O Jeff Bezos, the man who founded Amazon and served as its CEO for almost three decades, resigned as CEO on July 5, 2021.
Exactly 27 years since the founding of the internet giant (July 5, 1994), choosing the anniversary as the most appropriate day to hand over the heavy baton.
Andy Jassy is now officially the new boss of Amazon, leaving Bezos in the position of president.
it is about a very defining moment in the history of Amazon, is the first time that its founder will not make important decisions. Under Bezos, Amazon managed to stay afloat even in the turbulent years of the tech industry bubble there in the late 1990s.
Bezos was the one who turned it into one of the world’s leading technology companies, dominating the e-commerce of America and Europe by state.
In fact, through Amazon Web Services, which was headed by Andy Jassy since 2003, the Amazon managed to make a good part of the backbone of what we call modern internet services.
Except that Bezos’ leadership was not left untouched by criticism. At a time when Amazon stock was rising dramatically in his years, making him one of the richest people on the planet (and richest of all after all), Bezos indulged in bad work practices.
Warehouse workers and distributors have massively denounced the company’s high productivity goals, goals that plague their daily work.
Bezos hands Jassy a real colossus with even more ambitious dreams. The giant of e-commerce and internet applications is constantly expanding into other areas of action, having the same disposition for risky risks.
The richest man in the world, according to Forbes and Bloomberg, however, will not fall into obscurity. He will remain on Amazon’s board of directors, from where, as he has stated, he will “continue to be involved in important Amazon initiatives.”
At the same time he will have more time to devote to his other activities, such as his foundations (Day One Fund and Bezos Earth Fund), The Washington Post and the space company of course Blue Origin.
“I have never had so much energy before, it has nothing to do with retirement. “I’m very passionate about the impact these organizations can have,” he wrote in an Amazon blog post in February.
The new boss
Ο Andy Jassy is officially from July 5, 2021 the new CEO of Amazon. The company had announced the change of baton in February.
Jassy is neither a coincidence nor a small name on Amazon. Instead, it is one of the most important executives in its history, having taken Amazon Web Services (AWS) to astronomical heights.
Amazon cloud computing technology is its backbone Netflix, Spotify, Fortnite and other major platforms.
Jassy has been her soul and mind since 2003. Bezos personally hired him in the late 1990s for this very purpose, to explore this emerging market.
And his research yielded in 2003 AWS, one of the colossus’ most successful commercial divisions. The AWS recorded profits of $ 13.5 billion in the first quarter of 2021.
Who is Andy Jassy?
Andy Jassy joined Amazon shortly after graduating from his School of Economics Harvard in 1997. From the beginning he was in charge of cloud computing market research and when the relevant division of Amazon was finally established in 2003, he took over as its head.
However, he was only officially named CEO of AWS in 2016. His management was so effective that at the end of 2020, Amazon Web Services owned about 1/3 of the total cloud computing market. A really huge percentage, as held together by its most important competitors, Microsoft and Google!
Many find similarities in his career with that of the current CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, who once ran the cloud arm (Azure) of Bill Gates’s company.
Jassy was the man who sent Amazon to the forefront of cloud computing and is now ready to determine its overall fate.
As he has repeatedly stated, he is a staunch supporter of Bezos’ business philosophy. He has been running his department in the same way for almost two decades.
53-year-old Jassy may be unknown to the general public, but he is well known in Silicon Valley as a true Amazon veteran.
And his promotion to general manager of the whole company emphasizes in the best way the role that cloud computing plays in the technology giants. Every time AWS goes offline, huge sections of the internet fall with it.
Everyone is now waiting with bated breath to see if the new general will respectfully follow in the footsteps of his predecessor or differentiate himself. However, if he continues to be true to the vision of the founder and the famous mentality of “Day 1”, which tells us that when a company begins to rest on its laurels, then it is collapsing, Jassy will have to make many changes.
The change was and remains the most important feature of Amazon, its most successful corporate tool. And he himself believes this, having applied Bezos’ rule from his very first day in the company.
When it joined its potential, Amazon was almost exclusively engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing was not even in its plans. Jassy was one of the many promising graduates hired at Amazon in the late 90s.
As he has stated in an interview, he moved to the West for the needs of his job, always having in the back of his mind that he would return to New York at some point.
Something that would never happen, as Bezos became the first “shadow adviser” from the beginning, as they are called in the language of Amazon. That is, corporate executives with informal roles of managers who followed the general every day and were present at all meetings.
As revealed by Brad Stone in his book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” (2003), he made a rather bad impression on the boss the first time he saw him. Jassy accidentally hit Bezos with a paddle on the head, in another highly competitive corporate sport, one of Jeff’s favorite.
Jeff and Andy
However, their relationship flourished in the following years and at some point received the anointing from the founder. He was the chosen one who would explore the adventure of cloud computing, which was then in its infancy.
Bezos asked him one thing: if it made sense for Amazon to offer hosting services to other websites and companies, in years when its giants technology they had just begun to build their own networks and infrastructure.
Amazon had given us the battle to build a retail hosting platform 3 years ago and knew full well what problems it was facing. Jassy recognized the problem from the beginning: it was not the infrastructure that was to blame, but Amazon’s tools themselves!
And so he set out to improve them, improving along the way every technology involved. “And so very quietly around 2000 we became a service company without big fanfares”, he said at the conference re: Invent in 2018.
It took Jassy six years to do this, culminating in the founding of AWS in 2003. Although again its first product would not be on the market before 2006. Amazon was crowned a real pioneer here and got such a head in the market that it would take years to catch up with the competition.
Jassy had his own vision for the internet and performed richly. Today AWS offers an incredible number of applications, services and internet tools, things that websites, consumers and employees use every day.
AWS now has incomparable resources that are unmatched. Unless you are Google or Facebook, which has its own data centers, is obviously easier to turn to Amazon than to do it yourself.
Jassy has been praised as the architect of Amazon’s cloud vision. But also as an orchestrator of its most successful section. AWS accounted for 63% of Amazon’s profits for 2020, while for 2021 they expect even better things (turnover of $ 50 billion).
Without the rapid growth of AWS, Amazon would not have the billions to invest in everything from retail and transportation to smart devices, artificial intelligence, streaming platforms and more.
Bezos himself has said that AWS is the engine that powers all of Amazon. And Jassy the spark that made it all possible.
The emerging successor of Bezos
It is a fact that in recent years everyone has said that Jassy would be the man who would succeed Bezos at the helm of the colossus. A guess that Andy liked a lot, who spent all the previous time flirting openly and publicly with the idea.
You can now hear him talk about the early days of Amazon and the adventurous history of AWS, but also how what he learned there can be applied to other business environments.
He was the new face of Amazon, a keynote speaker at its conferences in recent years. In fact, when the second most dominant successor of Bezos, the Jeff Wilke, announced his retirement, all bets tilted in Jassy’s favor.
Inside Amazon, his spirit and personality are legendary. In the same way he was the big boss. He is famous for his exhaustive emphasis on detail, but also for his practical mind. And for his love for the long and crowded meetings of course!
At the same time, he is an advocate of social justice and does not hide his beliefs. He has spoken publicly via Twitter, supporting the movement Black Lives Matter, but also the rights of the LGBTQI community.
And like Jeff, he’s got his share of controversial decisions when he defended, for example, the sale of Amazon’s flawless face recognition software to police departments and governments.
“It’s really hard to build a company that stays viable for long periods of time,” he told last year’s re: Invent Amazon conference, “to do that, you have to reinvent yourself.” In fact, you often have to reinvent yourself many times, over and over again. “
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