What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team, or a new product. Today, I'm talking about Amazon Web Services, a $54 billion behemoth

that many of us ignore, some of us have heard of, but few of us truly understand.

It's time to break down AWS and what we can learn from its rise as business builders ourselves.

Let's hop into it.

As mentioned last episode, on July 5th, Andy Jassy stepped in as Amazon's newest and second-ever

CEO. There are many lessons we can all learn from Jassy's 24-year ascent at Amazon, many of which I

discussed in the last episode on Founders Journal. This episode, I'm going to talk about the business

behind the man, a business that Andy Jassy built over the course of 18 years beginning in the

early 2000s. That business is AWS or Amazon Web Services. If you're not familiar with AWS,

it's completely understandable, given that it is entirely B2B and primarily serves as the

lifeblood of a company's technology and data departments. But it's absolutely a business

that every builder should know about and learn from. So what is AWS? AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon

that provides cloud infrastructure as a service to over 1 million users, the bulk of which are small

the mid-sized businesses like Morning Brew. That was a mouthful. I'll explain what I mean.

You know, we've actually been an AWS customer since the early days. That said, AWS does have a

bunch of notable enterprise clients from Netflix to Slack to Spotify to Capital One. And just

hearing the customer list, you can probably guess that AWS is massive. But just to give you a sense

of scale, 15 years into its existence, AWS is growing 32% year over year. It's on pace to do 54

billion dollars in revenue this year. And it's responsible for over 50% of Amazon's Q1 profit.

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