Garman’s AWS History: From Amazon Intern To AWS CEO
Matt Garman is 48 years old and first joined Amazon during AWS’ inception in 2006.
Garman graduated from Stanford University in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, followed by obtaining his engineering master’s the next year. In 2004, he attended Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and received his MBA.
Garman officially started at Amazon as an MBA intern during the summer of 2005, and joined the company full time in 2006 as one of the first AWS product managers. His first role was principal product manager of software development for Amazon EC2.
In just three years, Garman was promoted to director and general manager of Amazon EC2. From 2013 to 2020, Garman was vice president of AWS Compute Services.
“Initially working across all of AWS, Matt helped create our first service level agreements, define new features, and create new pricing plans,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in a statement. “He then became our first product manager for EC2, and led EC2 product management in its early, formative years. During that time, he also led the team that defined, launched, and operated EBS [Amazon Elastic Block Store].”
In January 2020, Garman was promoted to senior vice president of AWS sales, marketing and global services. He began reporting directly to then CEO Jassy.
Garman will officially take over as CEO of AWS on June 3.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy: ‘Matt Knows Our Customers And Business As Well As Anybody In The World’
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (pictured) says he is bullish about AWS future with Garman at the helm due to his skillset.
“Matt has an unusually strong set of skills and experiences for his new role. He’s very customer focused, a terrific product leader, inventive, a clever problem-solver, right a lot, has high standards and meaningful bias for action,” said Jassy.
Amazon’s CEO added that Garman has been one of the best “learners” Jassy has met and his experience on both the product and demand generation side is a key.
“In the 18 years he’s been in AWS, he’s been one of the better learners I’ve encountered. Matt knows our customers and business as well as anybody in the world, and has senior leadership experience on both the product and demand generation sides,” said Jassy.
In is key to note that since 2020, Garman was a member of Jassy’s senior leadership team, dubbed the ‘S Team’, who helped set AWS goals, strategy, company culture and handle crises.
“I’m excited to see Matt and his outstanding AWS leadership team continue to invent our future—it’s still such early days in AWS,” Jassy said.