Jeff Bezos Entrusts Amazon To Andy Jassy, A Trusted Deputy

Andy Jassy will succeed Jeff Bezos as Amazon's second CEO on July 5.

After 15 years of building Amazon's cloud operation into a $40 billion corporation, the 53-year-old Amazon veteran is taking over as CEO. Jassy will take over one of the world's most valuable firms and one of its greatest jobs after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos transfers the baton.

Jassy appears to be the inevitable candidate to succeed the notoriously hard-charging Bezos. He is known for his passion for the customer experience and his high expectations for those who work for him. Jassy grew up in Scarsdale, New York, a posh suburb about 20 miles north of Manhattan. Everett, Everett's father, is a lawyer who used to be a partner at Dewey Ballantine in Manhattan. Margery, his mother, was a trustee at TheaterWorksUSA, a youth theatrical initiative.

Jassy received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his MBA from the same institution. He worked as a project manager at MBI, a collectibles company, in the interim. Jassy joined Amazon the same year it went public, and he rapidly established himself as a promising choice, according to Rick Dalzell, the company's chief information officer at the time. Despite his lack of mechanical skills, Jassy had a competitive streak and a photographic memory that set him apart. According to Fortune, Jassy was in charge of Amazon's music sales. Then, in 2002, he was named Bezos' first "shadow advisor," a kind of chief of staff who accompanied the CEO to all of his meetings for a year or more.

Jassy came up with the idea for AWS: he wanted to use Amazon's expertise in managing massive amounts of eCommerce data, as well as its vast network of data centres, to make data storage cheaper and easier for other businesses. According to Fortune, he drafted a memo to Bezos to persuade him that the proposal would work, and Bezos signed off in October 2003.

Since then, AWS has evolved to become Amazon's $40 billion business, accounting for more than 60% of the company's operating income. AWS currently controls more than 30% of the cloud computing market.

While Bezos has become more vocal about his views in recent years, Jassy is likely the company's most outspoken boss. He just became the executive sponsor of Amazon's Black Employee Network and has gone to Twitter to denounce police deaths of Black Americans. Jassy has also expressed his views on immigration, LGBTQ prejudice, and affordable housing on Twitter.

So far, the firm has taken a more aggressive stance, battling with key members of Congress and mobilising Amazon's public-policy arm to portray the e-commerce behemoth as a small-business ally. Jassy's legacy will be determined by how he leads Amazon through its antitrust entanglements and cultural crisis, not just by continuing to attract loyal Prime members and increasing AWS's proportion of technology investment.