Top 273 Quotes & Sayings by Jeff Bezos
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American businessman Jeff Bezos.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Part of company culture is path-dependent - it's the lessons you learn along the way.
We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.
It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.
My view is there's no bad time to innovate.
There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.
Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.
Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don't have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.
I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.
Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.
You don't want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.
If you can't tolerate critics, don't do anything new or interesting.
A life of stasis would be population control, combined with energy rationing. That is the stasis world that you live in if you stay. And even with improvements in efficiency, you'll still have to ration energy. That, to me, doesn't sound like a very exciting civilization for our grandchildren's grandchildren to live in.
No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it's government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.
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.
There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.
The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we'd have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.
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 don't know all the future steps, but I know one of them: we need to build a low-cost, highly operable, reusable launch vehicle. No matter which path we take, it has to include that gate, and so that's why that's Blue Origin's mission.
I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.
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.
The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.
What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.
What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy.
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
One of the things that I'm very excited about with New Shepard, which is our suborbital tourism vehicle, is using that to get a lot of practice. One of the equilibria that we're at today with space launch is that we don't get to practice enough.
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.
Our motto at Blue Origin is 'Gradatim Ferociter': 'Step by Step, Ferociously.'
I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they're simpler for customers.
There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
I think that, ah, I'm a very goofy sort of person in many ways.
If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.
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.
For people who are readers, reading is important to them.
A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.
If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
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.
The special ops guys and the firefighters around the world have this great phrase. They say, 'Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,' and that is true. Everything I've accomplished in my life has been because of that attitude.
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.
I'm skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.
The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.
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.
Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.
The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It's really a different product category.
People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it's cool.
If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
If your payloads cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they actually cost more than the launch. It puts a lot of pressure on the launch vehicle not to change, to be very stable. Reliability becomes much more important than the cost. It's hard to get off of that equilibrium.
My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.
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.
The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'
The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author's world.
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
What's dangerous is not to evolve.
I don't know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.
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.
Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.
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