Jeff Bezos Speaks About Amazon’s Failures, Evolution And $1-Billion Investment On Indian SMEs

Bezos looked steadfast towards the audience while saying the above, leading to a roaring round of applause from the crowd. He spoke about how the subcontinent’s dynamism, energy and thirst for growth makes it special.

Then came his second prediction.

“In this 21st century, the most important alliance is going to be the U.S.-India alliance.”

Climate change is something that will take collective action from people all around the world, Bezos said.

Highlighting that over the past 10-20 years, people have refused to acknowledge the reality, Bezos said "anybody today who is not acknowledging that climate change is real and that we humans are affecting this planet in a very significant and dangerous way, those people are not being reasonable."

Amazon recently took the Climate Pledge - which is to reach the goals of the Paris Accord 10 years early, the e-commerce giant’s founder said. Amazon is going to use 100 percent sustainable electricity by 2030, has recently announced the acquisition of 100,000 electric delivery vehicles and that we will eliminate all plastic by June 2020, he added.

E-Commerce giant Amazon will invest an incremental $1 billion towards digitizing small and medium businesses in India, Jeff Bezos said, reminding the audience that Amazon too, at one point, was a small business.

He also aims to use Amazon's global footprint to export $10 billion worth Make in India goods by the year 2025. “We are super excited about this and all the thanks and hardwork goes to Amit and his team,” he said.

Bezos here is talking about the Amazon Marketplace. It is an e-commerce platform owned and operated by Amazon that enables third-party sellers to sell new or used products on a fixed-price online, along with Amazon’s regular offerings.

The platform already has over 10 lakh third party sellers enrolled, Agarwal said.

There are at least two kinds of failures that are important, Bezos said. The first is the most important kind which enables learning - experimentation.

"You want to be doing as many experiments per unit time, per day, per week, per month, per year as possible because that's how you get invention and innovation. Innovation is all about maximisation of rate of experimentation," he said.

The second is the kind of failure we must tried to avoid, he said, which is operational and excellence failure. "You learn from that also but we have to acknowledge that it's a bad kind of failure."

• Amazon will invest an incremental $1 billion to digitise small and medium businesses in India
• Will use Amazon's global footprint to export $10 billion worth of made in India goods by 2025
• The dynamism, the energy, the people; this country has something special. And it's a democracy. This is going to be the Indian century.
• And the most important alliance of the 21st century will be the alliance between India & the U.S.
• Anyone who is not acknowledging climate change, is not being reasonable.

Having scaled Amazon from one person - himself - to 700,000 people, Bezos said that he has had to lead the company differently at different points in time.

Amazon India chief Amit Agarwal asked Bezos what he would have done if his bet to build Amazon had failed.

Here’s what Bezos said.

“I was living and working in New York city in 1994. I came across the fact that the world wide web was growing very quickly. It was tiny but it was growing very quickly. The initial idea was to sell books online.

I went to my boss, Davis, whom I liked a lot. I went to him and told him that I had this idea to start a company that would sell books on the internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park in New York and listened to me in great detail. He said it sounds like a great idea to me but I think it would be a better idea for someone who didn't already have a good job. It made some amount of sense to me and he said why don't you think about it for two days before you make a final decision.”

Bezos’ decision thereafter led to the largest e-commerce company today, also catapulting him to the position of the World’s richest man.

Amazon founder and Chief Executive officer Jeff Bezos, who arrived in India yesterday afternoon, is slated to speak at the Smbhav event around 11:15 a.m.

Bezos, however, is facing a bitter welcome as the country’s antitrust regulator initiated a formal investigation just hours before his arrival and trader bodies comprising millions of infuriated small store owners announced demonstrations.

The billionaire is scheduled to conduct a fireside chat with Amazon India chief Amit Agarwal, anchoring an event that also features Infosys Ltd. co-founder Narayana Murthy and retail billionaire Kishore Biyani, who recently sold a stake in his retail group to Amazon.

Ahead of the event, Bezos paid his respects at Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial, wearing a white tunic and a rust-colored Indian vest.