The Democratization of Business Creation

"We are delighted you will join PICNIC. Not that long ago you were a Dutch academic, and now you lead one of the world’s biggest online companies, setting up a whole new lines of services. First of all, what studies did you do, what kind of research and where did you work?**

"I received my PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. In the early 90’s the nascent Dutch IT world was still very conservative and I didn’t find much appreciation for my  innovative ideas so I decided leave for Portugal to join one of Europe’s largest industrial research institutes. After having worked there for 3 years on the reliability of very large scale computer systems I was approached by Cornell  University in to join their computer science faculty as research scientist and I moved to the US.

Fortunately the position at Cornell also allowed me to exercise my entrepreneurial skills, as I worked with companies that transferred technology from academia to industry. I worked at Cornell for 10 years on developing radical new technologies for building very large computer systems before leaving to join Amazon.com in 2004."

Do you miss academia? Do you still do a lot of research in your present role, or are you more of a manager now?

"There are certainly sides to academia that I miss; working at one of the top universities in the world gives you the ability to interact with very smart students and some of the most brilliant intellectual minds, not only in computer science but also in other fields.

However I always felt somewhat outside of the core academic group that focused on fundamental research. I have always strongly believed that systems research should develop real technologies for real people. Another big difference between industry and academia is that academia is very much individualistic, while in industry you need to work as a team to get anything accomplished.

Much of the work we do at Amazon is so new and groundbreaking that some would probably call it research. To get this done Amazon hires very smart people from all over the globe, so I have the pleasure to work with a very unique set of people."

How did you get in touch with Amazon? Were you approached, did you apply, how did that work?

"I was invited by Amazon to give a presentation about my work and have a discussion about the scalability and reliability of the Amazon Technology Platform. Soon after that, I was approached by Amazon for a position. From what I had seen during my visit I realized that Amazon is one the world’s largest distributed systems with a strong innovation culture, and I realized could really make a contribution there. It didn’t take long for me to accept the offer."

You very quickly took on a leading role in the developments of the various Amazon services. Did you and Jim Bezos compare visions in your job interview? Did you convince him? Do you have team meetings to brainstorm? I am just curious how Amazon arrives at this vision and what role you played..

"The services that we are exposing publically are all the result of an internal need for reducing the complexity of systems overhead that each engineer at Amazon had to deal with . We developed those services first for our internal systems and it wasn’t until we had those in place that we made the decision to also externalize those services. As with everything within Amazon those decisions are a matter of teamwork where there are many different contributors from different disciplines."

Amazon has developed a whole range of services for businesses worldwide, can you explain what kind of services these are?

"There are different categories of services that Amazon has developed; there are our associate services that give developers access to product data, etc. There are the Amazon Enterprise Services which are used to build some of the world’s largest ecommerce sites such as those of Target and Marks & Spencer.

We are also expose our payment and fullfilment services through Checkout by Amazon and Fulfillment by Amazon. More  recently we have started to expose the infrastructure building blocks of the Amazon Technology Platform as services to external developers. These services are in the field of compute (EC2), storage (S3 & EBS), communication (SQS), databases (SimpleDB) and payments (FPS)."

Why do you think these services are so important? What will their effect be on the business world?

"Many businesses are in a similar situation that Amazon was a few years ago;  spending  a significant amount of effort on managing resources that are not related to the unique products that you are building. As such these services help companies re-focus their efforts on what is truly important to the business: developing unique differentiating products.

We also see that the availability of these flexible on-demand services allow new, young business to develop product and services that previously only could be built by companies that had access to significant financial resources.

This means that access to resources is no longer a competitive advantages and a shift is happening towards building better and more attractive products to compete for attention of the customer. We are going through a number of economic changes that see a tremendous increase in the creation of new products and new business. To support this increase it is essential that the creation of businesses becomes more lightweight than it used to be in the past.."

Amazon also launched A9 a while ago, an open search tool. It’s not often discussed, and I wonder how important this service is for Amazon. Any plans to get on Google’s turf?

"A9 is responsible for developing Amazon’s unique product search technology that is used at Amazon and our partner websites".

Aha! Anyway... we are delighted you will join us in Amsterdam. I understand you plan to spend more time in Europe. Why is this?

"I will be working with our business development teams to see how Amazon can help European businesses be competitive in a global market through the use of our services. Not just the start-ups and young businesses are served well by the services but also traditional enterprises have great interest in shifting to variable cost model for resource usage."

After having experienced Silicon Valley, how do you feel about the Dutch and European start up scene? Are there specific companies or services Amazon is interested in here?

"Actually Amazon is located in Seattle so technically speaking we are not part of Silicon Valley! I am psyched to see the Dutch and European startup getting better support and really getting off the ground. I have come to know many European entrepreneurs throughout the past year and their passion and focus is on par with that of their Silicon Valley counter parts, and their creativity and drive for innovation  can rival any business in the world."

Thank you very much!

Werner Vogels is the CTO of Amazon. He blogs at Allthingsdistributed.com, where he writes about building robust and scalable distributed systems as well as his favourite music. Amazon just launched a new service called Elastic Block Storage

At PICNIC, he will be the keynote speaker in the PICNIC conference on Friday 26 September in the afternoon. He will speak about 'The democratization of business creation', and will engage the audience in a discussion on the future of business.