In 2003, Jeff Bezos invited his former chief-of-staff to a corporate retreat at his home. One 30min meeting on the schedule ended up going on for hours. **That former chief-of-staff is now worth $400M. Oh, and he’s Amazon's new CEO. Here’s what happened in that meeting **
Andy Jassy joined Amazon just before the dot-com boom and became Jeff Bezos’ “shadow.” He literally followed Bezos around everywhere he went, taking notes in all his meetings and learning directly from the boss himself.
Around the same time, Amazon was working on http://merchant.com Merchant was aimed at helping stores like Target setup their online shopping portals, without dealing with any of the technical infrastructure.
Technology wasn’t Target’s specialty, but it was Amazon’s. Target (and others) didn’t have to worry about the rapid pace of technological improvements either, as Amazon promised they’d handle all future requirements as well. That’s when the struggles started.
Amazon had built an amazing API-based infrastructure for other companies to use, and even started using it themselves. As their offering got more complex, they needed to move faster. They started hiring more software engineers, but it didn’t seem to help.
They were spending a lot of $$$ attracting the absolute best and brightest. Something was wrong. Bezos asked Jassy to go fix it. Jassy started digging and found a lot more than he expected.
The executive team would routinely scope out a project and set a deadline of 3 months. After 3 months, they’d get a report back that it wasn’t ready. For each new project, engineers were building the backend from scratch. It was taking forever. Jassy got to work.
In the summer of 2003, Bezos gathered his executive team at his house to align on Amazon’s future strategy. Among the many meetings on the itinerary, Bezos carved out 30 minutes to discuss Amazon’s strengths.
Most of the team elaborated on Amazon’s excellence in ecommerce. Fulfilling. Shipping. Pricing. They were the absolute best. But Andy thought Amazon had started to become great at something else too.
From working with the infrastructure services team, he explained how they’d standardized backend requirements. Now, each new project that came down the pipeline was completed ahead of schedule. Database, compute, and storage no longer took months to develop.
Once opened up, the worldclass infrastructure services they had built for themselves was used by millions of developers, all building their own things. Profits from AWS allowed their ecommerce biz to grow, and catapulted Amazon to the top spot. The world’s largest retailer.
26 years after founding Amazon, and 15 years after launching AWS, Bezos had decided it was time for a change. Yesterday, after reporting Amazon's first $100B sales quarter, Jeff Bezos announced that he’d be stepping down as CEO. Andy Jassy will be taking over the reigns.
Isn't that inspirational.. Share your thoughts in comments.