AFTER UNVEILING ITS vision to deliver goods via unmanned flying drones back in December, Amazon is still working on them.
In his annual shareholder letter, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos said the company’s Prime Air team was testing out its fifth and sixth generation aerial vehicles, and are currently designing the seventh and eight generation versions.
When Amazon first revealed its idea for unmanned delivery drones, Bezos said it would be years before the technology would reach the required standard necessary to make this a reality and for the Federal Aviation Administration to create the necessary rules and regulations to allow it.
The letter covered all areas of Amazon’s business and mentioned it will pay unhappy employees a small sum to leave the company. Called Pay to Quit and originally created by the online clothing shop Zappos, the company offers unhappy employees $2,000 to quit in their first year.
If they don’t take the offer, the offer is increased by $1,000 every year until it reaches $5,000. Bezos said the reason why it does this is to “encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.”
At the end of his letter, Bezos said that it will continue trying out new ideas and that not everything they will work on will be a success.
Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional. We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double-down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success. However, it’s not always as clean as that. Inventing is messy, and over time, it’s certain that we’ll fail at some big bets too.
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