Which Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $ 250 million ? Was it the Bezos who helped recover two Apollo-era F-1 engines from the bottom of the Atlantic ocean this spring ? A savior capable of raising rusted heaps out of their watery graves ? Was it the Bezos who 's sunk $ 42 million into the `` Clock of the Long Now , '' a timepiece that will run for 10,000 years entombed inside a man-made cavern carved into the top of a mountain outside of Ely , Nevada ? An eccentric billionaire who 'll drop vast amounts of money into , well , a hole in the ground ? Was it the Bezos who founded Amazon , the biggest store in the world , a company that has both transformed and trampled nearly every formerly brick-and-mortar industry it has entered , from books to shoes and beyond ? Or was it the Bezos whose personal investments -- in companies like Twitter , Airbnb , Makerbot , Uber and many others -- demonstrate an innate understanding of the shifting trends of the web ? Each one of those Jeff Bezoses would do interesting things to the Washington Post ( well , maybe not the crazy mountain clock guy ) . But as someone who spends every day thinking about the intersection of journalism and technology , I hope it was the Jeff Bezos who shepherded AWS -- Amazon Web Services -- into being . Unless you build things on the Internet , you 've probably never heard of AWS . That 's because AWS is in one of the world 's least sexy businesses : server and computational infrastructure . AWS began as a commerce problem . Amazon needed a massive server cloud for the holiday shopping season but only a fraction of it for the rest of the year . That means a lot of expensive servers would be sitting idle to make sure your Christmas presents do n't get hung up when you press `` purchase . '' So the idea hatched that those idle computer servers could be rented out to other companies . It worked . Now , when you watch a movie streamed from Netflix , you 're using AWS . When you check out your friend 's picture on Instagram , read a blog on Tumblr , pin something on Pinterest , you 're accessing AWS . Reddit , the `` front page of the Internet '' ? That 's built on AWS . The infrastructure of the Obama for America re-election campaign -- vaunted as the most technically sophisticated campaign in history -- relied on AWS , too . The size , scale and impact of the AWS server cloud is massive and growing . AWS is one of the most transformative and oft-overlooked technologies of the last decade . And it started as little more than a `` hare-brained scheme , '' as Benjamin Black , one of the original drafters of the technology , described it in 2009 . AWS is about as `` all of the buffalo '' as you get in technology : Use every part of the tech stack so that your servers are always in use , either by you or by others . With AWS , Bezos found value in every part of the process . He looked at risks and embraced `` hare-brained '' experiments . He saw opportunity in extending Amazon technology externally , not just keeping it all in-house ( AWS serves the streaming movies of Amazon 's competitor Netflix just as efficiently as it serves its own ) . Similar to the creation of AWS , journalism has its done its share of invention and experiments that have transformed the Web . Django , a Web framework used by companies like Pinterest and Instagram , got its start in the newsroom of the Lawrence Journal-World . Backbone , a Javascript library that powers sites like Hulu and Pandora , was created as part of the Document Cloud project at the New York Times . These newsroom technologies and others like them are transformational not just to journalism but to the entire Web the same way AWS does n't power only Amazon . These spinoffs , these `` hare-brained '' ideas , these bits and pieces of code that start in the newsroom and end transforming the Web itself , are what technologists in journalism do best when they have the right support and leadership behind them . That leadership is still too rare in the journalism industry . That may have changed in a big way on Monday . In a letter written to Washington Post employees , Bezos says that , moving forward , `` we will need to invent , which means we will need to experiment . '' Let 's do it .
Amazon.com 's Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $ 250 million . Dan Sinker : I hope it was the Bezos who shepherded Amazon Web Services into being . He started with AWS , a transformative technology , and embraced experiments . Sinker : Leadership that allows us to learn and grow is what we need .