It's not unusual to hear Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos talking about failures, but his latest comments about failing in context of the Fire Phone are particularly refreshing to hear.
In an interview with The Washington Post, which Bezos bought for $250 million in 2013, the Amazon boss made some honest comments about failing at scale in response to a question about lacklustre demand for the company's first smartphone, the Fire Phone.
"If you think that's a big failure, we're working on much bigger failures," said Bezos. "And I am not kidding. And some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip."
"You kind of have to back up because it is our job, if we want to be innovative and pioneering, to make mistakes."
Back it up
Bezos talked about the growth of the company, which now has over 250,000 employees, and how that effects the scale of the mistakes.
"The size of your mistakes needs to grow along with that. If it doesn't, you're not going to be inventing at scale that can actually move the needle."
"You need to be making big, noticeable failures".
He's not kidding - Amazon has had its fair share of sinking ships over the years, from its hotel booking site Destinations to its peer-to-peer money service WebPay.
But for each of these failures Amazon has had a success, from Kindle to Echo to, of course, the behemoth retail site itself.
