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Selipsky To Exit AWS; Matt Garman Named New CEO
After 15 years at Amazon Web Services, three of them as its CEO, Adam Selipsky is leaving the company. Stepping into the CEO position is Matt Garman, an AWS veteran of nearly two decades.
The leadership change was announced on Wednesday. In a post on X, Selipsky said, "It has been a true privilege to help lead this business from pre-revenue to $100B annualized revenue. ... AWS will be in great hands with Matt and the incredible leadership team. I'm looking forward to taking some time off with family, while taking the opportunity to think about my next adventure!"
Andy Jassy, president and CEO of AWS parent company Amazon -- himself a former AWS CEO -- officially broke the news in a memo, indicating that the CEO changeover will take effect on June 3.
Selipsky first joined AWS in 2005, leading the cloud giant's Sales, Marketing and Support group for over a decade. In 2016, he left AWS for data analytics company Tableau, where he served as CEO. AWS rehired Selipsky in 2021 to replace then-CEO Jassy, who had been tapped to replace Jeff Bezos as Amazon president.
Though brief, Selipsky's three-year CEO term spanned two watershed moments in the tech sector -- the pandemic and the current AI boom.
"He took over in the middle of the pandemic, which presented a wide array of leadership and business challenges. Under his direction, the team made the right long-term decision to help customers become more efficient in their spend, even if it meant less short-term revenue for AWS," Jassy said. "Throughout, the team continued to invent and release new services at a rapid clip, including several impactful Generative AI services, such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q. Adam leaves AWS in a strong position."
Garman, Selipsky's replacement, has been at AWS for 18 years and has deep experience with foundational AWS products. He was the company's first Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) product manager and spearheaded early development on Elastic Block Storage (EBS). He also "helped create our first service level agreements, define new features, and create new pricing plans," according to Jassy.
Between 2016 to 2020, Garman served as general manager of AWS Compute. Most recently, he was the head of AWS' Worldwide Sales, Marketing, Support and Professional Services group.
"Matt knows our customers and business as well as anybody in the world," said Jassy, "and has senior leadership experience on both the product and demand generation sides."
Garman addressed AWS employees in a coda to Jassy's memo, saying that he plans to share more details about the changes in the next weeks. In addition, he said, "I will be hosting a number of AWS Town Halls over the next month, and I look forward to connecting with more of you directly during those."