102 Of 261: I Like Big Bets
Dec 22, 2022
Back in 2006, Jeff Bezos got flack in a BusinessWeek article about a new service he was building out that no one felt confident would take off. It seemed like a waste of money. It seemed like Bezos was being frivolous.
That service was Amazon Web Services. It's now generating Amazon $62 billion in revenue annually. It also took 16 years to get there and several other big ideas failed in that time.
That's what it looks like to make a Bet.
This is your reminder to review your Bets. Where do you want to be one year from now? What about three years from now?
As you think about it, ask yourself these questions:
- Are our Bets big enough relative to the size of our organization?
- Are they driving us toward our Destination?
- Are there things we should stop doing in order to give more of our focus to these Bets?
Reminder from Jeff: "We need big failures if we're going to move the needle—billion-dollar scale failures. If we're not, we're not swinging hard enough."
—benj
(Sent out Thursday, May 26, 2022)
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