Good morning! Hershey gets a bid for its business, Lara Trump's next move, and an Amazon exec is trying to build the company's first true applications business. Have a lovely Tuesday.
- All about Amazon. When Colleen Aubrey joined Amazon in the U.K. almost 20 years ago, she worked with sellers of used books, DVDs, and video games. As she helped grow the U.K. market's share of units available on Amazon from the single digits to about 30%, she got a piece of advice from Eric Broussard, a longtime Amazon exec who was around for the company's earliest days.
"If I focused on developing a reputation for being able to deliver great results, then many opportunities would come my way at Amazon," Aubrey remembers Broussard telling her. "You just want to be the first person people thought of for a new problem to solve or a new mountain to climb. And I think he was right."
In the years that followed, Aubrey moved to Amazon's Seattle headquarters and rose in the ranks of its ads business, culminating in a role as SVP of advertising products and tech. In 2019, she was added by Jeff Bezos to Amazon's famed S-team, its group of senior leaders, now numbering 29. And earlier this year she took on a new role as SVP for AWS solutions, which builds business applications, some of which Amazon already uses internally. Its most successful product so far is Amazon Connect, a customer service support system.
AWS is, of course, already critical for many businesses' computing and cloud capabilities, but Aubrey's portfolio aims to build enterprise solutions for businesses on top of that, competing with everyone from Microsoft and Google to new AI applications. Her goal and that of CEO Andy Jassy is for Amazon "to be mission critical to how companies run their businesses each day with applications where...you don't have this fragmentation of your tools that you use day to day."
Her mandate in this new role is broad, crossing everything from enabling secure work for businesses in the age of AI; to tools for the life sciences, adding to Amazon's HealthOmics platform; to supply chain logistics for businesses; to additional applications of Amazon's "just walk out" technology used in its grocery stores.
"What kept me here is that I don't know if there's more than a six-month period that went by where I didn't have a new opportunity to go after, a new business to get started with, a new team to be working with," Aubrey says. "My responsibilities kept evolving, and the opportunities kept coming."
Aubrey is originally from Australia and moved to the U.K. and then the U.S. to pursue her career ambitions. "I was not working in a competitive enough environment in Australia," she says. "I was doing too much time swimming, riding my bike and drinking wine, watching the sailing, and not enough time really challenging myself to be the best that I could be in my work."
Her new leadership role is helping to scratch an itch she's had since she was in her 20s: to become a CEO. "In this current role, it's really on me," she says. The biggest question, she says is a simple one: "Are we going to be able to build a credible applications business or not?"
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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