Amazon executive Panos Panay, Senior Vice President of Devices, Alexa, and Leo, has advised startup founders that failure is a necessary component of developing a successful product. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Panay drew on his own experiences, including a significant setback during his nearly two decades at Microsoft.
Panay described the launch of Microsoft's first tablet computer, the Surface RT, as a major failure that resulted in a nearly $1 billion write-down. He stressed the importance of harvesting lessons from such experiences, stating that the failure itself was not the moment of public perception but rather the decisions made leading up to it.
He encouraged founders to accept failure, understand what went wrong without making excuses, and learn from setbacks to adapt and progress faster. Panay noted that while a vision should not be abandoned, it may need to be adjusted based on the lessons learned from failures.