lot meant that it had to be their idea they had at the start that she went with the people would get dug in and argue for their idea but being a leader and being write a lot means that you get to the right answer regardless of whose idea was at the beginning and regardless of how many times you change your mind along the way great leaders change their minds when they get new information so I really like that leadership principle I also really like have backbone disagreeing commit and so what that leadership principle is about is we don't just make it an option we expect employees if they disagree with the direction we're headed regardless of seniority of anybody in the room that they speak up and say we're going the wrong direction we're doing the wrong thing for customers even if we end up making the same decision we're gonna make before we end up with more rigor and the decision and people can argue too you know as long as they want as respectfully as they as they can in making the point and we're at the end of the day a truth-seeking culture so you know that old adage about two people look at a ceiling and one says it's ten feet and the other says it's 14 feet and they say okay let's compromise it's 12 feet what's very rarely twelve feet and so when you have a truth-seeking culture like we have it encourages people to disagree and debate with one but then once we make a decision yeah the disagreeing commit means that even if it's not the direction you were advocating everybody has to get him seeking argument you could say well if the customers not involve which version of the truth the customer has to calibrate that right I mean from here Stanfill ultimately the cut I mean we try to get customers involved the decisions we're making and we we speak to cus for input from customers yeah and we get input all the time but there are also times when you're making these decisions where you can't perfectly know we're trying to make what we think is the right decision for customers we get it right a lot of the time and sometimes we don't and if we don't then we'll learn from it sign here I gotta get this in but I gotta ask you a personal question do you get worried that you guys might get too cocky I mean right now you're on a great run rate the traction is amazing for me personally see it it's pretty stuff you know proud about you guys do this I'm a big fan as you know we're customer but you do a great work how do you guys not get too cocky what's that ethos what do you guys what do you say the customers would say it a little too big for your britches and Ian team how do you calibrate that I think that a lot of that has to do with the culture of the team and I think if you look at the culture of this team it is not a cocky team it's not an arrogant team it's a customer focused team and we I mean I think we're pretty thrilled with how things have gone the first 10 and a half years I don't think any of us would have had the audacity to predict yeah that would be where we are but I think we all know that the next 10 years are gonna have even more innovation and changed in the first 10 years so that's what we're really focused on and you know one another one of our leadership principles says that you know great leaders don't believe that their body odor doesn't stink you know and that's really intended to say that we recognize that there's all kinds of things that we can be doing better yeah and we have to be a constantly learning organization and that's the way we think about our business we have a lot of management style content on silca Daniel my third part of my three-part series with Andy final question I want you to summarize your you know really well done you had some nice clever confident in there the whole superpowers a bombastic claim with some that validated with some meat good very clever I like how you did that how would you summarize the keynote did the boy look down to what you were trying to accomplish what were you trying to convey what was the core theme of your keynote yesterday morning yeah the core theme really is that with the cloud with AWS builders have capabilities that were never before available to them on premises or elsewhere and with those capabilities or superpowers it allows them really to take on any technical challenge that they're facing and to build and implement any idea they can dream up and you know that was really the theme and then you know sprinkled in there we had a few announcements the 14 to be precise yesterday and then some customers who I think you know I think are really vivid illustrations of really reinventing their businesses and building customer experiences that weren't easily possible before doing it on top of AWS well congratulations on all your success I know it's still early I know I know you don't get to coffee knowing knowing you firstly after after the little sitting down with you and reinventing is about pioneering so you got to be humble and congratulations Andy Jesse the CEO of Amazon Web Services here in the cube I'm Sean for Ace to many are you watching Silicon angles the cube we right back with more live coverage of ABS 2016 reinvent after this short break