Jeff Bezos Isn't Afraid Of Failing

Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN's decision to make its intentions in the grocery business clear is part of CEO Jeff Bezos' history of embracing risk and thinking it knows what consumers want before they even know it.

The New York Times noted how Bezos has even earned himself a reputation of not only embracing risk but boasting about some of the failures that resulted from a bold leap. For instance, the executive had no shame in exclaiming in 2014 that he has overseen "billions of dollars of failures." In addition, listing failure after failure would be like a "root canal with no anesthesia."

One of the most notable failures is the Amazon Fire phone, which was perceived to be at the time key to Amazon's future. The device was such a failure it was selling for as low as 99 cents and eventually wrote off as a $170 million loss.

Needless to say there have been some big winners under Bezos' watch, the most notable of which is likely Amazon's small internal cloud computing project that turned into its own business unit now called AWS.

Will Bezos' acquisition of Whole Foods Market, Inc. WFM turn into its next success like AWS or end in failure like the Fire? The short answer can likely be found in Bezos' own words.

"If you're going to take bold bets, they're going to be experiments," New York Times quoted Bezos as saying back in 2014. "And if they're experiments, you don't know ahead of time if they're going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn't work."

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Image Credit: By DoD photo by Senior Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz (Released) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons