…at the 2012 re:Invent fireside chat with Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels.
Full video here.
My sporadic notes here. Mostly his words, with some editorializing and annotation:
- Flywheels are important (I take this to mean something that will gain speed over time)
- Some things won’t change in 10 years – focus on those. For example: people will always want cheaper prices, faster & better service
- If you’re ok being misunderstood for long periods of time, you can ramp up your rate of experimentation
- It’s easy to invent new things that customers don’t care about
- It’s all about rate of innovation (echoes Eric Ries and his quote about moving through the build-measure-learn feedback loop as quickly as possible)
- Used to be 30% product, 70% promotion/service; now it’s 70% product, 30% promotion/service
- Bezos does front line work from time to time, e.g. on factory floor, in call center
- 10K year clock is about long-term thinking. If I asked you to solve world hunger in 5 years, you’d say no way. But if I asked you to solve world hunger in 100 years, you’d think about it. The problem is the same, but the timeframe has changed
- If you wanted to catch a wave, you’ll never do it. What you should do is position yourself and catch the wave
- Missionaries build better products. I’ll take a missionary over a mercenary any day
- Passion and customer centricity will take you an awful long way