Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - How a $120 Billion Company Thinks Like a Startup | Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

What if your biggest competitive advantage isn’t how technologically advanced you are — but how psychologically agile your teams are?On today’s episode, we sit down with Matt Garman — CEO of Amazon Web Services — to dig into the leadership frameworks behind one of the world’s most innovative companies. We cover his “one-way vs. two-way doors” decision model, why “minimum lovable product” beats perfectionism, and how to push autonomy down while keeping trust and security high.We also explore what’s really slowing AI adoption (and why replacing junior employees with AI is a terrible idea), why documents beat slide decks for high-stakes calls, and the long-view energy bets—including nuclear—that AWS believes will shape innovation and sustainability. Along the way, Matt shares the personal side of leading at speed: family dinners, golf as a reset, and the “support then challenge” cadence that helps teams sustain pace without burning out.What you’ll learn:How to use the “one-way vs. two-way doors” framework to make faster, smarter decisionsWhy optimism (not naïveté) is a core competitive advantage for innovatorsThe key to shipping a minimum lovable product customers actually wantThe real frictions in AI adoption—and why replacing juniors with AI backfiresWhy long-horizon energy bets (including nuclear) matter for innovation and sustainabilityIf you’re leading in a fast-moving world—or want to—this conversation offers practical frameworks and a shot of grounded optimism to help your team move faster, smarter, and with more heart.__________________________________Links & ResourcesSubscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset!Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and XSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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But if you wait until it's perfect, three more people are going to launch ahead of you because the world is moving so fast. What if your biggest competitive advantage isn't how technologically advanced you are, but how psychologically agile your teams are? If you have somebody that thinks small, they offer it'll 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. We want people who are going to go do something, not just sit around and think about it. Welcome back. We're welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jerva, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. The idea behind these conversations is simple. It's to sit with the extraordinaries and learn to really learn how they work from the inside of. Today's guest is Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services. What AWS is, our goal is to power all of the applications. capabilities and technology that every company around the world needs to do, whether that's two kids in a dorm room, building a new web application, whether that's some of the largest companies in the world running their technical infrastructure.

We run the data centers and the services that power a lot of what they do. In this conversation, we unpack how he leads one of the world's most innovative companies, from why optimism fuels bold ideas to how he empowers teams to make faster decisions, using his one-way versus two-way doors approach. A lot of times, when you really dig in, like, why are you slow to make a decision? people are afraid that they're just like, I'm not sure I'm allowed to make that decision. And so we tell people 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. Overall, you're going to get to where you want to go faster. We also explore what's really slowing AI adoption. By replacing juniors with AI is a terrible idea. What is the main friction right now with AI?

People are appropriately worried about business disruption and job disruption. Some people position it as elimination. I just don't think it's that. I think it's... With that, let's jump into this week's conversation, Matt Garman. Okay, this has been a long time coming. First, I want to congratulate you on a massive body of work and leading a important company into our future.

So, Matt, thank you for coming on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it. Okay, great. So for those who might be unfamiliar with AWS, In the most simplest of terms, how do you describe AWS? That's good question. And, you know, like I've been describing AWS for 20 years.

Fortunately, more people know about it now than they used to. But, yeah, so AWS, it's cloud computing. And effectively, actually, when we started AWS 20 years ago, our vision was people running their own data centers and tracking servers and putting storage together was non-differentiated. And so our view was we could deliver that as a service. And so what AWS is, is our goal is to power all of the applications and capabilities and technology that every company around the world needs to do. And whether that's two kids in a dorm room, building a new web application, whether that's some of the largest companies in the world running their technical infrastructure, whether that's government agencies that are trying to drive their mission. We run the data centers and the services that power a lot of what they do. So that's kind of our vision is to, you know, a lot of times we say we try to do the muck and the hard things that the customers, it's not differentiated for our customers.

And so that's our goal. We want our customers to be able to move faster, innovate better, and we deliver innovations that try to help customers do that. Is the majority of your effort for AWS to serve large businesses or for individuals? We try not to make that differentiation. When we were starting early on, we got some advice from some people that said, look, there is no possible way that you can. can build a company that can go after supporting small, early-stage startups and go after large enterprises. And we took that advice and put it aside and decided to disregard it.

And we do both. And so from the very beginning, startups have been incredibly important for what we do. Individual developers, we want them to be able to create and really have the power to create the same thing that the biggest companies in the world do. We want an individual developer to be able to scale to support millions and millions of customers. And we want to have the controls and compliance and security and capabilities that the very largest banks and healthcare companies and media and entertainment companies and really every industry around the world can rely on. And so that's how we think about it. We think

about it as it's not, you know, we want to build capability. Some capabilities are obviously more applicable to an enterprise and some are more applicable to a startup. But generally, our services are designed to support all of those customers. So Christian Dior has balanced Siaga, right? And Nike has Adidas. What's the ecosystem look like of competitors in this stands for AWS? Is it Microsoft Cloud, Azure, or and or otherwise? Yeah, I mean, look, if you look in the cloud computing world, it's Microsoft and Google or the other really large competitors that are in our space. But I will say that the vast majority of our competition is still status quo of people running data centers on-prem.

So today, you know, estimates vary, but, you know, it's roughly 20% of workloads have moved into a cloud environment, and the rest of those are still inside of legacy on-prem computer environments. And so there are many people out there that are trying to go after those workloads, some of those that we mentioned. But the real competition is inertia, is trying to get enterprises or startups or small, medium-sized businesses, to change how they think about things. How do you get off of a mainframe that you've been on for 30 years? How do you get off of legacy VMware environments?

How do you get off of these old databases that are crusty and you've been running on for 20 plus years? And so that really is the competition. Honestly, it is helping customers get into a more modern world so they can take advantage of all the great technologies and the new capabilities that are out there in the world. So let's go back. Let's roll it back a little bit.

When you joined AWS, you weren't even sure what AWS was. That's why I wanted to start with hearing your ideas. understanding of AWS, because I think it was like 20 years ago, you're like, ah, something looks good over there. It looks interesting. I'm not sure what it is. So who does that? Well, my first job actually was as an intern. So that was pretty low risk. I was in business school. It was at Amazon. Amazon was least a real company. So I had no idea what AWS was. It was a secret, you know, internal project. So I didn't know until I started what it even was. But I was excited about I was interested. Part of why I joined, actually, I had done startups before

Amazon, before I went to business school. And I was interested to see how a larger company innovated inside of an existing business. And so I talked to a couple of different companies, and I talked to Amazon, and they said, hey, we're actually building a new business inside of Amazon. Can't tell you what it is, but love to have you come do your internship for us. And I was like, well, great, that's exactly what I want to see. So I did that and learned about what we were building with AWS and thought it was super interesting. And I did, again, didn't quite know what it was, but it sounded cool.

And so, yeah, that was my intern project was to actually put together a business plan of who would be our first customers that we would possibly go sell these services to that we were building. Okay. Go back to that framing. You wanted to, stay it one more time. You wanted to understand how companies inside of companies could grow. Is that what I heard? Okay. Yeah, basically. It was, and, you know, I had been at these small startups before, right? 10 people, 15 people. You know, one of them had grown to be like 50 people. But, you know, and when you innovate in that, you're starting from zero. And I had read a bunch about how folks at Google and Amazon and others, you know, build new products and services inside of those existing companies. And I was interested to just, you know, learn. I was kind of curious as to see, how does that, how is that different? And how do you drive a culture of innovation inside of a larger organization? And so that was part of my internship as I kind of sought out an example like that where I could try to learn.

I had no hopes that it would be something that was as transformative as AWS was. So I got a little pretty lucky there. But that was what I wanted. It's just something I was interested in learning at, mostly because I was pretty sure that I wanted to go back and work at startups, and I thought it would be a good grounding for, if I ever was at a startup that could grow bigger, to make sure to maintain that culture as part of that company. There you go.

Okay. So the original kind of interest was culture of innovation. If you did it in a company, inside a company, you didn't have to really scrape for money and resources and manage that narrative. but you did need to, of course, make sense of something. So what you were most interested in a culture innovation. Okay, that's going to be important for us. And I do want to go back to your dining room table.

Like when you were a kid, did you guys all eat at the same table? Was it chaotic? Was it very calm? Was it more Puritan? Was it more intense? Like, just I think we can learn so much by understanding the dining room table. Yeah. So, yeah, we ate dinner together most nights.

My mom cooked dinner. My dad's Lutheran minister, and my whole family, I would say, is talkative. And so, in fact, when you think about Thanksgiving, we'd have something like 20, 25 people over. And you really had to fight to get a word in edgewise. And so I think that. And there was lots of vigorous debate, I would say. All friendly and respectful, but vigorous. And, you know, I think that pushed me to make sure that if I wanted to get my opinions out there and heard, which I did, I had to actually do it.

So, but also I will say, you know, the family was incredibly supportive. You know, I made sometimes unconventional choices. In fact, right out of undergrad, when I went to go work for a startup, my mom was very worried. She's like, are you sure that this company is going to make it? And I was like, no, mom, I'm not. But it's okay if it doesn't. And it didn't, by the way. It went out of business in 18 months.

My first startup that I worked for. But, you know, I think I learned a lot. And I always had confidence that if things didn't go well, I could find something else and get to the next thing. Where did that sense of efficacy come from? that, you know, if it doesn't work out, I'll figure it out. I don't know. Maybe it's a rational confidence. I don't know.

But it's a, look, I mean, it's like there's a, the world is a big place. There's a lot of things to do. Wait, wait, okay, Matt, you're dropping gems. Where does that, where does that abundance come from? I don't have a good answer for you there. Is it dad? Is it mom? Is it something you learned in high school, college?

I've always kind of just felt that way. Like, I kind of was like I could, but there's a, there's a lot of opportunity. out there. And, you know, I think I was always just kind of confident that things would work out if I worked hard on them. Do you believe that the future works out if you apply yourself or do you think that, are you more optimistic as a framework or more pessimistic? I am, I also, yeah, so I am always very optimistic. And so maybe that's kind of where it comes from is I'm always just kind of optimistic that, you know, my friends make fun of me as I'll stand at the T-box playing golf and I'll hit a drive and it will clearly look like it's like 20 yards into the forest.

And I'll be like, it might open up. Like, I'll probably find it. I often don't, just to be clear. But I have that option that I'll, you know, it's probably a workout. And look, it doesn't always work out, by the way. And a lot for me has been good luck, just to be super clear. And I think some of it you make your own luck, but some of it is real. Like, you just get lucky.

And I had a very sport of family. I continue to have a very sport of family. I, you know, I do think that AWS is an incredible opportunity that I stumbled into. And then you make some of that, right? I think that the team here has been incredible. And we've worked hard to build a, business up and there's still a long ways to go. But, you know, so it's a mix of, I would say, talent and hard work. But luck is in there too. But you got to be optimistic. And I think when

you think about the future, I'm very optimistic that we can get to the right place. And it doesn't mean it's easy, right? And there's a lot of hard things out there. But it's interesting to hear a highly trained engineer account for luck as part of the equation. It's luck is a complicated concept. And I don't, I don't think you're just casually throwing it around. but I don't want to presume something. Yeah. It's not all luck, just to be super clear. Like, it can't.

It's not all. Of course. But it's a combination of those things. Like, there's a lot of things that could go wrong that are potentially out of your control. And sometimes they do. And sometimes they can be catastrophic and sometimes they're not. And so some of that is bad luck or good luck. And but you have to take those chances and you have to look for those chances too.

And I do think that some of that is there too where you recognize that. I'll use the early one as an example, When I came to Amazon kind of intern cell day, there was a whole bunch of leaders there kind of pitching their jobs. And there was a whole bunch of business school interns and all really smart people. And there's a bunch of people that were like, they heard like, hey, we're doing an internal kind of new business startup that's going to be deep technology focused. And I was maybe the only one that raised my hand instead I'm interested in that. Everybody else was like, I'm going to go work on books or music or sporting goods or something that was more established and safer. And I thought it was interesting.

and I wanted to go learn it and, you know, and got lucky that that turned out to be a really interesting thing. But I think you got to look for opportunities like that, too, and jump on them when you see them. You're making my job super easy. I love this. That's what I'm here for. That's what I'm here for. Yeah, no, yeah, that's really good. Because what you're sharing your framework so crystal clear. So there's an optimistic lens. There's a lens of abundance. You're accounting for luck, but what you're saying is you need to look for things. that is that is the optimism at play like there's things out there that's the optimism and abundance

kind of co-join there's things out there i've got to look for it as opposed to if your brain is doing what it's designed to do without the psychology to drive it your brain is designed to find all of the dangers and threats and things that could go wrong the things that could eat you or kill you and then what that looks like in modern life is like yeah if i take that risk on an AWS, I've never heard of. I don't know if that's going to work out. Maybe I'll just go do the safe game, whatever that is. You looking for and readying yourself for the ball to bounce a certain way

is probably why you're able to kind of get chunks of yardage if we use a football analogy for just a moment. Okay, that's cool. So amongst your peers, people that are, I don't know what the top line revenue for AWS is. Is it public? It is. Yeah, we announce it. We're rounding airs $120 billion run rate.

Yeah, something like that. that's probably pretty cool to say I remember our first days when it's like you know we passed $10 a day of revenue so you know we've come away's we've come away Finding Master is brought to you by Defender in the conversations I have with world class performers there's this theme that keeps coming up again and again

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And it's how we found our lead producer, Emma. We love what LinkedIn has created. And it's been such a great service for us as we've grown. If you're looking to grow your team with intention, this is a great place to start. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash finding mastery. That's LinkedIn.com slash finding mastery to post your job. for free. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, so at the plus 100 billion, your peers, so people that are at the similar tables to you and maybe larger tables, do you find them to be fundamentally

optimistic or fundamentally pessimistic? I would say mostly optimistic. Yeah, I didn't want to kind of bait you into that because I haven't met a world's best that is not optimistic. They're all optimistic. Yeah. It's a wild kind of just keeps splashing me that their psychology is built on like, hey, could work here. Hey, I think this could work. And if we get this thing together, and if we really apply ourselves, we've got to take some risk now, this could work. So how do you work with people that hedge their bet or hedge the company's bet, which is not fundamentally wrong? Of course, we need people to say, hey, I think you should stay away from the cliff. You've been dancing out there a little too long. Like, we need people to pull us back from the frontier sometimes. But how do you

work with people that have a naysay, gloom, doom outlook on what could be? Yeah, I would say it's much harder to work with people who have like a really naysay or doom gloom all the time kind of, you know, I think that's a tougher one. I will say, though, you need a mix of personalities to drive a successful business because you can't all just be super optimistic either. You actually need some people to help balance you that says, like, you know, we're very optimistic, but like when you're thinking about security threats or operational rigor and things like that, like you want to think about what could go wrong, too, because that's a big chunk of what you're doing. And so you want that mix of things because you can't just be like, oh, it'll probably all work out. I don't have to worry about it. Like that. I'm not, you know, it's, so it can't just be that. You actually want people who are incredibly rigorous and say, this could go wrong, this could go wrong, this could go wrong, particularly so you can then go and make sure that you build belts and suspenders around that to make sure that they don't. You know, and so I think you want a mix of folks like that. And, you know, now if everybody has always just, you know, sad panda all day, That kind of brings down the team, and so you can't just be that.

But I think there's a mix of that that you want for a team. 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. And 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 it will 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 of there is a bias for action. And 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.

Are you a risk taker or risk manager? Well, I think you've got to do both. So, you know, I think, you know, 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, 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, you know, and there's the right sets of upside for it, then it's a good deal. And then you mitigate as many of the downside for it. 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. 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 at the cost of moving fast to build something that is good enough right now

just to barely get introduced. So it's like 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. I'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 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. we 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. We obviously have a server component and a hardware component inside the data center, but the thing that customers touch and feel is software. When 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 know, you've got to have great security. You've got to make sure you can stand behind your product because for us, you know, businesses are trusting us with their important workloads, but they also want capabilities as fast as we can give them to them. 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? It's 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. And 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. Like, I want as many people at the people that are doing the actual work to make decisions as fast as possible. And so one of the mental models we use, actually, is this concept that we push inside of Amazon, 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, that, that, They're just like, I'm not sure I'm allowed to make that decision. Like, 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. Like, 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, you know, we committed $5 billion to go do something, or, you know, 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. And 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 than you're in place. 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. It's a framing that I use with my

son, and he's a 17-year-old. And so, you know, I'm trying to help him understand the difference between one-way and two-way decisions. And 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, just like... Right, right, you know. 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. I'm like, no, that's a one way because if 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 have, 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. And 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. like that you can't undo that right um you can't undo that but you know in in work hopefully most our decisions are are less impactful than that but but even so and and i think it's you know the easiest ones are you know 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 launched 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 like they're you can update it And you kind of make the calls of which things are doable or not or undoing or not. And there's thousands of decisions a day. 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. 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. You know, I think we try to have some explicit signals to the organization, you know, 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 was that needed to be fixed and they didn't wait for permission. It 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, you know, somebody that really saw something and moved quickly. And something where, you know, 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.

Like, there was a couple 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 of 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 it's okay.

and we kept growing. And so, you know, I think that's, you know, kind of really thinking about that. We do have a leadership principle called right a lot. Like, if you're two-way, or decisions, if you're wrong every time, that's also not great. So, you know, 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'd probably want to think about that, too. 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, um, no, not you.

That's funny. That's funny. I don't know. 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. Like, you know, one of our, another of our leadership principles is deliver a result. 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 it, 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? And do you fit that 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's not, it doesn't come natural to me. That's, that's okay. We want to see people that are working on it. But, you know, it's a combination of those things, which is, you know, 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. 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 a 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. And 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. And even with our business has been quite successful and some things haven't worked out. And, you know, I think across Amazon we do that, you know, we have some wildly unsuccessful projects, like things like, I don't know if you ever used the fire phone.

It was not awesome. 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, you know, hopefully they go well and we stand by them.

Yeah. I mean, and it's counterbalance with the point that you do need to get results. You know, like there's a counterbalance. You can't have 10 straight fire phones. Like that's... Okay, good. Right, exactly.

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I'm really trying to understand how do you discern to make the more accurate decision? You 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 do 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. And, 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 and 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. You know, I think part of the reason why Jeff

outlawed PowerPoint 25 years ago at Amazon is because PowerPoint really allows you to paper over details, right? You can just have a smooth talker and not really get into the details. And with the 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, you know, I think a lot of the value I can add is just make that decision and let the team keep going forward. And so, you know, 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. And so that's kind of how I think about it. Let's do it this way.

That's very cognitive, right? That's a very intellectual process that we're going to, we're going to 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 lens. 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. 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, 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 an AWS, want to be high achieving.

Like, they want to do a great job. They're not here to, like, and frankly, we, we, I tell people this 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. Like, it's not easy. And it'll be fulfilling. You'll get to do things. You'll have a huge impact on the world. We'll have really hard problems.

Like, I promise you, we'll get to go innovate. 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.

But sometimes cultures are not good fits for people or environments are not good fits for people. And 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, I mean, I've gotten a couple of people who have actually written and said, thank you because, like, I may not have moved on and I might have kept trying to, like, bang my head against a wall in an environment that wasn't right for me.

And so I appreciate you kind of give me that push to go find a different spot that was a better fit. And not everyone, by the way, like, not everyone sees it that way. But it is, it is true. And most people, you know, they want to be in a place where their careers. going to keep growing. And so they don't want to be stuck at the like bottom wrong 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. Because 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. Yeah. I guess. 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 like 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, 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. And for you, just personally, you're in a high-speed environment. You've got high demands from, you know, 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, you know, part of the WS?

Yeah, I think part of that is just figuring out of 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. I 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. And 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. You 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 in 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. That's one of the things that drive 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. And so they really understand the culture. When you say something, you don't have to like go deep into like 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. Because if everybody's burning out after three or four years, you don't get that. If you think about Horizon 1, 2, and 3, what which horizon do you think mostly about. So Horizon 1 is like, I'm looking at the first horizon. And for most people, that's like, that could be monthly horizons or, you know, quarterly horizons. Horizon 2 tends to be three to five years. But I didn't want to kind of back you into what it is. And Horizon 3 is like, you know, 10 years. And then some people answer the question. They're going, 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. Jeff 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, how 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. Like, I don't really know how big it could be, but it can be really, really large.

And so we've 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, we've got to think about, like, what do you do differently to get from $50 billion to $100 billion to $300 billion to $500? And 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, you know, 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. And 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, you know, there definitely is some long-term

planning in there and it's necessary to think about what that looks like but you know it's probably a mix of those two 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 what 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 we're like, there's no chance that we're going to be doing. But here we are. And 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. And 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 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, you know, things that take 10, 10 years to go build. You can put these smaller reactors that look a little bit more like gas turbine size, getting a rounding errors.

You can go put next to data centers that aren't the whole solution, but they can also be part of the solution. And so, you know, 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. finding master is brought to you by lisa sleep is a cornerstone of high performance full stop and it touches everything how we think how we feel how we move and when we get quality sleep consistently we give ourselves the best shot at showing up at our best that means the environment we sleep in really matters for me that starts with a great mattress one of our teammates here

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summer 75 at finding mastery.com slash course for $75 off because it's not what you know that changes your life. It's what you train. 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

because 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 now every business is run. I think there's a huge opportunity there. The second big friction today, though, is just there.

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 lifecycle where people are worried I'm getting enough value out of this, and 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, 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 things to be done. And 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. 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? Well, specifically what I said in that other one was, I think using, imagining that you're going to get rid of all of your junior people seems like a terrible idea because 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 an 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. And then I don't know how the world, you know, there's a bunch of unemployed kids out of college. So that was mainly my comment there. I do think, by the way, like, 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. 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. I 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 are 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 experience in 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. 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 an at the size that we are. And it is, like, there's a lot of decisions. There'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 know, you don't have a lot of $120 billion companies that are growing. 17, 18% year over year, and accelerating. And so that's a fun place to be, but it's hard. And I'm still kind of learning how to do that too. 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 Seneas, 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. All right. 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.

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