Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tells us how he turned his favorite part of his job into a TV show starring himself and a bunch of startups
- For 15 years, Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels has been the face of the retailer's cloud technology.
- Today, he travels the world talking up Amazon's tech at conferences, and meeting with customers large and small.
- Discovering cool tiny startups that have come up with solutions to some of the world's hardest problems around poverty, protecting the food supply or endangered animals, is the part of his job he loves the most, he said.
- And that's how he found himself starring in his own TV show, traveling the world to showcase the startups that wow him the most, he tells Business Insider.
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As CTO, Werner Vogels is the face of Amazon's cloud technology. His job these days at least partially consists of traveling the world giving public talks on Amazon's tech and privately meeting with customers, from insurance giant Allianz to tiny startups, he tells Business Insider.
"The best point of my life absolutely is meeting with customers and understanding the kind of things that they're trying to achieve," he said. "The fact that I get to travel the world."
He loves the job - so much so that he produced a new TV series called "Now Go Build," available now on Amazon Prime Video, where he trots the globe showcasing startups who are saving the world with tech. The pitch: Think Anthony Bourdain, but about tech instead of food.
(By the way, Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy is also listed as producer on the show, as are others. When we asked about what being a producer entailed, he laughed and said, "There's a lot of waiting.")
So why a TV show?
"So I've been traveling the world...of course you meet many enterprises, but you also meet many startups and quite a few of these startups are really tackling hard problems, right? Not just trying to find the next consumer thingy that people may like," he said.
The first episode
He offers for example, the first episode of "Now Go Build," about a Jakarta-based startup called Hara Token.
Indonesia has many small landholder farmers that produce important crops like rice. But many of those farmers are below the poverty line, and stay there, in large part because they have no government-issued ID.
Hara Token uses blockchain to record the farmers' identities, crops, and the land they own "so that they can actually get bank loans. Before that they had to go to a loan shark who will charge them 60%, and they have to mortgage against their crop before it is even grown," he said.
Other episodes feature companies like Singapore startup Zimplistic, makers of a bread machine that uses AI to produce perfectly-baked roti, an Indian flatbread. Another episode showcases Aquabyte, a computer vision startup that monitors fish for salmon farmers; Africam, a video streaming wildlife startup funding conservation organizations; and the ReDi School, an German organization teaching refugees to code.
Not intended as advertising
While these startups clearly all use Amazon's cloud, the TV show doesn't specifically hawk the company's wares.
Instead, it features Werner interviewing founders, employees, or customers. He wanted to share his favorite part of his job while also helping these startups get more "exposure," he says.
There's another, not so subtle message going on here too. Amidst calls to regulate and break up big tech, executives at Amazon are constantly talking about how technology should not just be feared; it can be used to save the world.
And a techie like Vogels is a true believer - who also happens to have access to Amazon's massive video production resources.
"So why don't we do something together to show the world what really cool things technology is doing, solving hard problems?" he explained. "Giving these startups a real platform for them to demonstrate to the world that technology is not just about the cool social media kind of things, but it is solving really difficult human problems."