Dave Clark, the man behind Amazon’s unprecedented scale of expansion during the past two decades and more, has decided to resign from the e-commerce giant. Clark had a decorated 23 year tenure with Amazon, and announced his plans to resign on Friday via twitter.
I've had an incredible time at Amazon but it’s time for me to build again. It's what drives me. To all I've had the honor of working with: thank you for making it so much fun to come to work every day for 23 years to invent cool, amazing things for customers.
Email to team below pic.twitter.com/c8Ao46VvaJ
— Dave Clark (@davehclark) June 3, 2022
In the heartfelt statement, Mr. Dave Clark said “I’ve had an incredible time at Amazon but it’s time for me to build again. It’s what drives me. To all I’ve had the honor of working with: thank you for making it so much fun to come to work every day for 23 years to invent cool, amazing things for customers.”
This departure sets Amazon firmly into the Andy Jassy era. Jassy replaced Jeff Bezos as the CEO of the company, and ever since, the company has seen an appreciable change in leadership personnel. “The past few years have been the most challenging and unpredictable we’ve faced in the history of Amazon’s consumer business, and I’m particularly appreciative of Dave’s leadership during that time,” Jassy said in a memo to staff.
Clark was the head of all logistics at Amazon till January 2021, before being promoted to CEO for it’s consumer division. During his tenure as Head of Logistics, Amazon faced unprecedented fulfilment challenges, as the pandemic caused the demand for e-commerce soar, and the company was struggling to keep pace with the market, running out of warehouse space and other resources. Under Clark, Amazon went on a massive hiring spree and doubled the capacity of it’s fulfilment centres, allowing them to speed up deliveries. Hindsight is always 20/20 (Pun very much intended), as the world returns to normalcy, demand has dipped, and Amazon finds itself stuck with more warehouse space than they need, costing them $10 Billion in extra costs just for the first half of 2022. As a direct consequence, Amazon reported its first quarterly loss in seven years.
Clark came aboard the Amazon wagon in 1999, and over the last 23 years, rose through the ranks from a regional operations manager in Kentucky, to Head of all Logistics, to then become Consumer CEO. He is known to be of colorful and outspoken personality, not shying away from social media banter with rivals like FedEX. A famously known statement of his came on twitter as he defended Amazon’s employee safety policy, saying “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace.”
