#87: VP Strategic Initiatives @ Amazon Web Services, Brian Taptich: Transforming Cloud Computing

0:00You know, again, in a universe where you're a$90 billion company and you see your addressable market as$3 to$4 trillion, there is expansion that will be happening on a number of different. very large dimensions.

0:19Brian Taptich is the head of strategic initiatives at AWS, a seasoned operator, part of the leadership team at AWS. Brian has worked for some of the most disruptive and impactful companies in the US and has had just a fantastic career, which was a joy to unpack. We talked about the rise of generative AI and what that means for AWS. We talked about cybersecurity and cybersecurity threats in 2024, what AWS took from their experience of the pandemic. And not forgetting, we have to talk about it, the legendary work culture at Amazon.com and how that seeps into the culture and leads the culture at AWS.

1:05There was so much to talk about on that point that we stemmed in all sorts of directions. It was so interesting and so much more. What an unbelievable episode to start 2024. It is Brian Taptich.

1:25Brian Taptich, thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders Podcast. I've been really excited to talk to you, but I understand you prefer to be addressed as tap. Do you want to give us the little story behind that? Oh yeah, I'm happy to do that real quick. So when I was in kindergarten, I went to my dad's office and everybody in my, he was a lawyer and everybody there called him tap. And I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, but you, you know, even when you're five years old that you can't give yourself a nickname. And then I go off to university, flash forward 13 years. And I played American football and lacrosse in college.

2:00And And you show up and they give you a gray t-shirt that says B Taptitch. And nobody knows what the B stands for. And Taptitch is a pain in the butt to say. So everyone starts calling me TAP. So Gareth, the punchline here is that dreams do come true. Brilliant. I love that story. What a great way to start. But what we normally start with is this question, TAP. We're obviously a technology and leadership podcast. What does good leadership mean to you, TAP? Yeah, you know, this is an intimidating question coming onto your podcast, Gareth, because you listen to all the really incredible answers that your previous guests have given.

2:34So there's just this accumulated pressure that you feel coming in. I would say that, and I've written about this before, the real key is striking the right balance between developing the right product and business strategy and developing the right company culture. And I think more often than not, people spend way too much time, especially in Silicon Valley, especially around startups, figuring out the first bit, what is a cool product and what is our optimal go-to-market strategy, and spend not nearly enough time on the latter bit and developing culture. Look, the reality is that we in the technology industry have the good fortune of really having our selection of jobs, and especially amongst the top tier talent.

3:19Employing people who are top tier talent, they can go anywhere they want to go. And the difference between staying and going is not going to be about the product per se, or certainly not your go to market strategy. It's going to be, you know, is it a place that I want to work? And is it with people I want to work? And is it a mission that I believe in? Fantastic. Well, I give yourself a tap on the back, no pun intended. That was a great answer. That's very relatable tap, I would say. So I want I want to basically just give the listeners a little bit of an introduction to yourself. I know you've had a very long and successful career.

3:55You're a major in psychology. You got into the tech sector. Talk us through the sort of milestones early on in your career, Tab, that set you on the path that you ultimately ended up pursuing. Yes, my liberal arts degree from Williams College in psychology and English literature wasn't the most logical path was not getting into the tech industry. I ended up after university. My dad liked to say I had my midlife crisis early. And so I jumped on a motorcycle and I spent a year traveling around the United States because I'd never really explored kind of everything there is to explore. And then I got done with that and I realized I'd never lived overseas in my first 18 years.

4:33So I decided to take a job teaching English in Japan. And I got placed in a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere and was teaching high school Japanese students how to speak English. And in the wake of that, it was time to get the career started. So I came back and I moved to San Francisco. And just by virtue of good timing, it was kind of, I moved there right as Netscape had released Navigator. And sort of the World Wide Web was sort of born. I was thinking a lot about teaching and writing and not at all about technology. And I stumbled into this job at this emerging magazine at the time called Red Herring, which was one of the tech business, which grew into being one of the tech business Bibles in Silicon Valley.

5:13which really set me off on my path. And so I ended up spending four years there as kind of Silicon Valley was becoming what Silicon Valley became. Ended up starting a company after that called Alarm Clock Communications, which was also a print and web media company, which then ran headlong into sort of the dot-com crash in the early 2000s. At which point, decided to go back to business school to kind of round out my business and leadership capabilities, and then had a series of jobs from there that culminated in my role today at AWS. So the first was I was running some product and business development at Electronic Arts in the games industry.

5:52From there, I got recruited away to help run, at the time, a small startup called BitTorrent. And if you're of a certain age, you know BitTorrent. I know BitTorrent. Yes. Yes, you do. And I won't ask why. That was a very important company, I think, around that time. And in fact, BitTorrent was a really interesting proposition at the time because Bram Cohen, who had invented the protocol, and it was open source, but it was really an open source effort of one, had developed this really elegant technical architecture that he set out into the wild. And it turns out that people used it for things that he wasn't anticipating people to use it for.

6:32But it turns out also the architecture had tons of different applications other than just downloading pirated content. Yeah. And so the whole idea behind starting the company was to create kind of an enterprise version of this protocol, which we ended up doing and to some success. For them, though, I was recruited back into the games industry and a startup also based in San Francisco called Zynga at the time, who made games like Farmville and Words with Friends and Mafia Wars for those who were real Zynga heads. And it was a wild ride. To this point in my career, I had kind of let the river take me where it will.

7:10And I started to get a little bit more intentional about how I thought about things. And I knew the next step I wanted was to be the CEO of a car company. And so I got recruited to be CEO of a company called BitCasa, which had built a bunch of interesting file system services on all on top of AWS. Ran that for three and a half, four years, ended up exiting to Intel, at which point I got recruited over to AWS. And I've been here for six years now. And the rest is history. That's a great toll through your career there, Tab. I think there's a couple of things I wanted to ask you about. But maybe can I just start with this one, which I think is just super interesting.

7:47Silicon Valley in the 90s, okay? Are you detecting a similar vibe within the dot-com sort of era, a similar vibe these days in relation to the dawn of AI technology? Do you know what I mean? Is there a similar level of excitement? Yeah, I think there are a lot of, well, I think there are a lot of parallels, but I do think it's, but more material, right? The challenge with the dot-com boom 1.0 of the late 90s was, to some degree, we all knew these businesses that were being started as disruptive as they may seem, didn't have kind of sustainable and scalable business models to help support them.

8:23And the nineties, it was really more about disrupting existing, like entirely disrupting, you know, existing brick and mortar businesses. It was entirely about, it wasn't about how is Walmart going to develop its own, web strategy. It was, hey, we're going to slice up the universe that is Walmart into thinner and thinner bits, and we're going to put it online. And sure, we're not going to make money on any single transaction, but we're going to make up for it on volume, which of course doesn't work. And so I think we all had this feeling then that the frothiness was doomed. It was just a function of when the other shoe was going to drop, and eventually it did.

9:08Right now, it's really less about, hey, how are new businesses going to disrupt existing businesses? It's how is this new technology going to enable companies everywhere to disrupt their own businesses, right? To do their businesses much more effectively, much more efficiently. And it's really less about how are these tools that are being developed in Gen.AI going to entirely replace existing companies, existing businesses, existing products. And so I think that's the big fundamental difference. So it's not, you know, it's not about, hey, how is generative AI going to displace AWS or Amazon from its leadership position and what it's currently doing?

9:50Rather, it's how is generative AI going to enable them to provide even better experiences for their customers, whether it's on the enterprise side or on the consumer side. And the same could be said of the automotive industry, the healthcare life sciences industry, whatever it may be. Yeah, that's really interesting. So can I just maybe draw some attention or maybe home in on your time with BitCastle then? Because I understand you took over and oversaw an enormous amount of growth there. It was a pretty impressive period of growth during that time. Looking back now then, Tap, what was your biggest lesson, do you think, from being a CEO at that organization?

10:26What are your sort of takeaways where you think I learned some serious lessons there in that, you know, where were those lessons? Yeah, I think it's two bits. You know, one is about not just making sure you have the right product and go to market strategy, which is sort of table stakes for any company, but also creating the right sort of culture. Because the reality is that we read all these headlines about, you know, companies that are wildly successful and, you know, have the luxury of recruiting anybody and everybody that they want. But the reality is the other 95 % are companies that aren't these huge unicorn rocket ships, right?

11:05That are struggling, whether it's with their product development, their product market fit, their go-to-market strategy. And so objectively on its face, getting people to come work for companies like those is really, really hard, right? I mean, of course, we always want the A plus talent to come join us. The challenge is that you can't always get the A plus talent either because you can't afford them because it turns out we live in a competitive marketplace or because, you know, in a world where they have their choice of jobs, like why am I going to go to a struggling company when I can go to one of these rocket ships?

11:35And so it really then you have to kind of compete on culture. And so it was really about creating a culture that was attracting people and who believed in the mission and believed in what we were trying to do as much as our product and go to market fit, you know? yeah for sure i can imagine the talent war in silicon valley at a time of a boom a boom period well in general actually but especially in a boom period i bet it's brutal i bet it's such a transactional marketplace isn't it you know what i mean if someone's unhappy they can get a new job like that you know i'm talking about people like engineers and those kind of in-demand skills like that i bet it's i bet it's brutal has that been sort of a challenging part of of growth and your career as a leader within the tech industry?

12:20Absolutely. And this is, you know, one, it's brutal. It's brutal. The baseline is it's brutal, right? It's brutal under any circumstances. And whether you're BitCasa, struggling turnaround, venture-backed startup, or whether you're AWS, you know, the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud services space, when it comes to attracting and retaining talent, we have the exact same challenges, just a different set of ammunition that we kind of bring to the fight. And to your point, in boom times, it just gets, you know, irrationally brutal. And so again, this is why culture, you know, becomes every bit as important as what your business and your go-to-market strategy is.

12:57I would say the other thing, and you asked specifically about leadership, it was actually subsequent. It was right after the board meeting where we talked about, the emergency board meeting, where we talked about how we needed time to come up with a new strategy because the existing strategy was intrinsically flawed, that one of my board members pulled me aside and he gave me one of the two best pieces of leadership advice that I've ever gotten. And he pulled me aside and said, look, Tap, I know this is your first time as a CEO. The thing you've got to understand is the key to being a CEO is you're a benevolent dictator.

13:30That's what CEOs are. CEOs are benevolent dictators. The great CEOs know when to be benevolent and when to be a dictator. And I've kind of taken that to heart. That's brilliant advice. I love, I have to remember that one, Tap. I think that's really good. You joined obviously Amazon in summer of 2017. What surprised you most about AWS and the organization that you joined at that time? Oh, you know, how different the laws of physics are at AWS was the biggest shock. And what I mean when I say that is that anytime that a company is going after kind of a three to$4 trillion addressable market, which is kind of how we think about it.

14:06So if you imagine that historically, any workload, any process, any service, any product that kind of has been run on existing on-premises services, on-premises servers, or a server closet that you might happen to have in your company, ultimately all of those things are going to live in the cloud someday. When the denominator is that large and the opportunity is so huge, it requires kind of a different way of thinking. And by the way, especially culture shocking coming from a venture backed, you know, turnaround small startup. And I'll tell you, I wasn't at all sure when I came to join that this is, this was going to be a good fit because my background was much more kind of small company entrepreneurial.

14:51And in fact, as part of the transaction with Intel, the reason I didn't go there is that I wasn't interested in joining a big company. And then anybody else called a few weeks later and we talked for a couple of months and I ended up landing over here, despite the fact that at the time Amazon, I think was two and a half times the size of Intel. So the biggest shock was what kind of laws of physics are just different. And I think when I joined, and it's proven out, right? When I joined, Amazon at the time was about 600 ,000 employees, which I remember in my first day training, when they said that number, my jaw hit the floor.

15:23I couldn't even imagine anything that large. And AWS run rate at time was around$12 billion. Well, flash forward just six years later, and AWS is now a$90 billion run rate company in just six years from 12 to 90. And Amazon is a 1.4, I think roughly 1.4 million person company. So just adjusting to that rate of growth, that overall size and the scope and scale of the opportunity is kind of the biggest shock. I can imagine. It's crazy numbers, that is. I mean, I didn't realize that they were quite that big in terms of headcount. So AWS, how closely integrated is AWS into Amazon, into the mothership?

16:10Is it regarded as like sort of a department? I know it's obviously a big company in its own right, but how close it is to this sort of centralized culture of Amazon is AWS? house? Oh, really good question. Again, this culture theme keeps coming through. One of the reasons that Amazon has been able to sort of grow as aggressively and successfully as it has is because it has such a strong culture. I mean, anybody who's done sort of any research at all on Amazon knows about sort of the leadership principles, which are when I joined 14 and now 16 of our leadership principles. And I've experienced lots of companies where the leadership principles are great fodder for posters on the wall or mouse pads, if they still exist, or coasters or whatever.

16:55At Amazon, these things are real and people genuinely live by them. And it's what's enabled the company to grow and still maintain its consistency of culture. And AWS is very much a part of it. I mean, the genesis of AWS was, Amazon's philosophy has always been, if we're going to build something, let's build it in a way that it can be platformized. It can be productized for other people to consume from. And so what started on the amazon.com side with, hey, let's let third party sellers use our platform because we're never going to be able to satisfy all the demand that's out there was very much the, that's what the germination for AWS, where Andy Jassy, who 17 years ago founded AWS, is now the CEO of all Amazon.com, came along and said, you know what we can do?

17:45We've built this underlying tech platform that supports Amazon.com. Let's take that and productize it and let other people benefit from our learnings and our scale as well. Now, as a result, and especially with Andy now in charge of it, AWS is not only technically an intrinsic part to what Amazon.com is doing because it all runs on top of AWS, But then culturally, it's never been considered separate. It's a business unit, but everything we do there is run the same way. Okay. So in terms of technology innovation then, obviously, I mean, AWS is synonymous with cloud computing now, isn't it? It's very much, it kind of owns that space.

18:28I mean, obviously, I know Microsoft are very strong in that space as well, and Google have got their own product. So in terms of innovation, and maybe we can come on to Amazon Q and AI technology at some point, but I just think in terms of tech innovation, how much do AWS influence Amazon's innovation around any sort of software and technology? Is it a driver? Do you get told to do by them or do you set strategy for Amazon? Do you know what I mean? What does that relationship look like from a technology perspective, Tav? It's also a good question. And it also gets to one of the things that I think differentiates Amazon from any place I've ever worked.

19:07By the way, the most striking, immediately obvious thing that makes Amazon feel different than other companies is that it's all document writing at Amazon. So I haven't used a PowerPoint except to launch it for stuff that people have sent me from outside since I started working here. Like I haven't made a single PowerPoint presentation since I got here. It's all document based. And it's a very trippy experience, your first handful of meetings, when you come here and you're accustomed to sitting down around a table and somebody puts up a PowerPoint presentation and starts going through slides and speaking to them and kind of you sit there and you receive and then there's an interaction.

19:42You know, when you walk into a meeting at Amazon, invariably there's either a piece of paper, a stack of papers or a document that somebody shared digitally. And the first quarter of the meeting, whether it's a half hour, two hours, six hour meeting, is just spent reading. It's silent. I've heard this. I've heard this actually. Yeah. Amazon acquired a company in Wales, basically, called Vico. Yeah, sure. And they immediately introduced this into the culture at Vico. They had to spend 10, first 10, 15, 20 minutes reading, which I think is genius because then nobody in that meeting has got any excuse.

20:20Even if they haven't read the stuff they should have read, they can read it now. So therefore, everyone's on the same page. That's fantastic that they've rolled that out. Yeah. And two additional really important points with this. And this is why I don't think I'll ever go back to PowerPoint culture, that hopefully I retire from AWS. But if that doesn't happen and I join other companies, I'm not sure I could ever go back to PowerPoint. Because the thing that it enables, it very much kind of levels the playing field in that when you're walking through a PowerPoint presentation, the person who's created the presentation already knows what's coming next, but nobody else does.

20:54And so it's sort of this nonlinear process. Whereas in the doc writing culture, everybody consumes what's on the page and has the full story to then be able to ask questions about instead of just bits and pieces along the way. And so it very much kind of democratizes on one level. The second is it's very sort of standard practice that the most senior person in the room goes last. And so when we would do doc reads with Jeff and now Andy, they always go last because they don't want their questions or their directions to kind of influence the other people in the room. And so there's this kind of unspoken but natural hierarchy of feedback that you get.

21:31It's super valuable. This episode is brought to you by Be Digital UK. Be Digital are a trusted partner to leadership teams of technology-driven organizations delivering ROI-led solutions across cost optimization and also data and AI adoption. AWS doesn't really influence how Amazon.com works. AWS really enables Amazon.com to do what it needs to do. And this gets to a very important tenet at Amazon, which is working back from customers. Another thing that's been sort of shocking, and it's very different about working here, is I've never been in a meeting where the first question is, how much money can we make from this?

22:20The first question is always, what is the big hairy customer problem that we're solving? And the presumption being that, look, if we really focus on customer requirements and we build the things that solve the biggest, most challenging customer problems, you know, the money will subsequently follow. So it's really about working back from customers and solving customer problems, not, you know, and so in the case of Amazon and AWS, we're not telling Amazon what to do. To the contrary, they're telling us what their requirements are. We're building technologies and services that support not just them, but also, you know, the rest of our AWS customer base.

22:59And, you know, just as everybody else benefits from the work that we do for Amazon.com, you know, Amazon.com benefits from the work that we're doing for everybody else as well. And, you know, we consider Amazon.com in the same light and with the same gravity that we would any one of our other customers. Yeah, that's fantastic. That's really, really, really interesting stuff. I mean, it kind of feels like a little bit of a given now that you obsess about the customer and work back from that point. But I can recall, you know, Amazon just working in that way or even just articulating it in that way.

23:37I would call it revolutionary. I don't think anyone really had thought about it like that. You know what I mean? It was always about the profit and the top line, bottom line. It was never about, you know, most companies thought of it in that way. And it was a bit of a paradigm shift, I would say. A hundred percent. And this is where, you know, and this predates me by a significant margin, but, you know, that DNA that Jeff sort of set very early on. And you'll remember when, you know, Amazon.com went public and, you know, Jeff's first shareholder letter is one of the artifacts that everybody who comes into Amazon reads because he very much sets the tone, you know, that had not successfully been set previously in the public markets, which is, look, we're in this for long term growth and we're willing to trade sort of short term profitability and quarter to quarter focus to think about years, decades.

24:32And the payoff will come. And it's proven out over and over and over again. And so it was revolutionary. But again, I don't want to sound too judgmental. I don't think there are lots of right ways to do things. Yeah, sure. This is the way that really has worked for Amazon and has kept the culture so strong since he set that DNA decades ago. Let's talk about the pandemic very quickly then, Tap. How did the pandemic change AWS US, in terms of like, what changes did you make from that period, which have stayed in place from a cultural standpoint, more than anything else, you know, or maybe from a structural standpoint, in terms of the way you guys lead teams and things, anything sort of stand out as maybe positive things that you've kept as a result of the pandemic period?

25:21I'd say a few things, you know, again, back to the leadership principles, one is a continued focus on one of our, one of our key leadership principles, which is, you know, bias for action, right, is we had going into the pandemic, like moving with a sense of urgency and really believing that speed matters is something that Andy has long, you know, espoused and believes in and driven down into the organization and bias for action sort of is the leadership principle that manifests that. Now, one of the things that we found is, you know, through a global pandemic, you had lots and lots of businesses that were just being thrown upside down and didn't know what to do.