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In 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, an online bookstore, out of his garage in Seattle.
Over the next decade, Bezos led Amazon’s rapid growth into an e-commerce powerhouse.
He helped the company expand past books, offering consumer goods, digital media, cloud computing services, and pretty much anything else you could think of.
Bezos turned the company profitable in 2001 despite the dot com crash.
In 2007, Bezos launched both the Kindle e-reader and Amazon Prime membership—helping to lock in customer loyalty.
He then helped the company rocket into the cloud computing space with Amazon Web Services, which was unveiled in 2006 and soon dominated the industry.
After going public in 1997 and surviving the Great Recession, Amazon’s stock price skyrocketed in the 2010s, making Bezos the world’s richest man by 2017.
Fueled by Bezos’s customer obsession and willingness to make bold long-term bets—Amazon fundamentally disrupted the retail sector—by the time Bezos stepped down as CEO in 2021—Amazon had over 1.3 million employees and was valued at over $1.7 trillion!!!
Though controversial for Amazon’s cutthroat management tactics, Bezos built one of the world’s most influential tech companies and changed the digital economy as we know it.
All from a humble start in his garage.
Andy Jassy, a longtime Amazon executive, succeeded Jeff Bezos as Amazon’s CEO in July 2021, when the company was valued at over $1.7 trillion.
Jassy led Amazon Web Services since its launch in 2006, where the cloud computing service helped subsidize Amazon’s e-commerce domination.
To Bezos, he was his technical and strategic right-hand-man.
Jassy is set up to lead Amazon to new heights.
He’s set his sights on prioritizing invention, customer obsession, and long-term thinking.
Jassy confronted significant challenges when he first became CEO, like increased antitrust scrutiny, unionization pressure, supply chain bottlenecks and the need to continue diversification.
Profits did drop under Jassy in 2022 amid a tech downturn and excess warehouse capacity—so lately; he’s been focused on spending on growing AWS and areas that reinforce Amazon’s vertical integration—like robotics and healthcare.
Both a public face for Amazon’s inventions and a fierce defender against critics in government, Jassy’s leadership in Amazon’s next era aims to prove he can take Bezos’s creation to the $2 trillion valuation mark and beyond.
Only a couple of years into his tenure as Bezos’s successor, Jassy is still writing the following chapters on Amazon’s monumental impact on consumers, technology, and the global economy.
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