Democratizing opportunity: how I enable transformation and growth as an AWS leader
Jaime Vallés, Vice President, AWS Global Sales - Asia Pacific and Japan, shares how he inspires Amazonian builders and customers to push boundaries and make a positive difference in the world.
Written by Jaime Vallés for Life at AWS
I was born in Spain but spent most of my life in Mexico, an emerging market in Latin America. From a young age, I witnessed the division between developing and developed nations, and how technology could narrow that gap and change people’s lives for the better — both at a community and national level.
This inspired my life's purpose — to drive positive change and empower people with increased opportunity in every action I take. In early in my life and throughout my career, I have seen how access to technology, learning new skills, and people’s own creativity can accelerate progress and create new possibilities.
At AWS, thanks to our cloud being the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted, we are democratizing access to technology across the globe. It is very humbling to see the tangible impact we have on billions of lives worldwide. What inspires me and my Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) team the most is that we don't just democratize access to technology, we democratize access to opportunity itself — opportunities to innovate, to let the best ideas become reality, and to think big in ways that transform how communities, customers, and economies grow. Whenever AWS launches a service anywhere, it becomes globally available at that moment for every person, every startup, every company, everywhere.
Our cloud goes beyond just availability of a service. We’re also lowering the entry barriers to enterprise-grade technology to everyone with a pay-as-you-go model that removes the need to invest in on-premises infrastructure. This is why the majority of startups are born on AWS. We open doors to help transform businesses, realize dreams, and drive economic empowerment in every community where we operate.
To put this into context, there over 90,000 startups that currently leverage our technology, services and programs across APJ. To all these founders, AWS is a partner that enables their innovation and makes it a meaningful reality.
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"Our culture empowers teams and builders to become the backbone of something meaningful on a global scale."
Jaime Vallés, Vice President, AWS Global Sales - Asia Pacific and Japan
A culture that fuels continuous reinvention and responsibility
AWS culture has Amazon’s Leadership Principles (LPs) at the core, which our teams live and breathe every day around the world. LPs drive our actions, support our decisions, and model our behavior. Our LPs are not lip service, they are ingrained in our day-to-day thinking and decision-making. Our customer-obsessed culture also acts as a launchpad for personal growth, professional development, and constant reinvention.
Our capacity to deeply understand customer needs drives us to constantly experiment, think long-term, and innovate. This, combined with our commitment to hire and develop the best talent in our countries, makes AWS’s culture successful and special. For me, this means building a team that is the most innovative, the most customer centric, and the best place to work.
Customers often tell me about how Amazon’s culture has transformed the way their teams organize toward innovation. They see how empowering and effective this mentality is. Our culture attracts others because it drives progress.
As leaders, we have a responsibility to embody these Leadership Principles to set the right cultural tone. Believing in and living them authentically is table stakes for success here. I have always felt that modeling our culture is our most important role as leaders.
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"Technology is a great enabler, but human ingenuity is what imagines and builds what's next. No matter how powerful, technology alone will never replace the necessity for human innovation and life-changing ideas. With a growth mindset, an always-learning attitude, and Customer Obsession at the center, anything is possible at AWS."
Jaime Vallés
Empowering through vision and high standards
As a leader, it is it my mission to embody these principles and create an environment where builders feel empowered to take intelligent risks, experiment, learn fast, and fully own their ideas and failures. Everything I do to develop our business and nurture our culture revolves around four key areas: articulating an inspiring vision, executing a simple strategy, hiring and developing exceptional talent, and rigorously measuring progress so we deliver results.
First, vision centers around enabling customer innovation through experimentation. I want our customers to feel emboldened to take intelligent risks and transform their industries.
Second, we keep our strategy simple and replicable — relentlessly insisting on the highest standards combined with big, bold thinking. Our strategy needs to be anchored on our customers’ needs (working backwards from them) and leveraging our many cultural, technological, experiential strengths. A strategy that can be easily communicated, understood, and executed with excellence.
Third, you need the best talent to push a culture of innovation to its full potential. We recruit top talent, but then double down on continuing to develop them. Find the fast learners, the ones that ask the right questions, and the ones with an enormous level of curiosity — these are the people who thrive at AWS and push us forward.
I expect every people manager to hire team members who are better than themselves in key areas. You have to build a team that doesn’t just talk about our Leadership Principles, but lives them. We have a monthly managers’ meeting where we openly discuss and learn how we can become better leaders. Learning agility also highlights not just what we're doing well, but learnings from failed experiments. Those valuable failures are what allow us to learn and evolve. Showing true vulnerability and learning agility is a game changer.
We measure our progress. We use data to understand every facet of our business, customer transformation and even our builders culture adoption. We understand that we need to think long-term to achieve our bold vision, but need to make progress in everything we do. Small short-term actions represent big long-term progress.
Finally, while culture is difficult to measure perfectly, you must continually evaluate signals and have quality mechanisms in place to gauge your progress. We look holistically across our businesses to measure and understand our cultural strengths and weaknesses and adjust accordingly. We seek to listen to our builders and create spaces to make these interactions happen.
Technology is a great enabler, but human ingenuity is what imagines and builds what's next. No matter how powerful, technology alone will never replace the necessity for human innovation and life-changing ideas. With a growth mindset, an always-learning attitude, and Customer Obsession at the center, anything is possible at AWS.
Finding purpose in your work
At the end of the day, an empowering career is about finding genuine purpose in the work you do. For me personally, I must contribute to an organization that is making a profoundly positive impact around the world. That's my core motivation and what drives me.
All around me at AWS, I see our Leadership Principle of Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility in action. Perhaps the most empowering aspect of an AWS career is knowing that you aren't just building new technologies — you are helping build the future in a sustainable, responsible way.
From our renewable energy commitments and sustainable data center initiatives to our responsible development of AI/ML technologies, to the energy efficiencies our customers realize by migrating to the cloud, everything we do aligns to this philosophy of responsible innovation. Our actions and investment commitments reinforce this message with billions of dollars in infrastructure investments across the world.
AWS allows me to make a tangible positive difference through my work as well. Our culture empowers teams and builders to become the backbone of something meaningful on a global scale.
At AWS, we get to be part of a company that is deeply thoughtful about its impact and influence. We help uphold robust security and values even as we push technological boundaries. In doing so, we ensure the innovations we help create are forces for lasting positive change.
Jaime Vallés is a Vice President within the AWS Global Sales organization leading the Asia-Pacific Japan (APJ) region. With over 30 years of experience in the technology industry, he previously served as Vice President for AWS in Latin America. Jaime holds a bachelor's degree in electronic and mechanical engineering from Anahuac University in Mexico and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His passion lies in helping customers leverage AWS technologies to achieve transformative business outcomes and drive innovation, while fostering long-term, positive impact in the countries and communities where they operate.
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