Athlete and environmentalist Joy Covey, Amazon’s first CFO, dead at 50

Athlete and environmentalist Joy Covey, Amazon’s first CFO, dead at 50

Athlete and environmentalist Joy Covey, Amazon’s first CFO, dead at 50, The tragic death of Joy Covey, 50, who as Amazon.com Inc.’s first chief financial officer helped founder Jeff Bezos hash out a financial strategy that is still in place today, is being mourned in Silicon Valley, where she was raised, and beyond.

Covey, who retired from Amazon AMZN  13 years ago, was killed Wednesday in a bicycling accident on Skyline Boulevard, a winding road high above Palo Alto with stunning Silicon Valley views, and popular with avid cyclists. She was hit by a van that turned left in front of her from an oncoming lane at the last minute, according to the Mercury News.

In 2000, she left Amazon, which she’d help guide through the IPO process in 1997, to focus on family, travel, skiing and environmental causes. Most recently she was treasurer and a member of the board of trustees with the National Resources Defense Council. She was also the president of the Beagle Foundation.

In a 2007 interview with MarketWatch technology editor Dan Gallagher for a profile on Bezos, Covey talked about working with Bezos in the early days of Amazon and how they formed the strategy to working with Wall Street — a novel concept at the time that emphasized cash flow over earnings per share.

Covey was a high-school dropout who eventually went on to study at Harvard, where she received a double J.D./M.B.A. degree in 1989. She told the Harvard Law Bulletin in 2002 that, after leaving high school, she bagged groceries and went to Cal State Fresno to get her undergraduate degree and worked briefly as a CPA.

At first, she was intimidated by her peers at the Ivy League school, but when first-semester grades came out she realized everything was going to be OK. She said one of the most useful things she learned while at Harvard Law School was the ability to take a structured, analytical approach to complex questions.

“We spent a lot of time thinking unconventionally, and thinking through things based on our core principles, which is the kind of thought process I learned in law school,” Covey said of her years at Amazon, where she’d become CFO at the age of 33.