You've probably heard by now that Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos is stepping back from his role running the company.
He's been doing it for a long time, and apparently wants to focus on championing innovation in the company as its executive chair, letting incoming CEO Andy Jassy take the company's reins.
Now, I'm an Amazon shareholder. I've known this day would come, at some point, but was hoping it was still a decade or so away (Bezos has run Amazon since 1996, but he's still only 57).
See, Bezos is one out of the box. He — with help from others, of course — conceived of Amazon, then built and ran it for the last 25 years, turning it into the poster child for e-commerce, while also creating a highly valuable cloud computing business (essentially started because Amazon had spare computing capacity) and leading the charge into e-books.
Oh, and Amazon is now a US$1.7 trillion company, doing around US$1 billion of sales a day.
If that's not enough, it's still growing at almost 40%.
You can see why I'm a shareholder.
You can probably also see why I'm a little nervous that Bezos is stepping aside.
Frankly, I was very surprised that shares didn't fall meaningfully on the news.
I guess he's still staying at the company, and will still be executive chair, meaning his hand won't be far from the tiller, if it's needed.
Still, it's hard not to see this as the first step away from Amazon. Maybe the second one never comes, or perhaps it comes sooner than we think.
Either way, Amazon is a stronger company, the more Bezos has to do with it, and a weaker one to the extent he loosens his grip.
That doesn't mean it's worth a lot less. Or even that we should be unduly worried.
But it's fair to say that, given the choice, I would have preferred him to stay in the big chair.
Is that a logical view, though?
Is a company really worth that much less when its founder leaves?
The answer is, unfortunately, far from clear.
A prime example is Amazon's FAANG counterpart, Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL).
There aren't many people who wouldn't have preferred to see what Steve Jobs would be doing with Apple in 2021, if he was still alive.
We can only imagine the innovations that might have come from his creative brilliance had he not been taken from us too early, nearly a decade ago.
That said, his successor, Tim Cook, has been hard to fault. He might not have Jobs' instinctive ability to imagine, design and, famously, create a 'reality distortion field' that had his staff run through walls, but Cook has brought new products to market, supported innovation, and dealt deftly with consumers, competitors and regulators.
We'll never know where Apple would be, today, under Jobs, but Cook has done a great job at the helm — there's certainly no sign that Apple has been hurt by his leadership.
Staying in the US, though, we have another high profile consumer products brand, Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ: SBUX), where the leadership baton seems to have been dropped after it was passed on.
At least, that seems to be the view taken by the board in 2008, when they reappointed long-time chair Howard Schultz back to the CEO role he held for 12 years before vacating it in 2000.
(Schultz again stepped down in 2016, and shares have since doubled.)
There are plenty of other examples, too, and with mixed results. Moreover, even including the cases, above, it's hard to know the 'counterfactual' — what might have happened if the changes hadn't taken place.
Maybe Schultz would have done a terrible job between 2000 and 2008, anyway?
What if Steve Jobs had bet the company on a new technology, or, unlike Cook's pragmatic decision to offer different phone sizes and use styluses on the iPad, had stuck to his guns on those issues?
We'll never know.
It's fair to say that I much prefer founder-CEOs where I can get them. Or, as a close second, members of the founding family.
Among the companies I own, I'm glad Ruslan Kogan continues to run the eponymous retail juggernaut, Kogan.com Ltd (ASX: KGN), Jamie Pherous retains the reins at Corporate Travel Management Ltd (ASX: CTD), and Robert Millner is the fourth generation managing director of Washington H. Soul Pattinson and Co. Ltd (ASX: SOL).
(Kogan and Soul Patts are current Motley Fool Buy recommendations, by the way — and shares we reckon you can buy today! — while CTM remains on Hold, as COVID works its way through the tourism industry, but we're very impressed with how Pherous steered the company before and during the worst of the pandemic.)
I don't own the shares, but I think (despite people taking potshots) Gerry Harvey has done a great job at Harvey Norman Holdings Limited (ASX: HVN). And I wouldn't have wanted anyone else at the helm of Flight Centre Travel Group Ltd (ASX: FLT) during the COVID pandemic, other than its founder-CEO Graham 'Skroo' Turner.
Still, that's not all that matters.
After all, Apple's compound returns since Cook took over have been nothing short of phenomenal. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT)'s stunning third act, under Satya Nadella has been astonishing.
Here at home, the Xero Limited (ASX: XRO) share price has gone through the roof after founder Rod Drury stepped back to a non-executive role, while few of the largest ASX companies are still run by the people who started them.
Which kinda brings me back to where I started.
All else being equal, you have to reckon that someone running a company that is her life's work, and that the vast bulk of her wealth is tied up in, might just work that little bit harder and care just a little bit more than someone else who could run the company. Not to mention they had the insight, energy and passion for actually getting the thing off the ground in the first place. I sleep just a little easier with founder-CEOs.
So, yes, I'm going to be keeping a closer eye on Amazon than I had in the past.
But just as it would have been a mistake to sell Apple and Microsoft just because they had new CEOs, I'm not intending to part ways with Amazon any time soon.
It's yet another example of why investing can be difficult. Rules of thumb are useful starting points, but rarely, if ever, do they provide absolute answers.
Remember, Alan Bond's Bond Corp and Christopher Skase's Qintex also failed…
Fool on!
