Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced Tuesday that he would step aside later this year as chief executive of the firm he constructed from a startup into one of the world’s most beneficial firms. He will be replaced by Andy Jassy, who spearheaded Amazon’s cloud computing venture, Amazon Web Services, turning it into a multibillion-dollar organization, reports CNBC.
Although Mr Jassy has not been in the public eye like Jeff Bezos, he has been an integral portion of Amazon given that he joined the firm in 1997.
A Twitter thread going viral on-line unpacks the vital portion he played in the accomplishment of Amazon Web Services, and his function as Jeff Bezos’ “shadow”.
“In 2003, Jeff Bezos invited his former chief-of-staff to a corporate retreat at his home,” wrote Twitter user Ankith Harathi. “That former chief-of-staff is now worth $400M. Oh, and he’s Amazon’s new CEO.”
Before becoming appointed the head of AWS, Mr Jassy was selected for the coveted position of “Technical Assistant” to work with founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
“At the time, we called it a ‘shadow role.’ And it really was like being Jeff’s shadow-I participated in all of his meetings, including his one-on-ones,” Mr Jassy told CRN back in 2015.
He commit 18 months shadowing Mr Bezos – studying “directly from the boss himself”, as Mr Harathi place it in his Twitter thread.
As he followed Mr Bezos about, Andy Jassy identified numerous inefficiencies in how teams at Amazon worked collectively.
According to The New York Times, Mr Bezos had grown frustrated with Amazon’s computer software improvement teams that have been taking longer than anticipated to total projects.
“They were spending a lot of $$$ attracting the absolute best and brightest. Something was wrong. Bezos asked Jassy to go fix it,” wrote Mr Harathi.
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Mr Jassy discovered that numerous projects have been delayed mainly because item teams have been spending also considerably time “setting up storage, compute and databases”.
Mr Jassy convinced Mr Bezos to “standardized backend requirements” and invest in infrastructure.
This reality was seconded by former Amazon executive Dan Rose, who wrote on “During his two-year run in Jeff’s office, Andy identified a bunch of inefficiencies in how teams worked together and convinced Jeff to invest in infrastructure to reduce dependencies. Amazon later externalized some of those APIs and Andy became the founder and CEO of AWS.”
AWS is today one of Amazon’s most lucrative arms. In a memo sent to personnel earlier this week, Mr Jassy stated he would constantly be “passionate and connected to AWS.”
He also spoke about the points he discovered from Mr Bezos – which integrated “criticality of hiring and developing great people”, the “importance of inventing” and “how to obsess over customers”.
For his portion, Mr Bezos has stated that Andy Jassy has his complete self-confidence.
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“Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence,” he wrote in a letter to personnel.