Bezos: 'I've Made Billions Of Dollars Of Failures At Amazon.com'

Jeff Bezos, CEO of the commercial force of nature known as Amazon, said he's not afraid to take chances on risky projects because even ones that fail can yield valuable lessons.

"I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally billions," Bezos said at Business Insider's annual Ignition conference in New York Tuesday, as reported by Fortune.

Bezos said that while his investments in dot-com era startups Pets.com and Kozmo didn't work out, other big bets like Amazon Web Services, which dominates the public cloud market, have panned out.

Amazon doesn't break out AWS revenue, but the business is said to generate around $5 billion in annual revenue. Last month, Morgan Stanley calculated that AWS could be worth $32 billion on its own.

[Related: AWS Exec Says Company Needs Rock Star MSP Partners With Cloud Skills]

This could be why Bezos isn't concerned about the Amazon Fire smartphone's dismal performance in the marketplace, which caused Amazon to take a $170 million write-down in October and slash its pricing for the device.

Bezos -- who described the Fire as a "bold bet" -- also indicated that more Fire smartphones are on the way, although he didn't offer a specific time frame.

"Companies that don’t embrace failure and continue to experiment eventually get in the desperate position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence," Bezos said at the conference, as reported by Fortune.

Meanwhile, Bezos also revealed that Amazon has a CEO succession plan in place, but he wouldn't say which executive is next in line to replace him. Bezos, 50, founded Amazon in 1994 and has been its CEO since 1996.

Re/code, in a Tuesday report, included AWS chief Andy Jassy on its short list of potential successors. That would make sense, considering Bezos is said to believe that AWS could eventually be Amazon's biggest moneymaker.

Other potential CEO candidates include Jeff Wilke, senior vice president of Amazon's consumer business; Jeff Blackburn, senior vice president of worldwide business development; and David Limp, senior vice president of Amazon's devices business, according to Re/code.

PUBLISHED DEC. 2, 2014