Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been vocal about his mission to return the company to its startup roots—a mindset he’s consistently emphasized across multiple platforms. He invoked the idea when ordering staff back to the office in September, reaffirmed it in Amazon’s annual shareholder letter earlier this month, and reiterated it once again today (April 29) at the Harvard Business Review Leadership Summit.
“It comes back to this notion of wanting to operate like the world’s largest startup,” said Jassy, who has advocated for Amazon to cut down on bureaucracy, move faster and take more risks in fields like A.I. “When you get larger, there are all sorts of ways—natural ways—that you can get slowed down.”
Jassy stepped into the CEO role in 2021, succeeding Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, but his tenure at the company dates back nearly three decades. He joined in 1997, just after Amazon went public and only three years after its founding. As the former head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jassy experienced firsthand the company’s early scrappy era.
“You’ve got to be scrappy,” said Jassy, who recalled the small groups of people that helped launch new projects during AWS’s early days. “Our storage service started with 13 people, our compute service had 11 people.”
To streamline operations, Jassy announced last year that Amazon would cut down on layers of management and increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15 percent—a goal the company achieved in the first quarter of 2025, he said.
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,” said Jassy. “People riff on top of each other’s ideas better if they’re together.”
Such changes are necessary in order to properly take advantage of the A.I. opportunity, Jassy emphasized. With a $100 billion capital expenditure planned for 2025, Amazon is positioning itself to seize what Jassy calls a generational opportunity. “With what’s happening in A.I. 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 first-quarter earnings on May 1.