Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Reaffirms Commitment to Startup Culture
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been vocal about his mission to return Amazon to its startup roots, a mindset he’s consistently emphasized across multiple platforms. Speaking at the Harvard Business Review Leadership Summit on April 29, Jassy reiterated this vision, saying, “It comes back to this notion of wanting to operate like the world’s largest startup.” Jassy, who has been with Amazon for nearly three decades since joining in 1997, believes that as companies grow larger, they naturally become slower. As the former head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jassy experienced firsthand the company’s early scrappy era. “You’ve got to be scrappy,” he recalled, noting that AWS’s storage service started with just 13 people, while its compute service began with 11.
To streamline operations and foster this startup culture, Jassy announced last year that Amazon would reduce layers of management and increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15 percent—a goal achieved in the first quarter of 2025. He also credited the company’s return-to-office (RTO) policy, implemented in January, with improving productivity and collaboration. “We’re in meetings together, we’re iterating with one another,” Jassy explained. “People riff on top of each other’s ideas better if they’re together.”
Jassy emphasized that such changes are crucial for Amazon to capitalize on the AI opportunity. With a planned $100 billion capital expenditure for 2025, Amazon is positioning itself to seize what Jassy calls a “generational opportunity.” “With what’s happening in AI right now, if you care about invention and you do a lot of invention—which we do—there’s never been a more important time to organize yourself to be able to invent,” he said. Amazon is set to report its first-quarter earnings on May 1.
