Who’s Andy Jassy? Meet the brand new Amazon CEO changing Jeff Bezos

An incredible 25 years after Jeff Bezos started Amazon out of his garage, it’s time the e-commerce mogul retired as CEO (albeit with $ 197 billion in his pocket) and Andy Jassy Platz lets take the helm.

So who exactly is Jassy?

The self-proclaimed experienced buffalo wing-eater is a father of two and a huge sports, music and film fan. He is also one of Bezos’ first recruits.

The new President and CEO of Amazon has been with the technology company since graduating from college 24 years ago.

“I took my last final exam at the Graduate School on the first Friday in May 1997. I started working at Amazon the next Monday, ”said Jassy Recode. “I didn’t know what my job would be [what] my title would be which group I would work in.

“I started working in marketing. With that I started to pursue customer loyalty and competitive information. “

With early understanding of the inner workings of Amazon, where he worked alongside Bezos for much of his career, Jassy has grown in the leading tech empire.

“I wanted a place that was very entrepreneurial. I wanted a place where, if I could help start a business, it was there [would be] no limit to what we could track, ”Jassy told Recode.

And there were definitely no barriers to what he – or the Amazon team – can accomplish.

Jassy became CEO on the sentimental date of the company’s 27th anniversary on July 5th, and has worked his way through the C-suite and held a number of senior leadership positions at Amazon, which had sales of $ 386.1 billion in 2020.

With the appointment announced in February, Jassy is stepping down from his previous role in which he founded and managed the subsidiary of Amazon’s IT platform Amazon Web Services. The executive had been CEO since April 2016 and generated sales of $ 13.5 billion in the first three months of 2021 alone.

“We have a great opportunity to build a lasting company that will outlast all of us.” – Andy Jassy

However, no leadership role is as important as the big boss of 1.3 million employees worldwide.

And to think that Jassy had only planned to stay with the company for a couple of years.

“My fiancé at the time, now wife, was from Los Angeles,” he said in 2019. “We had previously lived on the east coast for five years and the agreement was to come west for two to three years then go back to New York. In fact, we wrote the agreement on a napkin in a bar. That was 22 years ago. “

From being surrounded by visionaries to being inspired by Bezos’ unique ideas, the culture and groundbreaking opportunities have been hard to leave.

As the second CEO in Amazon’s history, Jassy is considered almost as competitive as Bezos.

With a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School, Jassy’s experience spans both business-to-business and business-to-consumer backgrounds.

In addition to taking the multi-billion dollar reins of Amazon, Jassy is commissioner of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, the trust of the American Academy of Arts of Sciences, the Board of Trustees for Rainier Scholars, and chairs the board of directors of Rainier Prep.

The new direction of leadership leaves Bezos room to explore his many innovative avenues, including his spacecraft company Blue Origin.

“Jeff is so unusual and so talented,” Jassy told Recode in 2019. “He’s incredibly inventive. He’s a really great thinker. He has incredibly high standards.

“I worked for him for 18 months … as chief of staff. I thought I had pretty high standards before I started this job … [soon] I realized that my standards weren’t high enough.

“Our work is not done. We have a great opportunity to build a permanent company that will outlast us all. “