The key facts

  • Panos Panay (Amazon SVP for Devices, Alexa and Leo) spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco
  • The failed launch of Surface RT at Microsoft led to a write-off of nearly $1 billion
  • Advice to founders: acknowledge failure, learn lessons and adjust course without abandoning the vision

Failure as a Necessary Stage

Amazon Senior Vice President for Devices, Alexa and Leo Panos Panay spoke at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco and stated that failure is an inevitable and mandatory part of building a successful product. According to him, it is not enough to be prepared for failure: you need to actually live through it. “If you haven’t failed, you probably haven’t pushed beyond the boundaries of the possible,” Panay said, adding that the essence lies in learning lessons from failure.

The Surface RT Lesson

Panay drew on his own experience: he worked at Microsoft for more than 19 years and went through a major failure — the launch of the company’s first tablet, the Surface RT, which led to a write-off of nearly $1 billion. He recalled how he ended up on the front page of a newspaper with the headline “failure.” In his view, admitting the failure was easy, and the main thing was to understand that it happened not at the moment of launch, but because of decisions made two years before it: unfinished software, wrong inventory, and mistakes in working with retail.

Don’t Make Excuses and Don’t Abandon the Vision

Panay urged founders to figure out what went wrong, avoid excuses, and accept failure. At the same time, he emphasized, one must not abandon the vision: “Surface, by the way, went pretty well.” He believes that if you learn as you go, the course correction is usually not radical — “not 180 degrees, but 30.” The problem, in his opinion, lies with those who hold on for too long: they never accept the very moment of failure.