I learned an important lesson in business when I launched a new retail category early in my career at Amazon: Fail Fast! I spent 18 months shipping a product that should have taken a few months, delaying the oppty to learn and adjust to our initial failure. Here's what happened:

I was originally hired at Amazon on the business development team. After a year I got recruited to help ship a new computer store and run merchandising. I jumped at the opportunity to launch a new business and learn new skills. Amzn was great at creating these opportunities.

Two weeks after joining the retail team, I was in a meeting presenting our pro forma P&L for our computer store launch. I was forecasting inventory turns and gross margins. It was exciting to be thrown into the deep end. I felt like I was at a start-up inside of a start-up.

Our store was predicated on a deal w/ HP that had been part of their earlier bid to win our datacenter biz. Amzn had driven a hard bargain, and when HP couldn't go any lower on server prices they offered to pay us $10M to be our anchor tenant in a new computer store.

HP's consumer business was getting disrupted by Dell who had invented configurable on-line ordering + on-demand manufacturing. HP thought they could fight back by leveraging retail distribution. They would plug their yet-to-be-developed configuration engine into our front-end.