How a $120 Billion Company Thinks Like a Startup | Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services

20:27Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, naive optimism is very, very dangerous, right? And like, oh, it'll all work out and we can just kind of do whatever we want. That's just silly and it doesn't work. And that toxic positivity is kind of collapsing on that concept a bit. But yeah, so you probably hire for people that have not a doom and gloom, but a readiness and a warning to counterbalance some of your like, no, let's go. Yeah, that's right. Look, we think, you know, I'll step back a bit. We kind of use different words for these at Amazon, but we do look for some of these principles. We call them leadership principles as we're hiring people.

21:03And a couple of things we look for is we look for people who do things like think big as one of our leadership principles. And, you know, and Jeff put these in place 20, 25 years ago. But the idea is that if you have somebody that thinks small, they offer or deliver to the thing that they think about. And if you have somebody that thinks big and says, hey, look, we can do this other thing that seems unachievable, even if you get 95 % of the way there, it's a pretty good outcome. And so we have that. And then another leadership principle we have that I think is really reinforcing there is a bias for action.

21:34And so we want people who are going to go do something, not just sit around and think about it, but actually jump in and drive and do it. And so we look at all those kind of leadership principles, and then we layer on things like operational excellence where we want to make sure that what we do, we can do great.

21:47Dr. Michael Gervais:Are you a risk taker or risk manager? Well, I think you've got to do both. So I think I don't accept that you can just be one of those things. I would say, on average, I kind of push the team to take more risks, and I would push the business to take more risks. But you've got to manage risks, too. And so I can't remember who it was. In business school, it was someone that came to give a speech. And he said, look, you don't want to avoid risks. You just want to get paid for them. And if you can get paid for taking the right set of risks, and there's the right sets of upside for it, then it's a good deal.

22:17And then you mitigate as many of the downside risks as possible of that. And so risks aren't inherently bad. In fact, if you have no risk, you're probably not going to make much money from it from a business. And so, you know, I think that taking risks is really good. And you have to figure out how you manage the downside of those.

22:31Dr. Michael Gervais:So one of the, let's call it shadow risks in our modern world of people and things moving so fast is that the risk of taking time to build something beautiful. Yep. at the cost of moving fast to build something that can is good enough right now just to barely get introduced. Yeah. So it's like, you know, the art of mastery versus the skill of productivity. Where do you fall on those two? And maybe I don't know if your personal life is different than your leadership role, but if you could open up both of those, both personal and leadership between the slow art of mastery and the high speed of productivity.

23:11I'm definitely on the kind of move fast and kind of iterate from there. I think that's just how I typically do things. I think, I don't know if my business or personal kind of take is any different really. And, you know, there's a few reasons for that. I do think that in business in particular, the cost of going slow is just so high. And, you know, the business that we're in, innovation and technology moves so fast that, you know, look, you have to get to a product offering that's great for customers. And so you kind of have that customer lens, which is, you know, I think there are a lot of times people in technology world talk about a concept like minimum viable product that they want to launch.

23:44We kind of coined that a minimum lovable product. Like what's a product that's the smallest amount that you can do that people will still love? And it's great. And I think you can always do more. You can always polish. You can always add more features. You have to have something that's super useful and capable and great for a customer when you want to launch it and a capability. But if you wait until it's perfect, three more people are going to launch ahead of you because just the world is moving so fast. And, you know, we have the luxury where it is software, a lot of the pieces that we do. I mean, we obviously have a server component and a hardware component inside the data center, but the thing that customers touch and feel is software.

24:19When you ship a consumer electronic device, as an example, you don't get to redo the bezel if you want to do it later. Admittedly, different businesses may have different bars as to what's good enough to ship, but from a software world, you know, I think shipping fast and often is important. And you've got to have great security. You've got to make sure you can stand behind your product because for us, businesses are trusting us with their important workloads, but they also want capabilities as fast as we can give them to them.

24:47Dr. Michael Gervais:What are some of the best practices for you and your teams to be able to move with speed? Yeah, that's a good question. Actually, it's where I spend a lot of time and we spend a lot of time at Amazon thinking about because we're no longer small, right? Amazon's a large company. AWS is a large company at this point, as we called out. And we've got to keep moving with the speed of a startup. And so the really interesting thing is for me, if we can really continue to nail each and every day, benefiting from the size and scope of AWS, while also continuing to innovate at the speed of a 20-person startup, we'll be in good shape and we'll continue to do great.

25:27And so part of where we spend a lot of time thinking about it. We don't always get it perfect, by the way, but we spend a good amount of time thinking about how do you push decision-making down to the lower levels of the organization that are closest to customers and can move fast and not kind of be bogged down by the size of an organization. I think if you look throughout history, a lot of companies that went really slow, there's decision-making frameworks, there's approval frameworks, there's managers, managers, and managers. And frankly, managers are overhead. I want as many people at the people that are doing the actual work to make decisions as fast as possible.

26:00And so one of the mental models we use actually is this concept that we push inside of Amazon, which is because you really want a broader set of organizations. You have to build these mechanisms that other people can make decisions as you might make them. And so one of the mechanisms or mental models that we use is this idea of a one-way door versus a two-way door. And so it's pretty, and many people have talked about this from Amazon, but it's a really useful mechanism where a lot of times when you really dig in, like why are you slow to make a decision, lower down the organization, people are afraid that they're just like, I'm not sure I'm allowed to make that decision.

26:36Like I would do it. The answer is A, but like I'm not sure I was able to make that call. And so what we tell people is if a decision is an easy two-way door decision, which means it's super easy to undo. You make this decision, turned out it didn't quite work right. You just undo it and then keep running forward. Make that fast. You don't need to wait for more information because the speed will matter. And you launch that and you go with that decision and you undo it if it's wrong and no problem and we keep running. And overall, you're going to get to where you want to go faster. Now, if it's a one-way door decision, which is really hard to come back the other way through that decision, think it's we committed$5 billion to go do something or we've launched something that then customers rely on that's hard to take back or something like that, then you want to be a little bit more thoughtful about it.

27:21And it doesn't mean you have to have layers upon layers upon layers of decision makers, but you want to take a little bit more time to make those one-way door decisions and two-way door decisions. And that really does free up then your employees. Because the vast majority of decisions are two-way door decisions, right? It's like 90 plus percent of them, 95 percent of them are that way. And so if you can move fast on all of those, it really helps your organization go faster and move quickly.

27:42Dr. Michael Gervais:It's a framing that I use with my son, and he's a 17-year-old. And so I'm trying to help him understand the difference between one-way and two-way decisions. I love that. Yeah, I think it's landing well with him. How do you just... Before he gets a face tattoo or something like that. Right, right. And nowadays, I'm not sure if that's a two-way. That might be two-way with some of the laser removals. Yeah, so, but like, let me play this out. Is drinking and driving a one-way or two-way? Yeah, that's for sure the one-way door decision. Yeah, it's interesting because I think a lot of people will hedge in that, no, it's only one way if a catastrophe happens.

28:17Dr. Michael Gervais:I'm like, no, that's a one way. Because if the catastrophe. Well, that's not the decision. That's the outcome. The decision is to get in the car. That's right. So open up, maybe just for fun. Maybe you've got a clear framing on how to do this, but maybe just open it up. How would you teach somebody, like a 17-year-old kid or a entry-level employee, what a one-way and two-way decision is? I think you have to focus on the decision, not the outcome, too. And so to your drinking and driving one, it really is focusing on inputs, not outputs. And so from an input perspective, what we really do is, I think the simpler the better, by the way.

28:53And so is it easy to undo? That's it. Is it just easy to undo or not? And so if you crash and kill someone, that is very hard to undo. You can't undo that, right? You can't undo that. But in work, hopefully, most of our decisions are less impactful than that. But even so, and I think the easiest ones are, are you going to go commit a billion dollars or not? that that's an easy kind of far out, like, okay, we should think about that one. But I think there's even when people are like, oh, if I launch this on the website or something like that, or decide to, you know, make this feature choice or whatever, like you can always change it.

29:29Like there, you can update it and you kind of make the calls of which things are doable or not, or undoing or not. And, and there's thousands of decisions a day that people get nervous because we have a big business now. It's$120 billion. Like maybe I'll mess it up. And most decisions aren't going to mess it up permanently because they're pretty easy to undo.

29:46Dr. Michael Gervais:Okay. So one of the things that you're levering there is that felt sense of autonomy and impact, which are great drivers for engagement for lots of other things, just flourishing in life, you know? So do you reward people, externally reward people with recognition and or money, I guess, I think it's probably recognition in this case, for making a bunch of two-way decisions? Or do you allow the inherent autonomy and felt sense of impact on doing something that seems like the right call to just take care of itself? Yeah, I think we do both. I think we try to have some explicit signals to the organization, all company meetings that we do a couple times a year, and we'll do awards where we have a bias for action award where somebody saw something that needed to be fixed and they didn't wait for permission.

30:29It wasn't necessarily part of their job, but they jumped in and fixed it, whether it was for a customer or an operational issue or a security issue or whatever it is. And we have a couple of other things like that. We have another one called Speed Matters, which is just somebody that really saw something and moved quickly. and something where the team was like, oh, we're going to have to do a bunch of thinking and this might take a month. And they're like, forget it. And they just did it in a day. And highlighting examples like that, I think are powerful. And they're good kind of crystallizing viewpoints where people can see, oh, that is interesting.

30:58Like there was a couple of people that had to weigh in. And instead of waiting for a month, they just got everyone together for 30 minutes and decided and launched it the next day. And examples like that really, I think helped the team realize and further emphasize kind of what's possible out there. So we do things like that. And we work really hard, and we're probably not perfect at this either, but we work really hard to not overly punish people when they made some good decisions and things just didn't work out and we had to undo them and that's okay. And we kept growing. And so I think that's kind of really thinking about that.

31:29We do have a leadership principle called write a lot. Like if you're two-way door decisions, if you're wrong every time, that's also not great. So we still want people to be right a lot, and that's something that we look for. But it doesn't have to be every time. But, you know, if you're making two-way door decisions wrong every single day, you know, we probably want to think about that, too.

31:44Dr. Michael Gervais:Okay. Your employee base is going to be interested in this response here. How do you get fired from AWS? Well, I haven't done it yet, but... No, not you. That's funny. That's funny. No. I don't know. I haven't been fired yet. I haven't been fired. Yeah. No, not you. Not you. How do people get fired? How do they get moved out? Is it from an abandonment of values? Is it from lack of speed? Is it from not taking enough risks? You know, like, how do you get moved out? Is it from being pessimistic or, like, the thing's wide open? I do think that one of the things, some of it is just not delivering.

32:21Like, you know, one of our, another of our leadership principles is deliver results. Like, you've got to do that, too. Like, and so you have to be able to, all these things, you know, you still have to be able to do your job well. And so you have to, you know, if you're a software developer and you just don't deliver any code, like, you know, it doesn't matter. All the rest of the stuff doesn't kind of matter. You still have to do that part of your job. So you've still got to be good at your job. And we have a pretty rigorous review process where we really measure on both kind of how do you do delivering on your job, but also kind of how do you measure up on the leadership principles?

32:49And do you fit the type of culture that we aspire to have here at the company? And if not, are you working on it? Which is also important, too, right? If you acknowledge, like, hey, yeah, you know what? I'm really working on trying to get better at Think Big. I'm going to need some pushes. I'll keep working on it. But it doesn't come natural to me. that's okay. We want to see people that are working on it. But it's a combination of those things, which is the first one is just like every company. You got to deliver, you got to be executing, you have to do a good job at whatever your role is and how you do it matters too.

33:18Dr. Michael Gervais:Okay, there you go. How do you take the risk taking off the table as best as you possibly can to free people up to take the right types of risks? One of the things that I like to do is kind of highlight to the team that I'm willing to, like if I think they're making a smart bet and it's a big bet, I'm happy to jump in front of it and own it for them. And if it goes well, then it can be theirs. And if it goes poorly, I'm happy to jump in front and kind of take the bullets for them and at least, at the very least, be in that with them in front of that and take ownership of it. And I do think, you know, I have this idea that I really want my leaders and my team to be able to make decisions.

33:54And my view is if I've decided to let them make that decision, that's a decision for me that I also own the decision that they make. Because that is the decision. And so I kind of let them know, like, look, if I tell you, you get to make the call, you get to make the call, and I will stand by your call. Like, that is the thing. And I'm happy to stand up and take responsibility if things don't work out, because that's kind of my job and my role. And my role is to make sure we have great people who make really good decisions and are smart, and we have the right team in place to do that. And look, they don't all work out.

34:26And even with our business has been quite successful, and some things haven't worked out. And I think across Amazon we do that. We have some wildly unsuccessful projects, like things like, I don't know if you ever used the Fire Phone. It was not awesome.

34:38Dr. Michael Gervais:I do. I do remember. I did not use it. No, it was not awesome. And most of the people on that project still work at Amazon in really high-profile roles because we found other things for them to do. And because it was not because they didn't work hard or even make good decisions, we just didn't work out. And I think that's a good learning for people and it's a good kind of recognition that the outcomes don't necessarily, if you did the right things on the inputs, the outcomes, hopefully they go well and we stand by them. Yeah, I mean, and it's counterbalanced with the point that you do need to get results.

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37:44You know, one of the things for me is that I find that a lot of times when the decisions finally get to me, like the team knows what they want to do. Like we have a lot of smart people. And so what I try to do is I try to poke on the logic that they got to to the decision. Like, did they, you know, how did, what was their thought process to get to what they wanted to do? Why did they think about it? Did they think about a couple of things around the edges? And I find like one of the valuable things I can do is just help them actually make the decision that they know that they want to make by kind of saying, yep, that's the right way to go.

38:15And, you know, look, you spend a rigor. I think we have a lot of rigor around Amazon. You know, we have people write documents, which I think is pretty well known in the industry, where it's not a PowerPoint presentation. When you want to go through a big decision, you write a narrative, you write a six-page document about what the decision is and what the thing is and how you're thinking about it. It really forces you to think about the details of what you want to do and really outline the arguments for and against of where we go. And then it allows you to also really probe and understand which parts of that thinking might have been robust and which ones were not and where there might be holes in that.

38:48I think part of the reason why Jeff outlawed PowerPoint 25 years ago at Amazon is because PowerPoint really allows you to paper over details. You can just have a smooth talker and not really get into the details. And with a document, you get into those details and you can understand it. And a lot of times it's kind of relatively clear or it's even clear what the tradeoffs are when you're making a decision. And so a lot of times, I think a lot of the value I can add is just make that decision and let the team keep going forward. And so I think – or identify where we haven't fully thought some things through and need to do a little bit more work before we're ready to make a decision.

39:22And so that's kind of how I think about it.

39:24Dr. Michael Gervais:Let's do it this way. That's very cognitive. right that's a very intellectual process that we're gonna we're gonna discern through details and as you know lore goes some of your meetings or most of your meetings i don't know where there's big decisions that need to be made you'll sit and read for the first 10 minutes together something along those lines so it's very intellectual in that capacity when you need to let someone go or you need to do something that has more of a heart feel to it how do you bridge the gap between the head and the heart, because I feel like AWS, Amazon in general, I think as well, is more of a cognitive, less heart, more intellect.

40:02Dr. Michael Gervais:The contour is more right angle than it is with smooth edges. How do you make decisions from the heart? Look, when it comes to people stuff, you can look at all of the data and it still is a real person. And so definitely when you have to let somebody go, I mean, like, you know, I don't sleep at night. Like it's hard. There's no two ways about it. it's hard. I have this thought that the vast majority of people that are working, particularly in jobs like in AWS, want to be high achieving. Like they want to do a great job. They're not here to like, like, and frankly, we, we, we, I tell people this when, when I do interviews, I like, if you want a job where you can coast and it's going to be easy, this is not the one for you.

40:38Like it's not easy and it'll be fulfilling. You'll get to do things. You have a huge impact on the world. We'll have really hard problems. Like I promise you we'll get to go innovate and And it's not going to be easy. Like it is going to be hard. And that doesn't mean you have to work 120 hours a week or something crazy like that. But it's like it's going to be taxing. And it's not a coasting type of job. And so I really do believe that most people who work in an environment like AWS want to be high achieving and they want to do a good job. And so but sometimes cultures are not good fits for people or environments are not good fits for people.

41:09And so part of what I think about is if you have the person who's in the wrong job or the wrong environment, like you're kind of doing them a service in some ways because they're going to find another job. Like this is not like a thing that someone's going to be unemployed for the rest of their life. And I have lots of examples where, you know, I've said, like, this is not the right place for you. And we've moved some people on and their careers have flourished. In fact, I've gotten a couple of people who have actually written and said thank you because I may not have moved on and I might have kept trying to bang my head against a wall in an environment that wasn't right for me.

41:41And so I appreciate you kind of giving me that push to go find a different spot that was a better fit. And not everyone, by the way. Not everyone sees it that way. But it is true. And most people, they want to be in a place where their career is going to keep growing. And so they don't want to be stuck at the bottom rung of the performance tier. So it doesn't make it any easier. And I think you have to lead with empathy. You have to understand where people are coming from. You have to understand situations. I do think that as a manager and a leader, being empathetic and understanding where your team is coming from is incredibly important.

42:13Because again, things are hard. There's a lot of things that we ask employees to do that are difficult and challenging. And it's important to understand the people aspect of those things too. And I try to do both.

42:22Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, I get that from you. There's two really important variables that I've learned from high-performing support. It's support then challenge. So if it's challenge only without support, people burn out. They become constricted. If it's too much support, well, now we're in a day spot. So it's support then challenge and to have fast iterations of that cycle. Support, support, challenge, challenge, challenge, challenge, support, support, challenge. And the high-performing environments tend to naturally gravitate to challenge with not enough support. And so if you get both of those right, I think you get something really special.

42:58Dr. Michael Gervais:And for you, just personally, you're in a high-speed environment. You've got high demands from downward pressures and internal pressures as well to do something amazing. How do you recover? And part two of that is what systems do you put in place for other people to recover from the demanding environment that is part and parcel of AWS? us. Yeah, I think part of that is just figuring out a balance personally of how you can kind of mentally reset so that you're ready to go the next day and the next week and the next month. And everybody's different. So there's not going to be any kind of one size fits all.

43:34I think it's important for me to know that I also get to spend time with my family too. And so I make it a priority that if I'm not on the road traveling, I get home in time to have dinner with the kids and my wife. And I appreciate that. So I get to see them every day and spend a little bit of time with them both at dinner and after dinner. You know, personally, I also, you know, I mentioned golf earlier. Like I found during COVID, I started playing golf just because it was the thing you could do outside. And I found it like an incredible refresh where you just take, you know, three to four hours to focus on nothing but hitting a little white ball.

44:07And I'm not good at it, but it's okay. It's a thing I could focus on. And actually, it was my wife that highlighted. She's like, you know what? I think you're in a better mood and you're like more focused when you play like on the weekends. I was like, you know what? I think that might be right. And so for me, it's a little bit of a like, you know, you can take three or four hours a week and you get kind of mental reset there. And it's, you know, it's a luxury to be able to do that, but it's helpful. And everybody's got to find their thing that does that. And it might be going for a run. It might be reading a book.

44:36You know, it might be, you know, whoever, who knows what it is. For my wife, it's yoga, but whatever it is, you got to find that thing that kind of read, kind of focuses you. And I think that's super important because I also think one of the other secret sauces of AWS and Amazon is we have people who've been here for a really long time. We do want people that are here. We don't want people to burn out after two or three years. We want people to be here 10, 20 years because you get a lot of institutional knowledge. You get, actually, that's one of the things that drives speed is that much of my leadership team, you know, we have a few people that are newer, but a lot of my leadership team has been at Amazon for 20 years.

45:10And so they really understand the culture. When you say something, you don't have to go deep into explaining what you're pushing on. Like, hey, we need to do this better. There's some shorthand there. They understand the operational aspects of the company. And a lot of that allows you to move more quickly and spread out if you can kind of talk to the team and say, hey, here's where we need to go land. Because obviously a lot of our junior developers are, of course, new. They're fresh out of college. And so if you have that, it's a huge luxury. But it means you've got to create an environment where people can last for 20 years.

45:39Because if everybody's burning out after three or four years, you don't get that.

45:42Dr. Michael Gervais:If you think about horizon one, two, and three, which horizon do you think mostly about? So horizon one is like, I'm looking at the first horizon. And for most people, that's like, that could be monthly horizons or quarterly horizons. Horizon two tends to be three to five years, but I didn't want to kind of back you into what it is. And horizon three is like, you know, 10 years. And then some people answer the question, they go, yeah, I'm thinking like generational, like, you know, 200 years. You know, is that Horizon 10? I don't know. Like, where do you spend most of your time thinking? Yeah, it's funny.

46:14Jeff told me once that he's, you know, he's building like a 10 ,000-year clock so that he can tell people to think long-term. I don't think anything about 10 ,000 years later. So not that far. I would say the majority of my thinking is somewhere in between, you know, call it the one to two quarters and three to five years. I think it's, you know, somewhere in those two ranges. And, you know, definitely most of what we think about is appropriately, you know, in the next call it one to two quarters. I don't know if that's a, but, you know, that level of thinking like, how are we thinking about our product roadmap?

46:47How are we thinking about, you know, our sales quotas? How are we thinking about working with customers that we're trying to help launch something? or how are we thinking about partnerships, all of those kind of things. You know, we necessarily think also a bit longer term with that too. So when you think about organizational structures and you're thinking about kind of how do you make sure that we have the right team in place, you know, I tell our team we're trying to build, and part of it is we try to think about we're a very growth mindset. And so we're at$120 billion today, and I tell our team, look, we have the opportunity to be a$300 billion,$500 billion business.

47:20Like I don't really know how big it could be, but it can be really, really large. And so we got to be thinking about at least the next kind of step is to how do we organize to get to be a$300 billion business? And it's probably, I started kind of helping people think about this mental model back when we were probably like$50 to$60 billion. And they're saying like, you know, like it's not, you know, that's an order of magnitude that we're not going to get to with the exact same product set, exact same organizational structure, exact same go-to-market plans, all of those kind of pieces. And so, you know, you've got to think about, like, what do you do differently to get from$50 billion to$100 billion to$300 billion to$500 billion?

47:57And you don't necessarily have to think about the 500 one right now, but to get to 300. And it's a useful mental model for people to think about, oh, right, we have to think about some things differently. There's also some tactical things that, frankly, you have to think about for us that are three to five years out. Like, how do we make sure that we have enough power availability for our customers in 2030? because sometimes some of these things like having enough data centers, having enough power, these are not one-month decisions. They're oftentimes you're thinking about, I mean, we're planning right now for how do we make sure we have power in 28, 29, and 30.

48:29And beyond, by the way, we're investing in nuclear and other things like that to ensure that out into the 30s, we have enough carbon zero energy to support what we think the world is going to need. So there definitely is some long-term planning in there. It's necessary to think about what that looks like. But, you know, it's probably a mix of those two.

48:47Dr. Michael Gervais:Matt, when you think about nuclear power, I'm sure 20 years ago, you didn't think that you're going to make decisions on, you know, understanding nuclear power to lay, I don't know, hundreds of million dollars of bets on it. Just to the order of magnitude, what type of bets are you laying on nuclear? You're right. I did not think that I would be making decisions like that. Or for that matter, I didn't think that we'd be building our own silicon. Like there's a bunch of things that we do today that 20 years ago, I thought were like, there's no chance that we're going to be doing. But here we are.

49:14And it's fun, by the way. It's cool to get to do some of those things. And I do think, you know, look, one of the biggest challenges we have is how do you get to a carbon zero energy world? And that's not something you just flip a switch with and just say, okay, we're never going to use natural gas again. You know, how do you build the actual, you have to be able to do it, right? And so how do you, you know, Amazon, we're the single biggest purchaser of brand new renewable energy contracts in the world every year for the last five years. And I don't know if we're doing enough. Like, we've got to go faster and do more.

49:45And so nuclear is one of those things where I think it has to be one of the solutions. And so it's a big bet for us. We're doing, we have a really large partnership in Pennsylvania around nuclear. And so that's a big bet for us. We have a longer term bet with investments in small modular reactors, which I think is an interesting longer-term bet, different than these kind of large things that take 8, 10 years to go build. You can put these smaller reactors that look a little bit more like gas turbine size, rounding errors. You can go put next to data centers that aren't the whole solution, but that can also be part of the solution.

50:18And so I think that's a big bet for us. And across the board, we think that carbon zero energy is a super important long-term goal for the company and for the world. And it's something we're very committed to doing. And I think nuclear is a big part of that.

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52:53Dr. Michael Gervais:Let's keep pushing. Let's keep exploring. Very cool. What is the main friction right now with AI? The main friction with AI? Well, there's a whole bunch of ways you can take that. So I don't know if there's one, but I'll list two if that's all right. One is just the availability of infrastructure. There's a massive growth of data centers, of power availability, of chip availability. And you've seen lots of us in the industry are investing in all layers of the industry, right? Whether it's utilities and power suppliers versus chip manufacturers versus cloud providers, all throughout that ecosystem are investing massive amounts of capital to help kind of build up.

53:37because it's a very compute-intensive application that has massive implications for, I believe, every part of business and probably a lot of consumer life too. And I'm very bullish about the promise of AI. I think it can massively improve efficiencies and effectiveness and how every job is done and how every business is run. I think there's a huge opportunity there. The second big friction today, though, is just there is going to be some bumps along the way with regards to adoption. And people are already thinking about, you know, there's the normal technology life cycle where people are worried, am I getting enough value out of this?

54:14And I think this happens with every new technology. The answer is maybe yes, maybe no today, and almost for sure tomorrow. And so like, you know, it's a, how do I get to that spot? And, you know, people are appropriately worried too about business disruption and job disruption. And I think it really is a disruption and not a elimination. I think some people kind of position it as elimination. I just don't think it's that. I think it is your job may be a little bit different tomorrow than it is today. And when there's more value creation, there are more jobs to be had and there's more things to be done.

54:43And I think that that's most likely what is going to happen. But that is a change for lots of companies. And so when you think about friction, there's also adoption friction and just thinking about how do I change the way I work? How do I change, upskill my employee base? How do I think about how I get real value out of this in the enterprise? And so those are the two big frictions that we have today. One's tactical, which is just, you know, how do we go spend a bunch of money and get a lot of stuff there? And the other one is organizational and how do you make sure you get value out of the company?

55:10Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, because you're on record saying replacing junior staff with AI is one of the dumbest things that you've ever heard. And at the time of this recording or this conversation, there's other very public CEOs that are saying, I just don't need this many heads. So are you staying the course with that idea that you're not using AI to replace people? Or is there a future where it's like, you need to figure out how to use AI to be able to have a meaningful role here at AWS? us. Well, specifically what I said in that other one was, I think using, like imagining that you're going to get rid of all of your junior people seems like a terrible idea.

55:47Because it's, you know, a lot of times what I was saying is the junior folks, the people that are just graduating from college, oftentimes they're your least expensive employees. They're probably actually the most familiar with some of these AI tools and they're the least stuck in their ways of doing it the old way. And in many ways, AI has the ability to let them deliver even more value than they did before, where they were having to learn how to work. And so imagining that this is a way to get rid of all your junior employees seems like a silly idea that I just don't see how that happens. Also just seems like at some point that collapses on itself because then no one learns how to work.

56:20And then I don't know how the world, there's a bunch of unemployed kids out of college. Anyway, so that was mainly my comment there. I do think, by the way, and we say about replacing employees, I think that the jobs change. And so I do think that in the near term, there will be churn. There will be people who don't adapt to the new way of doing work, there are some jobs that probably will go away. And so I'm not suggesting no jobs go away. I think that's also incredibly naive. And there are definitely jobs that are going to be automated. And there will be different jobs that are created. And so there's definitely going to be some churn in there.

56:53I think some aspects of work will be able to be done with many fewer people. And there's going to be an incredible opportunity to do more things, which you're going to want people to do. And so there's going to be a balance of that. There's going to be a transition in that. But, you know, I think you're going to want a mix of experienced and junior people doing that. And we should accept, and this is part of that thing that I mentioned before, there is going to be some turn and change and not everyone will be able to adapt exactly with that change. And there'll be some upskilling that's in different jobs that are going to be required.

57:23Dr. Michael Gervais:Matt, thank you so much for the time of sharing how you work and the frameworks that you work from and the felt sense of like conscientiousness that is imbued in the language that you choose. So I just want to say thank you for your time. Thank you for leading from the front. And one last question, what are you personally working on? Like, what are you trying to solve personally right now in this wild world that we're in? Yeah, I'm personally trying to figure out how to balance moving incredibly fast and helping the team kind of move at that speed too. Like it is just, it's, and at the size that we are, and it is like, there's a lot of decisions.

58:02There's a lot of things to do. And how do you balance that and give the team the space to do that and the framework to do that without kind of taking your foot off the gas? And I also don't claim to be able to have all the answers to that. But I think we're all learning in this space. Part of the fun of this space is there is no model. You can't say like, this is the way that people did this thing before. And so we should copy that because it worked really well, because there is no example of this before. And so you don't have a lot of$120 billion companies that are growing 17, 18 % year over year and accelerating.

58:37And so that's a fun place to be, but it's hard. And I'm still kind of learning how to do that too.

58:43Dr. Michael Gervais:Awesome. Matt, what a great conversation. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for having me. Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by Gary Sinise, award-winning actor and humanitarian for a conversation about purpose, resilience, and a life dedicated to service. Gary shares how supporting veterans, first responders and military families became his mission long before he faced his own profound loss and how that commitment to serving others ultimately gave him the strength and tools to navigate his own most devastating personal challenges. Join us Wednesday, November 12th at 9 a.m. Pacific only on Finding Mastery.

59:23All right.

59:24Dr. Michael Gervais:Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. punch over to finding mastery.com slash newsletter to sign up.

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1:00:36Dr. Michael Gervais:Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your health care providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.