Quotes from Andy Jassy

I think that there are a number of older-guard technology companies who either genuinely believe or are hoping people will believe that companies aren't going to move to the cloud that quickly or that a very large amount of workloads will remain on-premises forever. I don't believe that.

I took my last final exam at HBS, the first Friday of May in 1997, and I started Amazon next Monday. No, I didn't know what my job was going to be, or what my title was going to be.

Most meetings largely take place in one physical location, and then people plug in remotely. But they are a little bit off to the side; they can't participate in the meeting as fully as you like.

There are certain jobs where you can just as easily, in some cases more effectively, work remotely. If you take an engineer, for example, when they get into the mode of coding, being on their own where they're not distracted or interrupted is very helpful.

I would say that things like the head tax in Seattle I think are super dangerous for cities to implement. What company is going to want to start - or move to or grow in - a city that penalizes them for hiring full-time employees?

During the pandemic in our fulfillment centers, we had a system and a process around people being able to request short and long term leave and the process just didn't scale.

Companies usually are not able to provision accurately the amount of data center capacity that they require, and this problem recurs when they create their own internal cloud infrastructure.

A lot of competitors of various Amazon businesses use AWS. We don't view that as a problem. We very consciously want any company, competitor or not, to use our infrastructure to build their business.

There is insatiable demand for AWS cloud services.

Customers or employees are free to shoot me email. I may not respond to every single one because sometimes the numbers are voluminous, but I read them all.

We had a really animated debate about whether we should allow third-party sellers to sell on the Amazon site.

The company has been clear from the start that we try to serve customers long-term, and long-term investors are going to be more excited about Amazon than short-term investors.

In the past we've tried to hire people in locations where we have critical mass, because we thought it was better for people's career development and easier for them to collaborate. We realized if you have somebody in a particular location who is willing to work the hours to be able to collaborate, you can do it very efficiently.

I think if you have a large group of people like we do - we have 1.2 million employees - it's almost like a small country.

I think a lot of societal good is already being done with facial recognition technology.

In the early 2000s, we were finding at Amazon that software development projects were taking us longer than we thought they should. We decided to build a set of infrastructure services to allow our retail business to move more quickly.

These are serious problems in all of our major cities: homelessness, education, there are are a number of them. And they require hard thinking and innovative solutions. But I think cities are so better off working with the business community towards joint solutions, rather than trying to tax them.

At Amazon, with new initiatives, we don't look at something and say, 'Okay, it needs to hit this certain metric.' Because it's impossible to know whether somebody's going to respond to something really new and innovative.

We believe that governments and the organizations that are charged with keeping our communities safe have to have access to the most sophisticated, modern technology that exists.

You have to know what competitors are doing in your space.

Invention requires two things: One, the ability to try a lot of experiments, and two, not having to live with the collateral damage of failed experiments.

Re: Invent is different from the typical technology-industry conference in that it's not a sales and marketing event, but about learning and education.

We knew that the largest consumers of infrastructure would be large enterprise because they spend more absolute dollars. But we also had a mental image of a college kid in his dorm room having the same access, the same scalability and same infrastructure costs as the largest businesses in the world.

Simply because Amazon decides to pursue a market segment doesn't mean the customers are going to spend their money there, and so it means that we have to do an amazing job in providing a great customer experience that customers want.