Who Is Andy Jassy, the Man Replacing Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO?
He turned Amazon Web Services into the e-commerce giant’s biggest profit center
Today, Jeff Bezos announced that he would be stepping down from his role as CEO of Amazon and transitioning to executive chair of Amazon’s board in Q3 of this year. His successor will be Andy Jassy, who currently heads Amazon Web Services (AWS). Jassy joined Amazon in 1997, the year it went public, as a fresh graduate out of Harvard Business School. At the time, Amazon was still primarily an online bookseller, but in the early 2000s, the company launched its web services division, an effort that Jassy spearheaded. In a 2015 interview with John Furrier, Jassy describes how AWS began as a startup within the company, born out of frustration with how expensive and difficult it was to manage data warehousing on the internet. Under Jassy’s leadership, AWS quickly became the biggest profit center within the company. In the interview, Jassy credits his success to Bezos’ “Day 1” ethos that allowed him the freedom to fail:
“Invention,” says Jassy, “requires two things: 1. The ability to try a lot of experiments, and 2. not having to live with the collateral damage of failed experiments.”
Sounds like Bezos’ successor isn’t going to call it Day 2 anytime soon.
