Amazon executive Panos Panay has a message for startup founders: failure is an inevitable, required part of building a successful product. Panay, Amazon SVP of Devices, Alexa, and Leo, shared that advice onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, drawing on his own experience at Microsoft, where he spent more than 19 years and weathered one particularly expensive failure.
“"You have to be willing to fail, and actually, not just willing, you actually have to go fail," Panay said. "If you haven’t failed, you probably haven’t pushed the boundary. It’s literally about harvesting the lessons learned when you fail. You have to be willing to face it, and as you face it, learn from it."
Panay noted that it’s possible to recover from all sorts of failures, even catastrophic ones, mentioning his experience with the launch of the Surface RT, Microsoft’s first tablet computer, which he described as a significant failure during his tenure at the company. This failure ultimately led to a nearly $1 billion write-down.
“"I remember being on the front cover of a newspaper, and it just said failure," Panay recalled. "But, here’s the thing, it was easy to admit failure. The trick was, and always is, did you harvest the learnings and understand what happened? All right. What did you learn? Because the failure wasn’t that moment. It was decisions that led up to it two years before that, whether the software wasn’t complete or the inventory was wrong or how we balanced into retail. There were all these steps along the way."
