If you follow tech news at all, you'll no doubt have heard that Jeff Bezos is stepping down from his position as CEO of Amazon. Throughout his 26 yr stint at the helm of Amazon, Bezos has become a household name. This notoriety is not without reason. During Bezos' tenure Amazon grew from a startup into its current valuation which is greater than Canada's GDP. He is arguably the most successful tech CEO in history. Those are some pretty big shoes to fill for his replacement, Andy Jassy, but Jassy is up to the task.

Jassy has been with Amazon since 1997 and is said to have dreamed up (along with Bezos) the cloud computing platform that we now know as AWS, which he also came to lead as chief executive. AWS accounts for a significant chunk of Amazon's revenue and overall valuation, but that isn't what makes it so impressive. Under Jassy's leadership AWS has held true to the key tactics that have allowed Amazon.com to dominate the market. His ability to leverage scale to drive cost down for customer at AWS is a perfect microcosm of the greater Amazon playbook and he executed it brilliantly.

He has deftly steered AWS though some sticky moral quandaries in the past years, and moved quickly when the situation has called for it. This is perhaps best illustrated in the swift decision to remove Parler from AWS following the events in Washington DC on January 6, 2021 do to what AWS's Trust & Safety Team called a "serious risk that this type of content will further incite violence." He will doubtless see more tests with the impending antitrust fight that seems to be brewing against the tech giants, ethical questions about surveillance tech and facial recognition software, and the potential unionization of Amazon's warehouse workers, but he is certainly an executive who seems more than capable of handling whatever comes his way.

If you have shares in Amazon, you can continue to rest easy with Andy Jassy in charge, and if you bought those shares in the 90's, please take me for a ride on your yacht.