On Jan 5, Andy Jassy became President and CEO of Amazon.com, replacing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Jassy, 53, founded and led Amazon Web Services (AWS) from its inception and served as its CEO from April 2016 until July 2021. He joined Amazon in 1997 and, prior to founding AWS, held various leadership roles across the company, including both business-to-business and business-to-consumer.
“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,” said Bezos. “As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions,”
Jassy is a Westchester native, and a 1986 graduate of Scarsdale High School. He has an AB from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
In 2014, Jassy came back to Scarsdale High School and spoke with students about the impact the community has had on his success at Amazon.” I had a fantastic experience at Scarsdale High School,” he explained that his AP History teacher Eric Rothchild, “really changed my opinion that year about how I thought of myself as a student and had a big impact on my life,”
Scarsdale Mayor Jane Veron said the village is proud of Jassy, and that he received “the commitment that the Scarsdale community has to education”, and the town’s “commitment to making the world a better place, to educating, and to teach others about different perspectives.”
Jassy’s father was an attorney in a New York City law firm, while his mother was a homemaker. “You never got away with telling a story without being interrupted constantly with questions about the details or decisions you made,” said Jassy about his family’s dinner table.
A teenage Andy Jassy was a good tennis player and was more of a jock than a geek. “School was a bit of a game to me.” A love of sports came to Jassy before Amazon. He worked at ABC and Fox in the hopes of becoming a sportscaster. He also worked for a collectibles company and helped create a startup company before returning to Harvard Business School and eventually Amazon. His path can be a lesson to all that you don’t have to succeed at your first career choice.
One of his first jobs with Amazon was in the music business, which suited Jassy’s love of music, bands, and songwriters. Hard work and long hours were what caught Bezos’ eye on Jassy, and in the early 2000’s, Bezos asked Jassy to shadow his work for eighteen months, after which Bezos essentially named Jassy a possible successor, naming him “one of our most high potential people,” because Jassy told Bezos was not afraid to tell the Chairman the truth.
Jassy is known to have a photographic memory, and an encyclopedic knowledge of sports music and movies. Inside Amazon, Jassy is known as one of the nicer executives, but it was Jassy’s leadership of AWS, Amazon’s cloud service, that sealed his ascension to become CEO and replace Bezos.
Jassy’ claim to fame at Amazon is his leadership of AWS, Amazon’s cloud service, now a $50 Billion a year business on its own. “So very quietly around 2000, we became a services company with really no fanfare,” said Jassy who explored and experimented with Bezos before launching its first cloud product in 2006.
Today, AWS is Amazon’s most profitable components, making up almost two-thirds of the companies’ profits. Amazon now controls more of the cloud market than Microsoft and Google combined. Amazon, under Jassy’ leadership, has made it easier for companies to use AWS than build their own cloud operations. AWS clients include Netflix, the CIA, and the Democratic National Committee.
Jassy has also underscored the importance of Amazon doing its part to address systemic racism. AWS, under Jassy’s leadership has been the target of lawsuits from former employees who sued claiming racial and gender discrimination. “We’re working on it at Amazon. It’s going to take several years of us working together, but we need to do it. The reality is for the last several hundred years, the way we treated Black people in this country is disgraceful and something that has to change.”
Bezos never seemed to care about the public perception of what Amazon was doing in philanthropy, once telling the Seattle Times that Amazon’s commitment comes from providing paychecks and jobs to its employees, and that customers benefitted from Amazon’s products and services.
Ten years ago, the Seattle Times wrote an article critical of the lack of philanthropy coming from Amazon. Bezos defiantly told the paper that his company provided jobs and paychecks to the public, and that his company was also a benefit to its customers.
Jassy has taken more of a welcoming embrace of social justice issues than Bezos, starting in 2011 when he reached out to Rainer Scholars, a nonprofit that helps people of color get through college. Jassy explained that he had a fortunate upbringing in Scarsdale and wanted to give back. He serves on Rainier’s board and has created an intern-employee pipeline into Amazon.
In September, he tweeted publicly about accountability for the killing of Breonna Taylor, and he’s been outspoken in his support for the Black Lives Matter movement and LGBTQ issues. Jassy has also been involved in Amazon’s decision to ban social media platform Parler after the Jan. 6- US Capitol riot.
For the past ten years, Jassy has been the face of Amazon at tech conferences and industry events. “It’s really hard to build a business that sustains for a long period of time. To do it, you’re going to reinvent yourself, and often you’re going to have to reinvent yourself many times over. “You want to be reinventing when you’re healthy. You want to be reinventing all the time,” said Jassy at one of the many online conferences held during COVID.
Like any corporate giant CEO, Jassy is known for his exhaustive work practices. “He will be just as ambitious and bold as Jeff has been, if not more so,” said Jennifer Cast, who hired Jassy at Amazon in 1997.
Back to the Scarsdale HS interview in 2014, when asked who inspires him, Jassy said, “My boss Jeff Bezos. He is the most brilliant thinker I know, he is unbelievably creative, has technical acumen and unusual empathy for the customer. He quickly got to the heart of an issue and added value. He is not set in his ways, does not rest on his laurels, is optimistic about change and does not believe there is a glass ceiling on what we can do.”
One word of wisdom for high school students 0from Jassy came when he was asked what he wished he knew then that he knows now. “I wish I knew then that trying to be cool or popular was overrated,” and that “a hunger to always learn” is something he wished he knew as a student in Westchester.
Jassy, who like Bezos, has become uber wealthy with the rise of Amazon, still lives in a modest Seattle home he bought with his wife Elana Caplan, in 2009. They have to kids, ages 17 and 20.
