Amazon Devices Chief Panos Panay on the Importance of Failure and Bouncing Back
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, Amazon executive Panos Panay had a clear message for startup founders: failure is an inevitable and necessary part of building a successful product.
Panay, who serves as Amazon's Senior Vice President of Devices, Alexa, and Leo, drew on his own experience at Microsoft, where he spent more than 19 years and weathered one particularly expensive failure.
"You have to be willing to fail, and actually, not just willing, you actually have to go fail," Panay said. "If you haven't failed, you probably haven't pushed the boundary. It's literally about harvesting the lessons learned when you fail. You have to be willing to face it, and as you face it, learn from it."
Learning from a Billion-Dollar Failure
Panay noted that it's possible to recover from all sorts of failures, even catastrophic ones. He pointed to his own experience at Microsoft: the launch of the Surface RT, Microsoft's first tablet computer, which ultimately led to a nearly $1 billion write-down.
"I remember being on the front cover of a newspaper, and it just said failure," Panay said. "But here's the thing, it was easy to admit failure. The trick was, and always is, did you harvest the learnings and understand what happened? All right. What did you learn? Because the failure wasn't that moment. It was decisions that led up to it two years before that, whether the software wasn't complete or the inventory was wrong or how we balanced into retail. There were all these steps along the way."
He said founders need to be willing to understand what went wrong, avoid making excuses, and ultimately accept the failure.
Keeping the Vision Alive
"Here's the other side of it," he said. "You want to succeed, yeah? You take that failure, but you don't let go of your vision. That's it. Surface has done pretty well. You don't let go of your vision. You don't break it."
Panay emphasized the importance of staying committed to a vision, learning from experience, and moving forward. His advice underscores a broader truth in tech: resilience and the ability to extract lessons from setbacks are often what separate successful products and leaders from those that stall. As the devices landscape continues to evolve in 2026βwith AI integration, ambient computing, and voice assistants like Alexa and Leo at the forefrontβPanay's perspective serves as a reminder that innovation requires the courage to fail and the discipline to learn from it.
via TechCrunch