What can a startup learn from a $24B business that reinvented our industry?

As a startup, what would you like to learn from a a twenty four billion dollar business built in 12 short years while reinventing the tech industry?

That business is of course Amazon Web Services. Read on and you’ll not only glean insight into what we can learn from AWS, but you’ll also be given an opportunity to ask Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS, a question yourself!

In 2006, shortly after the launch of Amazon S3, SQS and then EC2, I was lucky enough to be in the audience when Jeff Bezos gave a visionary talk at MIT. Immediately it was obvious my world was about to change for good. I had written a thesis on “Everything as a Service” and already invested in companies like Demandware (eCommerce as a service) but now, here was the technology to make everything as a service a reality. And all without building and rebuilding the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” of infrastructure as Bezos rightly put it.

It was still early days for cloud and seeing how few people “got it” we started “The Future of Cloud Computing” thought leadership program and the largest industry wide survey of its kind to highlight the possibilities. 

That survey helped us correctly predict many things including:

1. The rise of the API economy...

And the possibilities of a "programmable cloud"...

2. The swarm of devices that would later be known as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the inevitable tsunami of data flowing from them that would overload us.

3. The importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the cloud to make sense of all this data as its velocity, variety and volume would be beyond human reach.

4. The crucial role trust and privacy would come to play for every person, place and thing to be connected

5. The shift from worrying about the lesser reliability of cloud to realizing the economies of scale for even greater reliability of the cloud.

But none of this would have been possible without the innovation that AWS drove to meet the need, opportunity and challenge of the cloud becoming the operating system. Having seen the incredible execution, I sought out Andy Jassy, the CEO behind it all, and brought his story to light for the first time at Harvard in 2013 and then Andy asked me to come and help him share it more publicly at The Monty Summit in Santa Monica. It’s a fascinating story that provides many learnings including this one that I framed as the 8 levels of problem solving that anyone can apply in any business at any stage.

Inspired by the still early evolution of Cloud, we founded Underscore VC, so as to back bold entrepreneurs to build the world with a thesis we call Trusted Cloud Intelligence. In turn, it’s fun to welcome Andy as our keynote next week at the Underscore Core Summit. We look forward to speaking to Andy about where we are now and what the future has in store for us. Excitingly, you don’t need to be just an observer, you can participate in 3 ways!

1. You can tweet Andy a question.
2. You can join the mini Future of Cloud survey and win an Amazon Alexa Show or an iPhone XS Max!
3. If you’re in Boston you can apply to join us at the Underscore Core Community event to listen to Andy answer your questions and talk about the survey results at 5pm on Oct 16th at the Westin Copley Place.

We look forward to you joining and shaping the future of the cloud. Follow us at @UnderscoreVC to get the results of the survey and hear Andy’s answers.

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1: Little known fact, I first discovered the makings of AWS when reading a blog post from Jeff Barr in 2004 as Amazon released APIs to access it’s catalog

2: Not everything we predicted panned out. For example we were convinced that private cloud was a hedge and that it would not persist due to inability to compete with the public cloud economies of scale. In part this was right because many private clouds are hosted by public cloud providers and AWS has partnered with VMware to enable this kind of approach.