The Long Game of Innovation

This week, Amazon announced the discontinuation of Amazon Glow. My heart is with the talented, driven, and hard-working people who worked hard to turn a vision of better human connection into reality. Zero-to-one is about celebrating the process, the learning, and the audacity to make hard calls like this. And let's focus on that today.

In inventing Glow, we gained the humility of designing technology that honors what makes us human - to connect, to be playful, and to create together. We also learned the power of rigorously understanding customer needs, and our customers have rewarded this discovery process with their 4.5-star rating.

Building a business is hard, and it's a privilege to invent and think long-term. I applaud Amazon's leadership for making this experiment happen, embracing the unknown, and experimenting with a sustainable human-tool relationship.

The mission to enhance human connection through virtual presence does not stop at the end of the pandemic. The digitization of the world through social media (e.g., TikTok) and advanced algorithms (e.g., artificial general intelligence) only puts human minds on steroids, creating siloed life experiences far removed from reality. Reviving what makes us human is the number one mission of an innovator in the 21st century as we develop tools to serve us.

And I want to share the "infinite mindset" with my fellow innovators, something I learned in mountaineering. The mountain is always there, and innovation is a long game. Success is not measured by summiting a mountain on the first or the N-th try. Success is measured by having the courage to keep coming back.