They could do one better and cheaper - start their own coin, make Amazon accept that (and no other coins) and it&#x27;d probable dwarf bitcoin in market cap.

I think he&#x27;s probably bored at this point.  Whats there really left to do at Amazon?  AWS and the website are eating the world. He&#x27;s 57. Why not at this point go play with his rockets and spend time inside that WaPo newsroom that he loves.

Hopefully the latter. We&#x27;ve got an excess of billionaires trying to mould society with their vast sums of wealth.Blue Origin would be a great use of his time. Massive long-term benefit to humanity, few implications on global governance or the lives of most individuals.Or his own private charter city, so people have to consent to live in his world.Or he could blow it all on yachts, hookers and blow.

His ex gave away 4.2 billion last December FWIW.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;30&#x2F;style&#x2F;mackenzie-scott-prisclila-chan-zuckerberg-melinda-gates-philanthropy.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;30&#x2F;style&#x2F;mackenzie-scott-pri...</a>

Maybe there&#x27;s a little PR FOMO? The former Mrs. Bezos is making a name for herself as a very generous philanthropist [0].[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;20&#x2F;business&#x2F;mackenzie-scott-philanthropy.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;20&#x2F;business&#x2F;mackenzie-scott-...</a>

Maybe he’ll take a cue from Bill Gates and get involved in philanthropy. Alternatively he might get more involved in Blue Origin?

I hope philanthropy, I expect space travel.

Maybe really take the reins of BO? The company has been floundering without strong leadership relative to SpaceX.

Become a supervilain&#x2F;superhero. Not much else to do with that kind of money.

He’d be better at it than the last guy, a low bar though.

run for president, seems like a thing for Billionaires these days.

I think the CEO as influencer is on the wane and with antitrust and regulatory reform coming we will be looking more for politicians who can unite and provide social leadership.  Trump took a lot of oxygen out of the room and now is a good time for up and comers like Buttieg and AOC.

It&#x27;s a good time for another CEO to take center stage at a different company. Any suggestions?

He mentioned a few focus areas:- Day 1 Fund- Bezos Earth Fund- Blue Origin- The Washington PostSo a combination of philanthropy, crazy cutting-edge tech, and media. He&#x27;ll still be pretty busy haha

From his email to staff:As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions. I’ve never had more energy, and this isn’t about retiring. I’m super passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have.

I suspect he will focus on his space venture (blue origin)... but maybe that is wishful thinking.That said, I think it can use his focus more than anything else (and he is investing 1B&#x2F;year in it)

End of an era. I wonder what he&#x27;ll do next.

Algos seem to be all over the place right now.  But I think they&#x27;re just confused by this news and the earnings report.

Kind of hard to tell how much the transition announcement is driving things given that they just announced predictably stellar Q4 results.

&#x27;?&#x27;After hours traders seem to like this move.

He&#x27;s becoming Executive Chair, so he&#x27;s not leaving the picture entirely.

AWS about to take over all those prime video projects

I just posted a reference to his purchase of 0.4 billion dollar boat.He is retiring. Amazon is outcome of purchase of many many companies just like Microsoft.Gates is retired and Microsoft is still buying companies even hotels; anything and everything has been bought with the cash acquired from US&#x27;s money printing machine.

I doubt he&#x27;s going to pull some big expenditure - with a net worth of 182BN USD there isn&#x27;t really an item available that would be &quot;a big expenditure&quot;.

I think retirement is more of a time to ponder life. I doubt he&#x27;s going to pull some big expenditure. He&#x27;ll probably invest in multiple companies.

Time to spend the cash.  The big money had been made.

Pretty sure that was meant to mean &quot;customer reviews&quot; the amazon product. See also in the list: &quot;marketplace&quot; which I don&#x27;t think they expect anyone to believe they invented either.

Could you point me to another merchant who offered customer-readable customer reviews before Amazon? I&#x27;m not saying there isn&#x27;t one, just that when we were implementing them, I was unaware of any precedents ...

Or insanely-fast shipping either, interstate  phone orders were being affordably delivered in less than 24 hours at least in the 1980s.

Pioneered is the key word here. The way Amazon does reviews has become something of the industry standard.

Amazon did not invent customer reviews.

Cloud Computing is uniquely an Amazon invention the way smartphones are uniquely an Apple invention.Which is to say there’s a sense in which you’re right and a sense in which this is an absurd statement..

Out of all those things the only two uniquely amazon are cloud computing and fast shipping.

&gt; We pioneered customer reviewsPerhaps, but you didn&#x27;t get them right (nobody did so far).&gt; 1-ClickReminds me of the guy who invented &quot;half-click&quot; buying, i.e. you buy on the mousedown event.

&quot; Amazon is also announcing today that Jeff Bezos will transition to the role of Executive Chair in the third quarter of 2021 and Andy Jassy will become Chief Executive Officer at that time.“Amazon is what it is because of invention. We do crazy things together and then make them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “If you do it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive. When you look at our financial results, what you’re actually seeing are the long-run cumulative results of invention. Right now I see Amazon at its most inventive ever, making it an optimal time for this transition.” &quot;Here&#x27;s the quote.

We&#x27;ve changed the URL to that from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ir.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;news-release&#x2F;news-release-details&#x2F;2021&#x2F;Amazon.com-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-Results&#x2F;default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ir.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;news-release&#x2F;news-release-details...</a>. Thanks!

Bezos email to employees: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;email-from-jeff-bezos-to-employees" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;email-from-jef...</a>

I&#x27;m pretty sure you&#x27;re wrong.Most people have no idea what AWS is, but know what Amazon the consumer business is.AWS is only well known among tech circles.

Ask outside tech bubble and 9&#x2F;10 never even heard of AWS,even though half of the things they use run on it. The retail front-end is the PR, while AWS is a magic money tree.

without Andy (and AWS), I&#x27;d posit that Jeff would just be another regular old billionaire who&#x27;d own a sports team, but otherwise folks would not know much about.

I&#x27;d say AWS + first-party products and services (Prime Video, Echo, Kindle, Grocery delivery). I can definitely see their pure retail business take more and more of a back seat as time goes on.

I see the future of Amazon as ~ 100% AWS. Do you think this will change that outcome?

a living wage (as defined by the internet&#x27;s favorite vermont politician) is immiserating?

Will he stop immiserating the warehouse workers that work for them?

I worked for AWS for a few years under Andy. He&#x27;s a good pick for CEO of that company.

I was a (young) kid when I overheard a news report making fun of an internet bookstore calling itself Amazon.It&#x27;s amazing what he&#x27;s been able to do. Good for him.

Shipping books was&#x2F;is one of the cheapest things to ship, as they need minimal packaging, and the USPS offers a special media mail rate. This allowed him to work out all the logistics behind the scenes, and then make incremental improvements to handle other products.

There was competition. Bookstacks.com had been in business with a telnet-only interface for more than a year before Amazon.As noted by others, the shipping cost-to-item-average-cost ratio is precisely why Jeff chose books to start with. But yes, he also looked way out (even if he couldn&#x27;t see as clearly as some people seem to think he could).

By his words[1] it was because books had a large possible inventory, allowing him to build a store larger than any one physical store could manage.Though i imagine a lot of reasons justified books.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM</a>

When I was working in Tokyo in the 90&#x27;s, English technical books were somewhat hard to come by and fairly expensive so co-workers would often pool together to do bulk purchases. There was one book site that I don&#x27;t remember the name of now that almost always beat Amazon when it came to purchase price plus shipping at least in the beginning so we would always comparison shop. Maybe not sexy but online bookstores were certainly something of a lifeline in our case and I would often look forward to the arrival of a book order like a kid waiting for Christmas.

Interestingly, it seemed at the time that books were just about the least exciting things being sold on the Internet, and the shipping costs looked fatal to the business. You could buy just about anything, and everybody was going out of business trying to compete on big ticket items like electronics and movies and games and beanie babies. Not much competition on books online (anybody remember the “Duwamish book store demo” from Microsoft?). It seems to me that he looked way out and thought about how things would be done 20 years hence, regardless of what made sense at the time, and chose to start on the piece of that future with the weakest competition.

Even then the P&#x2F;E has only been ridiculous for a few of those years - the stock is valuable, but the company walks the walk too.

Amazon&#x27;s stock went up like a rocket since its IPO. Wall Street didn&#x27;t laugh at Bezos.

I think AWS ended up subsidizing the rest of the company. Amazon stumbled backwards into a highly profitable business that allowed them to continue playing the long game to create a monopoly in distribution.

Wow.  I still remember when Amazon started as an online bookstore selling books and people kind of laughed at the idea, and the time Amazon kept losing money and refused to post an earning and people got mad.  Amazing long game.

As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions. I’ve never had more energy, and this isn’t about retiring. I’m super passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have.

I remember meeting Jeff over snacks at the O&#x27;Reilly Etech conference in 2003. We talked about art, if I recall...

Don&#x27;t know why you&#x27;re being downvoted, those interviews were vile. They were just probing for self-incriminating answers and when they didn&#x27;t moved on.

He probably had enough, after all the nastiness coming from DC.For instance, being paraded in front of Congress committees so each member can get a little sound bite shitting on him.Truly, we didn&#x27;t deserve Bezos. Maybe he&#x27;s realized that.

He had pushed a lot of it down to Jeff Wilke (retail business) and Jassy (AWS) but apparently wanted more time for other projects.

It is as mundane as they want it to be. It mostly comes off that way because the majority of CEOs are the MBA types. If you look at Steve Jobs, Elon Musk etc., their day to day involvement could hardly be called mundane.

The CEO role comes with a lot of mundane responsibility (and potential liability) that I’m surprised he held onto for so long. I would expect a guy like Jeff to want to get on another rocket ship (unsure if literal or figurative).

Jassy was the CEO of AWS. I&#x27;m not sure what role he had regarding leadership of the entire company, but his title was CEO of AWS.

Weren&#x27;t Jassy and Wilke co-CEOs already? I guess Jassy was &quot;CEO&quot; of AWS and now gets to be (actual-) CEO of Amazon.com?

Perhaps following Larry and Sergey&#x27;s Alphabet playbook - gracefully fade into the background so your legacy can be untarnished!

Either doesn&#x27;t want to or recognizes that anyone not him, i.e. not as polarizing, would be more effective.

I wonder if he doesn&#x27;t want to be the one to deal with what looks like increased regulatory pressure…

Note that Bezos announced that he will retire...in Q3 2021. Amazon uses the calendar fiscal year, so this means sometime Jul-Sep.AWS head will take over as new CEO.

Function should be obvious - the vast majority in fulfillment centers and logistics and customer service.

And pay. With the discussion in other threads about whether corporations should be able to compete with nations, is Amazon&#x27;s wealth-distribution better or worse than various nations?

Would be interesting to know how they are split by geography and function

The downvotes must mean that, as always, welfare is missing the point.

Although I know what you mean, in Amazon&#x27;s case the people making the &quot;value&quot; are paid very well. Its blunt but true, Amazon prints money from AWS not selling lightbulbs.Similarly, the idea that if you put 1.3 Million warehouse staff in a big room Amazon will come out the other side is really really stupid.

&gt; Today, we employ 1.3 million talented, dedicated peopleAll those creating the value. Many of them having poor working conditions and living off social welfare programs. One guy at the top skimming everything. Is he really worth all those billions? Could he survive on a little less and share with those doing the work? Or is his contribution really more than all those million combined..?

They had about 35,000 employees at the beginning of 2011. We struggle to hire a handful of developers per year :D

Listening to cbell rip someone apart in the weekly ops meeting while watching the #wtf peanut gallery whilst sipping my coffee are probably my fondest memories of working at AWS

Yes, a bit of shakeup at the top.  Jassy now CEO, Dave Clark stepping into Jeff Wilke&#x27;s role as head of retail. I assume Charlie Bell will step up as head of AWS.

Anyone that high up in Amazon is going to be laughing all the way to the bank regardless.

Sounds like Jeff Wilke felt a little bit left out?

My mental image is that people want to spin off AWS for society’s benefits because Amazon grew too big and abuses the integration. Amazon squarely resisting this idea seems uncontroversal.

It buys you time. You tell the antitrust: give us a few more months, we&#x27;ll find a new CEO and then spin out the company. IMHO.

AWS is arguably worth more than Amazon.com - so it might be that AWS is going to spin out the website instead of the other way around.

Antitrust aside, has there ever been a business reason to split up Amazon? I doubt anyone inside the company ever took that talk seriously.

That does tell us something about the corporate structure though - whilst a lot of people think AWS would be better off being spun out, there&#x27;s no way you hire the head of AWS as CEO of Amazon if you think that&#x27;s the direction forward.

Or it tells you about the people who compete for top jobs.

He retired because he wasn’t going to get Ceo. This tells you’ve lot about the future of amazon.

Nah, its just that you&#x27;ll have to change your perspective of customer support. Any questions will be answered in 5 days by pointing to the FAQ and each response will take an additional 5 days. If fact, you&#x27;ll probably find the answer yourself before support helps you. Finally, the feedback mechanism will be so generic as to be useless.Unless you want to pay 10% of your order for expedited service. Then those days drop from 5 to 3.&#x2F;s

AWS support is pretty great in my experience. That’s with a paid plan, but I consider it great even for a paid plan. Typically instant chat with someone who can usually fix it is a game changer.I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect free support for such a technical product to be as good as that for the retail site.

I just hope Andy Jassy will not bring the AWS customer support to retail, because Amazon is screwed if he does.

It was public knowledge that Bezos stopped running Amazon day-to-day a while ago. It was headed by the two execs under him (Andy Jassy for AWS and Jeff Wilke for retail). Jassy even had the CEO (of AWS) title. With Wilke announcing his retirement a few months ago, Jassy was the clear frontrunner to take over from Bezos. In hindsight I guess Wilke retired because Jassy was picked over him. The timing of the announcement is unexpected, but nothing else.

Yeah maybe he should&#x27;ve worked a few more years to shore up his net worth a bit, a 50% drop in the market might force him back to work

Yeah, he&#x27;s just one health crisis from complete bankruptcy.  What if he goes to the hospital complaining of a headache and they charge him $182 billion for an aspirin?

Whether this is satire or serious, I love it.

Yup health insurance is particularly expensive for older Americans!

Super risky.Assuming he lives past 100, and gets zero interest&#x2F;return on his ~200 billion net worth, he’ll need to somehow keep his spending below about a thousand dollars a minute to survive.Sounds like real poverty to me...

Retiring at 57 is pretty risky. Hopefully his savings hold out. He&#x27;s looking at 30 more years of life. Personally I would be too cautious to leave this early.Edit: risking -&gt; risky; fixed life sentence

That&#x27;s because Ive left. The product pipeline is now getting to the post Ive point and you can see a distinct change.IMHO Apple are stepping back from the form over function precipice and are being more pragmatic, to the benefit of customers.

&gt; Hopefully the transition for Amazon is as (seemingly) seamless as the Steve Jobs&#x2F;Tim Cook transition was for Apple.I like Apple, but there is quite a seam with the Jobs&#x2F;Cook transition. That seam is the overly minimalistic industrial design patterns witnessed in the butterfly keyboard, vanishing ports, trashcan Mac, etc. They seem to finally be coming around on this.

Crazy, he&#x27;s one of those guys that you think will just be at the top forever. Hopefully the transition for Amazon is as (seemingly) seamless as the Steve Jobs&#x2F;Tim Cook transition was for Apple.

&gt; Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.Why?Bonus question: Why should governments be allowed to get that big?

&gt; Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.Ok, I&#x27;ll bite. Why? It&#x27;s not like there&#x27;s some natural law against it, so you need to provide an argument for why you think they shouldn&#x27;t.

&gt; It&#x27;s $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc.&gt; Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.Or maybe we should convince a larger swath of humanity to unite behind an idea larger than &quot;nationhood&quot; or &quot;my country&quot;.

I would say in terms of anti-monopoly, that there is some natural cutoff that companies are forced to split.  For instance, AWS and Amazon can easily be two separate companies as the missions and revenue streams of each are vastly different.

It has 1.3 million employees and employs a great deal more through its distribution partnerships, sellers using Amazon storefront and so on. The amount of folks who rely on Amazon for their living is probably comparable to some of those countries you listed.

I think corporations should get absurdly large.You know, I’m saying things without substantiating them. No offense, but anti-Corp is cool these days. Virtue signaling without thinking on one’s own.

&gt; Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.Countries either. Why did we allow it?

I don&#x27;t get the comparison here tbh. The valuation of of AMZN is based on assets + future time-discounted dividends. While, those wealth figures for Saudi Arabia are just assets. After all Saudi Aramco, which is mostly state owned, is worth about 1T.

Why should a global business never exceed the GDP of a 4 million person nation?  I don&#x27;t see any inherent connection.

That&#x27;s the equivalent of saying &quot;corporations should be limited in what services they provide and to how many people&quot;. And I disagree with that.

First, Amazon isn’t even worth as much as the oil under Saudi Arabia, second, why is it better that murderer Mohammed Bin Salman controls that much wealth than Jeff Bezos?

Market Cap is stupid.What&#x27;s the value of 1 million shares of Amazon stock? If every single share of Amazon stock went on the market today, would it be worth share price * number of units? Hell no.

&gt; Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.Make your case instead of dropping your groupthink everywhere. Why? And: What is the maximum size a corporation should be allowed to grow? Who gives that permission now?

&gt; Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.This is partly why I left Google.

Don’t compare revenue to GDP.  Especially for a low margin business.

I’m glad Amazon is larger and more powerful than most nation states.

For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand.It&#x27;s $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc.Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.

&quot;...probably for the rest of his life.&quot;Ya think?

&gt; at this point [he] does NOT have to work anymore...probably for the rest of his life.that was already true a long time ago, you don&#x27;t need to be one of the wealthiest people on the planet before you don&#x27;t have to work anymore.

Bezos&#x27;s net worth was $12 billion after Amazon&#x27;s IPO in 1997. Him and a dozen generations after him would be set for life on that much wealth. Whatever the reason for stepping away might be, it&#x27;s definitely not money.As a company Amazon is definitely too big to fail at this point. Its fate will probably be like Google&#x27;s after Page&#x2F;Brin&#x2F;Schmidt stepped away. In the worst case it will start to fade away in another decade or two.

With his wealth he doesn’t need to work anymore since a long time. See e.g. here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mkorostoff.github.io&#x2F;1-pixel-wealth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mkorostoff.github.io&#x2F;1-pixel-wealth&#x2F;</a>In my opinion there is hardly a justification or a _need_ for an individual to own billions. But I think we haven’t found a good way to redistribute money, apart from billionaires self-pledging to give their wealth away.

I think you pass the point of not having to work somewhere prior to 130B net worth.I&#x27;m worried about what happens to Amazon with Bezos gone. A good outcome would be something like Apple and Tim Cook. A bad one would be Microsoft and Ballmer, it will take a while to see which type this ends up being.Either way losing Bezos as CEO is a bummer.

&gt; probably for the rest of his life.
At a net worth of $1 billion and assuming he lives to 100 that is $23 million dollars a year to spend, which reasonably, he could only spend around $5-10 Million if he tried.He is worth what, $150 Billion? By the fall he probably will be.He could find a group of 10,000 people of the same age, spit the money evenly and each person would have $340k per year, a large enough sum to reasonably travel all year long around the world for each person never working agin.Nobody should ever have a $1B worth.

Yeah - the man is 57, and at this point does NOT have to work anymore...probably for the rest of his life.Looks like he still intends to run his philanthropies, Blue Origin, and the Post, but after the type of run he has had, he&#x27;s probably taking some more free time while he&#x27;s healthy.I try not to fall into the &quot;cult of personality&quot; trap, but Amazon is where it is _because_ of Bezos, and it&#x27;ll be fascinating to watch how the transition plays out with the Jassy era.

Absolutely. I could see him shifting more in the Gates or Musk kinda life, funding more fun projects or philanthropies. Not gonna lie running Amazon after 20 decades probably isn&#x27;t as fun as running an aerospace company or other pet projects. He probably has lots of ideas he wouldn&#x27;t mind throwing money at and investing in.

I imagine he&#x27;s pretty burnt out of running the day to day.  Time for something new after 2 decades.  Love or hate Amazon it has been a force on the planet.

All of that and he’s probably exiting because he’s jealous of Musks’ success.

retail IS the economy.Sure, you can pump money into building fighter jets and aircraft carriers, but those don&#x27;t last long, nor are they helpful for economy in the long term.In the long term, the only backbone of the economy is making and selling things to people that they want, a.k.a retail.

What should kill Amazon is public protocols and fast cryptocurrency transactions.

Some companies are moving towards selling directly to consumers, especially if they have a brand to protect. Nike is pulling back from retail a bit and focusing on their own website and app to promote and sell their products.The flip side is Amazon has empowered a lot of smaller manufacturers to get nearly direct access to consumers. Especially Chinese firms but even some small American companies have benefitted from the huge base of customers Amazon gives them access too.

Another thing I find interesting is that Amazon&#x27;s main business is so common that there&#x27;s a single word for it: retail. They&#x27;re just yet another middleman between distributors and consumers. Not long ago, a lot of the business world thought Walmart was the indisputable retail king. Amazon proved there&#x27;s still room for growth in retail.Will this simple thing called retail produce yet more trillion dollar companies, or is it running out of gas? Will there be an Amazon killer? History suggests yes.

US printing machines has funded the share printing machine that has allowed them to keep buying other companies.

&gt; I still remember when Amazon was only selling Books. People laughedDid we? I just remember thinking oh neat and buying a bunch of books.

To me he looks like retiring. Working on new projects while someone else is CEO hasn&#x27;t worked out well. Ask Bill Gates, Steve Jobs (when Scully became CEO) and Larry Page. Bezos had been buying massive houses and spending a lot more time there. He had been seen with his girlfriend a lot more these days. Before his affair, he barely had time for anything other than Amazon. I think he is done with all ambitions more or less.

From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;email-from-jeff-bezos-to-employees" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;email-from-jef...</a>&gt;Fellow Amazonians:&gt;I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence.This reads to me as Jeff Bezos doesn&#x27;t want the boring job of running AWS and Amazon anymore. He want something new,&gt;As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.There are plenty of Growth left in Amazon and AWS. But that is not as exiting as Blue Origin or Funding other initiative via Day 1 Fund.I still remember when Amazon was only selling Books. People laughed, Media Laughed, and I guess most of us laughed.Amazon is now a ~$1.6 Trillion Dollar Company.What an era.

I feel it can be an uncertain transition when a founder&#x2F;entrepreneur steps down, and an employee of the company takes the place. Looking forward to how Amazon will evolve under the new leadership.

I&#x27;d argue that the customer experience of Amazon has declined dramatically in the last few years. Maybe there should be more internal viewings of that video.

Amazon&#x27;s customer support is mediocre at best. I tried to buy something from them and the card transaction failed because I had some protections in place. Instead of them trying again, they asked for all kinds of documents to prove the ownership. I sent them a receipt from a local store, but it wasn&#x27;t good enough for them. I guess they don&#x27;t want my money :-)

That video is pure gold. Lots of lessons you can use even today for any business.

Do people do any analysis anymore or do they just repeat memes? i.e. &quot;we put the customer first&quot;.For reference, I&#x27;m someone who hadn&#x27;t used amazon (i&#x27;m in Australia, and I&#x27;ve just had no need). These holidays was my first real experience with the amazon brand and the amazon website.What I saw was an incredibly user hostile site: reviews mashed together from all over the world, and you can&#x27;t even be sure whether they&#x27;re reviewing the right product or the seller. Search that doesn&#x27;t work and you&#x27;re never really sure what you&#x27;re getting and from whom. I was searching for keyboard trays and it quickly became apparent various products were all the same but just re-labelled cheap chinese output.When I went to check out, i had at least 3 dark patterns encountered where Amazon was directly trying to screw me: trying to trick me to sign up for prime, promising free shipping on the click but then default you out of it when you check out until you go searching for it, and continually spamming me with offers for whatever their streaming service is.They weren&#x27;t &quot;customer first&quot;, they were actively customer hostile. I don&#x27;t understand how this keeps getting repeated, unless their tech side is completely different from their consumer side...

I think Amazon&#x27;s search quality going down the drain lately. Too much&#x27;s been taken by promotions.

The last experience I had with Amazon customer service was so bad I decided to stop using them as much as is physically possible.  If your situation does not fit in a simple bucket, they will force it into one even if its bad for them and you at the same time.

And here is the video from 1999 [1] showing his obsession with customer which is why customer support is in the DNA of Amazon1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vxwjzVW7z5o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vxwjzVW7z5o</a>

&gt; Jeff&#x27;s pitch at the time (1997); so on point, so precise:Agreed! He knew exactly what he was doing.Interesting that he talks about attention being a scarce resource. Things did not improve from that point....

Thank you for sharing the video. I liked seeing Bezos on startup phase. I had not heard the story, so I learned that he started as a quant on Wall St and left that job to start Amazon later in life.  Many people expect tech startups to happen in your college dorm room, but Bezos took a completely different route.

I think cryptocurrency is more akin to personal computer. DeFi- the internet.

What else seems like a promising field that one could go 100% into right now to bet on?Biotech&#x2F;bioinformatics&#x2F;bioengineering.

I am in robotics and it seems well poised to grow. There’s a lot of big problems left to solve at the research level but deep learning seems to be slowly knocking down big problems left and right.

Yes cryptocurrencies are one thing but look at the possibilities afforded with having a decentralized, distributed ledger in all areas of life. Having a source of truth in things like law or politics. This would be a fundamental shift for society as a whole not just finance.

Quibble: to me &quot;This is day one&quot; is less about &quot;what market can we get in on the ground floor of and ride a wave&quot;. It is more to underscore we are driving the innovation or market and that we are always starting from zero, never too late to change &#x2F; pivot and we&#x27;re still aggressively growing everything, or that is the goalline.That isn&#x27;t meant to take away from your question. As a developer I&#x27;m often focused on leaf concerns. Your question is more about broad strokes and I have to remind myself to think about fundamental changes.

&quot;this is day 1&quot;.I&#x27;m wondering for what else it is day 1, right now.I know cryptocurrencies have been booming, it&#x27;s not clear exactly if they will continue to boom but the space is already so big that one has to really read a lot to catch up.What else seems like a promising field that one could go 100% into right now to bet on?

In what way, if you don&#x27;t mind? I always have the impression that he is practical to a fault, and consistent in his prescription for engineering above all.

I was at that Startup School lecture in 2008. I still have strong memories of his body language and affect. He wasn&#x27;t at all what I was expecting

Ostensibly it was going to take over the world? I think you mean to say it was non obvious. But unless we’ve split timelines that is exactly what was going to happen.

He sounds like a time traveler from the future. He talks like it&#x27;s a given that the Internet is going to take over the world but back then it really wasn&#x27;t.

&gt; This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name.Jeff&#x27;s pitch at the time (1997); so on point, so precise: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM</a>&gt; The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, “What’s the internet?” Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while.Here&#x27;s Jeff explaining the Internet (at a TED talk): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vMKNUylmanQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vMKNUylmanQ</a>&gt; Invention. Invention is the root of our success. We’ve done crazy things together, and then made them normal... If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. And that yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.Jeff speaking about innovation, invention (based on first principles), making data-driven decisions (and also when to not trust data), learned helplessness at Stanford (2005): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WhnDvvNS8zQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WhnDvvNS8zQ</a>&gt; When times have been good, you’ve been humble.Heh. Reminds me of this 2008 lecture where Jeff is selling AWS to startup school students: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=6nKfFHuouzA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=6nKfFHuouzA</a> Classic.&gt; Amazon couldn’t be better positioned for the future. We are firing on all cylinders, just as the world needs us to.Not sure about that last part, Jeff.So long, and thanks for all the fish.

I like that Jassy is taking over. He really helped transform the world with AWS and Bezos’ stubbornness to keep failing is what allowed that business to grow.

At some point you just have so much money that continue working full-time doesn’t really make much sense

Hopefully this will precipitate a change in how engineers are treated? Maybe they’ll be nicer to their employees and&#x2F;or stop the practice of arbitrarily culling large portions of engineering talent..

Same here. In 1998, my aunt recommended I read &#x27;The Call&#x27; by John Hersey. Local bookstores didn&#x27;t have it, Amazon did.

I still have the very first book I bought from Amazon when they were a very young company. Not too many choices. I bought &quot;Relativity : the Special and General Theory&quot; - Einstein.Decades later. We see in fact they are &quot;to the moon&quot; financially and with Blue Origin. Well played. Well played.

Back before the .com crash Amazon was one of the few .coms with an actual business plan.

There were those who saw his play. However there was another group of people that wondered the Amazon approach at that time.

Obviously Amazon employees would be bought in. It was people on the outside that laughed at him: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jimpethokoukis&#x2F;status&#x2F;1231245913764638720" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jimpethokoukis&#x2F;status&#x2F;123124591376463872...</a>

I was there as a developer and a consumer. I don’t remember anyone laughing at him for selling books. It was an obvious play to most of us.

Some did. It&#x27;s quite easy using hindsight bias to see how everything worked out.

He went to Princeton because he was smart, not because his family was rich. It isn&#x27;t a school of billionaires or something. The majority of Ivy League enrollment is regular kids from working class families. They all have the best need-based scholarship programs in the country.His dad was a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer at Exxon.

I always find comments like this interesting. This is similar to the comments I see whenever anyone says something remotely nice about a wealthy person on HN. What does going to Princeton have anything to do with being laughed at for selling books on the internet ? Who claimed he had a rags-to-riches story ? It oozes insecurity and envy.

BS dude.   He wasn&#x27;t laughed at.   The man went to Princeton.  Right next to other billionaires like Andy Florence.  His family was rich etc... He was already a millionaire.  It&#x27;s not a rags-to-riches story by any stretch.

There are a million titles, so no physical store will be able to compete with a warehouse. There are no refrigeration or unusual logistics with books. They are fungible: generally speaking, one book is as good as another, identical book.

Profit margin and ability to ship&#x2F;store easily.

Something other folks haven’t mentioned yet but it also means direct access to middle class households which are more likely to be buying books.

It’s quite simple: generally standardized product sizes and media mail. Don’t think it’s farfetched to say Amazon benefited greatly from USPS in its early days.

I&#x27;m curious, what was the reason for starting with books?

Love him or hate him, Jeff Bezos has been a legendary figure in the world of business for over 25 years now. His focus on the long term has led to the tremendous success Amazon has undergone.When he started selling just books, he was laughed at by some people; but he had a why behind starting off with books. One thing is certain, Bezos has stayed consistent on his principles. His annual letters to his shareholders contain a lot of business wisdom.I wrote about him covering the theme: Thinking as a means of leverage in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leveragethoughts.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;jeff-bezos-amazon-and-thinking-as" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leveragethoughts.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;jeff-bezos-amazon-an...</a>

Clearly the CEO should have no formal business training, regardless of their prior work.

An MBA has always been the way to signal that you want to move from engineering to senior management.  Almost every senior manager I&#x27;ve met with an engineering background has an MBA (or a PhD).  I have to assume that MBA programs teach the kind of stuff one would need to know to rise up the ranks.

Errr...both Sundar and Satya were software engineers first?

Three of the four have engineering degrees and have previously worked as engineers. Maybe having an MBA on top is not a bad thing to run a trillion-dollar company?

Don&#x27;t hold having an MBA against Jassy :). I have been in those ops meetings at AWS when Andy Jassy and Charlie Bell used to hold court. There wasn&#x27;t much MBA-speak there. Jassy can burrow through deeply technical issues, spot fundamental flaws and process a monumental amount of information on the spot  - skills they sure as hell don&#x27;t teach at any B-school I know of...

&gt; Why don’t non-MBAs manage to get to the top?Because smart and talented people who are interested in business or administration tend to go on and study it. It’s self selecting. I think maybe you are imprinting “MBA” as some sort of personality? I know designers, coders and biologists with MBAs. It’s just an accreditation.Every business has its roots or foundation with makers. But that doesn’t mean a chef should be running McDonalds, or a woodworker should be running Home Depot...

I&#x27;m as skeptical of MBAs as you are but this is a bad take considering Pichai and Nadella were both actual engineers first.

The takeover of tech by MBAs continues. It has now happened at the top 4 largest tech companies in the US.We will have Apple (Tim Cook), Amazon (Andy Jassy), Alphabet (Sundar Pichai), Microsoft (Satya Nadella &amp; Steve Ballmer) all taking over from non-MBA founders. Facebook is next in size and has Sheryl Sandberg as COO but don&#x27;t know if Mark Zuckerberg would ever hand over the reins.Why don&#x27;t non-MBAs manage to get to the top?

MS completely missed on mobile phones and tablets, despite trying so many times at it. The “Windows everywhere” approach prevented them from doing what really had to be done (make something new for these new devices). That was all under the Ballmer era.It’s only now that they have a new CEO who is happy to pursue other approaches that they have been able to start going in a better direction again.

But they did have a rough patch under Ballmer.

What is it you perceive that happened to MS? They appear to be doing well and are the top competitor to Amazon&#x27;s AWS.

Apple under Cook is a juggernaut.  I&#x27;m not sure why you would use Apple as an example.  Same with MS and Satya.  You could argue MS floundered with Ballmer.

&gt; I suspect Jassy&#x27;s selection had to do with fears that a pick from the retail side may see Jassy as a threatAmazon had (has) three CEOs: Bezos as overall CEO, Jassy as CEO of AWS, and Jeff Wilke as CEO of the &quot;Consumer&quot; business, i.e. the retail operation.Wilke announced last year that he would be leaving and that SVP of Operations Dave Clark would replace him as head of the Consumer business.The question is whether Bezos chose Jassy and that made Wilke leave, or whether Wilke leaving left Jassy as the only remaining choice to replace Bezos.

Google isn’t doing all that well under Pichai, they haven’t launched a successful product under him since Chromebooks (I guess GCP, but when you are that size and &lt;10% of market share, I don’t know if it’s successful), and they are just coasting on ads, YouTube and GSuite. Whereas Apple (say what you will about Cook) has launched AirPods, the Apple Watch and Apple Silicon-based Macs, which are all raking in cash. It’s possible that Google is only ever going to be an ads company, but based on their corporate rhetoric I don’t think that was the goal.Apple Silicon Macs aren’t really raking in cash yet, but Mac sales are up $1B in the last quarter, so by time transition is complete they will be.

Apple is doing quite well under Cook. Same with Google under Pichai. Microsoft had some pains during the Balmer years, but I think that&#x27;s partially due to the anti-trust suit making them gunshy and Balmer being a generally poor choice as a tech CEO, but they are doing very well with Nadella.I expect Amazon to be as ambitious as ever. Though, I am slightly afraid of a shift in focus towards AWS over retail. But I suspect Jassy&#x27;s selection had to do with fears that a pick from the retail side may see Jassy as a threat and may seek to undermine AWS in an effort to keep him in check.

I think it’s more the case that so many years have passed that it’s not like they were likely to fail. They just failed to succeed quite as much as their original CEOs could have made them. Steve left Tim a cash machine.

They are not. On the surface revenues keeps growing, profits are enormous but underneath there are virtually no new product lines. If you look at Microsoft of 1990s, there were new $1B business each year - MSSQL, Sharepoint, Dynamics etc etc. For Apple, Jobs made it a point for one new product line every 2-3 years. For Google, you had new stuff like Gmail, Maps keep coming. Now its mostly barren land. Amazon had a lot going on with Alexa, pharmacy, Fire tablets, prime video etc. Don&#x27;t expect these stuff 2-3 years down the road with new business suit at the helm.There are real impact of not having a &quot;product person&quot; at helm. Business suits will squeeze out revenues and profits no matter what but there are no more tech that truly leap frogs existing art.

Apple and Microsoft are arguably much better off today with their new leaders than they might&#x27;ve been. I don&#x27;t see your point?I think Facebook, too, could use a new face at the top as a matter of fact.

Looks like a typical MBA business suit to me. Could you elaborate on vision&#x2F;technical aspect? I&#x27;d think he would delegate those to others.

Big difference: Andy Jassy is an execution machine, AND has a really good sense of vision and strategy. AND has worked at Amazon for ~25 years.Source: my humble opinion, and I worked at AWS and met him several times.

I&#x27;d guess that Bezos&#x27;s genes are pretty well baked into the company.With Jobs, it sounded like there was a singular personality role that was a chaotic influence in the company. That wasn&#x27;t the only thing that made Apple great, but were people throughout the company inspired to be more like Jobs?

That’s actually a really good example too. The fact I didn’t shows how far they’ve slipped of late.

I’m just going to piss into the wind a little. After seeing what happened to Microsoft and Apple after they lost their founder CEOs, I don’t welcome this news as freely as others might. We’re not necessarily likely to see the company go directions that are for the better. (Maybe though this is really a rant about Cook. Amazon has lots of room to improve. Looking at all those forged brand names, for instance.)

&gt; they didn&#x27;t use any crazy javascript or front-end emerging tech- it was really basic HTML that drove the website and shopping cart.javascript didn&#x27;t exist.existing retail mail order couldn&#x27;t deal with &quot;almost in time&quot; inventory.there were no &quot;web frameworks&quot;.so it wasn&#x27;t a choice to write it ourselves, it was the only possible thing to do.

And amazon.com today still works exactly the same with JavaScript turned off or on.

I remember in the late 90&#x27;s when Amazon competed with Barnes and Noble (here in the US) to sell books online. An interesting fact that stuck with me about Amazon back then is they didn&#x27;t use any crazy javascript or front-end emerging tech- it was really basic HTML that drove the website and shopping cart.Their current logo, which smiles from A to Z (buy everything from A to Z!) hasn&#x27;t always been the logo- as they started out just selling books with a vastly different image.Here&#x27;s an interesting journey through the logos:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freelogodesign.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-amazon-logo-story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freelogodesign.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-amazon-lo...</a>

Great interview with Bezos from 1997<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;rWRbTnE1PEM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;rWRbTnE1PEM</a>

Email from Jeff Bezos to employees