Amazon Prime chief leaves for Airbnb

(CNN Money) — A top Amazon executive is trading Jeff Bezos for Brian Chesky.

Greg Greeley, the Amazon VP who oversaw its Prime subscription service, is leaving the company after nearly two decades to take an executive position at Airbnb.

Airbnb said Tuesday that Greeley will take over as the president of Homes, a segment that includes the startup’s recently announced high-end rental offerings.

“Greg will join our executive team and report directly to me,” Chesky, the cofounder and CEO of Airbnb, said in a blog post Tuesday.

Greeley joined Amazon in 1999, inspired by Jeff Bezos’s original letter to shareholders published when the company went public in 1997. The letter famously laid out the CEO’s plans to focus on the long term and “obsess over customers.”

“That letter described a unique approach for a public company, and the vision it contained was even more powerful than I fully understood at the time,” Greeley wrote in a LinkedIn post late Monday announcing his departure.

Related: 5 ways Amazon has already changed Whole Foods

Greeley held several executive roles, overseeing operations finance, media efforts and international expansion before taking over Prime in 2013.

Launched in 2005, Prime has emerged as a central pillar of Amazon’s business. Amazon has convinced tens of millions of customers to sign up for the $99 subscription service by offering free shipping, access to movies and TV shows, and now free two-hour delivery from Whole Foods.

This year, however, Greeley reportedly began to focus more on Whole Foods, which Amazon acquired for $13.7 billion.

“It has been an amazing and inspirational experience, but the time has come for me take on a different challenge,” Greeley wrote on LinkedIn.

In a statement provided to CNN, Amazon said: “We thank Greg for his contributions to Amazon and wish him the best in his new role.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.