Bezos Quotes

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

I'm a genetic optimist. ~ Jeff Bezos

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they'd already solved. They're open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking. ~ Jeff Bezos

During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn't take that well. "The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority," he answered bluntly. "That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can't excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you. ~ Brad Stone

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

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

I don't know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful. ~ Jeff Bezos

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. ~ Jeff Bezos

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

For many people, extended reading sessions on an LCD display cause eyestrain. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

Perhaps it is his goofy laugh and silly grin that made people underestimate him; certainly his playfulness contributed to that perception. At their wedding reception, Jeff [Bezos] and MacKenzie provided an outdoor adult play area that included water balloons. ~ Richard L. Brandt

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

Things never go smoothly. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

We've got thousands of investors counting on us. And we're a team of thousands of employees all counting on each other. That's fun. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos was one of those best and brightest who came to N.Y. to work in finance. He didn't need to know anything about retail bookselling to start Amazon. ~ Jose Ferreira

We change our tools and then our tools change us. ~ Jeff Bezos

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."* ~ Ashlee Vance

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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

What's dangerous is not to evolve. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

Your margin is my opportunity ~ Jeff Bezos

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

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. ~ Brad Stone

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

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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

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

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 ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

I'd disagree with the characterisations of him as competitive (which I think was just misinterpretation of his ambition) or secretive (which I think is more about wanting to protect his team and his customers). Jeff [Bezos] could much more accurately be described as a naively optimistic geek than a calculating megalomaniac. ~ Richard L. Brandt

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

Obsess about customers, not competitors. ~ Jeff Bezos

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

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

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

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

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

I definitely believe people should pay for copyrighted works. And the laws are sufficient: They already require you to pay for copyright work. There's no confusion. The problem is ... it's a heck of a lot easier to steal MP3s than to buy them. ~ Jeff Bezos

Read the Declaration of Independence to your children as a tradition every Fourth of July. Make sure they understand why the word "pursuit" precedes the word "happiness." ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Brad Stone

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

The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it's so easy to be motivated. ~ Jeff Bezos

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

In the end, we are our choices. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs did not start out wealthy, and actually added to income inequality, but we all benefit from their creative effort. ~ Foster Friess

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency. ~ Jeff Bezos

If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail. ~ Jeff Bezos

I never worked on the school newspaper. ~ Jeff Bezos

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress. ~ Jeff Bezos

I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface. ~ Jeff Bezos

On Monday morning, I rode the elevator up nine stories while fantasizing about a Marxist uprising where temps took control of the means of production and held Jeff Bezos hostage until he conformed to a socialist belief system where temp workers are valued as more than just cogs in his world-dominating machine. ~ Steven Barker

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. ~ Daniel Coyle

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."16 ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected. ~ George Packer

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness. ~ Jeff Bezos

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view. ~ Jeff Bezos

What characteristics do I look for when hiring somebody? That's one of the questions I ask when interviewing. I want to know what kind of people they would hire. ~ Jeff Bezos

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

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

Many of the traits that make Amazon unusual are now deeply ingrained in the culture. In fact, if I wanted to change them, I couldn't. The cultures are self-reinforcing, and that's a good thing. ~ Jeff Bezos

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

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful. ~ Jeff Bezos

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 ~ Brad Stone

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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

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

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

The Net is pretty cool, but the physical world is the best medium ever. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can. ~ Jeff Bezos

I think that, ah, I'm a very goofy sort of person in many ways. ~ Jeff Bezos

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 ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are far more important symbols than any politician today, and they occupy the space that iconic political figures did in earlier eras. ~ Fareed Zakaria

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

Not the outcome any of us wanted. ~ Jeff Bezos

If you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned. ~ Jeff Bezos

Work Hard, have fun, make history ~ Jeff Bezos