JEFF BEZOS stepped down as Amazon’s CEO on Monday, 27 years after the company’s founding. Moving into his role is Andy Jassy, who joined the company in 1997 as a bookseller but has since risen through the ranks to head the company’s successful cloud services division, Amazon Web Services (AWS). He inherits the e-commerce behemoth at a “critical time” as the company faces “a growing threat” of regulatory action to control its dominance of markets across the world. He certainly has a good track record, having conceived of and overseen AWS, which is now Amazon’s most reliable source of profit, bringing in US$13.5 billion in revenue in the first three months of 2021. He also apparently was the mastermind behind Amazon’s move into the world of CDs and DVDs in the late ’90s. He is “more of a continuity candidate than a revolutionary,” The Economist says, adding that Jassy is “detail-oriented and more than a little nerdy — much like Bezos in his first couple of decades in charge.” The new CEO of Amazon has been a trusted lieutenant to Bezos since the early days of the online behemoth, but he is taking over a company that faces new scrutiny to its expanding influence. Described as quiet in nature, Jassy is described as Bezos’ most trusted man, as he never stands far from him when it comes to making the big strategic decisions of the company. Over time he became the shadow adviser to the founder of Amazon. “Andy is well known within the company and has worked at Amazon for almost as long as I have,” said Bezos in his last letter to shareholders announcing his withdrawal to employees, adding by way of dubbing “He will be an exceptional leader and he has all my confidence.” Jassy has long seen Bezos as a mentor, but colleagues have said he is more mild-mannered, soft-spoken and less prone to angry outbursts, compared to Bezos. A super-bright 53-year-old and obsessive sports fan, Jassy is almost as hard-driving as his predecessor. Jassy, who is from New York, was just 29 when he joined Amazon in 1997, three years after Bezos started a then-modest business from his Seattle garage. The man had spent five years working for MBI, a company selling collectibles, as a project manager. After this experience, he returned to Harvard to attend his business school, earning an MBA. With an MBA degree in hand, Jassy left prestigious Harvard Business School “the first Friday of May in 1997 and started at Amazon the next Monday,” he told the Disruptive Voice podcast in September last year. Jassy’s arrival came just before Amazon issued an initial public offering (IPO) that valued its shares at US$18 and listed the company as a simple “online bookseller.” Today its stock trades for around US$3,500. The group, of course, has since become a colossus of the American and global economies, selling everything from cloud computing services to groceries and film production. Jassy has played a key role in that ambitious diversification. He notably helped found AWS in 2003 and has run it since. The tale of how he first came to the boss’ attention speaks volumes. When he was a fresh-faced newbie at the firm, Amazon used to host regular, highly competitive, tournaments of an American park game called broomball. Jassy and Bezos were both hard competitors and Alpha male junior ended up clocking Alpha male senior — Bezos — on the head by accident with a canoe paddle. One way to get noticed by your billionaire boss. Professionally, Jassy sowed the seeds of his career success at one of Bezos’ interdepartmental brainstorming sessions at his home in Seattle in 2003. He had the idea that Amazon was creating world-beating computing power to run its own websites, but didn’t need all the capacity it had created. Why not sell that capacity elsewhere, and keep building it out so companies could run all their IT on Amazon’s online systems? Bezos, who often states his belief in hiring the best people and leaving them to get on with their ideas, gave him the green light and a cloud computing giant was born. The cloud computing services provided by AWS are not particularly well known among the broad public but have become one of Amazon’s most profitable divisions, dominating the world market ahead of other giants like Microsoft and Google. AWS has been followed into the Web hosting space by Microsoft, Google and others, but it still has around 45 percent of the market. Last year, its US$13.5 billion profit made up 63 percent of the company’s entire earnings. Jassy, as the joke on Wall Street went, already ran Amazon before he became CEO. Jassy, a lover of music and movies and part owner of a professional hockey team, has been described as being more accessible than Bezos, while remaining deeply immersed in the details surrounding the cloud division. Amazon, its vast reach boosted by surging online sales during the COVID-19 pandemic, currently has a market value of some US$1.7 trillion. Jassy, as its new leader, is set to receive a generous welcome: a 10-year pay package including 61,000 Amazon shares worth more than US$200 million, based on the share value at the market’s close last Friday. The transition arrives at a pivotal time for Amazon. The question now is whether the enormous group will continue on its current course or will shift in new directions. It is too early to say, but on the Disruptive Voice podcast Jassy paid tribute to his mentor Bezos as a deep thinker with a rare combination of technical skills and empathy for consumers. Like Bezos, he will face daunting challenges amid growing questions about Amazon’s market domination and distortion, as the group not only sells its own products but sets the rules for how other companies sell theirs on its platform. While the company has boasted of its US$15 minimum wage and other benefits, critics say its relentless focus on efficiency and worker surveillance has treated employees like machines. The pandemic’s shift to remote work was a major boon for the company, soaring profits as Americans confined at home shopped more online and demanded additional cloud computing resources. Those new fortunes, however, come during a moment of growing pressure. Amazon’s competitive practices are the subject of probes from U.S. Congress, the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and regulators in Europe, as government officials accuse the company of abusing its market dominance. Amazon drivers and other workers have alleged mistreatment and complained about breakneck working conditions in Amazon factories. Jassy married Elana Rochelle Caplan who worked for Eddie Bauer, an American clothing store chain as fashion designer in 1997. They are both blessed with two children. Jassy has two houses in the U.S. One is a 10,000-square-foot (929-square-meter) house which he bought in 2009 for US$3.1 million in Seattle and the second one is 5,500 square feet, which he bought US$6.7 million in California. Interestingly, Jassy’s wife donated to U.S. President Joe Biden in the 2020 campaign and has been a small-time donor to the party and its leaders for many years. Staff seem to see Jassy as having more EQ than Bezos, with a tendency to fire off friendly emails and encouragement. Whether that translates into better working conditions for the army of employees in its warehouses around the world remains to be seen. CNN’s Poppy Harlow asked him about his CEO ambitions in an interview for a 2019 documentary about Amazon’s history. At the time, Jassy said he didn’t expect Bezos to leave his position in the near future. “I feel very fortunate that Jeff is not going anywhere anytime soon, and none of us want him to. He’s just such an unusual leader and so much part of the culture that I think he’s going to be here for a very long time.” While he was coy about his plans — telling Harlow, “It’s kind of hard to imagine life without Jeff running the company” — analysts say Bezos has been planning for the transition for years. (SD-Agencies) | 