Jeff Bezos Quotes

If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out all right.

If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.

E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details….

People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.

Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new.

I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. —Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, May 30, 2010

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.

We can't be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.

If you never want to be criticized, for goodness' sake don't do anything new.

Work Hard, have fun, make history

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.

In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

Your margin is my opportunity

As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.

Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer.

You can't simply will yourself to like things, either. As Jeff Bezos has observed, 'One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves.

I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past -- no matter how good it was.

It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.

My serotonin surges and Jeff Bezos is a rich man because he knows how much we all just love to get a present, even if it’s a present we bought for ourselves.

Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.

If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,

Start With the Customer and Work Backward

In the end, we are our choices.

Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.

Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.

People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature.

Missionaries have righteous goals and are trying to make the world a better place. Mercenaries are out for money and power and will run over anyone who gets in the way.

Ideas are easy. It’s the execution that’s hard. —Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon

No business can continue to shrink. That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.

Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.

When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.

One of the things that I hope will distinguish Amazon.com is that we continue to be a company that defies easy analogy. This requires a lot of innovation, and innovation requires a lot of random walk.

We pay attention to what our competitors do but it’s not where we put our energy.

But don’t be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.”15

The building block of organizations should be small teams. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, at one point had a “two-pizza team” rule,41 which stipulates that teams be small enough to be fed by two pizzas.

A method of schooling founded by the Italian educator Maria Montessori that emphasizes collaborative, explorative learning, and whose alumni include Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page; Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales; video-game designer Will Wright; Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos; chef Julia Child; and rap impresario Sean Combs.

Complaining is not a strategy.You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.

Amazon isn’t happening to the book business,” he likes to say to authors and journalists. “The future is happening to the book business.”)

My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.

We humans coevolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us.

I didn't think he was a very 'nice' person,' says Chichilnisky [about Jeff Bezos]. 'I liked him, but he was not warm. I'm not criticising him, not a bit. It was like he could be a Martian for all I knew. A well-meaning, nice Martian.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people… Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue

I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimise the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.

Most big technology companies are competitor focused. They see what others are doing, and then work to fast follow. In contrast, 90 to 95 percent of what we build in AWS is driven by what customers tell us they want.

If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it’s this,” Bezos says, veering into a familiar Jeffism: “We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent.

Friends suggested that it sounded a bit sinister. But something about it must have captivated Bezos: he registered the URL in September 1994, and he kept it. Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.

As a company, one of our greatest cultural strengths is accepting the fact that if you’re going to invent, you’re going to disrupt.

Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

If you're doing anything interesting in the world, you are going to have critics. You can't stop it. Move forward. It's not worth losing any sleep over.

Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you're missionary about.

starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.

It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.” —Alan Kay

I’ve noticed a paradox in great scientists and superforecasters: the reason they’re so comfortable being wrong is that they’re terrified of being wrong. What sets them apart is the time horizon. They’re determined to reach the correct answer in the long run, and they know that means they have to be open to stumbling, backtracking, and rerouting in the short run. They shun rose-colored glasses in favor of a sturdy mirror. The fear of missing the mark next year is a powerful motivator to get a crystal-clear view of last year’s mistakes. “People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a lot,” Jeff Bezos says. “If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot.

Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity), Jeff Bezos (of Amazon), and Reed Hastings (of Netflix) are other great shapers from the business world. In philanthropy, Muhammad Yunus (of Grameen), Geoffrey Canada (of Harlem Children’s Zone), and Wendy Kopp (of Teach for America) come to mind; and in government, Winston Churchill, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lee Kuan Yew, and Deng Xiaoping. Bill Gates has been a shaper in both business and philanthropy, as was Andrew Carnegie. Mike Bloomberg has been a shaper in business, philanthropy, and government. Einstein, Freud, Darwin, and Newton were giant shapers in the sciences. Christ, Muhammad, and the Buddha were religious shapers. They all had original visions and successfully built them out.

His goal (Bezos's)was not just to make browsing for books easy, but an enjoyable experience. “People don’t just buy books because they need books,” he has said. “There are products like that. Pharmaceuticals are that way. Nobody enjoys browsing the Preparation H counter. But people will gladly spend hours in a bookstore, so you have to make the shopping experience fun and engaging.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, made this exact argument in his 2015 letter to shareholders,33 where he introduced the idea of Level 1 and Level 2 decisions. He describes a Level 1 decision as one that is hard to reverse, whereas a Level 2 decision is one that is easy to reverse. Bezos argues that we should be slow and cautious when making Level 1 decisions, but that we should move fast and not wait for perfect data when making Level 2 decisions.

«“So, Sally, what’s new around here?” “Jeff Bezos just sold off two million shares.” “So, why would our sci-fi paperback bookseller need to sell that much Amazon stock?” “I think Jeff needs the cash for his private space rocket.”»

In the end, we are our choices.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I’ll take conflict every time,” Bezos often said. “It always yields a better result.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

When someone resigns, he is asked to hand in all that equipment—including the backpack.

The production philosophy pioneered by Toyota calls for a focus on those activities that create value for the customer and the systematic eradication of everything else.

What’s the quickest way to become a millionaire in space? Start out as a billionaire.

The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money.

People love to watch viral videos in which one kindly fisherman saves one sea turtle from a snarl of trash; they are less passionate about electing politicians who will dismantle policies that entrench corporate power and allow companies to pump poison into the oceans and skies in order to shore up the immoral wealth of billionaires and further destabilize the lives of the poor who will remain locked in toil until the planet boils us all to death as Jeff Bezos waves good-bye from his private rocket. Strange!

In a world where consumers had limited choice, you needed to compete for locations,” says Ross, who went on to cofound eCommera, a British e-commerce advisory firm. “But in a world where consumers have unlimited choice, you need to compete for attention. And this requires something more than selling other people’s products.

Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. “It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,” said Diego Piacentini

Focus on the big decisions. “As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do?” he asks. “You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.

Amazon may be the most beguiling company that ever existed, and it is just getting started. It is both missionary and mercenary, and throughout the history of business and other human affairs, that has always been a potent combination.

Naturally, some of the reviews were negative. In speeches, Bezos later recalled getting an angry letter from an executive at a book publisher implying that Bezos didn’t understand that his business was to sell books, not trash them. “We saw it very differently,” Bezos said. “When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”5

Twenty years later, “Day 1,” the name of the Amazon headquarters building, was still a rallying cry. “Day 2 is stasis,” he wrote in 2017. “Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.

Head down. Plow through the line.

I'd rather interview fifty people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.

We see our customers as invited guests to a party and we are the hosts.

If you never want to be criticized, for goodness' sake, don't do anything new.

Bezos is like a chess master playing countless games simultaneously, with the boards organized in such a way that he can efficiently tend to each match.

Bezos dismissed those objections and insisted that to succeed in books as Apple had in music, Amazon needed to control the entire customer experience,

Slow steady progress can erode any challenge over time.

One early challenge was that the book distributors required retailers to order ten books at a time. Amazon didn’t yet have that kind of sales volume, and Bezos later enjoyed telling the story of how he got around it. “We found a loophole,” he said. “Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn’t have to receive ten books, you only had to order ten books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, ‘Sorry, but we’re out of the lichen book.’ ”4

Rudeness is not cool. Defeating tiny guys is not cool. Close-following is not cool. Young is cool. Risk taking is cool. Winning is cool. Polite is cool. Defeating bigger, unsympathetic guys is cool. Inventing is cool. Explorers are cool. Conquerors are not cool. Obsessing over competitors is not cool. Empowering others is cool. Capturing all the value only for the company is not cool. Leadership is cool. Conviction is cool. Straightforwardness is cool. Pandering to the crowd is not cool. Hypocrisy is not cool. Authenticity is cool. Thinking big is cool. The unexpected is cool. Missionaries are cool. Mercenaries are not cool.

In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and their backers got drunk on the overflowing optimism and abundant venture capital and threw a two-year-long party. Capital was cheap, opportunities seemed limitless, and pineapple-infused-vodka martinis were everywhere.

It’s the tale of how one gifted child grew into an extraordinarily driven and versatile CEO and how he, his family, and his colleagues bet heavily on a revolutionary network called the Internet, and on the grandiose vision of a single store that sells everything.

Amazon engineer Greg Linden originally introduced doppelganger searches to predict readers’ book preferences, the improvement in recommendations was so good that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos got to his knees and shouted, “I’m not worthy!” to Linden. But what is really interesting about doppelganger searches, considering their power, is not how they’re commonly being used now. It is how frequently they are not used. There are major areas of life that could be vastly improved by the kind of personalization these searches allow.

In early 2002, as part of a new personal ritual, he took time after the holidays to think and read. (In this respect, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who also took such annual think weeks, served as a positive example.) Returning to the company after a few weeks, Bezos presented his next big idea to the S Team in the basement of his Medina, Washington, home. The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called “two-pizza teams.” Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people—small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon’s biggest problems.

The Post is famous for its investigative journalism. It pours energy and investment and sweat and dollars into uncovering important stories. And then a bunch of websites summarize that [work] in about four minutes and readers can access that news for free. One question is, how do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you can't, it's difficult to put the right resources behind it. ... Even behind a paywall, websites can summarize your work and make it available for free. From a reader point of view, the reader has to ask, 'Why should I pay you for all that journalistic effort when I can get it for free from another site?'

I see companies these days where thoughts of “exits” are foremost in the minds of top management and board, and it is so clear that this value will infect the decision making down to the smallest choice by the most junior employee. Do we create something that is good, or just that seems good and might get us acquired or funded?

We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.

Steve Jobs was known for the clarity of his insights about what customers wanted, but he was also known for his volatility with coworkers. Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs.

It was 1995, the dawn of the Internet era. “I thought the Internet would be something that would fundamentally change the nature of humanity,” he said during a speech in 2012. “It was like humanity gaining a nervous system.” So, he told his professor he was taking a deferment to see whether he could start an Internet company, and the teacher said, “Well, I don’t think you’ll be coming back.” That was the last time they ever talked.

Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon’s founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old “gatekeepers” of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume. This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward. “Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders. “When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say ‘that will never work!’ And guess what—many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.

Technological innovation is not what is hammering down working peoples’ share of what the country earns; technological innovation is the excuse for this development. Inno is a fable that persuades us to accept economic arrangements we would otherwise regard as unpleasant or intolerable—that convinces us that the very particular configuration of economic power we inhabit is in fact a neutral matter of science, of nature, of the way God wants things to be. Every time we describe the economy as an “ecosystem” we accept this point of view. Every time we write off the situation of workers as a matter of unalterable “reality” we resign ourselves to it. In truth, we have been hearing some version of all this inno-talk since the 1970s—a snarling Republican iteration, which demands our submission before the almighty entrepreneur; and a friendly and caring Democratic one, which promises to patch us up with job training and student loans. What each version brushes under the rug is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Economies aren’t ecosystems. They aren’t naturally occurring phenomena to which we must learn to acclimate. Their rules are made by humans. They are, in a word, political. In a democracy we can set the economic table however we choose. “Amazon is not happening to bookselling,” Jeff Bezos of Amazon likes to say. “The future is happening to bookselling.” And what the future wants just happens to be exactly what Amazon wants. What an amazing coincidence.

The technology has proven so valuable that SpaceX’s competitors have started to copy it and have tried to poach some of the company’s experts in the field. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s secretive rocket company, has been particularly aggressive, hiring away Ray Miryekta, one of the world’s foremost friction stir welding experts and igniting a major rift with Musk. “Blue Origin does these surgical strikes on specialized talent* offering like double their salaries. I think it’s unnecessary and a bit rude,” Musk said. Within SpaceX, Blue Origin is mockingly referred to as BO and at one point the company created an e-mail filter to detect messages with “blue” and “origin” to block the poaching. The relationship between Musk and Bezos has soured, and they no longer chat about their shared ambition of getting to Mars. “I do think Bezos has an insatiable desire to be King Bezos,” Musk said. “He has a relentless work ethic and wants to kill everything in e-commerce. But he’s not the most fun guy, honestly.

Bezos had seemingly made up his mind that he was no longer going to indulge in financial maneuvering as a way to escape the rather large hole Amazon had dug for itself, and it wasn’t just through borrowing Sinegal’s business plan. At a two-day management and board offsite later that year, Amazon invited business thinker Jim Collins to present the findings from his soon-to-be-published book Good to Great. Collins had studied the company and led a series of intense discussions at the offsite. “You’ve got to decide what you’re great at,” he told the Amazon executives. Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated; according to several members of the S Team at the time, they felt that, after five years, they finally understood their own business. But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce.