After spending close to the last three decades building Amazon into the formidable e-commerce site that it is today, the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, has announced that he will step down from his role as CEO of the company, to instead serve as executive chairman.

Bezos said the move would give him “time and energy” to focus on his other ventures.

The transition will begin in the third quarter of this year on July 1st.

“This journey began some 27 years ago,” Bezos wrote in a statement on Tuesday.

“Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, ‘What’s the Internet?’ Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while,” he said.

Bezos, 57, plans to stay involved in product development. “In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives,” he wrote. “Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence.”

Andy Jassy, who currently leads Amazon’s cloud computing business, will become the new CEO.

Amazon now has 1.3 million employees and “serves hundreds of millions of customers and businesses,” Bezos noted.