Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos has announced that he'll step down from the world's biggest online retailer to become executive chairman of the company this summer. He'll hand over the reins of the e-commerce giant to Andy Jassy, head of its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS). The announcement regarding the change of guard at Amazon came on Tuesday, clearing the air on who will succeed Bezos as the CEO of Amazon.
While Bezos is ending his role as the Amazon CEO on a high note, his successor is also known as one of the sharpest minds at Amazon, who led the company's push outside core business. Jassy has been instrumental in steering the company's fast-growing cloud-based services to among the top tech firms.
Amazon Web Services rents space and software programming to companies to run their operations smoothly. AWS under Jassy started as a start-up but now shares a big part of Amazon's profits and dominates the cloud computing market.
Jassy, 53, joined Amazon in 1997 after completing his MBA from Harvard Business School. He initially worked as technical assistant to Bezos. He also founded Amazon Web Services in 2006. The company now competes with the likes of Microsoft and Google.
"I took my last final exam at HBS, the first Friday of May in 1997 and I started Amazon next Monday," Jassy said in a Harvard Business School podcast in September, reported news agency Reuters. He added that on the first day, he had no idea about what his job at Amazon was going to be about but there was one thing he knew -- job was "super important" for Amazon.
He's married to Elana Rochelle Caplan, with whom he has two children. A huge sports and music fan, Jassy has also been vocal about issues such as police brutality in the US, black human rights, and LGBTQ rights.
As per Andy, the key to long-term success is reinvention. At a company forum in December 2020, as reported by Reuters, he said: "You want to be reinventing when you are healthy, you want to be reinventing all the time." He said only those who are "manancial and relentless and tenacious about getting to the truth" succeed and that companies must know what's working and what's not for them.
