Bezos admits making 'billion of dollars of failures' at Amazon

Amazon c.e.o. Jeff Bezos has admitted to making “billions of dollars of failures” at the company, and has said it does not matter.

Speaking at Business Insider’s Ignition conference, Bezos also addressed the dispute the online retailer had with Hachette Book Group in the US, which has now been resolved.

"Rarely does it break through into a kind of a public fight," the Telegraph reported Bezos as saying. "But it's an essential job of any retailer to negotiate hard on behalf of customers. Making reading more affordable is going to make authors more money," he said.

He also spoke about the company’s plans to use drones to deliver products, saying the US authorities were still considering proposals for commercial drone use.

"It's sad but possible that the US could be late [for drone deliveries], that other countries will have it first," he said.

Bezos said Amazon’s philosophy was to encourage people to experiment and make “bold bets”, reported Business Insider.

"If you're going to take bold bets, they're going to be experiments," he said. "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."

Bezos cited Amazon Prime, Amazon Marketplace and Kindle as bold bets that became successes, but said that it was still early days for the Fire smartphone, which has been less of a success.

"I've made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com,” said Bezos, adding that he it would be like a “a root canal with no anesthesia" if he tried to dwell on them.

He continued: “None of those things are fun, but they don't matter. "What really matters is that 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 make a 'Hail Mary' bet at the very end."

Bezos is an investor in business website Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.