Andy Jassy to take over as Amazon CEO from Jeff Bezos after leading tech giant’s cloud service
He's worth more than $500m and may have been poised for the new position after being described as Jeff Bezos’ shadow in the early years of the company.
Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy is set to take the reins of the e-commerce giant in the third quarter of 2021.
“Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have,” Mr Bezos wrote in an email to employees. “He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence.”
Mr Bezos will transition to the role of executive chair, where he will focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, his space exploration company, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and “other passions”.
Mr Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 as a marketing manager before founding Amazon Web Services, the company’s highly profitable cloud computing unit in 2003. He was later promoted from senior vice president to CEO of AWS in 2016.
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Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said on the company’s earnings call Tuesday that the executive change was made in consultation with Amazon’s board of directors, calling Mr Jassy a visionary leader.
The incoming CEO was paid almost $US350,000 ($A459,000) in 2019, according to Amazon’s most recent proxy statements reported The New York Post.
He owns about 85,000 shares in the company, valued at $US287.3 million ($A377 million) as of Tuesday, according to CNBC.
His net worth was estimated at $US394 million ($A517 million) in November 2020.
In Amazon’s early years, Mr Jassy reportedly took on the role of “Jeff Bezos’ Shadow.”
This position kept him at Bezos’ side daily as the two surveyed the company and moved toward developing Amazon’s cloud service, according to a 2015 Forbes profile of Mr Jassy.
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Matt McIlwain, the managing director of Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle venture firm that invests in cloud start-ups told the Washington Post recently that Mr Jassy “embodies the culture of Amazon.”
“He has consistently demonstrated the ability to be a builder,” Mr McIlwain said.
Microsoft CEOs Satya Nadella and his Google counterpart Sundar Pichai congratulated Mr Jassy and Mr Bezos on the new roles.
Congrats @JeffBezos , best wishes for Day 1 and Earth fund. Congrats @ajassy on your new role!
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 2, 2021
Congratulations to @JeffBezos and @ajassy on your new roles. A well-deserved recognition of what you have accomplished.
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) February 2, 2021
At the Goldman Sachs’ Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco last year, Mr Jassy said that there are “really only two significant industries which Amazon has disrupted,” speaking about retail and technology infrastructure. “In both cases, they were models that were pretty antiquated,” he added.
He explained at the conference that Amazon strives to build a culture of innovation.
“We want builders in everything that we do,” said Mr Jassy,” and so what we try to do in our culture and everything we talk about as a senior leadership team is ask how do we build the type of company and the type of culture that allows builders to build?”
He also said about working at the tech giant, “When we talk about processes that we don’t like or bureaucracy that we might see creeping in, a lot of it we want to knock out because we want to make it the world’s best place for builders to build. And I think that there really are few places like Amazon if you’re a builder and that’s what we spend most of our time trying to figure out.”
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The veteran cloud computing leader also talked about how the cloud is shaping the future, noting the “number one reason that enterprises and public sector organisations are moving to the cloud is agility and speed and the ability to innovate at a much more rapid clip.”
The cloud platform is used by millions including Verizon and McDonald’s and competes with Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud.
Mr Jassy’s division brought in $US12.7 billion ($A16.6 billion) in the most recent quarter, up 28 per cent from a year ago, reported the New York Post.
The 53-year-old executive attended Harvard University for his undergraduate studies and received an MBA from the Ivy League institution. He is married with two children.
A native of Scarsdale, a town in Westchester County in New York, a study of Mr Jassy’s Twitter feed is mostly touting and supporting Amazon-related projects. Since August of 2020, he has posted 15 times that he is “excited” about one project or another.
While mostly steering clear of politics, Mr Jassy has previously shown support for Supreme Court decisions that made it illegal to discriminate against LGBTQ people in the workplace and blocked former president Donald Trump’s bid to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
I look at the Supreme Court decision today on making it illegal to discriminate against LGBTQ people in the workplace and think about how crazy it is in 2020 that this was even a question. Good for the Supreme Court for getting this right.
— Andy Jassy (@ajassy) June 15, 2020
A longtime hockey fan who grew up cheering the New York Rangers, Mr Jassy is also part owner of the new National Hockey League expansion team, the Seattle Kraken. According to Fortune magazine, he is such a passionate sports fan he built a sports bar inside his home.
Of the colourful name of the team, he explained to ESPN why it is the perfect moniker for Seattle’s first NHL team.
“It’s a very unique and unusual name in sports, because almost all sport franchises end with an ‘S,’” Jassy told the 24-hour sports network, “There are a lot of obvious connections to Seattle — part because of our maritime history; part of because we have so much water around us — but there is longtime folklore in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest of this mystical Kraken creature that lives just below the surface of the sea, which really captivated people for many years.
Amazon bought the naming rights to the arena where Jassy’s team will play. But instead of calling it Amazon Arena it is called Climate Pledge Arena.
This story originally appeared on Fox News and is reproduced here with permission
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