Customer Obsession [Steve Yegge]

Listen to Steve Yegge's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0xmHrQJdAw

the

first in this little series was i talked

about their ability to root out disease

and dysfunction in the

organization and squash it immediately

the second one was about their focus on

retail customers and individual people

and how they put that front and center

in first and foremost and there was no

also customer service mentality there

in this episode what we're talking about

is

that situation where grabs servers would

run on amazon's cloud

so it's like a rental service it's like

we rent computers

from from amazon and we have other

options we could have been on google's

cloud we could have been on microsoft's

cloud and there were some efforts

actually to get onto microsoft's cloud

at least part of the computing just to

really mostly i think for negotiating

leverage but

but the reality was grab was not really

that important

i mean there are a lot of companies on

cloud

essentially someday all companies that

have any sort of computing in the

background which is most companies will

have uh a cloud presence okay

and so you know huge huge names you know

netflix runs on amazon

go figure they don't have their own data

centers as far as i know

everything you know i certainly know

their biggest

they're uh they're amazon's biggest

customer or they have been and they go

in and out of being amazon's biggest

customer

you look at the top 50 customers for

amazon and uh grabs not in that list

you look at the top 100 customers and

grabs probably not in that list just in

terms of how much they're spending okay

corporate customers uh you know pretty

pretty sizable chunk of money but not

not really a blip at amazon scale

and yet

uh

whenever i had a question uh about

amazon's cloud let me tell you what i

what i did

okay

um

i would say

hey bob can you come over here for a sec

yeah

notice i'm not touching a phone or a

computer uh

i'm talking to bob over here who who is

from amazon he's an amazon employee he's

a cloud specialist and uh knows how to

answer a lot of customer questions uh

he's an engineer uh and and sue you know

bob and sue she would do the same thing

they'd come in we had all these these

different account reps in a rotation

uh and they would uh they would come

over and say yeah what do you need what

do you need what were they doing in my

office in graham's office in downtown

bellevue we're not a top 100 customer

they can't that how does that even scale

they can't have enough people to go and

sit on site with every single customer

now you could make the argument oh well

grabs kind of important because you know

they're going to be the gateway to

southeast asia and so on and so they're

masasan's investment they're big and you

know there's a lot of you know smoke and

mirrors and you know it's it's all true

and it's going to come true and and grab

is going to be dominant but it's never

been a foregone conclusion i mean uber

was competing with him and then now

gojek's competing with him and gojek has

a bunch of really big investors and it's

not clear-cut right you know that

they're that they're gonna be big and

why would you bet on a customer that's

gonna be big when you've already got

customers that are already big

and yet amazon had people sitting in our

offices you know uh they offered we said

yes

uh you know microsoft got into that and

they sent some people too and that was

that was fine you know you know us too

um

but it was never really the same

so so i'm gonna i'm gonna close with a

with a story about uh i'll close this

off with a story about um

the conferences okay the developer

conferences because those are sort of a

customer interaction sort of a way that

they

can demonstrate customer obsession

and it's kind of um it's not a direct

thing it's more of an indirect thing you

know and how successful the conference

is

but you know it's a it's a it's a signal

uh so the story is i was at my grab in

my um

my first year

it was 2018

uh i joined just late the previous year

and uh my boss mark porter

he said hey steve yeah let's uh let's go

to re invent

reinvent is amazon's cloud conference

okay it's about aws

and it's in las vegas and you know i'm

in seattle and so it's only like a two

and a half hour flight

and so it made sense you know for for

for me to go and represent uh you know

as a head of engineering and ads and all

that stuff uh but i didn't want to go uh

you know i like i don't like conferences

i don't know why i don't like them i

just don't like them like they're

they're a waste of time they just

they're just like um

i could go on and on about how how

shallow they are but they're they're

nothing gets done at a conference

and they're

i don't see the point a lot of people do

like them they like they got their badge

and their lanyard and their packages

swag and they're like i'm in a

conference and they feel important or

something and people speaking at

conferences feel important i've done

that too and then it was ultimately it

was like why did i do that what was what

was the goal here right just building

brand recognition with developers i

guess

you know fine fine

it's fine that they have them and it's

fine that some people like them but i

didn't want to go okay because i was

busy like my job was very stressful and

i'll talk about my job at grad and how

working with asia from the united states

is just in general in in another episode

and mark's like oh come on man you got a

year to come you got to come it's like

you have to

and he was very insistent and i'm like

okay fine you know fine i'll take the

hit for the team and i'll go to las

vegas and bring my wife along and we'll

upgrade our hotel room at our own on our

own dime and we'll try to make it a fun

trip because conferences suck and i

don't want to go

but we'll do some gambling

so we go to re invent which i've never

been to before in 2018

and

uh well i went and i learned um

there were basically three components of

the conference that i want to compare to

the microsoft conference that i went to

a couple of months later

the uh the first one was the keynote

speech

i want you to remember these things when

i talk about the microsoft ones uh the

keynote speech is you know by andy jassy

i don't know if he still does it but at

the time you know for many years andy

jassy would give the keynote and you

know what a keynote is right a keynote

is some self-important person standing

up there and going well i'm really super

glad that you all came and boy i'm sure

making a lot of money off this and let's

head u...