Jeff Bezos' Success Mantra For Startups & Small Businesses Begins With His Failures At Amazon

In case you didn¡¯t know, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is in India this week. He was part of SMBhav -- a convention for small and medium businesses, and get them to grow online.

After revealing that he will be exporting 'made in India' products to the world at the event, he shared some of his success mantra and early Amazon experiences with entrepreneurs to inspire them all.

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How to make the push

In conversation with Amazon India chief Amit Agarwal, Jeff Bezos revealed how he got the idea to start Amazon, at a time when he was doing very well as a software programmer. He spoke about the push that he gave himself to take the risk of starting his own enterprise. He said ¡° I wanted not to have regrets. I pictured myself 80 years old, and thinking back on my life and a quiet moment of reflection, would I regret leaving this company in the middle of the year and walk away from my bonus and all those things?¡±

¡°In the moment all this could be very confusing, and I thought when I am 80, I am not going to think about that, I might not even remember it, but what I will do for a fact I have this idea, and if I don¡¯t try, I am going to regret having never tried. And I know also that if I try and fail, I¡¯ll never regret having tried and failed, and as soon as I thought about it that way, I knew I had to give it a try.¡±

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Changes in questions as the business progresses

He also helped entrepreneurs to learn scaling of their business through his experiences since he had seen Amazon from the point it was a one-man operation to the more than 500,000 man operation today.

He said, ¡°I have seen Amazon at every skill level, and at each stage, I had to lead the company differently. In the very beginning, not only are you deciding what to do but also how to do it and in fact, from the very beginning, you¡¯re in fact doing it yourself.¡±

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¡°As the company got bigger, say about a hundred people and you¡¯re still helping figure out what to do, you¡¯re still figuring out how to do it, but you¡¯re doing less and less yourself. As the company gets even bigger, eventually, that question changes and you stop helping as much with the how and you more exclusively start to figure out what to do."

"And as the company gets even bigger, the question switches again, and you stop spending as much time even figuring out the what and start figuring out the who. So the question sort of progresses to choosing leaders and so the questions shift from a how, to a what, to a who.¡±

Picking the right candidate

He also spoke about how an entrepreneur must pick the right candidate for working at their enterprise, where the learning is a two-way street.

He said, ¡°I have always been figuring out how to hire people who could be my tutor, people who would teach me. And if you ever get lucky enough to be hiring people, make sure you¡¯re hiring people not only that you can teach them what you know but also who are going to teach you things and be your tutors.

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Understanding failure and learning from mistakes

They also spoke about failure that entrepreneurs come across in day to day business. However, Bezos has a slightly different take on failure. He said, There are mostly two types of failures -- there are experiments, you¡¯re trying to figure out something new, maybe something nobody in the world has done before -- that is a high-quality failure. Because when you¡¯re experimenting, you don¡¯t know if it¡¯s going to work. In fact, if you know in advance that something is going to work, then it¡¯s not an experiment.¡±

¡°So you want to be doing as many experiments per unit time, per day, per week, per month, per year as you can because that¡¯s how you get invention, that¡¯s how you get innovation. Innovation is all about maximising the rate of experimentation. So, you have to organise to be able to experiment, you have to have a culture that supports failure.¡±

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He further added, ¡°There is a second kind of failure that you should try to avoid. That¡¯s operational excellence failure. When you do know how to do something, you have to treat that differently. When we go to open a new fulfilment centre, for example, we know how to do that. If we fail at that, that¡¯s just bad execution. But that kind of failure should not be celebrated.¡±

¡°When that happens you need to say, let¡¯s look in the mirror, let¡¯s be self-critical, let¡¯s figure out what did we do wrong. And you¡¯ll learn from that also, but you need to acknowledge that that¡¯s the bad kind of failure.¡±