Werner Vogels

You go from an internal focused CTO to an external focused CTO.

And I think Scott Dietzen, who was at BA, I think it was at that time, he called it really an external technologist.

The ability to talk to your customers, look at that, how are they using my products, and what are the problems that I see with 10, 20, 100 of my customers that they may not see as a single problem themselves, but where you can find, if I can build a tool for that, I can really help my customers.

And so your role changes from being purely internal to being external and sort of bringing back things into.

And then over time, I've become more and more interested in those organizations.

both profit and non-profit, that try to solve hard problems.

And with hard problems, I mean hard human problems.

The United Nations expects that by 2050 we have 2 billion more people.

I mean, how are we going to feed them?

How are we going to make sure they have an economic future?

How are we going to make sure they have health care?

Those kind of problems.

are the ones that I'm mostly focused on today.

On one hand, by the way that we build technology at Amazon, but also by looking for those often young businesses and how can we support them?

Take, for example, the Ocean Cleanup Project.

It's a massive problem.

The Grand Ocean Garbage Patch is full of fishnets and plastics.

And there's about 30 rivers that sort of contribute mostly to that.

So these guys have built plastic with GPS in them, threw them in the river and see them where they end up.

Or they have these AI cameras on boats to sort of first, where do these boats go?