Jeff Bezos has officially stepped down as the CEO of Amazon, exactly 27 years since he founded the company in July 1994. Bezos is likely to keep himself busy with space exploration, the Washington Post, the Amazon exec chairman role and figuring out how to spend (or maybe give away?) his $200bn fortune.
The individual succeeding him is Andy Jassy, the trusted lieutenant who has grown Amazon's cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, into a $45bn+ industry leader.
Andy's Amazon CV
After bouncing around the marketing department, and serving as Bezos' "shadow", Jassy and the other top executives realized that Amazon had, through its e-commerce endeavours, become quite good at building and managing tech infrastructure services like databases, storage and computing. And — in true Amazon fashion — they had gotten good at doing it cheaply.
The team wondered whether there might be something in offering these services to other developers or companies, and in 2003 AWS was formed, with its first products launching in 2006 under the leadership of Jassy.
Since then Jassy and his team have stacked countless services and products on top of each other into AWS, building it into an industry leader — ahead of rivals such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure (the revenues of which Microsoft doesn't explicitly disclose). This week Jassy's tenure got off to a good start as the $10bn Pentagon JEDI contract, which was previously awarded to Microsoft, was cancelled.
