Having the ability to throw enormous amounts of human and monetary capital into many different projects simultaneously, plus top notch technical talent, certainly helps.
There are plenty of companies out there who have the same resources, but are nowhere close in terms of results.
It's almost as if success is not purely a function of talent and capital. Who knew?
No offense to you, but I am getting really tired of luck-driven nihilism.
Survivorship bias doesn't mean everything is hopeless, it is just a reality you should hedge for.
I didn't interpret the comment as meaning luck driven. I thought it meant that execution and being prolific can also be factors, in addition to talent and capital. Samsung seemed to learn a lot by trying lots of form factors and seeing which ones sell.
There's a resource that no other large company has, though - Jeff Bezos. Don't underestimate the importance of having such a brilliant guy in the #1 spot.
This article claims the secret to success is "trying new things." That's misleading because it implies that AMZN management doesn't have a strategic plan.
This is my first ever comment on Hacker News after reading it for years... Inspiring article. This is one of the tenets I’ve built my ‘career’ on. For me, constantly trying new things is not only a necessity in business, it’s something I can’t live without in life, because it’s so exciting. It’s utterly possible to ‘Fail Upwards’ and you can do what Amazon does, with very little resources too. I bring many ideas to life, a huge proportion of them don’t make tons of money, but that’s mostly not my metric of success. Living a life less ordinary and being creatively fulfilled are some of my primary drivers. I encourage anyone to try more of their ideas - and if you’re interested, my books and speeches cover this area of ‘constant innovation’ too - just Google ‘Shed Simove’. Post over. Cherry popped. Xxx