Jeff Barr is the VP & Chief Evangelist at AWS. He joined Amazon in 2002 and wrote the very first post on the AWS blog in 2004. Over the next 20 years, he published more than 3,000 blog posts and helped turn AWS into the behemoth it is today. In 2003, he was part of a brainstorming session at Jeff Bezos’ house with Jeff and Andy Jassy to come up with the ideas that became the foundational building blocks of AWS: S3, EC2 & RDS.
In this episode, we talk about how to get developers to care about your product, the right way to do evangelism, and Jeff’s biggest lessons from writing 3,000 blog posts, traveling to hundreds of cities, and working directly with Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy.
Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify
We discuss:
The correct way to evangelize software
How he got developers to care about AWS in the early days
How to pick the right audience to speak to
The “long chain of highly improbable events” that made him AWS’s first evangelist
Lessons from starting the AWS blog in 2004, writing it for 20 years and publishing 3,000 posts
The single most impactful “piece of evangelism” he ever did
The moment Jeff realized AWS would be big
The one thing Jeff Bezos could do that nobody else was capable of
Connect with Jeff:
Jeff’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffbarr/
Connect with Finn:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/
Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/
Some takeaways:
Jeff turned web services into a business the moment Amazon let developers embed their Associates ID and earn money from the traffic they sent back. A protocol becomes a movement when there’s money in it for the person adopting it. If you’re evangelizing software, find the line where using your thing pays the user back.
Audience size is the wrong filter. Jeff flew around the world to speak to 20-40 people at the first Japan AWS user grop in 2010. He thinks like a forester planting seedlings for a forest he won’t see for 15 years. Jeff’s actual line: “They were the right 40 people.”
You can’t fake the excitement. Jeff’s whole point is that developers smell inauthenticity in seconds - they see marketing-speak and decide this person is just repeating what he was told. So the job has a hard prerequisite: you have to be genuinely connected to the thing and actually believe it’s useful.
The payoff is on a delay you can’t predict. Jeff calls it the world’s slowest-moving earthquake - someone heard him speak at a 2013 road-trip stop, reorganized his whole career around the cloud, and years later showed up as an AWS employee. Most evangelism shows nothing for five or ten years. If you need it to move the number this quarter, you’ll quit before it works - which is the same trap CEOs fall into on Linkedin.
Watching Bezos taught him that intuition only earns respect once you do the work behind it. Walk in with “I had an interesting thought” and you get a “so? we all have those.” Walk in with the thought plus the data and the analysis, and you get attention. Jeff’s actual line on Bezos: “you couldn’t BS him.” The instinct is allowed - it just doesn’t count until you’ve gone and proven it.
