Sam Webster-Harris

speaker

698 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 8 Sep

Sam Webster-Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement · How To Solve Complex Problems · 8 Sep 2026 podcast

Well, Amazon's engineers carved the technology into discrete services.

There was a service called S3, which is the way that Amazon stored data, and another service called EC2 for compute processing.

Each one worked simply and reliably.

So whether you wanted to build a new feature for adding product listings, or if you wanted to compute a new recommendation algorithm or store a user's purchase history, you had the core fundamental building blocks to build a highly scalable e-commerce website or any web-based application.

And this completely changed their business operations and made it radically easier to scale up quickly.

But then, someone had a remarkable idea.

If these tools are good enough for us to build the world's largest e-commerce store, why not just sell these tools to everyone else?

So in 2006, Amazon Web Services launched.

It was infrastructure as a service.

This meant that the cost of launching a technology business collapsed overnight.

You didn't need to buy servers, lease data centers or hire infrastructure engineers.

You just needed a credit card, an idea, and you could get building.

Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, they all built their services using AWS, which handled their explosive demand and grew with them.

As a business, in 2024, AWS generated $39.8 billion in operating income and contributed to almost 60% of Amazon's operating profit.

Which shows us that thinking in primitives is possibly a good idea and why Jeff Bezos wouldn't stop talking about it in his shareholder letters.

Right.

If Amazon is a complex organism built on compute primitives, it's only fair to ask, what are we built on?

Well, your body contains about seven octillion atoms.

That's a seven with 27 zeros after it, which is more atoms than there are grains of sand on Earth.

But here's what's remarkable.

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