The Secret Genius of Amazon with Chaim Landau

within Amazon like decisions are made so fast and and I would say they lower the center of gravity as in I never have to go up more than one level to make a decision there's so much autonomy here it feels like a startup even I would say it's changed a lot since 2016 still there is still the energy of innovators and it feels like a startup they give you so much autonomy and do things on your [Music] own hi thank you so much for joining me on the Leto business podcast sure thank you for having me it's my pleasure so I've been following a lot of the stuff that you post on LinkedIn we're pretty far away you're in Israel and we're in New York but I've seen your stuff currently you hold a you know a prestigious position at Amazon we all know what Amazon is all about maybe we don't but we'll get into this interview and I figure that there's sh you know stuff that you could share from your experience getting into that position and everything else that's that surrounded you to this position and currently and environment that our listeners could could adapt to in their way in their business you know not every business is the same and obviously not every business in the same size and and have the same capabilities that some of those large companies have but there's a lot that we could learn and and Implement in our business so that and there's so much more I want to speak to you about so for our listeners before we get in dive into the full conversation is give us a little bit of a background of your past history as far as what got you what interest did you have what is the skills that you have that got you to this position honestly I would say it all started when I was really really young like maybe eight years old I was at my uncle's house and I saw this old I saw this old Macintosh computer and at the time you know really it wasn't really doing anything you know all I was able to do was play Pac-Man on it yeah but something was telling me that be behind this big box there was something very deep behind it I don't know what it was was but I was intrigued I was curious and that was it this was it this was in the 80s and in the ' 80s you know there was no access to computers we didn't really see any computers especially where where I grew up so fast forward I was you know I went to ISA went to co and then I was looking for work and I was uh literally just I went to shei one morning and I ran into a friend I asked him what he was doing that day and he told me that he's on his way to speak to a a school that teaches you technology and I said okay can I come along and I joined him I went there we went for like an orientation and interview and I had like I had saved up $10,000 I had worked as when I was a book I I had try to make money everywhere everywhere I could and then as after I got married I tried to make money as well while I was in coand and I took the $10,000 that I had I put it down for at the school I I used 1,500 of it to buy a computer which I had no idea how to turn on I remember I had to um I found myself in a in a do screen which most people probably don't know what that looks like it's a black screen and I didn't know how to get out of it so I called I called a friend and he said type exit and hit enter and that got me out of that screen that was the first command I ever typed exit okay uh and then I so I went to that course and you know we spent me and my friend we spent three months studying really really hard and three months we were able to finish the entire course this was a nine Monon course that we truncated into three months and and you know I would credit my years of sitting in Yeshiva they gave me really strong discipline of sitting and learning I went to a very strict is in Montreal and so it taught us how to study and how to sit for hours and hours to solve a problem so after three months I I took another three months to to find a job that was an extremely difficult thing to do and this was this was in 98 so this was before Y2K so there were jobs everywhere but it was very very hard to for me to be able to find a job after hard work and hard search it's a long story I'm not going to get into all the details but I ended up finding a job working for a hospital NorthShore Hospital and Long Island it's a big hospital so that's kind of where I grew up I would say and I started doing some really basic things like I was fixing printers I was able to do a lot more based on what I've learned but this is the opportunity that was given to me so I jumped on that sure just a second so that was so what was the the premise of the course the course was just teaching you basic computers or it like which part of of computers at that time yeah was it that it was that the course was all about it's a very interesting question the course was on novel operating system so if you think of Windows servers today there was an operating system called Noel that you don't hear about today anymore so it was a server operating system that was supposed to serve up server Enterprise type applications at the time and what's really interesting about this is that what I've learned from that is that when I went to take the course I had to decide do I want to go with novel or windows that was the question that was posed to us in the course it was a very tough decision do I want to go with wind to go with novel and I decided on Noel as if my entire life was going to be this operating system and you know it it didn't take more than two years and Noel was it was something that I worked with you know at my first job at the hospital but very quickly switched over to Windows and all sorts of other Technologies which is you know and I feel people today when I see people get into the field of it very often I see them trying super hard to figure out which direction to go in as if their entire career they're going to be doing the the very first thing that they learned and to me that's a big lesson that just get through the door find I don't know if I'm kind of getting off subject here but get through the door and my advice is start feeling around and find where you're good at gravit where you can gravitate to something that speaks to you and mostly I would say try to gravitate towards the core of the problem as in for example example data stay closer to data because at the end of the day technology by itself is of no use without the data so start somewhere but don't necessarily stick to that and get stuck on that exactly and I think it's such an important point for our listeners and I usually share this exact same message with people that are looking for the first job and they're rather going to sit six months or 12 months finding the perfect job and I always say that you're going to definitely get closer to what you're going to be doing for those for the rest of your life if you start a job because if that job works out then great if that job doesn't work out chances are that your next job will come from a referral or an introduction or an opportunity you see now that you're in the workforce so it's a it's a great it's a great message for our listeners that are in that stage to understand the importance of there's place to think what you want to do and there's place to learn what you want to do so to speak but it's not a it's not a live sentence so to speak it's somewhere to get started with absolutely they must see it as a place where you just get started and what I've learned especially at Amazon at Amazon I've been incredibly challenged like I've been in the field of it for 25 years now 20 years of it as consultant for the Enterprise for really large companies but the challenges that I've faced at Amazon are enormous because you know the customers they support and what I've learned is we can learn anything if we know how to study if we have the mind to for it we can learn anything and the willpower and The Willpower yeah to sit and and try and solve problems and I see people get you know they pigeon hole themselves into a vertical as an okay I'm a programmer I know this language I know that language there's so much we can learn now I'm not suggesting that you go and learn everything that would be very very challenging like you really want to you want to differentiate yourself you want to you you know you want to master skill absolutely I'm not saying do everything but don't be afraid and just don't say this is not something that I do this is what I've learned about myself like I was a very strong an infrastructure that was officially what I was doing I was doing infrastructure and then I did something called citric I specialized in that which wasn't even so hard but because I specialized people paid money for that and then I just was able to just move from all sorts of different verticals and different domains so let's go back and maybe we're not going to share every type of position you had but from the hospital so obviously that was your real the first real job that was more it related based on what you said what came next yeah so that was six years and I mean it started it related then I moved to I joined the servy team I was doing more advanced stuff and and I also remembered there were a lot of people sitting there a lot of senior people and everybody was afraid like the the manager would sit in a big meeting and would say we have this new project who wants to take it and everybody would like look at one another and be like oh I don't know this and I would raise my hand every time and that's how I became proficient in Citrix and then the next job there was a company Gotham technology a small consulting company small relative terms but their clients were super big like really large like Banks Pharmaceuticals like all the all the big Enterprises were their clients and so I see that job is where you know the first one is where I was kind of born into this field the second one is where I grew up and at that job I became a consultant and suddenly I had to be in front of customers I had to present I had to speak I had to write I remember staring at a document at a blank page I was told to write a design document and I'm looking at that page I'm saying like what am I supposed to write here am I supposed to start at the top at the bottom what am I supposed to do here wow but that is where I learned and I was there for a long time I was there for I think about 11 years and I gained a ton of experience and I would say the experience I gained there that was extremely valuable were soft skills so after that I went to I had a LinkedIn account okay which everybody has today hopefully and so that's where I started I moved to a business intelligence company okay so I had no bu I had no business taking on a job like that what did I know about uh business intelligence about Big Data nothing but this company asked if I would interview and I said of course and so I took the job and that gave me a lot of insight into data and it was very eye openening I realized that I was really hanging out there at the very edge of something very specific and what was losing out on so much else that was going on then I had a little stint with Adele as a sales engineer that sort of gave me eyes on the sales side of things for one year and then Amazon I got a message from a recruiting team in Amazon in 2016 asking if I would be willing to interview and I said that I I don't really have any Cloud experience I didn't know anything about AWS I didn't know how to spell AWS but they they said don't worry about it like if we like you we'll train you and they were true to their War you know after I was hired they they let me fly anywhere anywhere in the country including overseas to go train myself for two years straight in between projects I would just sign up for courses all over the world and just fly on their dime to train myself and that is how I got involved with AWS wow and we'll we'll get to the you know everything that happened since 2016 I guess I want to start start off with a question is now you having the experience you have the experience of working for smaller companies although the smaller companies have been you know they had large Enterprise customers but now you're working for a very large Enterprise yourself and there's this notion out there some people would go either or they would say you know I I would love to work for a small company because I could I feel I could make a bigger difference and a bigger Dent versus a larger company I'm just another another person in the team and then some people will say I would love to have the opportunity to work for larger companies because I'm exposed to so much more what's what's out there in the real world obviously you had a little bit of both how would you respond to that and is there a time in your career which one would be better than the other yeah I mean I think there's truth to both of them really like I remember when I worked for the hospital I felt like a number nobody I didn't really not only did I not matter if I needed something there was no one to talk to your manager said well it's two three levels above me what can I do so you felt completely lost you didn't really feel connected to the company so just true to that okay but it allowed me to see things at scale okay I saw a big problem I saw a company with 30,000 users in their systems I've seen much much larger since but at the time this is really big so I was able to learn a lot of skills then when I joined the consulting company which was a smaller company like 120 employees I saw the difference I was friends with the owner if I needed something I just walked into his office if I needed a raids I was walked into his office and that afternoon I had an answer right uh I felt more valued and then I also had the opportunity to work with a big company so I felt like I had a both uh best of both walls because I the challenges the technical challenges I was facing were enormous because they were very large companies so that one had the best of both worlds but I would say and then when I joined Dell I again felt like it was just a number but then when I joined Amazon I found a very different company Amazon is one of the most successful companies in the history of the world if we think about it right yeah they to do things so unique it's still a very very large company so there is so much process but I think one of the Geniuses of of Jeff Bezos and and I think it's honestly I think this company stands on his ideas there's no luck there I think there is um a person with just unbelievable wisdom just been blessed with just wisdom that is very unnatural like if you look at it leadership principles like I remember when I joined I remember being in awe of how does a company of this size how are they able to operate so effectively when I joined because I saw so much efficiency around me and I've been in large companies before and this was even bigger than the ones that I've been in and eventually I realized it's their culture and their culture was really their leadership principles which were Bezos mostly his ideas and that was his way of communicating down to me someone who never met him and never unfortunately I never will probably but I understood what he wanted from me and it's not that we sit there and do everything he wants us to do we're we're very opinionated people but we buy into his ideas they're brilliant ideas like if you look at the Amazon leadership principles and and I really encourage people to go out there and read them like I do a lot of mentoring in of this company and I tell the people that I that I Mentor I tell them take a leadership principle come back next week and and let's discuss it tell me your interpretation now let's discuss it because on the surface it sound pretty straightforward but and maybe kind of simple but if you dig in their deep business concept and I think that's what makes Amazon a kind of company that's really large but also small it there it has a feeling of like I can reach anyone in the company anywhere in the world and we would do business together it can be in China could be in Japan could be in New York now in Tel Aviv so it has that feel of a very large company that's still operating as a small company so I want to dissect this a little bit I want to get back to First just get a better understanding in which division of the company are you I know that you work for AWS I'm not sure a lot of people listening understands where the cloud delivery architect is so if you could give us some insight as far as you know how the the companies at all like is AWS its own Wing running you know a solo or is it part of the the Amazon ecosystem as a whole yeah first what is not a cloud delivery architect it has nothing to do with packages showing up at your house let's just start with that and I don't fault people for thinking that it does so Amazon web services is a very interesting story Amazon web services is a department is sort of like an organization within Amazon and it was kind of born in a very interesting way it was I think the story goes that it was around 2002 when Amazon Amazon was already really really big as a company okay and it was during Black Friday and their website crashed imagine amazon.com was down for 12 hours during the busiest shopping season of the year and so they did a postmortem afterwards to figure out what happened how did we go down and they asked themselves they said we have the most advanced technology the most expensive databases we did not skip out on anything how did we go down and they realized that they are way ahead of the technology out there and that they have to innovate and come up with new ways of doing Computing and that's how the cloud was born there were a group of of engineers in Cape Town in Africa who came up and Andy jasse who was the CEO of Amazon of Amazon web services now he's a CEO of Amazon he was one of the founders of the cloud and that's how they came up with the concept of the cloud but they did it for themselves they they basically built Cloud type technology for themselves and then they realize they can sell it for to others as well right and so the concept of the cloud really was the concept of abstraction basically they were telling customers which they still do today you don't have to build data centers you don't have to know how to build servers in other words it's like there is a CTO of Amazon who I am a really big fan of verer Vogal and he he said he calls it the undifferentiated heavy lifting if you're a company that specializes let's say in banking and you spend time building servers doing things heavy lifting that does not differentiate you it brings you no value why do it so they said we know how to do this this is what differentiates us let's go out and sell it to other people so they could built on top of our technology so that's how Amazon the Amazon Cloud was born so that's called the Amazon web services and really you know if you look at the evolution of Technology every Everybody Builds on something else like I remember it was around 2002 Microsoft came out with a tablet you know everybody thinks Apple was the first one that came out with a tablet no Microsoft came out with a tablet but there was no ecosystem to support it the tablet couldn't really do anything right if you did not have the cloud you probably would not have iPhones today and Android phones and all the applications the the reason the Ubers of the worldall they're able to build and scale is because this quickly this quickly for sure this well not only this quickly if you think about it before the cloud what a company let's say that wanted to build a new technology what did they have to do how did they know how many systems to build they had to they probably used a marketing company they told them maybe you can get a 100,000 users now if they got 10,000 users then they over invested in technology if they got 200,000 users their systems collapsed and they lost their reputation overnight right so they could not get off the ground it was either too expensive or undp so the cloud is what enabled them because the concept of the cloud is it's a pay as you go model okay you pay for what you use and if you don't use it you don't have to pay for it right so it's very easy for somebody can wake up Monday morning uh with an idea and prototype it and no time for very cheap so really it's a fundamental shift in the way you do business it's fun mental shift in the way you approach technology which is you know one of the big challenges that we have here at Amazon is we are helping our customers transform you know if you ask me what do I do right which is what you're trying to get to Cloud delivery architect you know officially my title is an architect I'm I'm the Chief Architect here in Israel for the public sector service part of Professional Services so there is a team with an AWS called Professional Services and what we do is our customers uh mostly the larger customers hire us to help them design design their Cloud um but really we don't just do that what we do is transformation so we'll help them with designing their Cloud securing their cloud and we'll help them yesterday I had a conversation with a customer where um I spent a half an hour speaking to them about culture strictly about culture and then I challenged them is to you know they came to me to Advance their Technology Building a road map for what they're going to do the next 12 months and I challenged them I said let's talk about your culture how are you going to because an effective technology team is one that also has a very strong culture supporting it because you if you think about it how can you have thousands of people supporting a technology they must have a common way of thinking to be able to do that so I don't know if I answered your question yeah you did but back to back to the part of understanding is AWS anyway connected to the rest of the Amazon um company or it's almost like a mini company within mini organization within the larger organization so it's in some ways it's completely disconnected as in it's a completely separate organization has its own CEO as if top down as its own CEO it always had its own CEO that said the profits that Amazon has been making Amazon web servic has been the most profitable wing of all of Amazon for years now since it started making money and so while Amon amaz web services a completely a separate org it feeds the rest of Amazon as they use that money to to build the rest of Amazon so in terms of culture you mentioned before and you spoke before about the leadership principles are those things Universal across the whole Amazon entire Amazon organization regardless of which division or which service that is it's supposed to be like the leadership principles are not Amazon web service specific they are cross Amazon but you know I've read the articles like everybody else has like people working in warehouses or even software developers working even for Amazon web services will sometimes talk about a very different experience what I have I'm in a position where I am customer facing I don't sit in a cubicle and and write Cod all day I spend most of my days in in meetings it's a very different experience so for me it's been an unbelievable experience like extremely rewarding and stimulating like I've never been surrounded by so much talent and so much stimulation so I would I think that the culture is different within Amazon you probably have different Pockets that have different experiences even within Amazon web service I would say that's true even within my own team coming here to Israel I found a very different Amazon than what I saw in the US even with the same kind of work that we do so if you if you want to go there for for a short period of time understanding of what was the transition was that a certain team in Tel Aviv that needed your skill set so there's something called the project Nimbus that you could Google it's basically it's a very interesting story The so the Israeli government signed a contract with Amazon it's called project Nimbus which is Amazon was supposed to deliver a region so Amazon has a bunch of regions where they keep all their data centers so they were supposed to deliver a region here in Israel okay as in the Israeli government can now start putting their uh the technology on the you know on Amazon web services here in Israel and keeping the data here not having to keep the data elsewhere because that was a blocker for them uh before they had a region here and part of that contract was that you know project Nimbus I think it was like 1.4 billion that the government committed to spending between Google gcp which is Google's cloud and Amazon web services and so the way usually this business works is you know you start with you start with an account manager they go in and open the door to to find business and then you have Solutions Architects their job is to speak to the customers to talk to them about the possibility of what the cloud technology can do as the business grows typically what they need is they need Professional Services team that gets hired by the customer okay now that I've I understood what you're saying I agree what you're saying that this could help me bring me a team that can actually help set this up now what happened was in 2016 when I joined Amazon they have this feature one of the tools that was called communities so I was playing around during orientation they were showing us all the different tools and I was looking for communities I was looking for Jewish communities I didn't see many Jews around me uh or at least not you know and I found a community called Israel and I'm was not Israeli I've only been to Israel I think three times before that and I joined that group because that's the only Jewish community that I found and that was it I completely forgot about it I never real really paid much attention to it never interacted with that community and fast forward to 2022 one morning I see a slack message um in Hebrew okay and I had to put it into Google translate I could not read it and it basically asked me somebody from Tel Aviv reached out to me asking if I would consider interviewing inside of Amazon for a role that requires relocation to Israel and you know I had been speaking to my at that point at my kids about I told them during covid I said you know I see everybody's working remote if I was able to work remote 6 months out of the year I would have wanted to live in Israel like I've I've read a lot of Jewish history and something was pulling me there something about it's Isel that was really not Med is is was really pulling me and what happened was it turned out that this guy that sent me the message he had written a python script to to scrape our entire directory for candidates to bring here they were looking for a senior within Amazon to bring here to build this team to help build this Professional Services team to deliver for the government all these projects and I was he had a hit of 10 people he was looking for somebody that speaks Hebrew so he figured the Israeli Community he was looking for expats and I was one of the people that came up because I had joined in 2016 that Community yeah so then we you know we got on a phone call and right away he said after speaking to me he said like I think this is you this is this is your role and then he had me speak to his manager and he said the same things like this is yours and and something this was an extremely complicated process coming here to Israel and everything was seamlessly rolling you know all the obstacles were just moving out of its way on their own that and I felt led I felt like I did not make any of these decisions meant to be it was meant to be it was happening for somebody was making these decisions for me it's like you know when we have opportunities at the time I remember somebody saying there are opportunities all around us and we just need to have you know it comes halfway we have to approach the other half this one just rolled itself out right in front of me I had to pick it up and look at it and then everything just moved super fast and three months later I was here with my family and it was an amazing decision I have to say wow I want to go back to the leadership principles and I want to ask you a very specific question you know obviously culture is the livelihood of every successful organization because at the end of the day if you have great people and that's built with great culture ultimately you're able to achieve a lot when we speak about culture one of the things I see is you ask any any person you name a company with a great culture they'll probably mention Google because they read about an article about ping pong tables and babysitting service people confuse perks with culture I think you've been very vocal on LinkedIn specifically calling out some of the leadership principles of on Amazon and I want to ask you because a lot of companies focus on culture and they might have it sprinkled on the walls they might have a great section on the website but missing the implementation of the every day in their cooporation I think Jeff basos is known for the you know one of the leadership principles is is customer Obsession and and everything around that and I think as clients and sitting from the other side and getting those packages at the door we know that and even me dealing with a lot with Sellers and seeing why sellers get shut down and everything else a lot of times it has to do with because they care more about the customer than the seller and everything else because the end of the day the customer needs to have that their customer Obsession why could you share how you feel that the leadership principles are actually ingrained in Daily activity in the Amazon ecosystem yeah so so I mean the first thing I would say is I think you're right because I have worked for other really large companies and they had you know the they started they told me all the things that they stand for and I didn't see it and then I have been speaking a lot to my customers about culture and I have a a talk that I give here internally and I call it you know culture transformation migrating the human software to the cloud that's what I call it why am I calling it that because that's what culture is it's human software it's psychology and what is that mean that means that you don't get to sign your way into a new culture that's not how this works a lot of companies thinks its roles and responsibilities if I tell you this is what you do and I tell you this is how we do things you're going to do it no the way you influence culture is by selling ideas okay I remember reading a a book and it reached me when I saw somebody say that culture is a common way of doing things which makes a lot of sense you want your team to have a common way of approaching a problem because you cannot predict every kind of problem but if you have a common way of thinking a common way of approaching problems you will catch most of the problems but the truth is it starts with a common way of thinking a common set of beliefs so I think the the secret to Amazon's successful culture is that they sell ideas sell ideas because I think culture is it's a collective organism it's a bunch of human Minds coming together and thinking alike which means you can't force people to think a certain way you can force them into doing something so you have to plan to seed by selling an idea so if you want to really affect your culture and I challenge my customers all the time I say come up with Tenants come up with ideas with things that you believe in and tell your team this is what we believe in and here's why and then let them when they build Solutions let them think about that belief and buil through that lens and you may have a chance of advancing your [Music] culture