'We look forward to providing great customer
experiences in India.'
IMAGE: Andy Jassy, CEO Amazon Web Services, will succeed Jeff Bezos as
Amazon's CEO. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters
Amazon.in
was set up in India seven years ago, but the US-based company established its
first centre 18 years ago in India in 2003 and incidentally it was focused on
its technology arm Amazon Web Services.
Amazon Web Services chief
Andy Jassy travelled to India in 2004 and celebrated Holi with the early small
team here.
Jassy is now replacing
billionaire founder Jeff Bezos as Amazon.com's next CEO.
"That was a great day.
It was around 2004 and during Holi celebrations. We had a missionary group of
people in Bangalore, from the very start," remembers Jassy, 53.
Amit Agarwal, global senior
vice president and country head, Amazon India, played a key role in setting up
the AWS centre.
Jassy also finds it
remarkable that in just 7 years since the launch of Amazon India, the firm has
digitised 2.5 million MSMEs, enabled cumulative exports worth $3 billion and
helped create nearly one million jobs in India till date.
"There is so much to
do (in India).
We have made a pledge to do more," says Jassy during a recent fireside
chat at the Amazon Smbhav event with Amit Agarwal.
"It's very early days,
with respect to what we are hoping to enable for customers in India. We are
incredibly excited about what has happened and are appreciative of the
partnerships across all the various types of the customers," says Jassy.
"We look forward to
partnering over a long period of time in providing great customer experiences
in India."
IMAGE: Amazon Founder, Chairman and CEO Jeff
Bezos. Photograph: Pool/Mandel Ngan/Reuters
Jassy had joined the
e-commerce giant 24 years fresh out of graduate school.
"It has been a crazy
adventure, and I feel very lucky to have been part of it," Jassy said at
the Amazon Smbhav event.
An alumnus of
Harvard University, Jassy was from the East Coast and his fiance, who is now
his wife, was from the West Coast in the US.
He had agreed to move to
the West Coast for three years, as long as she agreed that they would go back
to New York, where he grew up.
"We actually signed an
agreement on a napkin in a bar when we were making the decision. Of course, 24
years later, I've been told that the statute of limitations on that napkin has
expired."
IMAGE: Jeff Bezos has changed the way the planet
shops. Photograph: David Ryder/Getty Images
After taking his final exam
in May 1997, Jassy joined Amazon as part of the 8 people marketing group. Here
all the roles were too big for them.
In the beginning, he was
told to lead competitive intelligence and customer retention for the e-commerce
firm.
"I didn't know what I
was going to do, or what team I was going to be on," says Jassy.
He was later asked to work
on a project where the company explored other product categories Amazon should
consider getting into besides books.
He looked at areas such as
music, videos and software. It made more sense that time to build those
categories instead of buying them.
Jassy then went back to
build customer relationships and marketing team and also led the product
management, music business and marketing.
After that, an unusual role
came to Jassy, which was "shadowing" Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
"That was an
incredibly interesting experience where we spent all of our time together (with
Bezos) and debriefed every few days on how to divide and conquer and the
things to follow up on. For him (Bezos), it was a way to extend his
bandwidth," says Jassy.
Jassy left the 'shadow job'
in the fall of 2003 to explore whether there might be a business of building a
set of infrastructure services. This could comprise a technology infrastructure
platform where developers and companies could build their applications.
Later that business became
the cloud computing business Amazon Web Ser.
"I did not envision it.
When I thought about coming to Amazon, I really was attracted to Amazon because
it was very customer-oriented," says Jassy.
"I feel lucky I got to
be part of it all this time and it's still pretty early days for us."
IMAGE: The logo for Amazon Web Services. Photograph:
Chris Helgren/Reuters
The idea about AWS was not
a single 'Aha moment'. Amazon had a business called Merchant.com, where it
provided e-commerce technology to third party merchants.
It was a technology on the
Web sites of retailers such as Target, and Marks and Spencer.
Amazon had to decouple
various technology services that had become jumbled together and provide the
capabilities through application programming interfaces or APIs. That was a big
shift inside the company around the year 2000 and changed its views about
software.
The other reason behind
setting up AWS was the firm was taking a lot longer to deliver software
projects, despite adding software engineers.
"I was working for
Jeff (Bezos) at that time as his shadow and he was very frustrated by
this fact," says Jassy.
"We realised
internally that all of the teams were reinventing the wheel. They were all
building these infrastructure services that didn't scale beyond our
services."
The firm later realised
that it is really good at building infrastructure services deepened stacks and
platforms such as compute, storage, database, analytics and machine learning.
It had to become good at
building and running reliable and cost-effective scale data centres as the
retail business was a low margin business.
In 2003, none of the key
proponents of the Internet operating system had been built.
Amazon had always thought
of itself as a technology company and decided to build the key components of
that internet operating system.
"I left that 'shadow
job' to go work with a group of people to explore how to build a set of
services that allowed any developer to build any application they could imagine
on top of our infrastructure services," says Jassy about starting work on
AWS in 2003.
Now the pandemic has also
accelerated the adoption of cloud computing technology by small and medium
businesses as well as large enterprises.
Cloud is having a
substantial impact on new firms and existing companies to reinvent themselves.
Jassy says one of the key
reasons for the adoption of the cloud is saving costs which includes the
investments in setting up data centres and paying only for the services that
the companies consume.
Also, another important
reason is that it allows firms to innovate at a much rapid rate.
"Agility and speed of
innovation is the number one reason."
Jassy said some of the most
successful startups built their businesses from scratch on top of AWS. These
include companies such as Pinterest, Airbnb, Stripe, Slack and Instagram. These
also include top Indian startups such as Dream11, Paytm and Swiggy.
For the past 8 years, large
enterprises and governments have also started using the cloud in a big way and
they are reinventing not just their organisations but also what is possible.
"If you look at what
Moderna did for building their COVID-19 vaccine, they built a digital
manufacturing suite on top of AWS using compute, storage, machine learning and
data warehousing," says Jassy.
"They built their
COVID-19 vaccine candidate in 42 days when it normally takes some 20 months.
Those are big differences in terms of what you could get done."
IMAGE: An AT&T worker holds the Amazon Fire
phone at an AT&T store in San Francisco. Photograph: Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images
Jassy also shared insights
about mechanisms he relies on as a leader. This includes having great teams as
one can't be doing everything. But it is hard to have the right team,
especially when the company goes through different evolutions of growth.
The right team needs to
allow the business to scale and the speed that one needs. Also one needs to
build a set of mechanisms that allows the business to be able to see the things
that matter most and understand what is working and what is not working.
"It's the inputs that
drive the output. So we spend most of our time focused on what are the inputs
that matter most for the business," says Jassy.
"We spent very little
time on the actual revenue numbers."
Some of the issues that get
discussed during leadership meetings are inputs related to customer experience
and ways to solve them.
For businesses to scale up,
it is important for the leadership teams to have the passion and will to keep
inventing.
Hiring the right people
that fit what organisations are trying to do is also important.
"It really starts with
having the will to hire builders and then organizing them as best as you can
into separable or autonomous teams where they own their own destiny," says
Jassy.
If the companies have a
penchant to invent, they have to also accept that they are going to fail
sometimes. For instance, Amazon's Fire phone experiment didn't work. Despite
consumers not reacting to the value proposition, the project was culturally
reaffirming for Jassy.
"The
inputs for the phone were really good. We took that technology and used it in
other initiatives," says Jassy.
"We took the people that
did a really good job on inputs and helped them land into other important
gigs."