Jeff Bezos Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.”

“Most people,” he said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.”

“You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality,” he says. “But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on. So, that’s the first step.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“Until July, Amazon.com had been primarily built on two pillars of customer experience: selection and convenience. In July, as I already discussed, we added a third customer experience pillar: relentlessly lowering prices. You should know that our commitment to the first two pillars remains as strong as ever.”

“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.”

“Purchase the book of Penster in the Amazon and Kindle Store and read, we hope you enjoy the benefits of the knowledge and wisdom of the Penster.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

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

“Einstein, likewise, realized how important it is to interweave the arts and the sciences. When he felt stymied in his quest for the theory of general relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart, saying that the music helped connect him to the harmony of the spheres.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“But Bezos had a rule, which was to use his heart and his intuition as well as empirical data in making a big decision. “There has to be risk taking. You have to have instinct. All the good decisions have to be made that way,”

“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.”

“Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day.”

“Your margin is my opportunity”

“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.”

“It’s not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”), but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that”

“More than half of US households are members of Amazon Prime, and Amazon delivered ten billion packages in 2018, which is two billion more than the number of people on this planet.”

“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.”

“the quality of customer experience a partner delivers is the single most important criteria in our selection process—we simply won’t build a partnership with any company that does not share our passion for serving customers.”

“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.”

“You collect as much data as you can, you immerse yourself in that data but then you make the decision with your heart.”

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

“In the end, we are our choices.”

“As the famed investor Benjamin Graham said, “In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term, it’s a weighing machine.”

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

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

“People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday's 'wow' quickly becomes today's 'ordinary'.”

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

“We’ve made mistakes, doozies like the Fire Phone and many other things that just didn’t work out. I won’t list all of our failed experiments, but the big winners pay for thousands of failed experiments.”

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

“I have no special talent,” Einstein once said. “I am only passionately curious”

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

“Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.”

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

“Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.”

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

“Those quarterly results were fully baked three years ago. So today I'm working on a quarter that will happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter is done already and it's probably been done for a couple years.”

“To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”

“What’s dangerous is not to evolve.”

“Work Hard, have fun, make history”

“You’ve worn me down” is an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead – it’s better.”

“AWS is customer obsessed, inventive and experimental, long-term oriented, and cares deeply about operational excellence.”

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

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

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

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

“Start With the Customer and Work Backward”

“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.”

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

“Theodor Seuss Geisel: “When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.”

“We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

“What's very dangerous is not to evolve”

“what’s good for customers is good for shareholders.”

“You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”),”

“I think it's true that big government institutions should be scrutinized, big non-profit institutions should be scrutinized, big universities should be scrutinized. It just makes sense.”

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

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

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