Andy Jassy

From the age of three, Jassy went with his father on Sundays to New York RangersNew York RangersThe New York Rangers are a professional ice hockey team based in New York City. They compete in the National Hockey League (NHL) and play at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.Open the full entry games at Madison Square Garden, a 45-minute drive each way spent analyzing the game and that night’s line combinations. He recalled: “My Dad had season tickets to the Rangers since 1960.”⁠[1]

Jassy was there with his father when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup in 1994. He recalled: “It was one of the best days of my life, truthfully.”⁠[1]

As of January 29, 2025, Jassy was 57 years old.⁠[2]

Jassy holds an AB from Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry and an MBA from Harvard Business School.⁠[3]

During college he spent three summers at the local Fox affiliate in New York, working on Good Day New York, a show two months from its first broadcast, and went out with camera crews to cover Mets batting practice and New York Rangers practices. He described it: “It was like a startup. And I loved the experience.”⁠[4]

On April 19, 1989, writing as an advertising manager of The Harvard Crimson, Jassy published the op-ed “No Eds in Ads,” arguing that the paper should keep running Eastern ads during the Eastern labor dispute. He wrote that picking and choosing advertisers to ensure they were “politically correct” would be “an extremely bad business practice.”⁠[5]

When he graduated from college, Jassy wanted to be a sportscaster. He sent his resume reel to about 200 small TV markets, received only two offers in very remote places, did not take them, and instead became a production assistant at ABCABCABC (American Broadcasting Company) is an American commercial broadcast television network. It grew out of NBC’s Blue radio network, took its name after becoming independent in 1943, developed into a national television network after merging with United Paramount Theatres in 1953, was acquired by Capital Cities in 1985, and has been owned by The Walt Disney Company since 1996. With CBS and NBC it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks, and it is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry Sports.⁠[4]

To make extra money, he also coached his former high school soccer team and worked at a retail golf store. Six months later, a college classmate persuaded him to interview at the consumer products company where he worked, and he spent three years there as a product manager; he then left to try some of his own businesses, had short stints in sales and investment banking, and went back to graduate school.⁠[6]

At business school he managed a band and wrote a field study about it, considered starting a music management and label business, decided against it, and then looked for jobs on the West Coast.⁠[4]

In early 1997, after a trip to the Bay Area, Jassy received a voicemail from Amazon employee Jennifer Cast, who had found his resume in the resume book and offered him a 9 a.m. interview slot left open by a cancellation. After visiting Amazon in Seattle he decided to join, recalling: “I loved the mission, I loved the people, I loved the ambition, I loved the possibilities.”⁠[4]

He started at Amazon in May 1997, three days after his last final exam, at the age of 29.⁠[6][7]

He recalled that in 1997 he and his wife agreed on a bar napkin that he would stay at Amazon for a few years and then move back to New York City.⁠[8]

When he joined, Amazon had booked $15 million in revenue in 1996, sold only books, had no third-party marketplace and shipped only to addresses in the United States.⁠[9]

Before founding AWS, Jassy held various leadership roles across the company in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer areas, and served as Jeff Bezos’s chief of staff.⁠[3][10]

Amazon started pursuing AWS in 2003 and launched its first services in 2006. Jassy later wrote that building a business around a set of technology infrastructure services in the cloud “was not obvious” in 2003, and still was not in 2006. Jassy led the creation of AWS and managed it from its inception.⁠[9][10]

The 2003 AWS Vision document set out to build services as “primitives,” describing them this way: “Primitives are the raw parts or the most foundational-level building blocks for software developers.”⁠[11]

The original AWS vision included storage, compute, payments and human intelligence; storage and compute became linchpins, while others did not succeed. When the compute service EC2 launched, it offered a single instance type in one availability zone, ran only Linux, and had no auto-scaling, load balancing, block storage or private networking.⁠[6]

From April 2006 to April 2016, Jassy was Senior Vice President of Amazon Web Services.⁠[2]

AWS was initially attractive to start-ups such as DoorDashDoorDashDoorDash is a local commerce platform co-founded in 2013 by Tony Xu and others that connects consumers, merchants, and delivery couriers, with its business expanding from restaurant delivery to groceries, retail goods, merchant software, and on-demand logistics. The company went public in 2020, and its businesses include Wolt, Deliveroo, and SevenRooms.Open the full entry, Dropbox, Pinterest, Slack and Stripe. In 2008 NetflixNetflixNetflix is a U.S. entertainment company that offers streaming series, films, games, and live programming, headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997, it grew from online DVD rental into an international subscription entertainment service and also runs original content, advertising, and in-person experience businesses.Open the full entry decided to move all of its applications to AWS; large commitments from GE, Intuit and others followed, and the CIA later chose AWS to build its classified cloud.⁠[6]

As AWS growth accelerated, so did its capital expenditures, with a dilutive effect on free cash flow. At the 2014 AWS operating plan review, a senior leader opened the discussion by asking, “Tell me again why we’re doing this business?”⁠[6]

From April 2016 to July 2021, Jassy was CEO of Amazon Web Services.⁠[2]

AWS revenue grew 30% year over year in 2020 on a 2019 base of $35 billion, and 37% in 2021.⁠[12]

In 2017 Jassy was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the specialty of business, corporate and philanthropic leadership.⁠[10]

On September 5, 2018, Jassy joined Seattle Hockey Partners as one of its new local investors; the group, led by President and CEO Tod Leiweke and majority owner David Bonderman, was seeking an NHLNHLThe National Hockey League (NHL) is a men’s professional ice hockey league with clubs in the United States and Canada. Founded in Montreal in 1917, it comprises 32 teams and awards the Stanley Cup to its playoff champion.Open the full entry expansion team for Seattle. Adrian Hanauer was among the other investors who joined at the same time.⁠[1]

At the press conference he said: “I love the game, I think it’s the best live game and I think the Seattle community is going to love it.”⁠[1]

On February 2, 2021, Jeff Bezos announced in an email to employees that he would become Executive Chair of the Amazon Board in the third quarter of that year and that Jassy would become CEO. Bezos wrote: “Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have.”⁠[13]

In July 2021 Jassy became President and Chief Executive Officer of Amazon and serves on its Board of Directors.⁠[2][3]

On April 14, 2022, Amazon published Jassy’s first annual shareholder letter as CEO, in which he wrote: “this is the first time I’ve had the honor of writing our annual shareholder letter as CEO of Amazon.”⁠[12]

In the letter he noted that Amazon’s North America and International Consumer revenue grew 39% year over year in 2020 and 43% in the first quarter of 2021, so that the company realized the equivalent of three years’ forecasted growth in about 15 months. The letter closed with “It remains Day 1.”⁠[12]

In his second shareholder letter, published on April 13, 2023, Jassy described 2022 as one of the harder macroeconomic years in recent memory and wrote that reprioritizing resources had led to the decision to eliminate 27,000 corporate roles.⁠[9]

In his shareholder letter published on April 11, 2024, Jassy used the concept of primitives to explain how Amazon innovates, with examples of building blocks in logistics, health care and robotics. Asked about the next set of primitives enabling breakthrough experiences, he wrote, “I’d lead with Generative AI,” and described the technology in three layers: compute for training and inference, tools for building models, and applications.⁠[11]

On September 16, 2024, Jassy wrote in a memo to employees that from January 2, 2025, they would be expected in the office five days a week outside extenuating circumstances. He also asked each S-team organization to raise its ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, and created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for examples of unnecessary process.⁠[8]

He wrote in the memo: “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup.”⁠[8]

In his shareholder letter published on April 10, 2025, Jassy wrote that he had received almost 1,000 emails from employees with examples of bureaucracy, had read every one, and that the company had made more than 375 changes based on the feedback.⁠[14]

He wrote: “We continue to believe AI is a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know,” and said more than 1,000 generative AI applications were being built across Amazon.⁠[14]

On June 17, 2025, Jassy wrote in a memo to employees that, as generative AI and agents rolled out, Amazon would need fewer people doing some of today’s jobs and more people doing other types of jobs; he wrote that in the next few years “we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”⁠[15]

In his shareholder letter published on April 9, 2026, Jassy wrote that Amazon was not investing approximately $200 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 “on a hunch,” pointing to OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s commitment of over $100 billion as an example of customer commitments covering a substantial portion of AWS’s 2026 capital spending.⁠[6]

In the same letter he put the annual revenue run rate of Amazon’s chips business, including Graviton, Trainium and Nitro, at over $20 billion, and used the title of New Zealand band The Beths’ album “Straight Line Was a Lie” to describe the nonlinear path of long-term endeavors.⁠[6]

Sharing career advice with employees in 2025, Jassy said: “I really do believe it's perhaps as important to figure out what you don't want to do as what you want to do,” and that “an embarrassing amount of what makes people successful is attitude.”⁠[7]

Jassy has served as a Commissioner on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, on the Trust of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, on the Board of Trustees of Rainier Scholars, and as Chair of the Board of Directors of Rainier Prep.⁠[3]

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.⁠[16]

Amazon: Official website: https://www.aboutamazon.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]