Amazon executive Panos Panay has a message for startup founders: failure is an inevitable, necessary part of building a successful product.
Panay, Amazon SVP of devices, Alexa, and Leo, shared this advice on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, drawing on his own experience at Microsoft, where he spent more than 19 years and understood one particularly expensive mistake.
“You have to be willing to fail, and actually, not just willingly, you actually have to fail,” Panay said. “If you haven’t failed, you probably haven’t pushed the limit. It’s literally the harvest of lessons learned when you fail. You have to be willing to face it, and as you face it, learn from it.”
Panay said it is possible to recover from all kinds of mistakes, even catastrophic ones, noting that he experienced one himself at Microsoft. He described the launch of the Surface RT, Microsoft’s first tablet computer, as a major mistake during his tenure at the company, one that ultimately led to a nearly $1 billion write-down.
“I remember the front cover of a newspaper, and it just said failure,” said Panay. “But, here’s the thing, it was easy to admit failure. The trick was, and always is, did you collect the lessons and understand what happened? Okay. What did you learn? Because the failure was not at that moment. There were decisions that led to this two years before, whether the software was not complete or the inventory was wrong or how we balanced all these steps in retail.
He said founders must be willing to understand what went wrong, avoid excuses, and ultimately accept failure.
“Here’s the other side of it,” he said. “You want to be successful, right? You take that failure, but you don’t let go of your vision. That’s it. Surface did it pretty well. You don’t let go of your vision. You don’t break it.”
Panay emphasizes the importance of staying committed to a vision, learning from experience and moving quickly. He believes that by embracing failure and learning from setbacks, founders can adapt and make progress faster, even when they encounter new obstacles.
“It goes back to the same fundamental, like, did you learn?” he said. “Did you learn along the way? Because when you’ve learned, you just change your vector. Usually it’s not 180 degrees. Usually it’s just 30 degrees. Take your lessons learned, change a little bit, adjust your vision to where it needs to be, and then go.”
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