 From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Imagine, nonprofit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle, Washington, actually right on the waterfront. It has been a spectacular visit here for the last couple of days. And we're back, back in Seattle for AWS Imagine. We were here a couple of weeks ago for AWS Imagine Education. This is a different version of the conference really focused around government and nonprofits. And we're really excited to kick off our day with the guy coming right off the keynote who's running this. He's Dave Levy. He's the vice president for US government and nonprofit for AWS. Dave, great to see you and congrats on the keynote. Thank you. Thanks for having me too. We're really excited. Absolutely. So as you're talking about kind of mission and purpose and as I'm doing my homework for some of the topics we're going to cover today, these are big problems. And I couldn't help but think of a famous quote from Jeff Hamabacker from years ago who said, the greatest minds of my generation are thinking about how to make us click ads. And I'm so happy and refreshed to be here with you and your team to be working on much bigger problems. Yeah, well thank you. Yeah, we're very excited. We're thrilled with all the customers here, all the nonprofits, all the non-governmental organizations, all of our partners. It's just very exciting. And there are a lot of big challenges out there and we're happy to be a part of it. So it's our first time here, but you guys have been doing this show. I believe this is the fourth year. It's fourth year. Give us a little background on the nonprofit sector at AWS. How did you get involved? Kind of what's your mission and some of the numbers behind? Well, it's one of the most exciting part of our businesses in the worldwide public sector. And we have tens of thousands of customers in the nonprofit sector. And they are doing all sorts of wonderful things in terms of their mission. And we're trying to help them deliver on their mission with our technology. So you see everything from hosting websites, to doing back office functions in the cloud, running research and donor platforms. And so it's just a very exciting time I think and nonprofit missions are accelerating and we're helping them do that. Yeah, it's quite a different mission than selling books or selling services or selling infrastructure when you have this real focus. The impact of some of these organizations is huge. We're going to talk to someone involved in human trafficking, 25 million people involved in this problem. So these are really big problems that you guys are helping out with. They're huge problems. And you know, at Amazon, we really identify with missionaries. We want our partners and our customers to be able to be empowered to deliver on their mission. We feel like we're missionaries and we're builders at Amazon. So this is a really good fit for us to work with nonprofits all over the world. And how did you get involved? You know, we were here a couple of weeks ago, talked to Andrew Coe who'd grown, he runs EDU, he'd grown up in tech and then one of his kids had an issue that drove him into the education. What's your kind of mission story? Well, you know, on a personal level, I'm just passionate about this space. There's so much opportunity. It's everything from solving challenges around heart disease to research for cancer, patient care to human trafficking. So all of those things resonate. It touches all of our lives and we're, you know, I'm thrilled to be able to contribute and I've got a fantastic team and we've got amazing customers. Right, it's great. Dude, a little homework on you. You're a pretty good, interesting guy too, but you referenced something that I thought was really powerful in somebody interviewing you and you talked about practice, practice, practice, practice as a person. And you invoke the Mars law, which I'd never heard for a person, which is, you know, we tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term, but we underestimate what we can do in the long term. And as these people are focused on these giant missions, the long-term impacts can be gargantuan. Yeah, I think so. I mean, look, like you said, we're tackling some huge problems out there, huge, difficult problems, migrations, diseases. And, you know, it takes a while to get these things done and when you look back on a 10-year horizon, you can really accomplish a lot. So we like to set big, bold, audacious goals at Amazon. We like to think big and we want to encourage our customers to think big along with us and we'll support them to go on this journey. And it may take some time, but I'm confident we can solve a lot of the big problems out there. But it's funny, there's a lot of stuff in social now. Where a lot of people don't think big enough and you were very specific in your keynote. You had three real significant kind of challenges. Go from big ideas to impact. Learn and be curious and dive deep. Because like you said, these are not simple problems, right? These aren't just going to go away, but you really need to spend the time to get into it. And I think what's cool about Amazon and your fanatical customer focus to apply that type of a framework, that type of a way to go to market into the nonprofit area really kind of gives you a unique point of view. I hope so. And you know, we're doing a lot of really cool things here at the conference. We've got a working backwards session. And you know, one of the things about working backwards, it's really, it's really interesting is the customers at the center of that. And it all starts with a customer. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a meeting at Amazon where somebody has said, you know, wait a second, this is what we heard these customers say. This is what we heard about their mission. And it's all about what customers want. So we're really excited that our customers here and our nonprofits here are going to be going through some of those sessions. And hopefully we can provide a little innovation engine for them by applying Amazon process. It's for the people that aren't familiar, the working backwards, if I'm hearing you right, is where it's the Amazon practice where you actually write the press release for when you're finished and then work backwards. So you stay focused on those really core objectives. Yeah, that's right. It's start with your in-state mind and work backwards from there. And it starts with a press release and certainly those are fun to write because you want to know what you're going to be delivering and how you're going to be delivering it and frankly how your customers and how your stakeholders will be responding. So it's a really great exercise. Helps you focus on the mission and sets up the stage for delivery in the future. It's funny, I think one of the greatest and easy simple examples of that is the Amazon Go Store. And I've heard lots of stores, I've been in it now a couple of times up here in San Francisco and the story that I've heard, maybe you know, if it's true or not, is that when they tried to implement it at first, they had a lot of more departments and unfortunately it introduced lines, not necessarily check out but other places in the store and with that single focus mission of no lines, cut back the skews, cut back the selection. And so when I went in it in San Francisco the other day and it gave me my little time in the stores like the old kind of Google search results, it was I think in a minute and 19 to go in, grab a quick lunch and then get back on my way. So really laser focused on a specific objective. Yeah, and you know, that's the point of the working backwards process. It's all about what customers want and you can refine that and continue to refine that and you get feedback and you're able to answer those questions and solve those difficult problems. It's great. Well Dave, thanks for inviting us here for the first time again, congrats on the keynote and we look forward to again, a bunch of really important work that your customers and your team are working on and learning more about those stories. Thanks, we're thrilled, very thrilled. All right, he's Dave, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're in Seattle at the AWS Imagine nonprofit. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.