Meet Andy Jassy, ​​Amazon’s Next CEO

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

Jassy, ​​who turned 53 last year, now has the opportunity to make his mark not only on Amazon, but also on the world and the key ways in which the business has shaped it, from Whole Foods to ‘ a million staff members in the warehouse to massive logistics. and AI sections with far-reaching real effects.

Far from being a household name, Jassy is still one of the most important drivers in Amazon’s history. His promotion highlights the importance of cloud computing for the biggest technological titans that now play important roles in powering the entire Internet. In the case of AWS, it includes everything from Netflix and Spotify to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Democratic National Committee. If AWS goes down, big pieces of internet go along with it.

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

The big question Amazon insiders and those looking outside will try to answer within the next six months, before taking up work in the third quarter of the year, is whether Jassy deviates from Bezos’ approach or him to the keep going as usual. If Jassy still sees himself as an acolyte of Bezos and his famous ‘Day 1’ mentality – claiming that companies are starting to deteriorate and die the moment they rest on their laurels, it will mean that there is a lot of change on the horizon . For Amazon, change is the most important survival instinct and the most successful business tool.

When Jassy joined Amazon in the late 1990s, the company was no longer thinking about the cloud for many years and still focused only on e-commerce. Jassy graduated from Harvard Business School in 1997 and soon joined Amazon as part of a spate of new MBAs flocking to the tech industry ahead of the dot-com boom. According to an interview last year, Jassy West moved out with the intention of one day returning to New York The disruptive voice podcast, but he has never held a job at another company.

Jassy became Bezos’ first ‘shadow’ adviser, something like a corporate chief of staff who followed the CEO every day and sat in on all his meetings, according to a profile of Jassy released late last month by Insider. Jassy also made a strange first impression on his boss by accidentally hitting him in the head with a kayak paddle during a characteristically competitive game, as told in Brad Stone’s 2013 book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

Bezos and Jassy’s relationship deepened in the years that followed, with Bezos giving his younger lieutenant the task of exploring the then-emerging technology of cloud computing in 2003. The goal was to see if it made sense for Amazon to provide hosting services to others. to host websites and businesses. back when many of the largest technology companies relied primarily on third-party data centers or had already begun exploring or building their own. The idea comes from Amazon’s own struggle to build an external retailer development platform three years earlier so that third-party businesses could build their own e-commerce operations.

Jassy helped identify the problem: Amazon’s development tools were honestly sucked. The company has tried to improve this by creating easy-to-use APIs and other technologies that allow any team at Amazon to pull resources from a common pool of resources. “So we quietly became a service business around 2000 with no fanfare,” Jassy told a crowd during the 2018 Re: Invent conference, according to TechCrunch.

It took Amazon another six years to research and experiment – with the attempt to formally develop AWS that really started after a fatal refuge in Bezos’ home in 2003, Jassy says – before the company launched its first cloud product in 2006. has. ‘ [AWS] seems pretty obvious, but at the time I did not think we ever really internalized it, ‘Jassy told Re: Invent. The company’s early investments paid off as it took competitors years to realize the business opportunity and introduce comparable cloud products.

‘If you believe that businesses will build the infrastructure services from scratch if the right choice is [of services] exists, and we believed that it would happen if the right choice existed, then the operating system becomes the Internet, which is really different from what was the case with the [previous] 30 years, ”Jassy explained.

The belief about the future of the internet was tentative. AWS today offers a large amount of applications, services and websites that consumers and employees use on a daily basis, mainly because Amazon has unmatched resources and developer tools that make building and using its massive resources as easy as using a standard API. This is why so many companies give up building their own data center operations and instead choose AWS or one of its competitors. Unless you are Facebook or Google, both of which have built their own global data center operations, it’s simply easier to use Amazon than to do it yourself.

Jassy deserves credit for the architecture of the company’s cloud vision, having managed AWS since its inception and becoming its CEO after Bezos promoted him to a senior vice presidential role in 2016. His tenure at AWS also made cloud computing the best. profitable for Amazon’s divisions, which by 2020 account for about 63 percent of the company’s profits and put it on track to earn more than $ 50 billion 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 significant growth of AWS, Amazon may not have had as much money over the years to reinvest in its retail, logistics, streaming video, hardware, smart home, AI and other divisions. This effectively makes AWS the engine of Amazon’s ongoing rediscovery, and Jassy is the spark that helps drive it.

In recent years, Jassy has clearly established himself as an heir to Bezos, displaying stories from Amazon’s early days and the remarkable beginnings of AWS and how this knowledge can be applied to other businesses. He is a keynote speaker at Amazon’s high-profile re: Invent conference, an event dedicated to cloud computing, and he has become a more public face of Amazon in recent years. Last summer, when Jeff Wilke, a longtime logistics executive, a potential successor to Bezos, announced his retirement, the writing was on the wall. Someone would eventually take over from Bezos, and that seems more likely than ever Jassy.

Jassy’s management quirks and persona have also become somewhat legendary in the company, similar to Bezos’ infamous email style and meeting décor. Jassy is known internally for his comprehensive attention to detail and practical approach, his penchant for back-to-back meetings and his welcoming embrace of issues of social justice, according to Insider.

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

Jassy’s approach is also characterized as harsh and unprecedented calls, best illustrated by AWS ‘decision to ban the social media platform Parler last month following the riots in the US Capitol. It was a move the company did not lightly consider as a ‘religious’ commitment to customer service. Insider reported at the time. But it feels compelled to do so after the call for employees and because Parler “poses a very real risk to public safety,” Amazon said in a statement at the time.

Jassy will no doubt call even harder in the future. But it is part of the work and the Amazon culture that he has helped cultivate. “It’s really hard to build a business that has been around for a long time,” Jassy told a virtual crowd at the fully digital Amazon re: Invent last December. “To do this, you will have to rediscover yourself and often have to rediscover yourself repeatedly.”

This is exactly what Amazon has done over the years, transforming from an online bookstore into an e-commerce giant and further into a hardware manufacturer, a major player in the Hollywood and entertainment industry, and now the second largest employer in the country. All the while, Jassy has been working behind the scenes to ensure that AWS grows into the profit machine it is today.

Now it looks like Jassy is ready for a rediscovery of his own, at a time when Amazon is still at the forefront of so many industries and continues to explore new territory, while in the US and overseas it is experiencing increasing antitrust pressure and increasing competition in the AI, cloud and e-commerce industries.

‘What you see is usually the desperate kind of rediscovery – companies that are on the verge of falling apart or going bankrupt, and decide to rediscover themselves. “If you wait until that point, it’s a stupidity whether you’ll be successful or not, ‘Jassy explained. “You want to find out again if you’re healthy. You want to find out all the time. ‘