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."