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By any measure, it’s an astonishing story.

When Andy Jassy was hired by Jeff Bezos straight out of Harvard Business School to join Amazon in 1997, the company was three years old and had fewer than 200 employees - 50 at headquarters and another 150 in a Seattle warehouse packing books into parcels.

“I knew pretty much everybody by name,” smiles the 51-year-old New Yorker, seated last week in Amazon’s sleek offices overlooking London’s Smithfield meat market.

“It was a much smaller company and we were a books-only retailer.”

How times have changed.

These days, the founder and chief executive of Amazon’s most profitable business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a pivotal player in the world’s second biggest company.

With 625,000 staff and a market value of $937bn only its crosstown rival Microsoft, at $1027bn, is worth more.

Jassy, Amazon’s second biggest individual shareholder with a stake worth $173m (£136m), may not be a household name like Bezos, who he shadowed for years as his right-hand man, but as the brains behind AWS - which now generates over half of all Amazon's profits - he has played an instrumental role in building the Seattle-based company into the ubiquitous global colossus it is today.