20 years ago, Dr. Werner Vogels almost hung up on Amazon.
"It's just a bookstore. How hard can it be?"
He went anyway. And realized AWS engineers were solving—in *production*—problems academia was still debating on whiteboards.
That culture never changed. 🧵
A hypervisor bottleneck? Gone.
Time sync in distributed systems? A problem the field said was unsolvable. Now it's invisible infrastructure millions rely on.
Today? AI. How do you build trust into an agent that actually does what you expect?
The hardest problems are always the ones no one sees being solved.
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