There is a failure mode in founder succession that nobody talks about honestly, because talking about it honestly requires saying something unkind about people who are universally praised.
The failure mode is this: the founder picks the best executor as successor. The executor inherits the company. The company stops innovating. Everyone is confused. The leadership principles are still on the wall. The culture documents are still circulated. The six-page memos are still written. Everything looks the same. Nothing works the same.
The confusion is genuine, and the explanation is simple: the founder confused “made my vision real” with “has vision.” Those are different capabilities. They may be opposite capabilities. The skills that make someone the best executor in the company (focus, discipline, alignment, efficiency, predictable delivery) are exactly the skills that kill the innovation engine (divergence, tolerance for failure, appetite for variance, willingness to fund weird things that don’t fit the roadmap).
This is not a new observation. What is new is the mechanism by which it happens, and the mechanism is more damning than the observation.
Amazon is the clearest case because Amazon was the most deliberately constructed innovation culture in modern business history, and it died anyway.
Jeff Bezos built the innovation engine on a specific implicit contract: swing hard, and if you fail, nothing bad happens to you personally. Failed project? The team disperses. The people get absorbed into other teams. There are always more projects than people, so the absorption capacity exceeds the failure rate. The institutional knowledge from the failure feeds the next success. Fire Phone dies, the voice technology team goes to Alexa.
That contract was the engine. Not the leadership principles. Not the six-page memos. Not “disagree and commit.” Not “it’s always Day One.” Those were expressions of the contract. The contract itself was structural: the cost of failure is zero for the individual. Under that condition, people take risks. They propose the weird idea. They write the six-pager that says “this is wrong and here’s why.” They swing for the thing that might not work because swinging has no downside and connecting has unlimited upside.
The contract depended on one condition: there are always more projects than people. New things are being started faster than old things are being shut down. The ecosystem is expanding. The failure can be absorbed because the growth creates room.
The contract broke in stages, and the stages map to specific, identifiable decisions.
The first stage was the management layer. Amazon grew, and growth required managers. Managers were hired from outside because external hiring is easier than internal promotion. Promoting an engineer into management is messy: the skills are different, the transition is awkward, the failure rate is high, and the engineer you promote out of engineering is an engineer you lose from engineering. External management hires arrive pre-formatted. They already know how to run meetings, write performance reviews, and build org charts. They are productive from day one.
But they don’t know what’s wrong.
The engineer who was promoted into management hears the angry six-pager and thinks “yes, I saw that too, we need to fix this.” The external management hire hears the angry six-pager and thinks “this person is not aligned with the team’s direction.” That is the entire difference. The promoted engineer shares the error-corrector’s context. The external hire shares the organization’s narrative. When they collide, the external hire wins, because the organization at scale rewards narrative management.
And each external hire hires the next external hire, because people select for what they recognize. The external hire recognizes narrative fluency, stakeholder management, strategic communication. The external hire does not recognize the angry engineer who is sometimes wrong and sometimes abrasive and always specific, because the external hire has never been that engineer. Within three hiring cycles, the management stack is four layers deep, none of whom have ever touched the system they manage, all of whom interpret error-correction as misalignment.
The six-page memo survives as a format. It dies as a function. The engineer still writes it. The manager says “let me take a look at that before you send it up, I want to make sure it’s positioned correctly.” The engineer, who wants to be promoted, says “sure.” The manager repositions. The document is no longer the engineer’s document. It has been workshopped. The alarm has been converted into a status update. The error is still there. Nobody who can act on it will ever see it described as an error.
Within two years, the engineer stops writing the raw version entirely. The engineer pre-filters at the point of composition. The engineer anticipates what the management chain will change and makes those changes before anyone else sees the document. The engineer writes the workshopped version directly. The alarm was never sounded. The six-pager is now written in the manager’s voice by the engineer. The format survived. The function is dead.
The second stage was the collapse of the new-project pipeline, and this is the stage that killed the implicit contract.
Around 2018 or 2019, the management chain (now heavily populated by external hires) started killing new projects before they could start. Not by saying “no” directly (that would be visible and attributable). By managing them down through prioritization exercises.
An engineer has a weird idea. The idea doesn’t fit the current roadmap. The engineer writes a proposal. The manager says “interesting, but let’s think about how this aligns with our priorities.” The proposal enters a prioritization exercise. It ranks low because it’s speculative and the metrics are uncertain. The proposal dies in committee. No one said no. The process said no. The manager’s hands are clean.
Multiply that by every organization in the company. The weird, speculative, high-variance ideas that produced AWS, Prime, and Kindle are being killed in prioritization exercises before they reach anyone with the authority or the appetite to say “do it anyway.” The innovation pipeline dries up. There are no longer more projects than people. The absorption capacity is gone. The implicit contract’s structural foundation has eroded.
And then the CEO, Andy Jassy, laid off eighteen thousand people in January 2023. More cuts followed. The layoffs targeted organizations that were underperforming, experimental, or “not aligned with long-term priorities.”
The implicit contract didn’t just erode. It shattered. The contract was: swing hard, if you fail nothing bad happens to you. The new reality was: swing hard, if you fail you might be walked out. Under the new reality, nobody swings hard. Everyone optimizes for safe bets. Everyone aligns with the roadmap. Everyone does the thing that “moves the needle” on this quarter’s metrics. Nobody proposes the weird idea because the weird idea might fail and failure now means termination.
Jassy saw the layoffs as operational discipline. Wall Street agreed. The stock responded. The board approved. By every conventional management metric, the layoffs were correct. Headcount was above plan. Revenue growth was slowing. The market wanted efficiency.
And efficiency is the definition of Day Two. Day One is unpredictable. Day One launches weird things. Day One fails publicly and expensively. Wall Street hates Day One because Day One creates variance. Jassy gave Wall Street reduced variance. Reduced variance is reduced innovation. He traded the innovation engine for a stock price bump. The trade was rational by every metric except the one that matters: what does the company look like in ten years?
The third stage is the one that makes the story personal, and the part nobody wants to examine.
Andy Jassy’s background is publicly documented and worth examining precisely, because the biography is the diagnosis.
Jassy grew up in Scarsdale, New York, one of the wealthiest suburbs in America. His father, Everett Jassy, was a senior partner and chairman of the management committee at Dewey Ballantine, a major New York corporate law firm. He attended Harvard College (cum laude, in government) and Harvard Business School. He married Elana Rochelle Caplan, whose father was also a senior partner at Dewey Ballantine. Both families were established, affluent, professionally connected New York legal families.
After Harvard College and before business school, Jassy spent five years at MBI, a direct-marketing collectibles company headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut. MBI sells coins, commemorative medals, jewelry, leather-bound books, and similar items through print and digital media under brands including Danbury Mint and Postal Commemorative Society. It is, to put it plainly, the kind of company whose advertisements you skip past in magazine inserts. Jassy was a project manager. He and an MBI colleague then co-founded a company that failed and closed. He went to HBS. He joined Amazon in 1997 as a marketing manager. He became Bezos’s “shadow” technical adviser. He built AWS from a 57-person team into the most profitable cloud business on the planet.
The AWS achievement is genuine and extraordinary. Jassy took a weird idea and turned it into a business generating more than $90 billion in annual revenue. He is one of the most successful operational executives in the history of the technology industry. This is not in dispute and should not be diminished.
What is in dispute is whether the skills that built AWS are the skills that the CEO of Amazon needed after Bezos stepped back. They are not.
Jassy’s career (Scarsdale to Harvard to MBI to Harvard Business School to Amazon-marketing-manager to Bezos’s-shadow to AWS-executor) is a career of consistently high prestige and consistently low personal risk at every junction. His one independent venture failed and he immediately retreated to the safety of a top MBA program. He never tried again. He attached himself to the most successful founder of his generation and executed brilliantly within the founder’s strategic vision for twenty-four years.
He never built something from conception through the full cycle of personal financial risk, failure, learning, and iteration. He never made a bet where losing meant losing everything. The startup with his MBI colleague failed and his next move was business school, not another startup. That tells you everything about risk calibration.
This is not a character deficiency. It is a biographical fact. And biographical facts shape disposition.
The founder’s disposition (the willingness to look at something weird and see transformative potential rather than risk) is a calibration produced by the specific experience of having bet everything and survived. Bezos left a senior position at D.E. Shaw to start a bookstore in a garage, telling his family there was a 70% chance he would lose everything. That experience is in his body. When someone brings him a weird idea, something pre-rational fires before the metrics are evaluated.
You cannot acquire that calibration at Harvard Business School. You cannot acquire it by observing a founder for twenty-four years. You either have the scar tissue from having risked everything or you don’t. Jassy doesn’t. He learned Bezos’s moves. He did not learn why Bezos’s moves worked. He learned to execute “disagree and commit.” He did not learn the disposition that generates the disagreement in the first place. He inherited the liturgy. He did not inherit the faith.
And the founder himself was not paying attention during the critical window.
Between 2018 and 2022, during the exact years when the management layer was calcifying, the innovation pipeline was drying up, and generational platform opportunities were open and closeable, Bezos’s bandwidth was consumed by matters of public record.
The affair with Lauren Sánchez became a global tabloid story in January 2019. The leaked texts. The National Enquirer. The AMI extortion allegations. The security investigation. The divorce from MacKenzie Scott. The $38 billion settlement. This consumed an enormous amount of the cognitive bandwidth that should have been spent in the lab asking “what is the thing underneath the thing.”
Simultaneously, Blue Origin. The suborbital flight in July 2021. The cowboy hat. The four minutes of weightlessness. The press tour. While SpaceX was building Falcon 9 reusability, winning NASA contracts, deploying Starlink, and constructing Starship (actual orbital-class lift capacity, actual infrastructure, actual platform play), Bezos was riding a tourism rocket that goes up and comes down and doesn’t do anything useful.
The transition to Jassy happened in July 2021, the same month as the Blue Origin flight. The timing tells you what had the founder’s attention and what didn’t.
The comparison with Musk is not about character. It is about bandwidth allocation. During the same window, Musk was building actual infrastructure across multiple companies while managing his own considerable share of personal chaos. He maintained the seeing. Bezos allocated his bandwidth to crisis management, a vanity rocket, and (subsequently) the construction of one of the world’s largest sailing yachts. The market doesn’t care about the reason for the allocation. The market only sees the result.
There is a specific, concrete example that illustrates the cost of this combined failure (founder disengaged, executor unable to see platform plays), and it is worth stating in detail because the cost is not hypothetical. It is real, it is permanent, and it affects everyone.
Amazon was positioned, between approximately 2016 and 2022, to become the air traffic control provider for autonomous aerial vehicles worldwide. The opportunity was a direct structural analog to AWS.
AWS arose from a simple insight: what does every other online business need that we’re building for ourselves? The answer was compute, storage, and database.
Prime Air (Amazon’s drone delivery program) generated the identical insight: what does every other drone need that we’re building for ourselves? The answer was air traffic management. Route deconfliction. Airspace authorization. Regulatory compliance infrastructure. Every autonomous aerial vehicle on Earth needs these services. Someone has to provide them. The provider will be a natural monopoly (you don’t run two competing air traffic control systems in the same airspace). The business model is per-transaction pricing, volume at low margin, becoming the platform that everything else runs on.
Amazon had the cloud infrastructure to run it at global scale. Amazon had the logistics expertise to understand operational requirements. Amazon had the drone program that provided firsthand knowledge of system requirements. The FAA was actively seeking a technology partner. NASA’s UTM program was explicitly designed around the assumption that a commercial provider would operate the low-altitude traffic management layer. The drone manufacturing industry wanted Amazon to do it because they trusted AWS and didn’t want their cloud provider competing with them. The military wanted Amazon to do it because they trusted AWS’s security infrastructure.
The opportunity was not pursued. It was deprioritized through the standard mechanism: high cost, no near-term revenue, regulatory complexity, uncertain timeline, doesn’t fit the three-year planning window.
Bezos, undistracted, would have funded it. Bezos made the identical move with AWS when every analyst said a bookstore shouldn’t build server infrastructure. He overrode the framework because he could see the platform play. Jassy executed within the framework because Jassy has the disposition to execute within frameworks. And Bezos wasn’t watching because Bezos was dealing with the consequences of sending photographs of his genitals to his girlfriend.
The drone ATC opportunity has closed. The airspace management layer will be built by whoever wins the federal contract, which will be won through the federal procurement process, which is won by companies whose core competency is winning federal procurement processes. (Read “Beltway Bandit” here.)
The downstream cost is measured in what the world gets instead.
Amazon would have priced drone ATC the way it priced AWS: margin on volume, pennies per transaction, drive adoption until the cost is invisible in unit economics. AWS pricing gave a college student twelve-dollar-a-month compute. It created the modern startup ecosystem. Amazon’s ATC pricing would have given a farmer in Oregon affordable crop monitoring drones. It would have given rural clinics drone medical supply delivery. It would have given infrastructure inspectors cheap aerial survey capacity.
The defense contractor will price it the way defense contractors price everything: extract maximum revenue from a captured customer base that has no alternative. The FAA will mandate a certified traffic management system. Every drone operator will be a captive customer. The contractor will set registration fees, monthly minimums, and per-second airtime charges at whatever the market will bear. And the market will bear anything, because the mandate removes the option of not paying.
Half the commercial drone applications that would have transformed agriculture, rural healthcare, infrastructure inspection, disaster response, and environmental monitoring do not work at defense-contractor price points. Those applications will never be built. Not because the technology fails. Because the infrastructure pricing kills them.
And the defense contractor will lobby to maintain the extraction model. The regulatory structure will calcify around the high-price model. The affordable infrastructure future will be permanently foreclosed by regulatory capture.
One more thing about what does not appear in anyone’s KPIs.
The VP who killed the drone ATC opportunity through deprioritization (or more precisely, the VPs plural, across multiple organizations, who collectively deprioritized it through individually rational planning decisions) will never have that decision appear in a performance review. There is no metric for “killed the next AWS.” There is no performance review category for “failed to fund a five-hundred-billion-dollar opportunity.” There is no dashboard that shows “opportunities not pursued.”
The KPIs show what you did. They do not show what you didn’t do. The VP’s KPIs show the projects that were funded, the milestones hit, the revenue generated, the costs reduced. The KPIs look excellent. The VP gets promoted. The VP who kills a generational platform opportunity by not funding it produces the same KPI profile as a VP who simply didn’t have a generational opportunity available. The two cases are indistinguishable in the data.
The only person who knows the difference is the engineer who saw the opportunity and tried to send it up the chain and was told it wasn’t aligned with priorities.
This is not primarily a story about Amazon. It is a story about what happens when the founder’s disposition leaves the building.
The pattern repeats everywhere. Apple: Jobs to Cook. Cook is a brilliant supply chain operator. Cook has not originated a new product category since inheriting the company. The product pipeline runs on what Jobs left, progressively refined, operationally perfected, strategically inert.
Microsoft: Gates to Ballmer. Ballmer was the best enterprise salesman in history. Ballmer missed mobile, missed cloud, missed social, missed every platform transition of the 2000s. Not because he was stupid. Because he evaluated opportunities through a sales framework, and platform transitions don’t look like sales opportunities. They look like weird experiments. (Microsoft’s revival under Nadella is the exception that proves the rule: Nadella had the specific disposition to see cloud as a platform play, and the biography to support it, having spent his career building infrastructure products rather than selling them.)
Disney: Walt to everyone after Walt. The company has been acquiring other people’s intellectual property for six decades (Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Fox) because the creative origination engine was Walt and Walt died in 1966.
In each case, the founder picked or was succeeded by the best executor available. In each case, the executor maintained existing businesses with extraordinary competence. In each case, the innovation engine died because the innovation engine was the founder’s disposition, not the company’s culture, and the disposition didn’t transfer with the title.
The founder’s disposition is a non-renewable resource. It enters the organization with the founder. It operates for as long as the founder is actively engaged and has the cognitive bandwidth to see. It dissipates when the founder disengages, whether by choice, by distraction, or by the slow displacement of exploration by governance.
It cannot be replaced by a successor who has not independently developed it through their own history of existential risk-taking. It cannot be preserved by leadership principles, culture documents, or institutional ritual. It cannot be sustained by the founder personally at sufficient organizational scale, because the governance consumes all available bandwidth and the seeing requires bandwidth the governance doesn’t leave.
If you are a founder, the most important thing you do is not building the business. It is maintaining the disposition that allows you to see the next business inside the current business. Protect the seeing. Protect the time that is not governance. Protect the cognitive bandwidth that asks “what is the thing underneath the thing.” Protect it from the calendar. Protect it from the quarterly review. Protect it from the board meeting. Protect it from the personal crises. Protect it from the vanity projects. Protect it from the yacht.
Because the moment you stop seeing, it doesn’t matter what’s on the wall. The liturgy continues. The function is gone. And the farmer in Oregon doesn’t get the drone.
Don’t put down the drone.