Amazon will fail one day but our work is to delay it, says Jeff Bezos

Seattle, Nov 16: Amazon Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jeff Bezos said at a meeting in Seattle recently that his company is "not too big to fail" and that he predicts that it will fail one day and go bankrupt. He said if one looks at large firms, their life spans tend to be 30-plus years and not hundred-plus years, CNBC said in a report.

Bezos, the richest man in the world, came up with the hard-hitting observations when an employee of the company asked him about the future of the e-commerce giant which Bezos had founded in 1994. The employee particularly wanted to know the lessons Bezos learned from the recent bankruptcies of Sears and other big retailer firms.

Bezos also gave a prescription on how to delay the end and that is about focusing on the customers instead of the company itself.

"If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end. We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible," Bezos was quoted as saying by CNBC.

The CEO's observations came at a time when the Amazon is at its prime with its core retail business continuing to boom while it is winning huge cloud-computing market.

The massive expansion is what has made some employees worried, according to the CNBC report. Amazon's workforce has grown by more than 20-times in the last eight years to over 6 lakh employees and its stock price has multiplied more than four times in the last five years, the report added.