Today, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced that starting in Q3, he"s going to be stepping down from his role as CEO and he"ll be transitioning to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board. He"ll be replaced by Andy Jassy.
Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore. The idea, which was completely innovative for its time, was that an online storefront could offer a much wider selection than any physical bookstore could, due to limited physical space. Due to the amount of books that exist, they were the perfect choice for a product to sell. After that, the company obviously expanded into other markets and became the "everything store" that we know today.
Amazon also expanded into web services, and today, AWS is the largest provider of cloud services in the world. And when AWS goes down, it can be felt just about everywhere. And let"s not forget that Amazon pretty much created the virtual assistant device market with its Echo devices, competing when it doesn"t even have a proper mobile platform to base services off of.
Most of his email to employees that announced him stepping down was a list of things he"s proud of as CEO, such as employing 1.3 million people. He touted invention, and when considering the things stated above, it"s easy to skip over customer reviews (vendors couldn"t imagine why Amazon would let people leave bad reviews for books when they"re in the business of selling them), one-click ordering, Prime shipping, Kindle, and more.
Bezos said that Amazon "couldn"t be better positioned for the future", and that millions of customers are depending on its services. In other words, Bezos feels like he"s leaving the company in a good place, rather than abandoning it while it"s in crisis. His final words to employees were, "Keep inventing, and don’t despair when at first the idea looks crazy. Remember to wander. Let curiosity be your compass. It remains Day 1."