Andy Jassy, Amazon’s new CEO, believes in reinventing all the time

Andy Jassy will take over as the chief executive of e-commerce giants Amazon from July 5, after founder Jeff Bezos had earlier announced his decision to step down from the role.

“He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence,” Bezos said of Jassy in a letter to Amazon employees. Bezos, the world’s richest person, will now transition to the executive chair of the Amazon board.

Jassy, 53, joined Amazon as a marketing manager in 1997, three years after Bezos started it in his garage, and founded Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud services division of the company, in 2003. 

Also Read | Jeff Bezos leaves enduring legacy as he steps away as Amazon CEO

He has since overseen the company’s tremendous growth in the cloud computing business, one of the tech giant’s most profitable yet least known units. 

It brought in a reported $12.7 billion in revenue in the last quarter, and competes with crosstown rival Microsoft‘s Azure and Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud.

A graduate from Harvard Business School, Jassy was instrumental in guiding the company from an online book store to the global conglomerate it is today. 

He led Amazon into the cloud computing business with the launch of AWS, becoming its CEO in 2016. Under his leadership, the division became a major cloud platform, with clients like Verizon, McDonalds and Honeywell among millions of others. 

Also Read | Space tourism: Sir Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos ready for their first trip

And he has set reinvention as the agenda for Amazon’s future. 

“You want to be reinventing when you are healthy, you want to be reinventing all the time,” Reuters quoted Jassy saying at a company forum in December.

“You have got to be manancial and relentless and tenacious about getting to the truth…. You have to know what’s working and what’s not working.”

Jassy grew up in Scarsdale, New York and has been married to Elana Rochelle Caplan, with whom he has two children, since 1997.