[raw_anon_1111]

Because even if you do have the talent, it’s a lot easier to get your feature/product out to millions when you have both the weight of Amazon behind you and existing customers.

Besides anyone can build a product. The hard part is obtaining customers. Too many people especially on HN seem to suffer from survivorship bias not realizing that nine out of 10 out right fail and many of the “successful” ones end up having a lot lower returns than someone can make as an entry level developer in a second tier city.

On the other hand, I’ve been on the interviewer side of the table enough times at smaller companies and software developers who have spent their careers in BigTech often don’t have the skillset we need and wouldn’t know what to do with an empty AWS account and new repository.

I did my stint at AWS ProServe from 2020-2023.