In 2005, a new Amazon recruit named Adam Selipsky joined a small team working on a project that was seemingly far afield from the company’s core business of selling products such as books, laptops, and baby supplies over the internet. Amazon Web Services, as it was known, would give any business pay-as-you-go access to the same robust, cost-efficient computing infrastructure Amazon had built for its own purposes. “In the very early days, we used to walk around inside of Amazon evangelizing that this could be the next billion-dollar business,” Selipsky recalls.
That turned out to be a rare instance of anyone at Amazon thinking too small. After a decade and a half of remarkable growth, AWS has a current run rate of $59 billion a year. In the second quarter of 2021, revenue increased by a booming 37%. When AWS CEO Andy Jassy became Amazon’s CEO in July, Selipsky—who’d left Amazon in 2016 to run visualization software maker Tableau—took Jassy’s old job.
Even just in the four and a half years that Selipsky was absent from AWS, it became a far more massive operation. “I guess I could honestly say that I didn’t quite anticipate the scale that it is operating at today, even though I knew the stats on paper,” he says. “It was about four times bigger when I returned.”
If all Selipsky did was keep that formidable flywheel spinning, that would probably satisfy Wall Street. That, of course, would not be the Amazon way. Along with preserving AWS’s operational momentum, “part of my job is to make sure that we are restless and dissatisfied,” he says.
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