In the summer of 2005, while at Northwestern University to get his master’s in business, Matt Garman interned at Amazon. While the rest of his cohort marveled at the company’s ambitions in selling books and music, Garman was struck by a presentation about a new division that hadn’t launched, had great potential and required strong technical skills.
In the summer of 2005, while at Northwestern University to get his master’s in business, Matt Garman interned at Amazon. While the rest of his cohort marveled at the company’s ambitions in selling books and music, Garman was struck by a presentation about a new division that hadn’t launched, had great potential and required strong technical skills.
“I knew immediately: that was the one I wanted to work on,” Garman wrote in a company blog post recounting this story this month.
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“I knew immediately: that was the one I wanted to work on,” Garman wrote in a company blog post recounting this story this month.
The division was Amazon Web Services. The person giving the presentation was Amazon.com’s current chief executive, Andy Jassy, who was running the unit at the time.
This past Monday, Garman had his first day as CEO of the unit, now a $100 billion business and the engine of Amazon profits.
Back then it was a still-nascent idea that companies could move their data-hosting and -processing needs away from their own servers into AWS data centers. Rather than owning the equipment, companies could rent space on large racks of servers and quickly increase and decrease their capacities based on demand.
While most major companies depend on the cloud today, in the beginning, it was part of Garman’s job, as one of the first product managers at AWS, to explain what it was and why customers needed it. Some didn’t get why a bookseller was in this business. One bank said it would never trust an outside company with its data.
“They basically told us there’s no chance that any big bank would ever put a production workload and run it outside of their own facility,” Garman said in a 2021 interview at an industry conference.
Garman frequently worked directly with customers to customize cloud-service products, former AWS executives say. He liked to dig into projects and his memory and attention to detail stood out.
One former colleague recalled Garman questioning him about something he had promised months earlier in a “six-pager,” the Amazon document where employees lay out a proposal in a memo. When the employee…
Read More: The former Amazon intern now running its profit engine