Bezos’ exit is just one of many among Amazon’s top ranks
When Andy Jassy takes the reins from Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, on Monday it will be one of the most closely watched executive handoffs in years.
But a much less heralded — though still deeply meaningful — change is already underway. Dozens of executives in Amazon’s upper ranks have departed in the past 18 months, many after working there for over a decade.
It is an unusual level of disruption inside the business. The departing executives don’t represent a huge slice of the top ranks, with hundreds of vice presidents now. But for years, Amazon’s leaders were considered lifers. Many had been there since the company’s earliest days. They were loyal to Amazon, whose rising stock price often made them wealthy.
Bezos epitomized that relationship. So did Jeff Wilke, who led the global consumer business, and Steve Kessel, who ran its physical stores, and others who introduced and ran key programs, including Alexa, free delivery and large parts of its cloud business. Now those leaders are gone.
Having Wilke and Bezos leave so close together amounts to “epic, tectonic shifts,” said David Glick, a former Amazon vice president who is now the chief technology officer at Flexe, a logistics startup.
Wilke and Kessel retired, but many vice presidents are leaving for top jobs at public companies or high-growth startups. Teresa Carlson, who over a decade built Amazon’s government cloud business, in April became the chief growth officer of Splunk, which provides data software, and Greg Hart, who once shadowed Bezos for a year and then launched Alexa and Echo, is now the chief product officer at the real estate firm Compass. Maria Renz, another former Bezos shadow who started at Amazon in 1999, is now a senior executive at SoFi, a personal finance company.
“Amazon has done a better job than anyone in the history of the world at staying Day 1 longer,” said Glick, referring to a phrase Bezos used regularly to encourage employees to act as if they were at a startup. “But you get to a point where you are so big, it can be hard to get things done. People want the fun of getting a little bit closer to the metal.”
He talks “every day,” he said, with Amazon leaders debating if they should make a jump.
“You have this set of people who got to VP and it’s like ‘OK, what do I do now?’” he said.
Amazon is facing a shift that earlier generations of tech companies experienced as they grew and their strong founders stepped aside, said David Yoffie, a Harvard professor who served on Intel’s board for 29 years. Amazon’s overall workforce has doubled to more than 1.3 million.
“Intel, Microsoft, Oracle you see this pattern,” he said.
Even before a founder leaves, executives sense a business is approaching a new era, he said.
“People get the idea that Jeff is going to be transitioning, and that leads people to start thinking about other options,” he said, adding that as companies get large, executives can often find less bureaucracy and more financial upside if they leave.
“We’ve had and continue to have remarkable retention and continuity of leadership at the company,” said Chris Oster, an Amazon spokesperson. The average tenure is 10 years for vice presidents and more than 17 for senior vice presidents, he added.
Bezos long played up the longevity of deputies. At a forum in 2017, an employee asked him about the lack of diversity on his senior team, known as the S-Team, which was almost exclusively white and male, and Bezos said it was a benefit that his top deputies had been by his side for years.
Transition on the team, he said, would “happen very incrementally over a long period of time.”
In recent years, Bezos has stepped back from much of Amazon’s day-to-day business, focusing instead on strategic projects and outside ventures, like his space startup, Blue Origin, giving his deputies even more autonomy.
Bezos, 57, reengaged on day-today matters early in the pandemic. “So why leave?” Wilke wrote in an email to staff in August announcing his plan to retire. “It’s just time.” His last day was March 1.