 From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. As you know by now, Jeff Bezos CEO of Amazon is stepping aside from his CEO role and AWS CEO Andy Jassy is being promoted to head all of Amazon. Bezos of course is going to remain executive chairman. Now 15 years ago next month, Amazon launched it's simple storage service which was the first modern cloud offering and the man who wrote the business plan for AWS was Andy Jassy and he's navigated the meteoric rise and disruption that has seen AWS grown into a $45 billion company that throws off the vast majority of Amazon's operating profits. No one in the media has covered Jassy more intimately and closely than John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. John joins us today to help us understand on theCUBE this move and what we can expect from Jassy in his new role. And importantly what it means for AWS. John, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Hey, great day, great to see you. We've done a lot of interviews together over the years and we're on our 11th year with theCUBE and Silicon Angle. But I got to be excited that we're simulcast is on Clubhouse which is kind of cool. Love Clubhouse been on since the, in December, it's awesome, it's like, it's like Cube Radio. It's like, so this is like Cube Talk. So we open up a Clubhouse room while we're filming this, we'll do more live hits in studio and syndicate the Clubhouse and then take questions after. This is a huge digital transformation moment. I'm part of the Digital Transformation Club on Clubhouse which has almost 5,000 followers at the moment and also has like 500 members. So if you're not on Clubhouse yet, if you have an iPhone, go check it out and join the Digital Transformation Club. Android users, you'll have to wait until that app is done but it's really a great club. And Jeremiah O. Yang is also doing a lot of stuff on digital transformation as well. Or you could just buy an iPhone and get in. Yeah, that's what people are doing. iPhone sale are up and has all the influences are on there. But you know, to me, digital transformation has always been kind of a cliche, the consumerization of IT, information technology. This has been the boring world of the enterprise over the past, you know, 20 years ago. Enterprise right now is super hot because there's no distinction between enterprise and society. And that's clearly because of the rise of cloud computing and the rise of Amazon web services which was a side project at Amazon that Andy Jassy did. And it wasn't really pleasant at the beginning. It was failed. It failed a lot. And it wasn't as successful as people thought in the early days. And you know, I have a lot of stories with Andy that he told me a lot of the inside baseball and we'll share that here today. But you know, we started covering Amazon since the beginning. I was as an entrepreneur, I used it when it came out and huge fan of them as a company because they just got a superior product and they have always had been. But it was very misunderstood from the beginning. And now everyone's calling it the most important thing. And Andy now is becoming Andy Jassy, the most important executive in the world. So let's get into the, I mean, look at you said to me over the holidays, you thought this might happen, something like this could happen. And you said, you know, Jassy's probably in line to get this. So, you know, tell us, what can you tell us about Jassy? Why is he, you know, qualified for this job? What do you think he brings to the table? Well, the thing to know about Amazon is everyone's been following that the Amazon news is Jeff Bezos has a lot of personal turmoil. They had his marriage failed. He had some issues with the smear campaigns and all the stuff going on. The run-ins with Donald Trump. He bought the Washington Post. He's got a lot of other endeavors outside of Amazon because he's the second richest man in the world competing with Elon Musk at SpaceX versus Blue Origin. So the guy's a billionaire. So Amazon is his baby and he's been running it as best he could. He's got an executive team committee called the S team. He's been grooming people in the company. And that's just been his mode. And the rise of AWS and the business performance that we've been documenting on SiliconANGLE theCUBE has just been absolutely changing the game on Amazon as a company. So clearly Amazon Web Services has become a driving force of the new Amazon that's emerging. And obviously they got all their retail business and they got the gaming challenges and they got studios and all the diversified stuff. So Jassy is just, he's just one of those guys. He's just been an Amazonian from day one. He came out of Harvard Business School, drove across the country. Very similar story to Jeff Bezos. He did that in 1997. And him and Jeff have been collaborating and Jeff tapped him to be his shadow, they call it, which is basically a technical assistant and an heir apparent and groomed him. And then that's how it is. Jassy is not a climber as they call it in corporate America. He's not a person who's looking for a political gain. He's not a territory taker, but he's a micromanager. He loves details and he likes to create customer value. And that's his focus. So he's not a grandstander. In fact, he's been very low profile early days when we started meeting with him. He wouldn't meet with press regularly because they weren't writing the right stories. And he was misunderstood. And that's classic Amazon. So he gave us the time, I think it was 2014 or 15 and he told us a story back then, John. You might want to share it as to how AWS got started. You know, what was the main spring? Amazon's tech wasn't working that great. And Bezos said to Jassy, go figure out why and maybe explain how AWS was born. Yeah, in fact, we were the first ones to get access to do his first public profile. We go to the Google and search Andy Jassy, the trillion dollar baby. We had a post we put out the story of AWS, Andy Jassy's trillion dollar baby. This was in early, this was January 2015, six years ago. And back then we posited that this would be a trillion dollar total addressable market. Okay, people thought we were crazy, but we wrote a story and he gave us very intimate access. We did a full drill down on him and the person, the story of Amazon and that laid out essentially the beginning of the rise of AWS, Andy Jassy. So that's a good story to check out. But really the key here is that he's always been relentless and competitive on creating value in what they call raising the bar outside Amazon. That's a term that they use. They also have another leadership principle called working backwards, which is like go to the customer and work backwards from the customer in a very Steve Jobs kind of way. And that's been kind of jobs mentality as well at Apple that made them successful. Work backwards from the customer and make things easier. And that was Apple. Amazon, their philosophy was work backwards from the customer and Jassy specifically would say to me many times and eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. That was a key principle of what they were doing. So that was a key thesis to their entire business model. And that's the Amazonian way, faster, cheaper, ship it faster, make it less expensive and higher value. Well, when you applied the Amazon shipping concept of cloud computing, it was completely disrupted. They were shipping code and services faster and that became their innovation strategy. More announcements every year. They out-announced their competition by a huge margin. They introduced new services faster and they're less expensive, some say, but in the aggregate, they make more money. But that's kind of a key thing. Well, I was listening on the TV today and there was a debate on whether or not this portends that they'll actually split the company into two. To me, I think it's just the opposite. I think it's less likely. I mean, if you think about Amazon getting into grocery or healthcare, eventually financial services or other industries and the IoT opportunity. To me, what they do, John, is they bring in together the cloud, data and AI and they go attack these new industries. I would think Jassy of all people would want to keep this thing together. Now, whether or not the government allows them to do that, but what are your thoughts? I mean, you've asked Andy this before in your personal interviews about splitting the company. What are your thoughts there? Well, John Ford at CNBC always asks the same question every year. It's almost like the standard question. And I kind of laugh and I ask it now too because I like John Ford, I think he's an awesome dude and I'll ask it just a tongue in cheek, Jassy. He won't answer the question. Amazon, Bezos and Jassy have one thing in common. They're really good at not answering questions. So if you ask the same question, he'll just say, you know, nothing's ever, you know, never say never. That's his classic answer to everything. Never say never. He's always said it to you and I many times. And some say he's flip flopped on things, but he's really customer driven. For example, he said at one point, you know, no one should ever build a data center. Okay, that was a principle. And then they come out and they have now a hybrid strategy. And I called him out on that and said, hey, you know, what are you flip flopping? You said at some point no one should ever data center. He's like, well, we looked at it differently. And what we meant was is that it should all be cloud native. Okay, so that's kind of a revision, but he's cool with that. He says, hey, we'll revise based on what customers are doing. VMware, working with Amazon. No one ever thought that would happen. Okay, so, you know, VMware has some techies, Ragu for instance over there, super top notch. He worked with Jassy directly in his team. Sanjay Poonan, they went to business school together. They cut a deal and now Amazon essentially saved VMware in my opinion. And Pat Gelsinger drove that deal. Now Pat Gelsinger, CEO Intel and Pat told me that directly in candid conversation off the queue. He said, hey, we had to make a decision. Either we're going to be in cloud or we're not going to be in cloud with partner. And I'll see he was Intel. He understood the Intel inside mentality. So that's good for VMware. So Jassy does these kinds of deals. He's not afraid. He's got a good stomach for business and a relentless competitor. So how do you think, as you mentioned, Jassy is a micromanager. He gets deep into the technology. Anybody who's seen his two hour, three hour keynotes know he has a really fine grasp of the technology across the entire stack. How do you think John Hill approached things like antitrust, the big tech lash, the unionization of the workforce at Amazon? How do you think Jassy will approach that? Well, I think one of the things that emerges Jassy, first of all, he's a huge sports fan. And then people don't know that but he's also a progressive person. He's very progressive politically. He's been on the record and off the record saying things like obviously literacy, he's been big on. He's been on basically underrepresented minorities pushing for that and certainly cloud computing and tech. Women in tech, he's been a big proponent. He's been a big supporter of Teresa Carlson who's been a rising star at Amazon. People don't know who Teresa Carlson and they should check out her. She's become one of the biggest leaders inside Amazon. She's turned around public sector from the beginning. She ran that business. She's a global star. He's been a great leader and he's, again, he's a micromanager, he's on top of the details. I mean, the word is that nothing gets approved without Andy seeing it. But he's been progressive. He's been an Amazon original as they call it internally. He's progressive. He's got the business acumen but he's perfect for this pragmatic conversation that needs to happen. And again, because he's so technically strong, having a CEO that's that proficient is going to give Amazon an advantage when they have to go in and change how DC works for instance or how the government geopolitical landscape works because Amazon is now a global company with regions all over the place. So, you know, I think he's pragmatic. He's open to listening and changing. I think that's a huge quality. Well, do you think of this just to set the context here for those who may not know? I mean, Amazon started as I said back in 2006 in March with simple storage service that later that year they announced EC2 which is their compute platform. And that was the majority of their business is still a very large portion of their business. But Amazon, our estimates are that in 2020 Amazon did 45 billion, 45.4 billion in revenue. That's actually an Amazon reported number. And just to give you context, Azure, about 26 billion, GCP, Google, about 6 billion. So you're talking about an industry that Amazon created that's now $78 billion and Amazon at 45 billion, John, they're growing at 30% annually. So it's just a massive growth engine. And another story Jassy told us is they, he and Jeff and the team talked early on about whether or not they should just do an experiment, do a little POC, dip their toe and they decided to go for it. Let's go big or go home as Michael Dell has said to us many times. Be pretty astounding. Yeah, one of the things about Jassy that people should know about, I think it's some compelling relative to the new ascension to the CEO of Amazon is that he's not afraid to do new things. For instance, I'll give you an example. The Amazon web services reinvent their annual conference grew to being thousands and thousands of people and they would have a traditional after party they called a replay. They'd have a band like every tech conference and their conference became so big that essentially it was like setting up a live concert. So they were spending millions of dollars and set up basically a one night concert and they'd bring in great artists. So he said, hey, what's been on this cash? Why don't we just have a festival? So they did a thing called intersect. They got LA involved from creators and they basically built a weekend festival on the back end of reinvent. This was when real life was before COVID and they turned it into an opportunity because that's the way they think. They like to look at the resources. Hey, we're already all in on this. Why don't we just keep up for the weekend and charge some tickets and have a good time? He's not afraid to take chances on the product side. He'll go in and take a chance on a new market. That comes directly from Bezos. They try stuff. They don't mind failing, but they put a tight leash on measurement. They work backwards from the customer and they're not afraid to take chances. So that's going to bode well for him as he tries to figure out how Amazon navigates the contention on the political side when they get challenged for their dominance. And I think he's going to have to apply that pragmatic experimentation to new business models. So John, I want to take on AWS. I mean, despite the large numbers, I talked about 30% growth. Azure's growing at over 50% a year, GCP at 83%. So despite the large numbers and big growth, the growth rates are slowing. Everybody knows that. We've reported it extensively. So the incoming CEO of Amazon Web Services has a TAM expansion challenge. And at some point they've got to decide, okay, how do we keep this growth engine? So do you have any thoughts as to who might be the next CEO and what are some of their challenges as you see it? Well, Amazon's a real product-centric company. So it's going to be very interesting to see who they go with here. Obviously they've been grooming a lot of people. It's been some turnover. You had some really strong executives recently leave. Jeff Wilkes, who was the CEO of the retail business, he retired a couple of months ago or formally announced I think recently. He was probably in line. You had Mike Clayville, who is now the Chief Revenue Officer of Stripe. He ran all commercial business. Theresa Carlson stepped up to his role as well as running public sector. Again, she got more power. You have Matt Garmin, who ran the EC2 business, Stanford grad, great guy, super strong on the product side. He's now running all commercial sales and marketing. And he's also on the, was on Bezos's S team. That's the executive kind of team. Peter DeSantis is also on that S team. He runs all infrastructure he took over for James Hamilton who was the genius behind all the data center work that they've done and all the chip design stuff that they've innovated on. So there's so much technical innovation going on. I think you're still going to see a leadership probably come from, I would say Matt Garmin, in my opinion, is the lead dog at this point. He's the lead horse. You could have an outside person come in depending upon who might be available. And that would probably come from an Andy Jassy network because he's a real fierce competitor, but he's also a loyalist and he likes trust. So if someone comes in from the outside, it's going to be someone Andy trusts. And then the other wild cards are like Theresa Carlson, like I said, she is a great woman in tech who's done amazing work. I've profiled her many times. We've interviewed her many times. She took that public sector business with Amazon and changed the game completely. Obviously the Jedi contract she was in competitive for had the big Trump showdown with the Jedi with the Department of Defense. They had the CIA cloud. Amazon set the standard on public sector and that's directly result of Theresa Carlson. But she's in the field. She's not a product person. She's kind of running that group. So Amazon has that product field kind of structure. So we'll see how they handle that, but those are the top three I think are going to be in line. So the obvious question that people always ask them is a big change like this is, okay, in this case, what is Jassy going to bring in and what's going to change? Maybe the flip side question is somewhat more interesting. What's not going to change in your view? Jassy's been there since nearly the beginning. You know, what are some of the fundamental tenets that he's, you know, that are fossilized that won't change, do you think? I think he's, I think what's not going to change is Amazon's going to continue to grow and develop their platform business and enable more SaaS players. That's a little bit different than what Microsoft's doing. They're more SaaS oriented. Office 365 has become their biggest application in terms of revenue on Microsoft's side. So Amazon's going to still have to compete and enable more ecosystem partners. I think what's not going to change is that Bezos is still going to be in charge because executive chairman is just a code word for not an active CEO. So in the corporate governance world, when you have an executive chairman, that's essentially the person still in charge. And so he'll be in charge. He'll still be the boss of Andy Jassy and Jassy will be running all of Amazon. So I think that's going to be a little bit of the same, but Jassy's going to be more in charge. I think you'll see a team change over. I think you're going to see some new management come in. Andy's management team will expand. I think Amazon will stay the same. Amazon Web Services. So John, last night I was just making some notes about, you know, notable transitions in the history of the tech business. You know, Gerson to the Palmasano, Gates to Bomber, then Bomber to Nadella. One that you were close to, David Packard to John Young and then John Young to Lou Platt, your old company. Ellison to Safra and Mark, Jobs to Cook. We talked about Larry Page to Sundar Pichai. So how do you see this? And, you know, you've talked to, I remember when you interviewed John Chambers, he said, you know, there is no right of passage. East Coast, many computer companies. Edson DeCastro, Ken Olson, An Wang. These were executives who wouldn't let go. So it's kind of interesting to juxtapose that with the modern day executive. How do you see this fitting in to some of those epic transitions that I just mentioned? I think a lot of people are surprised that Chef Bezos is even stepping down. I think he's just been such the face of Amazon. I think some of the poll numbers of people are doing on Twitter. People don't think it's going to make a big difference because he's kind of been that, you know, leader hand on the wheel, but it's been its own ship now. So depending on who's at the helm, it'll be different. I think the Amazon choice of Andy wasn't obvious. And I think a lot of people are asking the questions, who is Andy Jassy? And that's why we're doing this and we're going to be doing more features on Andy Jassy. We've got tons of content that we've had shipped, original content with him. So we'll share more of those key sound bites and who he is. But I think a lot of people are scratching their head like, why Andy Jassy? It's not obvious to the outsiders who don't know cloud computing. If you're in the computing business and the digital transformation side, everyone knows about Amazon Web Services. It's been the most successful company in my opinion since I could remember at many levels, just the way they've completely dominated the business and how they change others to be dominant. So, I mean, they've made Microsoft change, they've made Google change. And even then, he's a leader that accepts conversations. Other companies, their CEOs hide behind their PR wall and they don't talk to people. They won't come on Clubhouse. They won't talk to press. They hide behind their PR and they feed the media. Jassy's not afraid to talk to reporters. He's not afraid to talk to people, but he doesn't like people who don't know what they're talking about. So he doesn't suffer fools. So, you know, you gotta have your shit together to talk to Jassy. That's really the way it is. And he'll give you a mind share, he'll answer any question, except for the ones that are too tough for him to answer like, are you his facial recognition bad or good? Are you gonna spin out AWS? I mean, these are the hard questions. And he's got a great team. He's got Jay Carney, former Obama, the press secretary working for him. He's been a great leader. So I'm really bullish on this is a good choice. We're going to jump into the Clubhouse here and open it up shortly, John. And the last question for you is his competition, you know, Amazon as a company and Jassy specifically. I always talk about how they don't really focus on the competition, they focus on the customer, but we know that just observing these folks, Bezos very competitive individual. Jassy, you know him better than I, very competitive individual. So, you know, Jassy's been known to call out Oracle of course it was in response to Larry Ellison's jabs at Amazon regarding database. But how do you see that? Do you see that changing at all? I mean, will Amazon get, you know, more publicly competitive or they stick to their knitting you think? You know, this is going to sound kind of a weird analogy and I know there's a lot of hero worshiping on Elon Musk but Elon Musk and Andy Jassy have a lot of similarities in the sense of, you know, their brilliance. They got both a brilliant people, different kind of backgrounds, obviously they're running different things. They both are builders, right? If you were listening to Elon Musk on Clubhouse the other night, what was really striking was not only the magic of how it was all orchestrated and what he did and how he interviewed Robin Hood, he basically is about building stuff and he was asked questions like, what advice do you give startups? He's like, if you need advice, you shouldn't be doing startups. That's the kind of mentality that Jassy has, which is, you know, it's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart but Elon Musk is a builder. Jassy builds, he likes to build stuff, right? And so if you look at all the things that he's done with AWS, it's been about enabling people to be successful with the tools that they need, adding more services, creating things that are lower price point. If you're an entrepreneur and you're over the age of 30, you know about AWS because you know what? It's cheaper to start a business on Amazon web services than buying servers. And everyone knows that if you're under the age of 25, you might not know the days when it was like 50 grand to 100,000 just to start something. Today you get your credit card down, you're up and running and you can get Clubhouses up and running all day long. So the next Clubhouse will be on Amazon or a cloud technology. And that's because of Andy Jassy, right? So this is a significant executive and he continued will bring that mindset of building. So I think the digital transformation, we're in the digital transformation club, we're going to see a complete revolution of a new generation. And I think having a new leader like Andy Jassy will enable, in my opinion, next generation talent, whether that's media and technology convergence, media technology and art convergence. And the fact that he digs music, he digs sports, he digs tech, he digs media. It's going to be very interesting to see. I think he's well poised to be. And he's soft-spoken. He doesn't want the glamorous press. He doesn't want the puff pieces. He just wants to do what he does and he lets his game do the talking. He's talking about advice and startups. Just to quick aside, I remember John, you and I were interviewing Scott McNeely, former CEO of Sun Microsystems. And you asked him, you know, advice for startups. He said, move out of California. He's kind of tongue in cheek. I heard this morning that there's a proposal to tax the multi-billionaires one percent annually, not just a one-time tax. And so Jeff Bezos, of course, has a ranch in Texas, no tax there, but places all over that. I don't see Amazon leaving Seattle anytime soon. You know, Jassy. Jeremiah O'Yan did a clubhouse on California. And the basic sentiment is that it's California's not going away. I mean, come on, people got to just get real. I think it's a fact. There's some benefits with remote working, no doubt. But, you know, people will stay here in California. The network effects beautiful. I think Silicon Valley is going to continue to be relevant. It's just going to syndicate differently. And I think other hubs like Seattle and around the world will be integrated through remote work. And I think it's going to be much more of a democratizing effect, not a win-lose. So that to me is a huge, huge shift. And look at Amazon, look at Amazon and Microsoft. It's the cloud cities that people call Seattle. You got Google down here and, you know, they're making waves, but still all good stuff. Well, John, thanks so much. Let's wrap and let's jump into the clubhouse and hear from others. Thanks so much for coming on back on theCUBE. Many times we, you and I have done this really was a pleasure, haven't you? Thanks for your perspectives. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time.