Selling porcelain figurines and starting a cloud computing company may seem like rather different skills. But Andy Jassy, who founded and now leads Amazon Web Services, says one experience deeply informed the other.
“It was an unbelievable crash course in general management,” he says, referring to his time in the collectibles business, where he worked right after college for Danbury Mint, seller of dolls, coins, ornaments and keepsakes.
“The products weren’t long-term interesting to me, but the general management training and the business training were fantastic.” After that he started his own project, eventually going back to business school and then ending up at Amazon where he worked as Jeff Bezos’s “shadow”, a position that is somewhere between chief of staff and technical assistant.
Now Mr Jassy has his own shadow, a salt-and-pepper-haired engineer named Eric Docktor, who follows him into the room for our interview.
Seattle-based AWS has become the most closely watched division of Amazon after it was broken out as its own business segment in April. AWS, which rents out computing power and data storage, accounted for half of group profits in the most recent quarter. It is also the fastest-growing part of the company, accounting for one-fifth of revenue growth even though it is just one 20th of overall sales.
When AWS started, its success looked anything but inevitable. When Mr Jassy wrote the “vision document” that laid out the idea for AWS in 2003, he wrestled with every word, going through 31 drafts. Amazon’s policy, then and now, is that these proposals be no longer than six pages, to force the writer to clarify his thinking (and to save the reader time).
Through the revisions, the outline of AWS emerged with many of the key features it has today. Unlike its competitors at the time, it was to be pay-as-you-go, sparing users expensive monthly subscription plans. The computing platform was to be self-service — anyone with a credit card and an Amazon account could sign up.
Read More : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f19dbe5e-7d7b-11e5-a1fe-567b37f80b64.html#axzz3qc6yPtap
“It was an unbelievable crash course in general management,” he says, referring to his time in the collectibles business, where he worked right after college for Danbury Mint, seller of dolls, coins, ornaments and keepsakes.
“The products weren’t long-term interesting to me, but the general management training and the business training were fantastic.” After that he started his own project, eventually going back to business school and then ending up at Amazon where he worked as Jeff Bezos’s “shadow”, a position that is somewhere between chief of staff and technical assistant.
Now Mr Jassy has his own shadow, a salt-and-pepper-haired engineer named Eric Docktor, who follows him into the room for our interview.
Seattle-based AWS has become the most closely watched division of Amazon after it was broken out as its own business segment in April. AWS, which rents out computing power and data storage, accounted for half of group profits in the most recent quarter. It is also the fastest-growing part of the company, accounting for one-fifth of revenue growth even though it is just one 20th of overall sales.
When AWS started, its success looked anything but inevitable. When Mr Jassy wrote the “vision document” that laid out the idea for AWS in 2003, he wrestled with every word, going through 31 drafts. Amazon’s policy, then and now, is that these proposals be no longer than six pages, to force the writer to clarify his thinking (and to save the reader time).
Through the revisions, the outline of AWS emerged with many of the key features it has today. Unlike its competitors at the time, it was to be pay-as-you-go, sparing users expensive monthly subscription plans. The computing platform was to be self-service — anyone with a credit card and an Amazon account could sign up.
Read More : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f19dbe5e-7d7b-11e5-a1fe-567b37f80b64.html#axzz3qc6yPtap
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