# Amazon chose customer speed over efficiency during the pandemic buildout

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/amazon-chose-customer-speed-over-efficiency-during-the/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Andy Jassy](https://realalpha.app/people/andy-jassy/) · Andy Jassy is CEO of Amazon. · Founded and led AWS, then became Amazon's CEO in 2021, steering its $220 billion AI buildout.
- Host: [Ben Horowitz](https://realalpha.app/people/ben-horowitz/) · Co-founder, a16z · Co-founded a16z and Opsware, sold to HP for $1.6 billion; wrote The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
- Host: [Erik Torenberg](https://realalpha.app/people/erik-torenberg/) · General partner, Andreessen Horowitz · Helped build Product Hunt; founded On Deck, Village Global and Turpentine.
- Show: a16z Podcast
- Episode: [Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on the $220 Billion AI Buildout](https://realalpha.app/v/-YMMRQ1qscI/), Oct 23, 2026
- Moment: 5:58 to 9:48 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/amazon-chose-customer-speed-over-efficiency-during-the/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/-YMMRQ1qscI/?t=358

## Quote

> “we decided, as we almost always do, to **shade on the side of customers**.”
> — [Andy Jassy](https://realalpha.app/people/andy-jassy/) at [7:29](https://realalpha.app/v/-YMMRQ1qscI/?t=449) · a16z Podcast

## Takeaways

1. Amazon accepted higher costs to serve customers and sellers during the pandemic.
2. The company later regionalized its fulfillment network to cut delivery distances.
3. Metrics and candid discussion helped identify what needed reworking.

## About this segment

Andy Jassy explains why Amazon built fulfillment capacity quickly despite the cost, then regionalized it to improve speed and cost-to-serve. The decision balanced customer needs with operational efficiency.

From “Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on the $220 Billion AI Buildout”, Oct 23, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/-YMMRQ1qscI/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[6:09](https://realalpha.app/v/-YMMRQ1qscI/?t=369) things. But here you are going like, we're going to build UPS and like that. And so how do you reconcile those? Well, what's interesting is we have this set of leadership principles that a lot of people know about. We have 16 leadership principles. And a lot of these leadership principles, they're supposed to really, and they do govern the way we think about operating as a team and culturally. But there are several that are in tension with one another. And sometimes people are confused about that. But the reality is it just reflects the way the real world works.

[6:40](https://realalpha.app/v/-YMMRQ1qscI/?t=400) Nothing is really perfectly clean. You're always making trade-offs. So if you go back to that time when we made the decision to build out the fulfillment network and the last mile transportation network that aggressively, that quickly. The question from the team was facing is, we know if we go this fast, it's going to be really hard. It'll probably be more expensive than if we went slower. We will probably not get everything as optimally as we would if we went slower, but customers and sellers really need it. So are we going to actually shade on the side of enabling? Remember back then in the early part of the pandemic, no physical stores were open.

[7:17](https://realalpha.app/v/-YMMRQ1qscI/?t=437) I mean, if you look at the role Amazon played in everybody's lives during the pandemic, it was very seminal. And so we had to ask ourselves, are we going to build fast and maybe not as optimally as we can with the tradeoff of serving customers and sellers who are trying to also have businesses that sustain themselves or not? That's the first decision you have to make. And we decided, as we almost always do, to shade on the side of customers.

[7:44](https://realalpha.app/v/-YMMRQ1qscI/?t=464) And then it was fairly obvious that as we were building, it was obvious that not everything that we were planning was going perfectly. We had a lot of our fulfillment team was more in the office than most of the rest of the company. But still... A lot of people that have to participate in a lot of the designing and the planning and the assessing get people all over the place and remote. And now you're balancing the combination or the tension of bias for action or speed and relentlessly high standards, which means you deliver at the cost structure and the delivery and the design that you'd always plan for.

[8:23](https://realalpha.app/v/-YMMRQ1qscI/?t=503) And so, again, you have to make tradeoffs. We made the trade-off to side with customers and to move quickly to be able to serve sellers and consumers, and we thought there'd be some amount of cleanup. Now, did we know exactly how the topography would work out in the way it did? No, and there were certain things that we didn't have optimized that I'm not sure we foresaw wouldn't be optimized. But if you have good metrics, and if you're a culture that's a truth-telling culture, which that is another really important part of our culture, is that we get the data on the table, we get the issues on the table, we're direct with one another, we don't allow people to paper over issues.

[9:01](https://realalpha.app/v/-YMMRQ1qscI/?t=541) If you have that type of culture, it's fairly obvious in the metrics and it's fairly obvious in the discussion. And then you just have to go about figuring out how you want to improve it and which pieces are just kind of small productivity things and which are architectural pieces. We went back and really re-architected key parts of the network after we got that capacity installed that was probably at the time for that team was maybe eight or nine on their list of priorities, but became a much higher priority in a way to actually get the combination of speed and cost.

[9:33](https://realalpha.app/v/-YMMRQ1qscI/?t=573) Fascinating. You kind of, like at the beginning, when you started AWS, you started AWS,