It was quite a surprise when Adam Selipsky stepped down as the CEO of Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit. What was maybe just as much of a surprise was that Matt Garman succeeded him. Garman joined Amazon as an intern in 2005 and became a full-time employee in 2006, working on the early AWS products. Few people know the business better than Garman, whose last position before becoming CEO was as senior VP for AWS sales, marketing, and global services. Garman told me in an interview last week that he hasn’t made any massive changes to the organization yet. “Not a ton has changed in the organization. The business is doing quite well, so there’s no need to do a massive shift on anything that we’re focused on,” he said. He did, however, point out a few areas where he thinks the company needs to focus and where he sees opportunities for AWS. One of those, somewhat surprisingly, is startups. “I think as we’ve evolved as an organization. … Early on in the life of AWS, we focused a ton on how do we really appeal to developers and startups, and we got a lot of early traction there,” he explained. “And then we started looking at how do we appeal to larger enterprises, how do we appeal to governments, how do we appeal to regulated sectors all around the world? And I think one of the things that I’ve just reemphasized — it’s not really a change — but just also emphasize that we can’t lose that focus on the startups and the developers. We have to do all of those things.”

Full interview : AWS CEO Matt Garman answers questions on generative AI, AWS’ AI chatbot Q, shutting down services, investing in open source, open sourcing projects, and more.