Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipski is stepping down

A little more than three years ago, when Jeff announced my new role, one of my first jobs was to determine who would take over and lead AWS. It was important to me that we have someone who understands AWS, values ​​our culture, will provide strong continuity, and can continue to grow the business. We had strong leaders at AWS, many of whom could lead the overall business for the long term, but would benefit from a few additional years of gaining experience and learning under a more experienced CEO.

Adam Selipski was one of the first Vice Presidents we hired at AWS in 2005, and spent an excellent 11 years leading AWS sales, marketing, and support, before leaving to become CEO of Tableau. I have always had great respect for Adam, and we have met several times to discuss the possibility of returning to lead AWS. In those conversations, we agreed that if he accepted this role, he would likely do so for a few years, and that one of the things he would focus on during that time was helping to prepare the next generation of leadership.

We were fortunate that Adam agreed to step in and lead AWS, and he has brilliantly led the business, while also growing his leadership team. Adam will now move on to his next challenge (after taking a well-deserved rest), and Matt Jarman will become AWS CEO, effective June 3.

I want to thank Adam for everything he has done to lead AWS over the past three years. He took office amid the pandemic, which has presented a wide range of leadership and business challenges. Under his leadership, the team made the right decision in the long term to help customers become more efficient with their spending, even if it meant less revenue in the short term for AWS. All the while, the team has continued to rapidly innovate and release new services, including several influential generative AI services, such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q. Adam leaves AWS in a strong position, having reached an annual revenue run rate of $100 billion last quarter, With revenue accelerating year-on-year once again. Perhaps most importantly, AWS continues to lead in operational performance, security, reliability, and the overall breadth and depth of our services. I greatly appreciate Adam’s leadership during this time, and the dedication of the entire team to clients and the business.

As some of you may know, Matt started at Amazon as an MBA intern during the summer of 2005, and joined the company full-time in 2006 as one of the first AWS Product Managers. Initially, Matt worked across all AWS services, helping create our first SLAs, defining new features, and creating new pricing plans. He then became our first Product Manager for EC2, leading EC2’s product management in its formative years. During that time, he also led the team that defined, launched and operated EBS. Matt eventually became General Manager for all AWS Compute Services in 2016, which he did for about four years. In 2020, after being deeply involved in our product organization for 14 years, I asked Matt to move over to the Demand Generation side of AWS to lead WW Sales, Marketing, Support, and Professional Services.

Matt brings an unusually strong set of skills and experience to his new role. He is extremely customer focused, a great product leader, innovative, a smart problem solver, right on a lot, has high standards and a purposeful bias for business, and in his 18 years at AWS, he is one of the best learners I have encountered. Matt knows our customers and our business as well as anyone in the world, and has senior leadership experience on both the product and demand generation sides. I’m excited to see Matt and his outstanding leadership team at AWS continue to innovate our future – these are still early days at AWS.

Thanks again to Adam for his leadership, and please join me in congratulating Matt.

dew