The Man Who Built a $500bn Division Will Now Become Amazon CEO
Meet Jeff Bezos’s successor: Andy Jassy
“No, I didn’t know what my job was going to be, or what my title was going to be. It was super important to the Amazon people that we come that Monday.” — Andy Jassy
When Andy started working at an online bookstore in 1997, no one could have predicted he would one day be running a $1.7 trillion empire.
Those first few years were far from glamorous. Amongst other things, he was Jeff Bezos’s personal technical assistant and floated around other roles. A more stereotypically ambitious person might have left to start their own company but Andy stuck around and as result will go down in tech history.
Away from all the media attention and headlines, he created a small division called Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006. Without getting too nerdy, it provides a service to other massive companies like Netflix to host all of their content in the cloud. It is in these relative shadows where Andy operated for over a decade as he built something spectacular.
You probably think Amazon’s online retail division where you buy batteries is massive and you wouldn’t be wrong. Yet AWS brings in over half the profits of the entire company on just 12% of the total revenue. Amazon is a cloud…
