AP/Ted S. Warren
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announcing the Amazon Fire Phone, which later proved to be a flop.
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has called the e-commerce giant "the best place in the world to fail."
- He has famously instituted a culture where failure is an acceptable - even necessary - part of doing business.
- That said, Amazon has had some spectacular failures over the years, resulting in billions of dollars in mistakes, according to Bezos.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos famously called the e-commerce giant "the best place in the world to fail" in his 2016 shareholder letter.
"What really matters is, companies that don't continue to experiment, companies that don't embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence," Bezos told Business Insider's Henry Blodget in a 2014 interview.
Amazon's most successful initiatives would never have happened without some element of risk.
"I've made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally billions of dollars of failures," Bezos told Blodget. "None of those things are fun. But they also don't matter."
We've catalogued some of Amazon's more high-profile failures through the years. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it offers a taste of Amazon's culture of failure.