Andy Jassy’s shift from life in the cloud to CEO of Amazon

Amazon.com’s new Chief Executive, Andy Jassy, who has overseen its fast-growing cloud computing business, says the key to long-term success is reinvention.

“You want to be reinventing when you are healthy, you want to be reinventing all the time,” Jassy, 53, said in December at a company forum. “You have got to be manancial and relentlessand tenacious about getting to the truth.... You have to know what’s working and what’s not working.”

He cited Netflix’s decision to cannibalise its own DVD rental business in favor of streaming.

Web services

The focus on the future is fitting given Jassy’s career is defined by his leading Amazon into a wholly new market: cloudcomputing. Amazon Web Services rents space and software programming for customers to run their technical operations onthe company’s servers. The arm now fuels Amazon’s profits and dominates the cloud market just as the company leads the the world of e-commerce.

Also read: Amazon Web Services takes cloud to space

Jassy, who joined Amazon in 1997, worked as a technical assistant for Bezos inthe early 2000s and was instrumental in leading the company’s push outside of book sales.

Jassy’s rise to the top job looked clear after long-time executive and consumer chief Jeff Wilke announced his retirement after more than two decades with the company. Wilke was Amazon’ssecond most high-ranking official along with Jassy.

Also read: Amazon Web Services CEO calls on Ministers to promote cloud computing

At the same speech in December, Jassy noted just 83 of the Fortune 500 companies from 1970 are still on the list - and only half are on the list from 2000.

“It’s really hard to build a business that sustains for along period of time,” Jassy said, adding, to stay on the list, he said, “You are going to have to reinvent yourself.”