“We’re maybe three steps into a 10K race, and the question should not be, ‘Which runner is ahead three steps into the race?’
written by Stefan Christoph
“We’re maybe three steps into a 10K race, and the question should not be, ‘Which runner is ahead three steps into the race?’, but ‘What does the course look like? What are the rules of the race going to be?” — Adam Selipsky, then CEO of AWS, in a mid-2023 interview. The metaphor ran through several of his interviews that summer — see for example Yahoo Finance’s Collision 2023 coverage. Highly recommend to give it a read!
📝 Last updated: August 14, 2026 — Technical corrections from a quality audit; repaired a title that the LinkedIn import had truncated mid-word