Amazon CEO Andy Jassy joined the company in 1997 when it had already operated for two years and had recently become a public company. But practically speaking, Jassy has been at Amazon from basically the beginning. Jassy joined Amazon the startup.
Now, nearly 28 years later, it’s become increasingly clear through Jassy’s words and actions that the Amazon chief is fixated on resurrecting key pieces of the startup that the tech giant once was.
The latest reminder: In his annual letter to shareholders published on Thursday, Jassy said his company strives “to operate like the world’s largest startup” and then laid out some of the details of what that means, including using what’s essentially an internal bureaucracy hotline to identify, and then cut, red tape in an attempt to move faster.
In the corporate world, what Jassy is seeking to do is largely uncharted territory: to transform a global behemoth that employs more than 1.5 million people and is worth nearly $2 trillion into the “world’s largest startup.”
But Jassy has good reason to try, even if the odds are stacked against his company. As Fortune documented in a deep investigation last year, Amazon’s rapid hiring and employee growth over the past decade, coupled with the remote work boom incited by the pandemic, greatly impacted the company’s culture and how it operates. Amazon’s famed leadership principles—the 16 tenets that guide behavior and decision-making at the company—began showing signs of fraying.
Jassy has tacitly acknowledged this and sprung into action over the past year. Shortly before Fortune’s feature on Amazon’s company culture was published last year, the CEO released what was essentially an hour-long video tutorial on the meaning of each of the company’s 16 LPs, as they’re called internally, and how they should be interpreted.
Then, in the fall, Jassy ordered corporate staff back to the office five days a week. A main factor in that decision was his belief that new employees can’t learn, or abide by, the company’s governing principles if they’re not observing them in action daily and practicing them in person.
Jassy also mandated that company leaders squeeze out layers of middle management and increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15%.
“If we do this work well,” Jassy wrote at the time, “it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify, and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day.”
To outsiders, Amazon is still operating in ways that many rivals should fear, with steady revenue growth, record profits, and enough extra cash to invest heavily in the AI arms race and other potential monster businesses of the future.
But to Jassy, the safest way to secure that future is to learn from Amazon the startup and in some ways turn back the clock.