[kikoreis]

It's not completely wrong, but overly simplistic:

> In 2006, Amazon launched what is now AWS, exposing the internal compute, storage, and database services its retail group had built. The internal pitch was identical to Marketplace seven years earlier.

These were not internal services, and it wasn't exactly the retail group that built them (Chris and Ben were dedicated to EC2 and the team ran remote from Seattle). Nor was Marketplace run on the 1P Amazon platform, so it would have been a strange analogy to use for a pitch.

In the end, though, the point is the same as I made elsewhere in the thread — once you are big enough you can try and bootstrap pretty much anything adjacent to your business and have a good shot at success.

[treis]

I'd call that completely wrong. It's become something of an urban legend but the reality is that AWS was net new. It was not share Amazon infrastructure with the world

[cmiles8]

Correct… Amazon only migrated most of its things to AWS much later and even now some bits are kept separate.

AWS was inspired by certain engineering concepts developed inside Amazon but was launched largely as a greenfield new thing.

Amazon itself is not even “all in” on AWS despite encouraging its customers to do so.