The cost of going slow is just so high. The business that we're in, innovation and technology move so fast that you have to get to a product offering that's great for customers. But if you wait until it's perfect, three more people are going to launch ahead of you because the world is moving so fast.
What if your biggest competitive advantage isn't how technologically advanced you are, but how psychologically agile your teams are? If you have somebody that thinks small, they offer deliver to the thing that they think about. And if you have somebody that thinks big and says, 'Hey, look, we can do this other thing that seems unachievable.' Even if you get 95% of the way there, it's a pretty good outcome. We want people who are going to go do something, not just sit around and think about it.
Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jerich, by trade and training, a high performance psychologist. The idea behind these conversations is simple. It's to sit with the extraordinaries and learn to really learn how they work from the inside out. Today's guest is Matt Garmin, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
What AWS is, our goal is to power all of the applications, capabilities, and technology that every company around the world needs to do. Whether that's two kids in a dorm room building a new web application, whether that's some of the largest companies in the world running their technical infrastructure. We run the data centers and the services that power a lot of what they do.
In this conversation, we unpack how he leads one of the world's most innovative companies. From why optimism fuels bold ideas to how he empowers teams to make faster decisions using his one-way versus two-way doors approach.
A lot of times when you really dig in like why are you slow to make a decision? People are afraid that they're just like I'm not sure I'm allowed to make that decision. And so we tell people if a decision is an easy two-way door decision which means it's super easy to undo. You make this decision turned out didn't quite work right. You just undo it and then keep running forward. Overall you're going to get to where you want to go faster.
We also explore what's really slowing AI adoption by replacing juniors with AI is a terrible idea. What is the main friction right now with AI? People are appropriately worried about business disruption and job disruption. Some people position it as elimination. I just don't think it's that. I think it's with that. Let's jump into this week's conversation. Matt Gar.
Okay. This has been a long time coming. First, I want to congratulate you on a massive body of work and leading an important company into our future. So, Matt, thank you for coming on the podcast.
Yeah, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.
Okay, great. So, for those who might be unfamiliar with AWS in the most simplest of terms, how do you describe AWS?
That's a good question. And, you know, I've been describing AWS for 20 years. Fortunately, more people know about it now than they used to. But, yeah. So AWS, it's cloud computing and effectively actually when we started AWS 20 years ago our vision was people running their own data centers and putting and racking servers and putting storage together was non-differentiated and so our view was we could deliver that as a service. And so what AWS is, our goal is to power all of the applications and capabilities and technology that every company around the world needs to do and whether that's two kids in a dorm room building a new web application, whether that's some of the largest companies in the world running their technical infrastructure, whether that's government agencies that are trying to drive their mission, we run the data centers and the services that power a lot of what they do. So that's kind of our vision. A lot of times we say we try to do the muck and the hard things that are not differentiated for our customers. And so that's our goal. We want our customers to be able to move faster, innovate better and we deliver innovations that try to help customers do that.
Is the majority of your effort for AWS to serve large businesses or for individuals?
We try not to make that differentiation. In fact, when we were starting early on, we got some advice from some people that said, 'Look, there is no possible way that you can build a company that can go after supporting small early stage startups and go after large enterprises.' And we took that advice and put it aside and decided to disregard it. And we do both. And so from the very beginning, startups have been incredibly important for what we do. Individual developers, we want them to be able to create and really have the power to create the same thing that the biggest companies in the world do. We want an individual developer to be able to scale to support millions and millions of customers. And we want to have the controls and compliance and security and capabilities that the very largest banks and healthcare companies and media and entertainment companies and really every industry around the world can rely on. And so that's how we think about it. We think about it as we want to be able to build capabilities. Some capabilities are obviously more applicable to an enterprise and some are more applicable to a startup but generally our services are designed to support all of those customers.
So Christian Dior has Balenciaga, right? And Nike has Adidas. What's the ecosystem look like of competitors in this stand for AWS? Is it Microsoft cloud Azure or and otherwise?
Yeah, I mean look, if you look in the cloud computing world, it's Microsoft and Google are the other really large competitors that are in our space. But I will say that the vast majority of our competition is still status quo of people running data centers on prem. So today, estimates vary, but it's roughly 20% of workloads have moved into a cloud environment, and the rest of those are still inside of legacy on-prem compute environments. And so there are many people out there that are trying to go after those workloads, some of those that we mentioned. But the real competition is inertia, is trying to get enterprises or startups or small medium-sized businesses to change how they think about things. How do you get off of a mainframe that you've been on for 30 years? How do you get off of legacy VMware environments? How do you get off of these old databases that are crusty and you've been running on for 20 plus years. And so that really is the competition honestly. It is helping customers get into a more modern world so they can take advantage of all the great technologies and the new capabilities that are out there in the world.
So let's go back. Let's roll it back a little bit. When you joined AWS, yeah, you weren't even sure what AWS was. That's why I wanted to start with hearing your understanding of AWS because I think it was like 20 years ago you're like, something looks good over there. It looks interesting. I'm not sure what it is. So who does that?
Well, my first job actually was as an intern. So that was pretty low risk. I was in business school. It was at Amazon. Amazon is at least a real company. I had no idea what AWS was. It was a secret, internal project. So I didn't know until I started what it even was. But I was excited about it. I was interested. Part of why I joined actually, I had done startups before Amazon, before I went to business school and I was interested to see how a larger company innovated inside of an existing business. And so I talked to a couple of different companies and I talked to Amazon and they said, 'Hey, we're actually building a new business inside of Amazon. Can't tell you what it is, but love to have you come do your internship for us.' And I was like, 'Well, great. That's exactly what I want to see.' So I did that and learned about what we were building with AWS and thought it was super interesting and I didn't again quite know what it was but it sounded cool and so yeah that was my intern project was to actually put together a business plan of who would be our first customers that we would possibly go sell these services to that we were building.
Okay go back to that framing you wanted to you say it one more time. You wanted to understand how companies inside of companies could grow. Is that what I heard?
Okay. Yeah. Basically it was, and you know I had been at these small startups before, right, 10 people, 15 people, you know one of them had grown to be like 50 people but you know, and when you innovate in that you're starting from zero and I had read a bunch about how folks at Google and Amazon and others build new products and services inside of those existing companies and I was interested to just learn. I was kind of curious to see how does that how is that different and how do you drive a culture of innovation inside of a larger organization. And so I that was part of my internship as I kind of sought out an example like that where I could try to learn. I had no hopes that it would be something that was as transformative as AWS was. So I got pretty lucky there. But that was what I wanted. That's just something I was interested in learning at mostly because I was pretty sure that I wanted to go back and work at startups and I thought it would be a good grounding for if I ever was at a startup that could grow bigger to make sure to maintain that culture as part of that company.
There you go. Okay. So the original kind of interest was culture of innovation. If you did it in a company inside a company, you didn't have to really scrape for money and resources and manage that narrative, but you did need to of course make sense of something. So but you were most interested in a culture innovation. Okay, that's going to be important for us. And I do want to go back to the your dining room table. Like when you were a kid, did you guys all eat at the same table? Was it chaotic? Was it very calm? Was it more Puritan? Was it more intense? Like just like I think we can learn so much by understanding the dinner table.
Yeah. So yeah, we ate dinner together most nights. My mom cooked dinner. My dad's a Lutheran minister and my whole family I would say is talkative. And so like in fact when you think about Thanksgiving, we'd have something like 20, 25 people over and you really had to fight to get a word in edgewise. So I think that and there was lots of vigorous debate I would say. All friendly and respectful but vigorous and you know I think that pushed me to make sure that if I wanted to get my opinions out there and heard which I did I had to actually do it. So but also I will say the family was incredibly supportive. You know I made sometimes unconventional choices. In fact right out of undergrad when I went to go work for a startup my mom was very worried. She's like, 'Are you sure that this company is going to make it?' And I was like, 'No, mom, I'm not. But it's okay if it doesn't.' And it didn't, by the way. Went out of business in 18 months, my first startup that I worked for. But you know, I think I learned a lot. And I always had confidence that if things didn't go well, I could find something else and get to the next thing.
Where did that sense of efficacy come from that, you know, if it doesn't work out, I'll figure it out.
I don't know. Maybe it's irrational confidence. I don't know. But it's a look, I mean, it's like there's the world is a big place. There's a lot of things to do.
Wait, wait. Okay, Matt, you're dropping gems. Where did that Where does that abundance come from? I don't have a good answer for you there. Is it Is it dad? Is it mom? Is it something you learned in high school, college?
I've always kind of just felt that way. Like I kind of was like I could, there's a lot of opportunities out there and I think I was always just kind of confident that things would work out if I worked hard on them.
Do you believe that the future works out if you apply yourself or do you think that are you more optimistic as a framework or more pessimistic?
I am, I will say, yeah, so I am always very optimistic and so maybe that's kind of where it comes from is I'm always just kind of optimistic. My friends make fun of me. I'll stand at the tee box playing golf and I'll hit a drive and it will clearly look like it's 20 yards into the forest and I'll be like it might open up, I'll probably find it. I often don't, just to be clear, but I have that optimism that it'll probably work out. And look, it doesn't always work out, by the way, and a lot for me has been good luck, just to be super clear. And I think some of it you make your own luck but some of it is real like you just get lucky and I had a very supportive family, I continue to have a very supportive family. I do think that AWS was an incredible opportunity that I stumbled into. And then you make some of that right. I think that the team here has been incredible and we've worked hard to build the business up and there's still a long ways to go. But it's a mix of talent and hard work but luck is in there too. But you got to be optimistic and I think when you think about the future I'm very optimistic that we can get to the right place and it doesn't mean it's easy, right, and there's a lot of hard things out there.
It's interesting to hear a highly trained engineer account for luck as part of the equation. It's a complicated concept and I don't think you're just casually throwing it around but I don't want to presume something.
Yeah, so look, it's not all luck, just to be super clear. It's not all, of course, but it's a combination of those things. There's a lot of things that could go wrong that are potentially out of your control, and sometimes they do. And sometimes they can be catastrophic and sometimes they're not. And so some of that is bad luck or good luck. And you have to take those chances and you have to look for those chances, too. And I do think that some of that is there, too, where you recognize that. I'll use the early one as an example, which is when I came to the Amazon kind of intern sell day, there was a whole bunch of leaders there kind of pitching their jobs and there was a whole bunch of business school interns and all really smart people. And there's a bunch of people that were like they heard like, 'Hey, we're doing an internal kind of new business startup that's going to be deep technology focused.' And I was maybe the only one that raised my hand and said, 'I'm interested in that.' Everybody else was like, 'I'm going to go work on books or music or sporting goods or something that was more established and safer.' And I thought it was interesting and I wanted to go learn it and, you know, got lucky that that turned out to be a really interesting thing. But I think you got to look for opportunities like that too and jump on them when you see them.
You're making my job super easy. I love this as I'm trying to understand. That's what I'm here for.
Yeah, no. Yeah. That's really good because what you're sharing your framework so crystal clear. So there's an optimistic lens. There's a lens of abundance. You're accounting for luck. But what you're saying is you need to look for things. That is the optimism at play. Like there's things out there.
That's the optimism and abundance kind of co-join. There's things out there. I've got to look for it. As opposed to if your brain is doing what it's designed to do without the psychology to drive it. Your brain is designed to find all of the dangers and threats and things that could go wrong, the things that could eat you or kill you. And then what that looks like in modern life is like, yeah, if I take that risk on an AWS I've never heard of, I don't know if that's going to work out. Maybe I'll just go do the safe game, whatever that is. You looking for and readying yourself for the ball to bounce a certain way is probably why you're able to kind of get chunks of yardage if we use a football analogy for just a moment. Okay, that's cool. So, amongst your peers, people that are I don't know what the topline revenue for AWS is, is it public?
It is. Yeah, we announced it. We're rounding ears $120 billion run rate. Yeah, something like that.
That's probably pretty cool to say.
It's a, I remember our first days when it's like, you know, we passed $10 a day of revenue. So, you know, we've come a ways. We've come a ways.
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Okay. So, at the plus $100 billion, your peers, so people that are at the similar tables to you and maybe larger tables, do you find them to be fundamentally optimistic or fundamentally pessimistic?
I would say mostly optimistic.
Yeah. I didn't want to kind of bait you into that because I haven't met a world's best that is not optimistic. They're all optimistic. Yeah. It's a wild kind of just keeps splashing me that their psychology is built on like, hey, something could work here. Hey, you I think this could work. I think and if we get this thing together and if we really apply ourselves, we got to take some risk now. This could work. So how do you work with people that hedge their bet or hedge the company's bet or which is not fundamentally wrong? Of course, we need people to say, 'Hey, I think you should stay away from the cliff. You've been dancing out there a little too long.' Like we need people to pull us back from the frontier sometimes. But how do you work with people that have a naysay gloom doom outlook on what could be?
Yeah, I would say it's much harder to work with people who have like a really naysayer doom gloom all the time kind of. You know I think that's a tougher one. I will say though you need a mix of personalities to drive a successful business because you can't all just be super optimistic either. You actually need some people to help balance you that says like you know we're very optimistic but like when you're thinking about security threats or operational rigor and things like that like you want to think about what could go wrong too, because that's a big chunk of what you're doing. And so you want that mix of things because you can't just be like it'll probably all work out I don't have to worry about it. You want people who are incredibly rigorous and say this could go wrong, this could go wrong, this could go wrong particularly so you can then go and make sure that you build belts and suspenders around that to make sure that they don't. And so I think you want a mix of folks like that. And now if everybody is always just sad panda all day, that brings down the team. And so you can't just be that. But I think there's a mix of that that you want for a team.
Yeah. Naive optimism is very dangerous.
Yeah. Right. And like it, oh, it'll all work out and we can just kind of do whatever we want. That it's just silly and it doesn't work.
And that toxic positivity is kind of collapsing on that concept a bit. But yeah, so you probably hire for people that have not a doom and gloom, but a readiness and a warning to counterbalance some of your like, 'No, let's go.'
Yeah, that's right. Look, we think, you know, I'll step back a bit. We kind of use different words for these at Amazon, but we do look for some of these principles. We call them leadership principles as we're hiring people. And a couple of the things we look for is we look for people who do things like think big is one of our leadership principles. And Jeff put these in place 20, 25 years ago. But the idea is that if you have somebody that thinks small, they only deliver to the thing that they think about. And if you have somebody that thinks big and says, 'Hey, look, we can do this other thing that seems unachievable, even if you get 95% of the way there, it's a pretty good outcome.' And so we have that. And then another leadership principle we have that I think is really reinforcing there is a bias for action. And so we want people who are going to go do something, not just sit around and think about it, but actually jump in and drive and do it. And so we look at all those kind of leadership principles and then we layer on things like operational excellence where we want to make sure that we can do what we do great.
Are you a risk taker or risk manager?
Well, I think you got to do both. So, you know, I think I don't accept that you can just be one of those things. I would say on average I kind of push the team to take more risks and I would push the business to take more risks, but you've got to manage risks, too. And so I can't remember who it was at business school. It was someone that came to give a speech and he said, 'Look, you don't want to avoid risks. You just want to get paid for them. And if you can get paid for taking the right set of risks, and there's the right set of upside for it, then it's a good deal. And then you mitigate as many of the downside risks as possible of that.' And so risks aren't inherently bad. In fact, if you have no risk, you're probably not going to make much money from it from a business. And so I think that taking risks is really good and you have to figure out how you manage the downside of those.
So one of the let's call it shadow risks in our modern world of people and things moving so fast is that the risk of taking time to build something beautiful. At the cost of moving fast to build something that is good enough right now just to barely get introduced. So it's like the art of mastery versus the skill of productivity. Where do you fall on those two? And maybe I don't know if your personal life is different than your leadership role, but if you could open up both of those, both personal and leadership, between the slow art of mastery and the high speed of productivity.
