Why failures are an important part of any business – Jeff Bezos at Amazon Smbhav

On the second episode of the three-part series on Amazon Smbhav, the mega-summit conducted for India’s SMBs, Jeff Bezos, in a freewheeling chat with Amit Agarwal, talks about early days of Amazon, the lessons learnt, the importance of experiments

the possibilities of scaling up businesses are now more than ever, especially with apt technological solutions aiding the process. Amazon Smbhav was an event organized with just that in focus, and on the first episode about the event broadcast on CNN News18, we saw NR Narayana Murthy, Founder of Infosys, and Kishore Biyani, Founder and CEO of Future Group, recount their experiences of starting and scaling up businesses, and the lessons learnt along the way. On the second episode, we hear from the man himself – Jeff Bezos, the Founder and CEO of Amazon.

Dressed in a blue ethnic jacket, a gift to him by one of the attending SMBs, he said “It's hard to remember, but 25 years ago, Amazon was a tiny little company. And you know, not only was I driving the packages to the post office myself, but I was wrapping them and, and preparing them and, you know, doing all the things that small entrepreneurs do." Answering Amit’s question on why Amazon is the best place to experiment and fail at, Bezos said, “See if you know in advance that something is going to work, then it is not an experiment. So, you want to be doing many experiments per unit time, as many experiments per day, per week, per month, per year as you can because that's how you get innovation. Innovation is all about maximizing the rate of experimentation. And so you have to organize to be able to experiment and you have to have a culture that supports failure. Amit and I together, we've been working together for two decades and I have failed together so many times and that is that is, it's another way of learning."