Bezos: Interview and Video

Video of my interview with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at NYU is now here on Portfolio.com. You can watch a teaser below. And if you want to read the edited Q&A as it will appear in the June issue of Portfolio, that's here.

After Amazon's earnings came out, I published an excerpt from the interview here on the blog. It included perhaps my favorite comment of his from the session, about Amazon's failed search site, A9:

Bezos: Yeah, well, we are going to be bold with our experiments and some of them aren't going to work. If you know they're going to work they're not experiments. And if you decide that you are only going to do things that you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table. Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try.

Maney: That's true.

Bezos: And they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at. And that's one of the reasons, if you want to be a pioneer, you have to get comfortable being misunderstood. In some ways it's a much more pleasant life, probably, we wouldn't know from personal experience, to not - you know, once you have something good just to hone it and hone it and hone it and not try anything new.

Preview is below, but the whole hour-long video is on our site.

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