Biography | Andy Jassy — PacMed Tower, Where the Cloud Team Sat

People treat the Day 1 towers as the rooms where AWS began. The early Amazon years sat in a former hospital. Pacific Tower stands at 1200 12th Avenue South on the north end of Beacon Hill. John Graham Sr. and Bebb and Gould designed the 1932 Art Deco pile as a U.S. Marine Hospital. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A clinic still occupies lower floors. Amazon leased space here from 1999 and used the tower as headquarters until about 2010. In 2003, after the shadow year beside Jeff Bezos, Jassy was given a small team to turn internal infrastructure into a service other firms could rent. The 2003 offsite that framed the idea was not in this building. The subsequent years of building storage and compute were Amazon years, and this was still the company's public headquarters. Simple Storage Service opened in March 2006. Elastic Compute Cloud went into public beta on 25 August 2006. Jassy stayed with the division as it grew from that first stack. In April 2016 the title became CEO of Amazon Web Services. The pin is the landmark tower, not a desk and not a current office routine. Photo: Vladimir Menkov, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons