A 2017 survey by Stanford University researchers of 113 company directors and 18 executive recruiters indicated that Jeff Bezos was probably the most difficult CEO of US companies to replace.
Now is the time to do it.
Amazon announced this week that Bezos, the world's richest person, will step down from his position as CEO of the e-commerce giant at 57.
He will be succeeded by Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Jassy is expected to take over the helm of the company in the third quarter of the year.
The transition comes at a sweet time for the tech giant, just as it announced that for the first time it has surpassed $ 100 billion in sales in a single quarter.
Bezos said Tuesday in a letter to company staff that the change comes at a time when "Amazon could not be better positioned for the future."
“Andy is well known within the company and has been with Amazon almost as long as I have.
He will be an outstanding leader and he has all my confidence ”, he indicated.
Jassy, 53, knows the company well.
He joined it in 1997, just three years after it was founded, after completing an MBA at Harvard Business School (HBS).
“I took my final exam at HBS on the first Friday in May 1997 and started with Amazon the following Monday,” Jassy stated in September 2020, on a Harvard Business School podcast.
At the time, he told the podcast, he still didn't know what his job at the company was going to consist of.
He would start on the marketing team and in the early 2000s he would become Bezos's technical assistant, something of an advisor and chief of staff to the founder of the e-commerce giant.
"[Jassy] has adopted much of Jeff's personality," a former Amazon executive told The Washington Post.
Raised in Westchester County, north of New York City, Jassy "is more of a creative thinking person than an operational person."
In 2003, a group of executives, including Jassy, met one rainy day in the living room of Bezos' home in Seattle, according to The Washington Post.
They debated whether to offer the storage and unused computing service to other companies.
"Andy pushed for Amazon to enter the new business," another former company executive told the same newspaper.
Jassy led the founding of Amazon Web Services three years later and closely followed its early steps.
Since then, the cloud computing business has not stopped growing.
The company has put in place a massive infrastructure that is used by millions of companies, organizations and governments around the world to host its services.
AWS competes with Azure, from Microsoft, and Google Cloud, from Alphabet.
Jassy often causes a buzz in her
keynotes
at Amazon Web Services' annual conference in Las Vegas.
It is still unknown who will replace him as CEO of AWS.
We will also have to wait to see if the appointment of Jassy as CEO of Amazon will mean an even greater bet by the company for services in the cloud.
Amazon's decision could be a reward for Jassy for being behind one of its most successful business units.
"On the financial side, it makes sense to appoint an executive who knows intimately the most profitable business of Amazon, which operates in more competitive markets," says Holger Mueller, senior analyst at Constellation Research to the portal specialized in technology TechCrunch.
Jassy is married and the father of two children.
This is stated in his biography on Twitter, in which he also describes himself as a "great fan of sports, music and cinema and an experienced eater of buffalo wings."
This is confirmed by his photos on Facebook.
On his profile, he shares posts at concerts and basketball games.
Jassy is also the co-owner of a new National Hockey League franchise for the 2021-2022 season, according to The Washington Post: the Seattle Kraken.
In addition, the businessman on some occasions has spoken out on social issues on the networks.
For example, in September 2020 it ruled on the death of Breonna Taylor, a young African-American who was shot on March 13 in her own home in the middle of the morning as a result of an erroneous operation against a drug trafficking gang.
“I can't let Breonna Taylor's death go without responsibility.
We still haven't got it in the United States.
If you do not hold police departments accountable for the murder of black people, we will never have justice and change, nor will we be the country we aspire (and claim) to be, ”he stated on Twitter.
