From intern to industry leader: Matt Garman’s journey at Amazon
It was a project that didn’t even have a name.
When Matt Garman ’06 MBA joined Amazon as an intern in 2005, then-marketing-executive Andy Jassy — now Amazon’s CEO — was recruiting interns to help develop a new business within the retailer. “He couldn’t say anything more, but I had startup experience and loved the idea,” Garman says.
That new business became Amazon Web Services (AWS). Garman returned post-Kellogg as its product manager, and in 2024 he was named CEO of AWS. Both Garman and the high-profile business he leads have grown dramatically over the past 20 years.
On September 15, Kellogg and Amazon University Talent Acquisition co-hosted a fireside chat with Garman at Amazon’s headquarters, for an audience of alumni that included many of the nearly 500 Kellogg graduates working there. Kellogg Dean Francesca Cornelli moderated the chat, which was followed by a panel of distinguished Kellogg alumni leaders in technology.
The event featured a wealth of insights from top decision-makers in technology including those about career transitions, leadership and the future of AI.
Journey to the top
A willingness to take on new things marked Garman’s rise within AWS, making him an exemplar of the high-impact, high-empathy leaders Kellogg develops.
“You have to be comfortable doing stuff you know nothing about and to admit when you don’t know something,” he says. “It could be understanding deep technology or learning new marketing stuff.”
He says his ability to ask “dumb questions” facilitated his learning: “Fifty percent of the time the team would say, ‘That’s actually not a dumb question.’” Those questions — and their answers — helped AWS “break a lot of the ways traditional technology had worked,” Garman says.
Though AWS was making “just $3 a day” when he started, Garman knew “we were on to something.” The business’s exponential growth proved that out.
About 12 years after Garman joined, having led some of AWS’s largest engineering teams, Jassy asked him to run its sales and marketing. “I went from leading 5,000 to 50,000 people,” Garman says. “How you motivate a sales team is very different from engineers. I had to start from scratch.”
Today, Garman oversees a business with a revenue run-rate of about $120 billion and consistent annual growth of 20%. He still thinks of it as the “world’s largest startup,” working to flatten layers of bureaucracy and democratize decision-making, especially for those closest to AWS’s one-million-plus customers.
Garman himself sits down with customers at least 10 times a week to understand their needs: “I’m most excited by solving customer problems, whether a two-person startup or 100-year-old enterprise. If they’re going to spend $1 on AWS, we want them to get $3 back.”
He recognizes that AI is an increasing part of addressing customers’ needs and works to ensure AWS has “guardrails, controls and classifiers” to use the technology in a safe, responsible way. “Like making sure a bank’s AI technology doesn’t provide financial advice.”
Garman emphasizes that Kellogg provided critical capabilities in problem-solving and leadership: “It helps you learn cross-functionally and connect the dots. That’s a skill set more valuable than being able to construct a business plan. Business school offers a way of thinking and incredible peers.”
Moreover, spending two years in Kellogg’s Full-Time Program “can be a time to reset and think about the next step of your career,” Garman says. “I urge everyone to take career risks. When you have a good education and work history, it seems like the least risky thing you can do — higher risk means higher return.”
Joining AWS was a risk that certainly paid off for Garman. “I planned to stay three to four years, and now it has been almost 20,” he says. “Each week it gets 1% harder. Now I’m trying to figure out how to evolve to $500 billion business.”
Takeaways from the Kellogg alumni panel
Joining Garman for the event was a panel of distinguished Kellogg alumni leaders from the technology and consulting domains.
Tarek Elmasry ’94 MBA, co-head of McKinsey’s Technology, Media, & Telecommunications Practice and a Northwestern University trustee, moderated the panel, which included Peter Krawiec ’00 MBA, Amazon SVP of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development; Carla Cooper ’95 MBA, CFO of Contentful; and Gary Briggs ’89 MBA, former CMO of Facebook who now serves as a board member and advisor to tech businesses including OpenAI.
The panelists offered advice both from visionary leaders and their own experience. “Think of your career as a jungle gym, not a ladder,” Briggs says. “Climb in all directions and try to work on things that move senior management from don’t know/don’t care to know/care.”
Krawiec emphasizes the need to be mission and impact-driven: “A focus on money alone won’t sustain you. Be stubborn on vision and flexible on details, while always thinking big.” Part of this is building a strong culture, as Cooper notes: “Make sure people know what the organization will support, to get everyone to embrace big changes.”
One of those changes, of course, is AI. “I’ve never seen anything as ambitious or rapid,” Briggs says, drawing on his front-row view at OpenAI. “We will see fully-AI-created movies and ‘upside-down pyramid’ organizations with more people at the top and fewer entry-level employees, like in a law practice.”
Cooper underscores the importance of the human touch in AI processes: “You can’t do any of this without the creative input of humans, but you have to find the right mix. You have to empower people and make sure you’re hearing from all voices in the company to help cope with big changes.”
Indeed, managing such change in an increasingly STEM-focused world requires exactly the kind of leaders Kellogg develops. “Leading today is about horizontal thinking across functions, and Kellogg has excelled at that,” Briggs says. Similarly, Krawiec recalls the values of his soft-skills classes: “If you can trace people’s incentives, you can figure out how to negotiate with them. Collaboration and teamwork are hallmarks of the Kellogg education.”
Cooper says, “It requires effectively communicating with people who have different viewpoints and expertise. Being tech savvy but also thinking flexibly — this takes empathy and humility, which is what Kellogg teaches.”
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