Amazon devices chief Panos Panay on the importance of failure and setbacks

Panay said that when building products, one can recover from all kinds of failures, even catastrophic ones, and learn from them.

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Amazon CEO Panos Panay has a message for startup founders: failure is an inevitable and necessary part of building a successful product.

Panay, Amazon's VP of devices, Alexa and Leo, shared the advice on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, drawing on his experience at Microsoft, where he spent more than 19 years and experienced a very expensive failure.

"You have to be willing to fail, and actually, not just be willing, but actually fail," Panay said. "If you haven't failed, you probably haven't crossed the line. It's literally about the lessons you learn when you fail. You have to be willing to face it and learn from it as you face it."

It's possible to recover from all kinds of failures, even catastrophic failures, Panay said, noting that he experienced one himself at Microsoft. He described the launch of the Surface RT, Microsoft's first tablet, as a major failure during his tenure at the company, a failure that ultimately resulted in a loss of about $1 billion.

"I remember being on the cover of a newspaper and it just said failure," Panay said. "But, here's the thing, it was easy to admit failure. The trick was, and always is, did you take the lessons and understand what happened? Well. What did you learn? Because the failure wasn't the moment. It was the decisions that led up to it two years before, whether the software wasn't perfect or the inventory was wrong or how we balanced retail. There were all those steps along the way."

Founders must be willing to admit mistakes, avoid making excuses, and ultimately accept failure, he said.

"Here's the other side of it," he said. “You want to succeed, yes? You accept this failure, but you don't give up on your vision. That's it. Surface has done very well. You don't give up your vision. You don't break it."

Panay stressed the importance of staying committed to a vision, learning from experience and moving quickly. He believes that by accepting failure and learning from failures, founders can adapt and progress faster, even if they face new obstacles.

"It comes back to the basics, like, have you learned?" he said. “Were you learning along the way? Because if you were learning, you would just change your vector. Usually not 180 degrees. Usually it is only 30 degrees. Take the lessons learned, change a little, adjust your vision to where it needs to be, and then go. "I believe there are people who hang around for a long time, but that's because they haven't accepted the moment of failure at all."

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Ayesha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Before joining 2021, he was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Ayesha holds a Bachelor's degree with honors from the University of Toronto and a Master's degree in Journalism from Western University.

You can contact or confirm Aisha by sending an email to [email protected] or by sending an encrypted message to aisha_malik.01 on Signal.

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