Amazon’s Post

Transcript

Hi, I'm Andy Jassy. I'm the CEO of Amazon and I am so excited to be here at re:Invent. This is my first time I've been back to re:Invent in the three years I've been doing my current job. I just got into Vegas and so we're going to try and experiment this week. I don't know how it's going to work out. Maybe you'll tell me how it works out, but we're going to try a few times during the week to to video some things I'm going to try during the week as we have. Days chalk full of launches to maybe share with you the launches that I think are are most excited about or more most impactful and we're just going to periodically do it during the week. But I'm going to start today with just having gotten to re:Invent here in Las Vegas and maybe just reminisce a little bit. So we we started working on AWS in the fall of 2003 and the the vision and the mission that we had was to enable any individual. In their garage or their dorm room to have access to the same cost structure and scale of infrastructure technology that people had at the largest companies in the world back then. When we were thinking about this in 2003, we use PeopleSoft as our example. So the world changes pretty quickly. And we had this internal need inside of Amazon to be able to build our applications much faster without each team having to reinvent the wheel on compute and storage and database. Content distribution, analytics. And so we figured if we had that need as a pretty strong technical company and Amazon, it was probably likely that a lot of other companies had that same need. What ended up happening is we started building AWS was we eventually hired a marketing team and we hired people who had worked at other enterprise technology companies. And almost every year it became a ritual that the marketing team would propose to me that we should do our own conference. And for three or four years in a row, I would read the presentation, which was always a narrative. That's how we do all our communication of information. And I will look at it and I would say, Nope, I don't think we should do a conference. And the team would get very frustrated with me. And I and I actually kind of wanted to do a conference, but we hadn't done it before. We didn't have enough people to be able to do a conference well in the fourth quarter of the year and still get all the deliveries we needed to get to all of you and every proposal that we saw was for the typical corporate technology conference, which none of us wanted to do. And so it wasn't really until maybe the 4th or 5th try that we had somebody propose what ended up becoming re:Invent and the way that they were able to compel us to do it in part we had enough people where we thought we could we could do something good for all of you and still deliver what I know is most important to you, which are the features and services that let you build great applications quickly and cost effectively. But really what it was also was that the team had lots of ideas to make this a conference that was a learning conference and it was a little bit quirky, not like your typical enterprise technology conferences. So when you come to re:invent, the theme should be that you come to learn you. You learn from the keynotes, to learn from the breakout sessions, you learn from each other. And hopefully what it does is it helps you understand a little bit more about what's happening in the cloud, a little bit more about what you can use to build great customer experiences. And if you come as a team or even if you come as the representative for your company, that you get inspired by what's available, what's been released, and what all your peers are doing. Because you can really feel the energy and the vibe here to go back to your company and figure out how to change what your customer experiences are and your businesses are. And that's what re:Invent historically has been. Now, I also remember a lot of the early debates in what we were doing with re:Invent. First of all, we had, it took us probably a ridiculously embarrassing amount of time to name re:Invent. We had all sorts of other names until we came up with re:Invent, which today seems so natural. But I can tell you, it took us four months and probably six or seven meetings to figure out that we wanted to call it re:Invent. But we've always had fun, quirky events that round out the re:Invent, you know? We, we have a Buffalo wing eating contest. We've had broom ball competitions. We've, we've done weddings here over the years with the Chapel. You can still get tattoos and piercings. One of my good friends got an AWS re:Invent tattoo. I remind him that, you know, like tattoos are permanent. They're, they're not easily removed. You can take it off, but they're not easily removed. But it always felt like a gathering of a community. And that's what I'm hopeful that you're going to find this coming week. And so, we have a lot of learning for you, a lot of sessions for you, a lot of really interesting and intelligent and inventive people that you'll get to interact with. But we also have a lot of releases and, and new goodies that we're going to share with you over the coming days. I hope to come back and share with you some of the ones that I think are most exciting, most impactful, but I hope to see you during the week and I hope we have a great week together. Thank you.