The Day 1 Academies Fund is gearing up to open the inaugural school in its new network of full scholarship Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities.
The nonprofit, backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ $2 billion Day One Fund, will open a new school on Oct. 19 in Des Moines, Wash., just south of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.
Bezos first unveiled the Day One Fund two years ago, setting aside $2 billion for the “Day 1 Academies Fund” and the “Day 1 Families Fund,” which addresses homelessness.
The Academies Fund will directly operate the schools for children 3-5 years old using “the same set of principles that have driven Amazon,” according to its website.
“Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession,” the website reads. “The child will be the customer. ‘Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.’ And lighting that fire early is a giant leg up for any child.”
Here’s more about how the fund picks communities to open up its schools:
In selecting communities for our preschools, we consider a wide range of data, including income levels, participation in free and reduced-cost meal programs, and gaps in access to licensed childcare providers. We also look for local organizations and businesses that understand the needs of their community members and are excited about the prospect of hosting a tuition-free, high-quality preschool in their neighborhood.
Mike George, an ex-Amazon vice president who oversaw some of the company’s most successful products, is leading the Academies Fund. George retired from Amazon in July 2017 after nearly 20 years at the tech giant, where he held multiple leadership positions spanning hardware to HR. He was most recently vice president of Echo, Alexa, and the Appstore.
Wesley Homes, a retirement community and facility provider, partnered with the Academies Fund to help open the Des Moines location.
The Day One Fund last year announced initial grants from the Families Fund for organizations that aim to prevent and reduce homelessness.
“Day One” is a reference to Bezos’ mantra at Amazon, that it’s essential to approach every day with the enthusiasm and energy of a new venture because it’s “always Day One.”
Bezos, himself a product of Montessori education, last year announced a separate $10 billion fund to fight climate change.
With Amazon’s market value soaring past $1.5 trillion, Bezos has become the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of more than $175 billion, positioning him to make a major impact on the world impact with his new philanthropic pursuits.
Amazon Consumer CEO Jeff Wilke at the 2017 GeekWire Summit. (GeekWire Photo / Dan DeLong)
Jeff Wilke, the flannel-wearing CEO of Amazon’s vast consumer business, has been described as a natural business leader and the most important executive at the company over the past decade. The 53-year-old Pittsburgh native also was viewed as the logical successor to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
So when Wilke last week announced his plans to retire in the first quarter of next year — an unexpected move that caught many Amazon watchers off guard — we naturally wondered: Who is next in line?
It’s a simple question, but the answers are as complex as Amazon itself.
To get a better sense of who may lead the sprawling empire of Amazon — a company that now touches everything from advertising to entertainment to logistics and cloud computing — we chatted with half a dozen former managers, executives and insiders. Most wanted to talk off the record, echoing the intense privacy that surrounds one of the world’s largest companies. Amazon declined to comment on its succession plans.
First, a quick caveat. There’s no indication that Jeff Bezos, at age 56, is ready to hand over the reins. In fact, COVID-19 is only driving Bezos to reimagine the company he started as a tiny online bookseller in a Bellevue home in 1994.
One former insider told us that Bezos is “very engaged” in building the business, and is especially interested in expanding the company’s reach into areas like healthcare and autonomous vehicles. “I don’t expect him to step down from CEO anytime soon,” this person said.
Even so, every large publicly-traded company — especially one with a $1.7 trillion market value — needs to be prepared for a future without its founder.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy at the 2019 re:Invent conference. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
But there are some obvious choices for a successor among the company’s top executives: Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy; Senior Vice President of Worldwide Business Development Jeff Blackburn (who is on a year-long sabbatical); and Dave Clark, the senior vice president of worldwide operations, who is taking over for Wilke.
It’s also worth looking at Amazon’s recently expanded 26-person “S-team,” the leadership group that drives key decisions for the company and includes executives who oversee business lines such as fulfillment, studios, fashion and delivery. The longer Bezos remains at the company, the more likely the reins could eventually be handed to someone who’s currently a newer member of that leadership team. That’s one reason why the growing (yet still minimal) gender and racial diversity among that group is notable.
For the time being, Jassy is the likely front runner for the CEO job, overseeing the enormously profitable cloud computing business.
One former Amazon manager noted that if you were to split Jeff Bezos in half you’d find the combination of Jeff Wilke — an “incredibly talented business executive” — and Andy Jassy — a Jeff Bezos “whisperer” who is the embodiment of Amazon’s 14 leadership principles.
In fact, those principles — frugality; thinking big; insisting on high standards; etc. — are so core to the success of Amazon that it’s highly unlikely that any future CEO would come from outside the organization.
In that regard, Amazon could (reluctantly) take a page from perhaps the most successful CEO transition of the past decade.
Bill Gates, Satya Nadella and Steve Ballmer at Microsoft in 2014. (Microsoft Photo)
When Satya Nadella was named CEO of Microsoft six years ago, very few had him on the short list of candidates. He’d never served as CEO, and he came from deep within the engineering ranks of a company that needed to refocus on its expertise in enterprise software and the cloud.
The internal pick was, by many measures, the right choice for Microsoft, just as Apple successfully transitioned to operating executive Tim Cook following the untimely death of co-founder Steve Jobs. Both Apple and Microsoft — who’ve grown significantly in recent years — looked internally for their next CEOs.
Of course, Amazon is a very different beast than Apple or Microsoft. But its culture does lend itself to picking an insider.
“There’s certainly bench strength,” said Dr. Bruce Avolio, a business professor at The University of Washington who specializes in strategic leadership. “Learning the culture and how different it is would be a challenge for somebody, especially given the up tempo of Amazon.”
Executives who succeed at Amazon tend to have long tenures — Jassy is in his 23rd year; CFO Brian Olsavsky is in his 18th year; and senior vice president and general counsel David Zapolsky is in his 21st year.
Amazon’s Dave Clark, now the new CEO of the company’s consumer business, at a 2018 event unveiling the company’s Delivery Service Partners program. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Clark, who worked as a junior high school music teacher for a year after college, has spent nearly all of his adult career at Amazon. The 47-year-old joined Amazon in 1999 after graduate school, and worked his way up the ladder, implementing robotics in fulfillment centers and overseeing the electrification of the company’s ever-expanding delivery fleet. (A good profile of Clark from Fortune magazine here).
Clark will have a big flannel to fill when Wilke — who for years celebrated front line Amazon workers by wearing flannel shirts during the fourth quarter — retires.
One former Amazon executive told GeekWire that Wilke was perhaps the most important executive in the entire organization for the past decade.
“He brought lean thinking into the organization, developed the category leader model and set Amazon up for the tremendous growth over last 10 years,” the former executive said.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota)
Jeff Bezos crossed into new billionaire territory on Wednesday with another surge in Amazon stock that pushed the CEO’s net worth to more than $200 billion. Forbes called it the largest fortune ever amassed.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk also marked a new milestone — albeit one that makes him half as rich as Bezos — when he reached $100 billion in net worth for the first time. And Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott will be the richest woman in the world any day now as she rose to 13th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at $66.2 billion, just barely behind L’Oreal SA heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers.
Bezos reached the $202 billion mark by adding $5.22 billion to his fortune on Wednesday as Amazon stock jumped 2.85% to close at $3,441.85 a share. Earlier this month, Bezos sold 1 million shares of Amazon stock valued at $3 billion.
Fueled by online shopping habits during the pandemic, Amazon stock is up more than 80% since the beginning of the year. Bezos’ net worth has rocketed right along with it after starting the year at $115 billion.
Scott, who has a 4% stake in Amazon following her divorce from Bezos last year, gained $1.86 billion on Wednesday. She previously announced that she had given nearly that much away already this year as part of a broad philanthropic mission to help fund a variety of organizations and institutions.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is second on the Bloomberg list at $124 billion ($11 billion richer than this time last year) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gained $8.48 billion on Wednesday to hit $115 billion.
Bloomberg says the 500 richest people have gained $809 billion so far this year, a 14% increase since January, even as economies have suffered mightily under the weight of COVID-19 and millions of people have lost their jobs.
“We cannot continue to allow billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to become obscenely rich while millions of Americans face eviction, hunger and economic desperation,” Vermont Sen. and one-time Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said Wednesday in a statement reported by Bloomberg. “It’s time to fundamentally change our national priorities.”
Amazon is taking its “Project Zero” anti-counterfeit program to seven additional countries, expanding a program designed to help brands fight fake products, amid heightened scrutiny of knock-offs on its e-commerce platform.
Project Zero will now be available to sellers on the Amazon online stores in Australia, Brazil, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, bringing the total to 17 countries, the company announced Monday night. Launched last year, the program is already available in the U.S., UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, India, Mexico, and Canada.
Amazon says more than 10,000 brands, ranging from small companies to large global retailers, have enrolled in the program, which gets its name from Amazon’s stated goal of zero counterfeit products on its platform. The company cited the examples of Arduino, BMW, ChessCentral, LifeProof, OtterBox, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Veet as participants.
Counterfeits were one of the topics that legislators grilled Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos about in a recent Congressional antitrust hearing with other major tech CEOs.
“Amazon has said it’s fixing its counterfeit problem, but counterfeiting seems to be getting worse, not better,” said U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, asking Bezos why Amazon doesn’t do more to fight counterfeits.
He added, “Amazon acts like it’s not responsible for counterfeits being sold by third-party sellers on its platform, and we’ve heard that Amazon puts the burden and cost on brand owners to police Amazon’s site, even though Amazon makes money when a counterfeit good is sold on its site.”
In response, Bezos outlined the company’s fight against counterfeits and disputed the notion that counterfeits are ultimately a benefit to Amazon.
“I think this is an incredibly important issue and one that we work very hard on. Counterfeits are a scourge,” he said. “It does not help us earn trust with customers. It’s bad for customers. It’s bad for honest third-party sellers. We do a lot to prevent counterfeiting. We have a team of more than a thousand people that does this. We invest hundreds of millions of dollars in systems that do this.”
As an example, Bezos pointed to Project Zero, saying it “helps brands serialize individual products, which really helps with counterfeiting.”
That was a reference to one of Project Zero’s three main components, in which brands apply a unique code in the packaging or product to allow Amazon to confirm the authenticity of individual products. Project Zero also includes self-service tools for brands to remove listings from Amazon.com, and technology that automatically identifies suspicious listings.
“Amazon is committed to protecting our customers and the brands we collaborate with worldwide,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon vice president of Worldwide Customer Trust and Partner Support, in the news release announcing the expansion Monday night. “Project Zero has been a leap forward in protecting brands, especially for those that use all three of its components.”
In the hearing, Rep. Johnson cited prior testimony from David Barnett, the CEO of PopSockets brand phone holders, who had said in an earlier hearing that Amazon listed counterfeit versions of the product ahead of genuine ones, and only stopped the practice after PopSockets committed to spend $2 million on advertising.
“That’s unacceptable,” Bezos said, promising to look into the specifics of the PopSockets claims, which received widespread coverage earlier this year. “If those are the facts, and if someone somewhere inside Amazon said, ‘Buy X dollars in ads, and then we’ll help you with your counterfeit problem,’ that is unacceptable.”
Even if Amazon makes money in the short term on counterfeit goods, it’s ultimately not in its best interest to allow fake goods, Bezos said. “I would much rather lose a sale than lose a customer,” he said.
As noted by Bezos in the hearing, the company announced the formation of an internal “Counterfeit Crimes Unit” earlier this year as part of its initiatives.
Amazon has also filed a series of lawsuits over counterfeit goods in recent years, most recently joining Italian luxury fashion brand Valentino to pursue an alleged counterfeiter of the company’s Rockstud shoes. Amazon has filed similar suits in the past in partnership with companies including Nite Ize, a maker of mobile accessories and LED products; Vera Bradley, designer of purses and accessories; and high-end phone case company OtterBox.
The company has sought to avoid legal liability for counterfeit goods sold on its platform. In what became a landmark case, Amazon was sued in 2013 by Seattle-based novelty pillowcase maker Milo & Gabby over knock-offs sold by other companies on Amazon.com. Courts sided with Amazon’s argument that the sellers of the counterfeits were the ones who should be held liable.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in June 2019. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will point to the “strikingly large and extraordinarily competitive” global retail market in his opening statement to a U.S. House antitrust subcommittee on Wednesday, making the case that the tech giant he founded as a modest online bookseller more than two decades ago is but a bit player in the larger world of commerce.
“Every day, Amazon competes against large, established players like Target, Costco, Kroger, and, of course, Walmart — a company more than twice Amazon’s size,” Bezos will say, according to a copy of his prepared remarks released by the company Tuesday afternoon. “And while we have always focused on producing a great customer experience for retail sales done primarily online, sales initiated online are now an even larger growth area for other stores.”
It remains to be seen whether Amazon can persuade lawmakers to accept its definition of the market, given its status as one of the world’s most valuable companies, led by the globe’s richest person. But the opening statement stakes a clear position on the critical question of whether Amazon has attained enough market power to warrant an antitrust crackdown.
“Amazon accounts for less than 1% of the $25 trillion global retail market and less than 4% of retail in the U.S.,” Bezos will say, according to the prepared remarks. “Unlike industries that are winner-take-all, there’s room in retail for many winners.”
On a key issue at the heart of the inquiry, the company will tout the benefits of its online marketplace for third-party sellers. Bezos’ opening statement contrasts sharply with the image of the company that has emerged from reports, most notably an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, that the company has leveraged proprietary data to compete unfairly with those sellers.
“We didn’t have to invite third-party sellers into the store. We could have kept this valuable real estate for ourselves,” Bezos says in the statement. “But we committed to the idea that over the long term it would increase selection for customers, and that more satisfied customers would be great for both third-party sellers and for Amazon. And that’s what happened.”
Toward the end of the statement, Bezos repeats a sentiment that he has expressed in the past, dating back to the company’s 2018 shareholder meeting: “Let me close by saying that I believe Amazon should be scrutinized. We should scrutinize all large institutions, whether they’re companies, government agencies, or non-profits. Our responsibility is to make sure we pass such scrutiny with flying colors.”
Bezos is set to testify via video conference Wednesday in addition to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Read the full text of Bezos’ prepared remarks.
Support independent journalism at a time when trusted storytelling and community engagement is more important than ever.
Don’t expect Amazon to roll out a social media platform anytime soon.
Speaking at an antitrust hearing that often waded outside of antitrust-related topics, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos called social media a “nuance destruction machine.”
The comment was made with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the video conference call, in addition to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
“What I find a little discouraging is that it appears to me that social media is a nuance destruction machine, and I don’t think that’s helpful for a democracy,” Bezos said.
I think Jeff Bezos calling social media a “nuance destruction machine” may be the quote everyone will remember coming out of this hearing.
— Brian Fung (@b_fung) July 29, 2020
The Amazon chief was responding to an inquiry from U.S. Rep Jim Jordan about whether the tech execs were concerned about the “cancel culture mob.”‘
A Florida teenager faces 30 felony charges related to a July 15 scam in which he hacked into the Twitter accounts of prominent users such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Barack Obama and others.
An FBI and Department of Justice investigation led to the location and apprehension of the suspect in Hillsborough County, Fla. Graham Ivan Clark, 17, was taken into custody in Tampa on Friday morning according to a news release by State Attorney Andrew Warren’s office.
Clark’s scheme to defraud involved posting tweets under the identity of prominent people, directing victims to send Bitcoin to accounts associated with Clark. He took in $100,000 in Bitcoin in one day. The cryptocurrency is difficult to track and recover if stolen in a scam, officials said.
“These crimes were perpetrated using the names of famous people and celebrities, but they’re not the primary victims here,” Warren said. “This ‘Bit-Con’ was designed to steal money from regular Americans from all over the country, including here in Florida. This massive fraud was orchestrated right here in our backyard, and we will not stand for that.”
A fake tweet sent on Bill Gates’ Twitter account earlier this month. (Twitter screengrab)
The Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office is prosecuting Clark because Florida law allows minors to be charged as adults in financial fraud cases when appropriate.
The specific charges Clark faces are:
Organized fraud (over $50,000) – 1 countCommunications fraud (over $300) – 17 countsFraudulent use of personal information (over $100,000 or 30 or more victims) – 1 countFraudulent use of personal information – 10 countsAccess computer or electronic device without authority (scheme to defraud) – 1 count
“Scamming people out of their hard-earned money is always wrong. Whether you’re taking advantage of someone in person or on the internet, trying to steal their cash or their cryptocurrency — it’s fraud, it’s illegal, and you won’t get away with it,” Warren said.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in June 2019. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will point to the “strikingly large and extraordinarily competitive” global retail market in his opening statement to a U.S. House antitrust subcommittee on Wednesday, making the case that the tech giant he founded as a modest online bookseller more than two decades ago is but a bit player in the larger world of commerce.
“Every day, Amazon competes against large, established players like Target, Costco, Kroger, and, of course, Walmart — a company more than twice Amazon’s size,” Bezos will say, according to a copy of his prepared remarks released by the company Tuesday afternoon. “And while we have always focused on producing a great customer experience for retail sales done primarily online, sales initiated online are now an even larger growth area for other stores.”
It remains to be seen whether Amazon can persuade lawmakers to accept its definition of the market, given its status as one of the world’s most valuable companies, led by the globe’s richest person. But the opening statement stakes a clear position on the critical question of whether Amazon has attained enough market power to warrant an antitrust crackdown.
“Amazon accounts for less than 1% of the $25 trillion global retail market and less than 4% of retail in the U.S.,” Bezos will say, according to the prepared remarks. “Unlike industries that are winner-take-all, there’s room in retail for many winners.”
On a key issue at the heart of the inquiry, the company will tout the benefits of its online marketplace for third-party sellers. Bezos’ opening statement contrasts sharply with the image of the company that has emerged from reports, most notably an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, that the company has leveraged proprietary data to compete unfairly with those sellers.
“We didn’t have to invite third-party sellers into the store. We could have kept this valuable real estate for ourselves,” Bezos says in the statement. “But we committed to the idea that over the long term it would increase selection for customers, and that more satisfied customers would be great for both third-party sellers and for Amazon. And that’s what happened.”
Toward the end of the statement, Bezos repeats a sentiment that he has expressed in the past, dating back to the company’s 2018 shareholder meeting: “Let me close by saying that I believe Amazon should be scrutinized. We should scrutinize all large institutions, whether they’re companies, government agencies, or non-profits. Our responsibility is to make sure we pass such scrutiny with flying colors.”
Bezos is set to testify via video conference Wednesday in addition to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Read the full text of Bezos’ prepared remarks.
Support independent journalism at a time when trusted storytelling and community engagement is more important than ever.
Don’t expect Amazon to roll out a social media platform anytime soon.
Speaking at an antitrust hearing that often waded outside of antitrust-related topics, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos called social media a “nuance destruction machine.”
The comment was made with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the video conference call, in addition to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
“What I find a little discouraging is that it appears to me that social media is a nuance destruction machine, and I don’t think that’s helpful for a democracy,” Bezos said.
I think Jeff Bezos calling social media a “nuance destruction machine” may be the quote everyone will remember coming out of this hearing.
— Brian Fung (@b_fung) July 29, 2020
The Amazon chief was responding to an inquiry from U.S. Rep Jim Jordan about whether the tech execs were concerned about the “cancel culture mob.”‘
A Florida teenager faces 30 felony charges related to a July 15 scam in which he hacked into the Twitter accounts of prominent users such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Barack Obama and others.
An FBI and Department of Justice investigation led to the location and apprehension of the suspect in Hillsborough County, Fla. Graham Ivan Clark, 17, was taken into custody in Tampa on Friday morning according to a news release by State Attorney Andrew Warren’s office.
Clark’s scheme to defraud involved posting tweets under the identity of prominent people, directing victims to send Bitcoin to accounts associated with Clark. He took in $100,000 in Bitcoin in one day. The cryptocurrency is difficult to track and recover if stolen in a scam, officials said.
“These crimes were perpetrated using the names of famous people and celebrities, but they’re not the primary victims here,” Warren said. “This ‘Bit-Con’ was designed to steal money from regular Americans from all over the country, including here in Florida. This massive fraud was orchestrated right here in our backyard, and we will not stand for that.”
A fake tweet sent on Bill Gates’ Twitter account earlier this month. (Twitter screengrab)
The Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office is prosecuting Clark because Florida law allows minors to be charged as adults in financial fraud cases when appropriate.
The specific charges Clark faces are:
Organized fraud (over $50,000) – 1 countCommunications fraud (over $300) – 17 countsFraudulent use of personal information (over $100,000 or 30 or more victims) – 1 countFraudulent use of personal information – 10 countsAccess computer or electronic device without authority (scheme to defraud) – 1 count
“Scamming people out of their hard-earned money is always wrong. Whether you’re taking advantage of someone in person or on the internet, trying to steal their cash or their cryptocurrency — it’s fraud, it’s illegal, and you won’t get away with it,” Warren said.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaking at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. (Economic Club of Washington, D.C. Photo / Gary Cameron)
A wide-ranging antitrust hearing Wednesday with top tech CEOs skewed more toward grandstanding than substance, but there were a few revealing exchanges with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Several members of the House antitrust subcommittee for the first time shed light on their year-long inquiry into Amazon and other tech giants — and those glimpses could resurface in other investigations. Lawmakers cited interviews with third-party sellers, Amazon employees, and competitors that were all within the scope of their inquiry.
Bezos testified alongside Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai in a hearing that marks the end of the House’s investigation into the power these companies wield over the tech industry.
The first two hours were largely bogged down by questions about privacy, political bias, and other issues outside the scope of antitrust law. Not one question was directed at Bezos during that time.
But the tone changed when the Congresswoman from Bezos’ district in Washington state had her turn. Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked Bezos about a Wall Street Journal investigation from April that found Amazon uses detailed data on third-party sellers in its marketplace to inform the development of in-house products.
“The issue that we’re concerned with here is very simple,” she said. “You have access to data that far exceeds the sellers on your platform with whom you compete … you have access to the entirety of sellers’ pricing and inventory — information past, present, and future — and you dictate the participation of third-party sellers on your platform, so you can set the rules of the game for your competitors but not follow those rules yourself. Do you think that’s fair to the mom and pop businesses who can sell on your platform?”
Amazon’s Assoc. General Counsel told me under oath that Amazon does NOT, “use any specific seller data when creating its own private brand product.”
Reports revealed that was a lie: that they DO access data on third party sellers.
So I just asked Jeff Bezos which it is. Watch: pic.twitter.com/MiR7NHI7Y8
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) July 29, 2020
It’s a thread that other lawmakers, including the subcommittee’s chair David Cicilline, would later pick up. The panel cited interviews with third-party sellers who claim Amazon abused its position as operator of the marketplace to compete with them, in some cases driving the sellers out of business.
Amazon Consumer CEO Jeff Wilke at the 2017 GeekWire Summit. (GeekWire Photo / Dan DeLong)
AWS CEO Andy Jassy at the 2019 re:Invent conference. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Bill Gates, Satya Nadella and Steve Ballmer at Microsoft in 2014. (Microsoft Photo)
Amazon’s Dave Clark, now the new CEO of the company’s consumer business, at a 2018 event unveiling the company’s Delivery Service Partners program. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota)
Photo: Julie Clopper / Shutterstock.com.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in June 2019. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (Amazon Photo)
(BigStock Photo)
A fake tweet sent on Bill Gates’ Twitter account earlier this month. (Twitter screengrab)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in June 2019. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (Amazon Photo)
(BigStock Photo)
A fake tweet sent on Bill Gates’ Twitter account earlier this month. (Twitter screengrab)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaking at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. (Economic Club of Washington, D.C. Photo / Gary Cameron)