Andy Jassy launched my career over 20 years ago. Here's what he did and why I will be forever grateful to the new CEO of Amazon:

In my first year of b-school I desperately wanted an internship at Amazon. They weren't recruiting from Michigan so I asked everyone I knew if they had any contacts. My parents' friends' daughter's boyfriend had gone to b-school with Andy Jassy, early marketing manager at Amazon.

I begged for an intro and he connected me to Andy who was gracious but said they were too heads down to think about summer internships. I asked Andy if he would get lunch with me if I showed up to his office in Seattle. He agreed, and I flew to Seattle over Xmas break.

Andy told me they wouldn't be hiring summer interns until May. I pinged him again in April and he set up a loop for me with his marketing team. I had no experience in marketing, but I was thrilled to have my foot in the door.

The week before my interview with Andy's team, I stumbled across another connection in my network to Ram Shriram who was running business development at Amazon and was also a Michigan alum. I actually had some experience in Biz Dev! This would be my dream job at Amazon.

I told Ram I was already scheduled to interview with Andy's team and asked him for a second interview loop with his Biz Dev team. Amazon was already paying for my flight to Seattle, why not get the most out of my trip?

I blew my interview with Andy's team. His boss had just moved from P&G, I opened our interview by making a joke about how much harder she must be working now that she was at a start-up - bad idea! She proceeded to quiz me on my marketing knowledge and quickly saw that I had none.

My interview with the Biz Dev team went well, and they later made me an offer for a summer internship - hooray! Andy called to tell me I wasn't getting an offer on the Marketing team, and when I called him back to say I had received an offer in Biz Dev he was very happy for me.

After I joined Amazon full-time, I asked Andy to get lunch every 6-12 months. He always gave me great career advice and helped me navigate the company. When he later became Jeff's technical assistant (aka "shadow") it was really fun to catch up with him at those lunches.

During his 2-year run in Jeff's office, Andy identified a bunch of inefficiencies in how teams worked together and convinced Jeff to invest in infrastructure to reduce dependencies. Amazon later externalized some of those APIs and Andy became the founder and CEO of AWS.

Andy talked to me about joining AWS in 2004. I didn't think I was technical enough to work on that team so I went to Kindle instead. I continue to be blown away to this day that Andy could run and scale AWS without a deep technical background. We're only limited by our ourselves!

When Andy took my first call in 1998, he opened a huge door for me. You never know who will be on the other side of that call...