What will Amazon's next CEO be like? Meet the quiet audacity of Andy Jassy

Say goodbye to the booming laugh -- and the space-colonizing ambitions -- of Amazon's founding CEO, Jeff Bezos. Now that long-time top lieutenant Andy Jassy will be taking over as top executive, things at the Seattle techno-retail giant may seem a little quieter at first.

But don't let Jassy's outward calm fool you. Even if his hobbies and his clothing tastes aren't as attention-grabbing as his predecessor's, I'd say that Jassy's business horizons stretch at least as far as Bezos's. Maybe farther.

Nearly a decade ago, I spent an hour with Jassy, piecing together the origin story of his career-defining moment: the creation of Amazon Web Services in 2003. What came through in that interview was his superb eye for the big chance, paired with a calm sense of how to get there, one step at a time.

The goal, Jassy recalled, was to help build "the internet's operating system." At first, it was just him and perhaps a few engineers. But they saw a lot of blue sky ahead. As Jassy tells it: "When we thought about what Amazon was good at . . . we realized we could contribute to most of those components of the internet operating system."

Spin the calendar ahead 18 years and voila! Today AWS is operating at a run rate of $50 billion of revenue a year. It's the world's biggest provider of cloud-computing services, and it's growing 28% annually, with robust profit margins.

You can see why Amazon's board chose to hand the CEO keys to Jassy. If AWS were a standalone business, Wall Street analysts estimated in 2019, it would be worth at least $500 billion. Anyone who can come up with that big an idea, early in his or her career, deserves a shot at running the whole business.

On many issues, Jassy sounds very much like a faculty member in good standing at the Bezos School of Business. The incoming CEO regularly champions Amazon's long-time habit of designing new products by "working backwards" -- first defining the customer experience and then figuring out how to build it. Like Bezos, Jassy believes that the best products sell themselves through great word of mouth. And both men like frugality.

In everyday banter, though, the two are worlds apart. Bezos can be sizzling with his word play, offering wisdom, wit and snark in bountiful helpings. Jassy steps more cautiously (or carefully!?). He remembers the little goofs that somehow create team culture, such as the ill-fated attempt to launch AWS's Simple Storage System (3S) with four S'es. ("It sounded clunky.") But if there's a snappy joke to be made there, he isn't looking for it.

Even on core business practices, Jassy is his own man. In a speed-obsessed company, Jassy says that in the early days he never set an explicit deadline for when AWS needed to be launched. (It took about three years from idea to debut.)

Jassy didn't even make a revenue projection at first. The reason: "There are a lot of bumps that you just have to work out." Explicit projections turn out to be wrong, and they become more of a burden than a help.

Given Jassy's 18-year immersion in AWS, some people may wonder if he can recalibrate himself to the widely varying norms of Amazon's many other businesses, which range from Hollywood production to retail delivery. His Harvard M.B.A. might help. His biggest asset is the diversity of his 1997-2003 experiences at Amazon, pre-AWS. These include running Amazon's music store and serving as Jeff Bezos's technical assistant.

When we spoke in 2012, Jassy was intrigued by the idea that if AWS made the most of its opportunities, it could some day be a bigger business than all of Amazon's vast retail operations. That isn't close to happening by revenue, even though AWS has expanded at a ferocious rate. The retail side has been growing too fast to let AWS narrow the gap much. But in terms of profit contribution, the race has been much tighter.

Make room for the idea that Jassy, now able to steer all of Amazon, will be looking for new opportunities that could turn into the AWS of a new decade. As Jassy knows, it's impossible to model such growth curves accurately at first. Everything starts with just a loose sense of a big opportunity and something unique to offer. In his world, that's all right.

In our conversation, I asked him repeatedly when he first knew that AWS was going to be a true growth rocket. He never provided a pinpoint answer, talking instead about many different stages where customer engagement kept being bigger and more enthusiastic than expected. At one of those junctures, Jassy recalled, "We started saying to ourselves: 'This actually looks like something interesting.'"

Interesting. Remember that word. Amazon's board is betting that in his pending role as CEO, Andy Jassy will start something interesting once again.