Tableau Software CEO Adam Selipsky will be the new CEO of Amazon Web Services, replacing Andy Jassy, who will take over as Amazon’s CEO later this year.
Selipsky is a familiar face at Amazon as a former AWS executive who spent 11 years at the Seattle-based tech giant. He left to join Tableau as CEO in 2016.
Selipsky, 54, will replace Jassy, who in February was named to succeed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in the third quarter of this year. Bezos will remain as executive chairman. Selipsky and Jassy worked closely when Selipsky was at AWS as its vice president of marketing, sales, and support.
Jassy led AWS since the cloud computing business launched in 2006. AWS has grown into a $45 billion business and a market leader that helps boost Amazon’s profits and allows the company to invest heavily in other areas.
“Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation, and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team,” Jassy wrote in a memo to employees (read in full below). “And, having been in such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and business well.” The news was first reported by CNBC.
Seattle angel investor and cloud technology guru Charles Fitzgerald said the hire makes a lot of sense.
“It would have been extremely difficult to bring in an outsider to run AWS,” said Fitzgerald, who hosts the Cloud City Meetup and writes at Platformonomics. “Selipsky is an AWS insider with some recent outside seasoning.”
Some had speculated that Matt Garman was in line for the top job at AWS, but with Selipsky taking on the role it will be interesting to see what the future holds for Garman. Garman, a member of Amazon’s senior leadership team or S-team, has worked at AWS for 14 years and currently runs its sales and marketing efforts.
And just as Jassy has big shoes to fill in taking over from Bezos, Selipsky will have equally large shoes to fill in running a cloud organization that has Jassy’s fingerprints all over it.
The good news is that Selipsky and Jassy have worked so closely together, which led Seattle venture capitalist and close Amazon watcher Matt McIlwain to call this the “perfect move.”
“He’s got the trust and got the history and knows the domain, because he helped define it,” said McIlwain, who is close with both Jassy and Selipsky. In fact, the managing director at Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group said Jassy’s biggest challenge as the incoming CEO of Amazon was finding his own replacement at AWS.
“I think (Jassy) has brilliantly addressed it, and it set him up for greater success as the leader of the overall company,” said McIlwain.
The reason that was so important is because AWS is a behemoth, with $45 billion in annual revenue and representing 63% of the company’s operating profit. If AWS — which helps power the businesses of Netflix, Epic Games and Airbnb — were a standalone entity, it would be one of largest companies in the U.S. with estimates that its market value could top $500 billion.
But beyond its massive scale, McIlwain also said Jassy needed a leader in the role he could trust with both historical perspective and a vision for where the unit is headed.
In other words, Jassy had to feel confident he could “sufficiently let go of AWS,” noted McIlwain.
While leading Tableau, Selipsky helped drive growth for the Seattle data visualization pioneer, which had a market capitalization of around $3 billion when he took over as CEO. Selipsky oversaw the company’s acquisition by Salesforce for $15.7 billion in 2019, the second-largest in Salesforce history, and he was instrumental in pivoting the company from a traditional software product to one tied in the cloud with subscription offerings.
The experience leading a company like Tableau — while still being firmly rooted in the leadership principles of Amazon — will serve Selipsky well, said McIlwain. He noted that Selipsky was able to get a unique view into cloud-based applications and their importance under the direction of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Cloud-based applications that allow organizations to work more efficiently is an area where Amazon has not historically shown strength, but could be part of AWS’ next frontier.
Speaking to GeekWire following the Salesforce deal, Selipsky talked about how customers looked for flexibility when buying software — picking between AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, or deciding between on-premise and in the cloud.
“We’re really the only significant analytics solution who provides the flexibility and choice to all of those as first-class citizens,” he said at the time. “And by the way, a lot of our customers don’t want one of those. They want to mix and match and do a couple of different things.”
As a leader, Selipsky is both “very relatable to people, but also very analytical,” said McIlwain, noting that his leadership style was honed even more under Benioff and his time at Tableau.
Selipsky also brought along Amazon’s maniacal customer focus while leading Tableau.
“Really putting customers at the center of how you think about the world, not putting competitors at the center, not putting financial metrics at the center, but by putting customers at the center and then figuring out how to build a business around that, is not the only way to succeed, but a very powerful model for success,” he said in 2019.
The other thing about Adam coming in as CEO of AWS is that he loves startups. I was concerned that a new CEO might shift AWS hard towards the enterprise to the detriment of startups. This move means that won't happen.
Extra excited for my old team @AWSstartups
— Micah Baldwin (@micah) March 23, 2021
As for Tableau — it also has a new leader. The company announced that Mark Nelson, the former CTO at SAP Concur who joined Tableau nearly three years ago as executive vice president of product development, has been named president and CEO.
“With 25 years of enterprise software experience, Mark has been on the Tableau leadership team for three years and he has deep relationships with our customers and employees,” the company said in a statement. “We look forward to Tableau’s continued momentum and customer success.”
Here is the full memo that Jassy sent to AWS employees:
I want to share that Adam Selipsky will be the next CEO of AWS.
Adam is not a new face to AWS. Back in 2005, Adam was one of the first VPs we hired in AWS, and ran AWS’s Sales, Marketing, and Support for 11 years (as well as some other areas like our AWS Platform services for a spell). Adam then became the CEO of Tableau in 2016, and ran Tableau for the last 4.5 years. Tableau experienced significant success during Adam’s time as CEO—the value of the company quadrupled in just a few years, Tableau transitioned through a fundamental business model change from perpetual licenses to subscription licensing, and the company was eventually acquired by Salesforce in 2019 in one of the largest software acquisitions in history. Following the acquisition, Adam remained the CEO of Tableau and was a member of Salesforce’s Executive Leadership Team.
Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation, and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team. And, having been in such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and business well.
With a $51B revenue run rate that’s growing 28% YoY (these were the Q4 2020 numbers we last publicly shared), it’s easy to forget that AWS is still in the very early stages of what’s possible. Less than 5% of the global IT spend is in the cloud at this point. That’s going to substantially change in the coming years. We have a lot more to invent for customers, and we have a very strong leadership team and group of builders to go make it happen. Am excited for what lies ahead.
Andy
P.S. Adam will return to AWS on May 17. We will spend the subsequent several weeks transitioning together before making the change sometime in Q3.
