Meet Andy Jassy, ​​the next CEO of Amazon

Amazon is welcoming a new CEO for the first time in its 27-year history: head of cloud computing Andy Jassy, ​​who will replace co-founder Jeff Bezos later this year. Jassy, ​​currently the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), believes in Bezos’ business philosophies and is a longtime veteran of the company, having run the cloud division since its inception almost two decades ago.

Jassy, ​​who turned 53 last year, is now having the opportunity to make his mark not only on Amazon, but also in the world and in the main ways the company has shaped it, from Whole Foods to a warehouse workforce with over a million people and massive logistics and AI divisions with far-reaching effects in the real world.

Far from being a household name, Jassy is still one of the most important executives in Amazon’s history. Its promotion underscores the importance of cloud computing for the biggest titans of technology who now play vital roles in supplying power to the entire Internet. In the case of AWS, this includes everything from Netflix and Spotify to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Democratic National Committee. When AWS goes down, big chunks of the Internet go with it.

The power transition is reminiscent of Satya Nadella’s promotion to the position of Microsoft CEO in 2014, after Nadella spent three years running the company’s Azure cloud business. Nadella has modernized many elements of Microsoft’s business and culture with a focus on cloud and mobile computing, as well as an excellent eye for large acquisitions. Jassy’s rise to the top job at Amazon could also usher in an era of transformation for the e-commerce giant.

The big question that Amazon insiders and outsiders looking to try to answer in the next six months, before he takes office in the third quarter of the year, will be whether Jassy deviates from Bezos’ approach or remains as usual. However, if Jassy continues to see himself as an acolyte of Bezos and his famous “Day 1” mentality – which argues that companies start to decline and die the moment they rest on their laurels – it will mean that many changes are in the making. horizon. For Amazon, change is both the most important survival instinct and its most successful business tool.

When Jassy joined Amazon in the late 1990s, the company was years away from thinking about the cloud and still focused exclusively on e-commerce. Jassy graduated from Harvard Business School in 1997 and joined Amazon soon after, as part of a wave of new MBAs that migrated into the technology industry before the dot-com boom. Jassy moved to the West with the intention of one day returning to New York, according to an interview last year at The Disruptive Voice podcast, but he never worked at another company.

Jassy went on to become Bezos’ first “shadow” advisor, something like a corporate team leader who followed the CEO every day and attended all his meetings, according to a profile by Jassy published late last month by Insider. Jassy also left a peculiar first impression on his boss by accidentally hitting him on the head with a kayak paddle during a characteristically competitive game of company broomball, as reported in Brad Stone’s 2013 book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Age.

Bezos and Jassy’s relationship deepened over the next few years, with Bezos commissioning his youngest lieutenant to explore then-emerging cloud computing technology around 2003. The goal was to see if it made sense for Amazon to offer hosting services to others. websites and companies, back when many of the biggest technology companies depended primarily on third-party data centers or had already started to research or actively build their own. The idea came from Amazon’s own struggle to build an external development platform for retailers three years earlier, so that third-party companies could build their own e-commerce operations.

It was Jassy who helped identify the problem: Amazon’s development tools, frankly, sucked. The company decided to improve them by creating easier-to-use APIs and other technologies that would allow any team at Amazon to extract resources from a common resource pool. “Very quietly, around 2000, we became a service company without much fanfare,” Jassy told a crowd at the re: Invent conference in 2018, according to TechCrunch.

Amazon spent another six years exploring and experimenting – with the effort to formally develop AWS really taking off after a fateful executive retreat in 2003 at Bezos’ home, said Jassy – before the company launched its first cloud product in 2006. “ In retrospect [AWS] it seems pretty obvious, but at the time I think we had never really internalized it, ”said Jassy at re: Invent. The company’s first investments paid off, as it took years for competitors to realize the business opportunity and launch comparable cloud products.

“If you believe that companies will create applications from scratch on top of infrastructure services if the right selection [of services] existed, and we believed that they would exist if the right selection existed, then the operating system becomes the internet, which is very different from what had been the case for the [previous] 30 years, ”explained Jassy.

This belief about the future of the Internet proved to be prescient. Today, AWS empowers a wide range of applications, services and websites that consumers and employees use every day, largely because Amazon has unparalleled resources and developer tools that make building and leveraging its enormous resources so as easy as using a standard API. That’s why so many companies abandon building their own data center operations and choose AWS or one of its competitors instead. Unless you are Facebook or Google, who have built their own global data center operations, it is simply easier to use Amazon than to do it yourself.

Jassy deserves credit for architecting the company’s cloud vision, having run AWS since it was created and becoming its CEO after Bezos promoted him to the position of senior vice president in 2016. His management at AWS has also turned computing into the most profitable cloud from Amazon’s divisions, accounting for about 63 percent of the company’s profits in 2020 and putting it on track to earn more than $ 50 billion in revenue this year. Amazon now controls about a third of the entire cloud infrastructure market, more than its closest competitors (Microsoft and Google) combined, according to Synergy Research.

Without the growth of AWS, Amazon may not have had the resources to invest so much money in its retail, logistics, video streaming, hardware, smart home, AI and other divisions over the years. This makes AWS effectively the engine of Amazon’s continuous reinvention, and Jassy is the spark that helps propel it.

In the past few years, Jassy has clearly transformed into an apparent heir to Bezos, telling stories about Amazon’s early days and the remarkable start of AWS and how those learnings can be applied to other businesses. He is the keynote speaker at Amazon’s renowned re: Invent conference, an industry gathering dedicated to cloud computing, and he has become a more public face of Amazon in recent years. Last summer, when longtime logistics executive Jeff Wilke, another possible successor to Bezos, announced his retirement, what was written was on the wall. Someone would eventually replace Bezos, and it seemed more likely than ever to be Jassy.

Jassy’s peculiarities and management personality have also become legendary within the company, similar to Bezos’s infamous email style and meeting decorum. Jassy is known internally for his thorough attention to detail and practical approach, his tendency for consecutive meetings and his acceptance of social justice issues, according to Insider.

In September, he publicly tweeted about responsibility for the Breonna Taylor murder, and he has been outspoken in his support for the Black Lives Matter movement and LGBTQ issues. Jassy, ​​however, is also known to have defended controversial decisions, such as Amazon’s sale of its allegedly flawed facial recognition technology to police departments and the government. (Amazon announced a one-year ban on selling law enforcement technology as of June last year.)

Jassy’s approach is also characterized by making difficult and unprecedented calls, best exemplified in AWS’s decision to ban the Parler social media platform last month after the US Capitol rebellion. It was a change that the company didn’t take lightly, considering its “religious” commitment to maintaining service for customers, Insider reported at the time. But she felt compelled to do so after protests by officials and because Parler posed “a very real risk to public security,” said Amazon in a statement at the time.

Undoubtedly, Jassy will be responsible for making even more difficult calls in the future. But that is part of the Amazon work and culture that he helped to cultivate. “It is really difficult to build a business that sustains itself over a long period of time,” Jassy told a virtual crowd at Amazon’s all-digital re: Invent last December. “To do this, you will reinvent yourself and, many times, you will have to reinvent yourself many times.”

This is precisely what Amazon has done over the years, moving from an online bookstore to an e-commerce giant and later to a hardware manufacturer, a major actor in Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and now the second largest employer in the country. All the while, Jassy worked behind the scenes to ensure that AWS was growing and becoming the profit machine it is today.

Now, Jassy looks set to reinvent on its own, at a time when Amazon is still at the forefront of so many industries and continues to explore new territories, while facing increasing antitrust pressure in the United States and abroad and growing competition in the AI, cloud and e-commerce industries.

“Usually, what you see is the desperate kind of reinvention – companies on the verge of collapsing or going bankrupt, deciding they need to reinvent themselves. When you wait until that point, it’s a crapshoot whether you’re going to succeed or not, ”explained Jassy. “You want to reinvent yourself when you’re healthy. You want to reinvent yourself all the time. “