SEATTLE – In 2002, Andy Jassy, a young Amazon executive, began to follow Jeff Bezos, the founder of the online bookstore, closely.
Jassy followed Bezos everywhere, including board meetings, and attended his calls, said Ann Hiatt, who was Bezos’ executive assistant from 2002 to 2005. The idea, she said, was that Jassy be “a brain stuntman” to Mr. Bezos, so that he could challenge his boss’s thinking and anticipate his questions.
“I thought I had very high standards before I started this job,” said Jassy in a podcast interview last fall about the 18-month period alongside Bezos. “So when I did that side job, I realized that my standards were not high enough.”
Now Mr. Jassy, having learned from Mr. Bezos for more than two decades in total, has been accused of taking the Bezos Way forward. This summer, the 53-year-old businessman will take over as chief executive of Amazon, while Bezos, 57, takes over as chief executive.
Few corporate successions will be observed so closely. Jassy is expected to head Amazon – which has grown into a $ 1.7 trillion company with 1.3 million employees and worldwide operations in e-commerce, logistics, cloud computing, entertainment and devices – under Bezos’ watchful eye , which remains the largest shareholder.
Amazon, which is on a growth spurt, also faces growing challenges. In Europe and the United States, the Seattle-based company is under scrutiny by regulators and legislators for its power. Its own workforce has become increasingly active and active in dealing with the company. And with its size, some investors and employees wonder whether Amazon can maintain its innovative methods without bureaucracy getting bogged down.
Jassy did not speak publicly about his vision for Amazon, but those who know him said that what was clear is that he would continue what Bezos had built – and he would not make a sudden break from it. The epitome of an Amazonian life, Mr. Jassy helped to conceive and proselytize many of the company’s internal mechanisms and culture.
“Andy is part of the whole culture,” said Tom Alberg, managing partner of Madrona Venture Group and board member at Amazon until 2019. “I really think it will be a strong continuation.”
Amazon declined to make Jassy available for an interview. In an email to employees on Tuesday announcing the transition, Mr. Bezos said, “He will be an exceptional leader and he has all my confidence.”
Mr. Jassy grew up in Scarsdale, NY, with three children. Her father ran a white-shoe law firm and her mother ran the house while supporting artistic organizations. He majored in government at Harvard and worked on the business side of The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.
Mr. Jassy wanted to be a sports announcer, but ended up working in direct marketing after graduation. He also tried to open a business with a colleague before joining Harvard Business School.
In 1997, he got the call for an interview on Amazon while heading to a Shawn Colvin concert in New York City. He got the job, took his final graduate exam on a Friday and started at Amazon the following Monday, three weeks before the company went public, he said in a podcast interview.
In 2002, after assuming positions in marketing and music, Jassy was chosen by Bezos to be his “shadow”, a role similar to that of a team leader for promising leaders.
“His job was to be a sparring partner for Jeff intellectually,” said Hiatt, a former executive assistant to Bezos, who is now an executive consultant. She said Jassy helped Bezos debate the merits of offering memberships for the Prime fast shipping program to convince a skeptical council.
While Mr. Jassy followed Mr. Bezos, he also led Amazon’s move to a new field: cloud computing. At the time, Mr. Bezos was becoming frustrated with Amazon’s software development teams, which took longer than expected to complete the projects, although the company was hiring many new engineers to launch products more quickly. He asked Mr. Jassy to get to the bottom of the matter.
Mr. Jassy found that product teams spend more time designing and building their own infrastructure than developing products. Amazon finally decided to reconfigure its technology systems to allow different groups to share the same basic blocks of technology.
In 2003, Mr. Jassy and other executives met for a meeting at Mr. Bezos’ home. They said they smelled a business opportunity by helping other companies solve the same problems that Amazon encountered.
But before the project could move forward, Mr. Jassy had to present a “six pages” – a narrative memo that presents a vision for a new idea – to Amazon’s board and explain what resources would be needed.
“I was so nervous. I wrote 30 drafts of this article, ”said Jassy in a 2017 lecture at the University of Washington.
He requested 57 people, a significant request, since Amazon employed about 5,000 at the time. Bezos “didn’t blink,” said Jassy.
The project became Amazon Web Services, now Amazon’s biggest source of profit. Companies were quick to embrace the notion of paying Amazon only for the computers and storage they used, rather than investing large sums to buy, build and maintain their own computer systems.
In 2012, Jassy said, Amazon’s cloud unit was growing so fast that it added almost every day the number of computers needed to run the entire company in 2003.
Amazon Web Services, known as AWS, functioned as a start-up within the company. Mr. Jassy has developed a reputation for being tough, but not shouting or harming the team, according to current and former employees. At meetings, he asked specific questions, but he also leaned back and let others doubt while he accepted his arguments.
In e-mails, Jassy responded to the good news simply by saying “Cool,” with an apparently random number of exclamation points, current and former officials said. Many debated whether the number of exclamation points had any secret meaning.
Mr. Jassy also set aside time for the team’s activities. At an annual Buffalo Wing feeding competition, known as the Tatonka Bowl, he served as the emcee. He gave participants “badges”, one with a burning chicken, which appeared on Amazon’s internal directory.
In recent years, AWS has launched its own software services to run on its machines, often meaning ruin for start-ups with competing products.
Corey Quinn of the Duckbill Group, which writes a newsletter called “Last Week on AWS,” said the cloud computing unit exhibited the same relentlessness in the search for new products and markets as Amazon’s leading retail site.
“They seem to share a common belief that the impossible is just a matter of time,” he said.
Last year, AWS sales grew to $ 45.4 billion, or 12% of the company’s revenue and 63% of its profits.
After he becomes chief executive, Jassy’s views will come under closer scrutiny. Early last year, he spoke enthusiastically about selling Rekognition to police departments, Amazon’s facial recognition technology, which was criticized for prejudice against darker-skinned people.
“Let’s see” if police departments in any way “abuse technology,” he told PBS’s “Frontline” program in February. “They didn’t do that. To assume that they will do this, and therefore you must not allow them to have access to the most sophisticated technology that exists, does not seem the right balance to me. ”
“I cannot let Breonna Taylor’s death go without accountability,” wrote Jassy in a six-part topic on Twitter about the police in September. “We still don’t understand in the USA. If you do not hold police representatives responsible for the murder of blacks, we will never have justice and change, or we will be the country we aspire to (and claim to be). “
At an AWS conference in December, Mr. Jassy offered a glimpse of how he could take control of one of the richest technology companies in the world. Echoing Bezos, who has long championed how companies need to continue to evolve, Jassy said the key to long-term survival is for companies to reinvent themselves while things are going well.
Mr. Jassy then presented an eight-step plan for corporate reinvention and emphasized the importance of being “manic, relentless and tenacious”.
“It takes courage to pull the company up and force it to move and move,” he said.
David Streitfeld contributed reports.