Jeff Bezos at YC Startup School 2008 [video]

Post by onetimemanytime » Tue, Feb 19, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

whoisjuan wrote: post #7

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6

One thing I think is so extraordinary about Jeff Bezos is his uncanny technical prescience despite not really being a technologist. For example, the famous Steve Yegge "platforms rant" blog post [1] about how Bezos basically made a company-wide edict for microservices was very much ahead of its time. Similarly, the vision of cloud computing was much more advanced and early than any of its competitors. Considering thi…

I believe the cloud computing vision came from Andy Jassy. In fact he wrote the original six pager for AWS. Equally impressive since Jassy isn't really a technologist either.

Post by StreamBright » Tue, Feb 19, 2019, 8:08 PM UTC

whoisjuan wrote: post #19

josh2600 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this language of “so and so isn’t a technologist”. You don’t need to understand how a compiler works or grok segfaults to see the future. It’s obvious if you’re running a big data center yourself that you’d rather pay someone else to do that, it’s just that no one wanted to take on that operational burden because it’s a pain. It doesn’t take a technologist to realize that arbitraging pain is where you make mon…

I disagree with this. The vision wasn't a simple economic statement on why "we should rent out our unused server capacity". It was vastly more complex than that. It included technical details on how it should be approached and how to leverage and scale their existing infrastructure. It also laid down the ground for EC2 and S3 as foundational services. Perhaps my error was saying that Jassy isn't a technologist. He is…

Post by bobl » Tue, Feb 19, 2019, 8:22 PM UTC

whoisjuan wrote: post #19

josh2600 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this language of “so and so isn’t a technologist”. You don’t need to understand how a compiler works or grok segfaults to see the future. It’s obvious if you’re running a big data center yourself that you’d rather pay someone else to do that, it’s just that no one wanted to take on that operational burden because it’s a pain. It doesn’t take a technologist to realize that arbitraging pain is where you make mon…

I disagree with this. The vision wasn't a simple economic statement on why "we should rent out our unused server capacity". It was vastly more complex than that. It included technical details on how it should be approached and how to leverage and scale their existing infrastructure. It also laid down the ground for EC2 and S3 as foundational services. Perhaps my error was saying that Jassy isn't a technologist. He is…

Post by vkaku » Tue, Feb 19, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

jeffbarr wrote: post #10

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6

One thing I think is so extraordinary about Jeff Bezos is his uncanny technical prescience despite not really being a technologist. For example, the famous Steve Yegge "platforms rant" blog post [1] about how Bezos basically made a company-wide edict for microservices was very much ahead of its time. Similarly, the vision of cloud computing was much more advanced and early than any of its competitors. Considering thi…

Jeff's original request for S3 was, as I recall, along the lines of "We need malloc() for the Internet."

Post by aboutruby » Tue, Feb 19, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

rexreed wrote: post #17

Side note, why don't these videos show the slide content? That's just as useful, if not moreso, than seeing a video of the person speaking. You can hear the person without seeing them, but you can't hear the slides without seeing them, even if they're being described. A simple split screen with slides on one side and video on the other would work. Or even a picture-in-picture with the speaker. The top comment on the…