The former CEO of AWS , Andy Jassy, who was promoted to lead Amazon after the step down of Jeff Bazoz, announces Adam Selipsky, the ex-CEO of Tableau Software, as his successor. This in fact marks the return of Adam to the company, where he spent 11 years — from 2005 to 2016.

Adam previously held the role of COO in AWS . He held the worldwide responsibility for AWS’ marketing, sales, business development, partner management, technical support and customer service, and product marketing/mgmt. divisions. Member of Amazon's 18-person senior operating committee (S-Team), he took AWS from pre-revenue to $13B+ revenue business, while growing team size from fewer than 10 to thousands. He then directly reported to the CEO.

Commenting on the occasion, Andy wrote, “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.”

A graduate from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, Adam started his career in 1993 with Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver Wyman). Before joining amazon, he also worked with RealNetworks, a software company based out of Seattle.

Andy added, “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.”

AWS also explained that Adam will return to AWS on May 17 and will spend the subsequent several weeks transitioning to the new role before making the change sometime in Q3.