The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos has his latest piece of advice for anyone starting a business. When asked what advice he would give to anyone looking to start their own business at Amazon’s re: Mars conference in Las Vegas this week, Bezos told them to be ready to take big risks and fail.
“Take risk. You have to be willing to take risk. If you have a business idea with no risk, it’s probably already being done,” he said, according to an Amazon transcript. “You’ve got to have something that might not work. It will be, in many ways, an experiment. Many of those experiments will fail, but “big failures” are a necessary part of the journey toward success.’’
“We take risks all the time, we talk about failure. We need big failures in order to move the needle. If we don’t, we’re not swinging enough. You really should be swinging hard, and you will fail, but that’s okay,’’ he said.
In addition to taking the risk and failing, Bezos advised startups to also be passionate:
“You’ll be competing against those who are passionate,” he said.
Above all, he said, entrepreneurs should be “customer-obsessed.”
“The most important thing is to be customer-obsessed. Don’t satisfy them, absolutely delight them.”
In 1995, already a highly successful employee, with fat pay packages and bonuses, David Shaw, lead partner of D. E Shaw & Co could not understand why Jeff Bezos would want to gamble his life away, to ‘do this crazy thing’ called internet market, which was supposed to be a better idea for somebody who didn’t have a job or any financial security. Maybe they would have to go for a walk, said David. But after two hours of such walk along Central Park, Jeff had never been more convinced that he was ready to resign from his role at D.E Shaw &Co.
Here was Jeff who just become D.E Shaw & Co’s youngest Senior Vice President, at the age of 30, with all the financial security of one of America’s top hedge funds, leaving to swim in the tides of what he was not sure of.
‘I knew that when I was eighty,’ said Jeff, ‘there was no chance that I would regret having walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus in the middle of the year. I wouldn’t even have remembered that. But I did think there was a chance that I might regret significantly not participating in this thing called the internet, that I believed passionately in. I also knew that if had tried and failed, I wouldn’t regret that. So, once I thought about it that way, it became incredibly easy to make that decision,’’ Jeff was quoted as saying in Get Big Fast by Robert Spector.
From just 10 employees in 1995 when it was started, Jeff has since turned Amazon into one of the most valuable public companies in the world, with a market capitalization of nearly $860 billion.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world.