Jeff Bezos Quotes

If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail.

We're not competitor obsessed, we're customer obsessed. We start with the customer and we work backwards.

I'm not prepared to make any multi-decade commitments.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

If you're going to invest in an Internet stock, you must be a long-term investor.

It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.

I like having the digital camera on my smart phone, but I also like having a dedicated camera for when I want to take real pictures.

But there's still so much you can do with technology to improve the customer experience. And that's the sense in which I believe it's still Day One, and that it's early in the day. If anything, the rate of change is accelerating.

Percentage margins don't matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.

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.

I'm skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

Start With the Customer and Work Backward

We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that, because we believe
and we have to take this as an article of faith
that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.

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

When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.

I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it's not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that's not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.

I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.

It's perfectly healthy-encouraged, even- to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today

But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.

The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'

Percentage margins are not one of the things we are seeking to optimize. It's the absolute dollar free cash flow per share that you want to maximize, and if you can do that by lowering margins, we would do that. So if you could take the free cash flow, that's something that investors can spend. Investors can't spend percentage margins.

One of the things that gets me up in the morning is knowing that customer expectations are always rising, and I find that very exciting.

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.

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

Obsess about customers, not competitors.

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

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.

If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.

When it comes to space, I see it as my job, I'm building infrastructure the hard way. I'm using my resources to put in place heavy lifting infrastructure so the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space.

Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.

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.

I told all of our original investors that they would lose their money for sure.

Your margin is my opportunity

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large.

If you look at academic studies, you can see that stock prices are most closely correlated with cash flow. It's such a straightforward number. Cash flow is what will drive shareholder returns.

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

Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It's not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win.

Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.

I know Elon, we're very like minded in many ways. We're not conceptual twins. One thing I want us to do is go to Mars, but for me it's one thing. He's singularly focused on that. I think motivation wise, for me I don't find that Plan B idea motivating. I don't want a plan B for Earth, I want Plan B to make sure Plan A works.

I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It's really a different product category.

Not the outcome any of us wanted.

If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.

There are a whole bunch of people who don't like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time.

In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

We're building a unique global platform ... In the last 18 months we found that sellers and partners are interested in complementing their online and offline businesses with Amazon's platform

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

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

Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It's lack of utilization. It dominates all other costs.

Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.

If we think long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn't otherwise accomplish.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

What's dangerous is not to evolve.

The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'

I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.

We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.

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.

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.

The Internet is disrupting every media industry ... people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.

In the end, we are our choices.

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.

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy-they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet - how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.

You have to use your judgment. In cases like that, we say, 'let's be simple minded. We know this is a feature that's good for customers. Let's do it.

The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That's approaching evil.

I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.

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

People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.

If it's not your style to stretch and go the extra mile to make sure our customer experience is great, you're going to have an allergic reaction to this company. You probably won't stay. If you do try and stay, but can't adapt to the culture then it will reject you like a virus from a healthy immune system.

Advertising is the price you pay for unremakable thinking.

Seek instant gratification - or the elusive promise of it - and chances are you'll find a crowd there ahead of you.

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

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

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

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

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.

Be proud of your choices, not your gifts.

Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade leverage Amazon's existing 'Search Inside the Book' technology to give customers unusual flexibility in how they buy and read books, .. In collaboration with our publishing partners, we're working hard to make the world's books instantly accessible anytime and anywhere.

I never worked on the school newspaper.

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

I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they're simpler for customers.

There are multiple ways to be externally focused that are very successful. You can be customer-focused or competitor-focused. Some people are internally focused, and if they reach critical mass, they can tip the whole company.

If you build a great product or service, people will talk about it. But it starts with having something that's worth talking about.

I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.

I like to be counted on.

If you think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later.

Good ideas will always get funded, so that's not going to be a problem. But you will see that it will be harder and harder for bad ideas to get funded.

I wouldn't be surprised if history records Tim Berners-Lee as the second Gutenberg.

Things never go smoothly.

I think if people read more, that is a better world.

Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.

We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business.

If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.

Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process.

Any business plan won't survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.