Bezos Quotes & Sayings

I've not seen an effective manager or leader who can't spend some fraction of time down in the trenches ... If they don't do that they get out of touch with reality, and their whole thought and management process becomes abstract and disconnected. — Jeff Bezos

If there's one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience. — Jeff Bezos

We are pioneers and the history of pioneers is not that good. — 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

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

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

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. — Jeff Bezos

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. — 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

We like to pioneer, we like to explore, we like to go down dark alleys and see what's on the other side. — Jeff Bezos

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives. — Jeff Bezos

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

Work hard, have fun and make history. — Jeff Bezos

Did you know that Jeff Bezos, in place of PowerPoint presentations in meetings, requires his execs to write six-page narrative memos? — Bryan Eisenberg

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

We would trust Jeff to take them to movies," Jackie Bezos says, "but the two of them would come back embarrassed, saying, 'Jeff laughs too loud.' It would be some Disney movie, and his laughter was drowning out everything." After — Brad Stone

Mike Bezos's job took them to Miami - a city Mike had first encountered fifteen years before as a penniless immigrant. Now he was an executive at Exxon, and the family bought a four-bedroom house with a backyard pool in the affluent Palmetto neighborhood in unincorporated Dade County. Miami — Brad Stone

For every leader in the company, not just for me, there are decisions that can be made by analysis. These are the best kinds of decisions! — Jeff Bezos

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

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. — Jeff Bezos

My view is there's no bad time to innovate. — Jeff Bezos

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

Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location. — Jeff Bezos

I think the definition of a book is changing. — Jeff Bezos

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. — Jeff Bezos

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

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. — Jeff Bezos

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

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. — Jeff Bezos

Go to bed early and wake up early. The morning hours are good. — 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

You don't want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day. — Jeff Bezos

The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible. The hard part is figuring out when to be which. — Jeff Bezos

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

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

Obsess over customers. — 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

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

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

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. — Jeff Bezos

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

The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth's most customer-centric company. — Jeff Bezos

Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes. — Jeff Bezos

But through it all, Bezos never showed anxiety or appeared to worry about the wild swings in public sentiment. "We were all running around the halls with our hair on fire thinking, What are we going to do?" says Mark Britto, a senior vice president. But not Jeff. "I have never seen anyone so calm in the eye of a storm. Ice water runs through his veins," Britto says. — Brad Stone

You want to look at what other companies are doing. It's very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don't want to look at it as if, 'OK, we're going to copy that.' You want to look at it and say, 'That's very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?' And then put your own unique twist on it. — Jeff Bezos

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

Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos's founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books - those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock - also drew the most enthusiastic customers. Amazon became the dominant solution for anyone located far from a bookstore or seeking something unusual. Amazon then had two options: expand the number of people who read books, or expand to adjacent markets. They chose the latter, starting with the most similar markets: CDs, videos, and software. Amazon continued to add categories gradually until it had become the world's general store. The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company's scaling strategy. — Peter Thiel

If you can't tolerate critics, don't do anything new or interesting. — 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

No communication is terrible! — Jeff Bezos

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

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

If Bezos wanted to be a true owner and entrepreneur, with significant equity in his creation and the potential to achieve the same — Anonymous

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big. — Jeff Bezos

The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works. — Jeff Bezos

Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies. — Steve Yegge

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

It's harder to be kind than clever — Jeff Bezos

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

Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times. — Jeff Bezos

Our vision is every book ever printed in any language in under 60 seconds. — Jeff Bezos

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. — Jeff Bezos

Beautiful speech doesn't need protection, it's ugly speech that needs protection. We have these cultural norms that allow people to say really ugly things. You don't have to invite them to your dinner party, but you should let them say it. — Jeff Bezos

Start With the Customer and Work Backward — Jeff Bezos

People who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. — Jeff Bezos

MacKenzie later said it was she who targeted Bezos, not the other way around. — Anonymous

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

We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don't is because it is detrimental to teamwork. — Jeff Bezos

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

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

Almost no one wants to admit the genius of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Apparently, many have failed to see that Amazon has become the world's biggest retail company. — Hubert Burda

There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here's the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.
Jeff Bezos
From 7 insightful quotes to shareholders via letter. 2017 — Malini Chaudhri

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

Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia - run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company's executives - is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected in America's public spaces. — Rebecca MacKinnon

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 into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon. — Brad Stone

Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard. — Jeff Bezos

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

While he was charming and capable of great humor in public, in private, Bezos could bite an employee's head right off. — Brad Stone

Strip malls are history. — Jeff Bezos

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. — Jeff Bezos

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. — Jeff Bezos

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

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

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

You don't chose your passion, your passion choses you — Jeff Bezos

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. — Jeff Bezos

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. — 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

Work Hard, have fun, make history — Jeff Bezos

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

Bezos personifies a new breed of executive that arose with the emergence of the game-changing technologies in the 1980s and 1990s ... a 'productive narcissist' ... These executives have big enough egos to make up seemingly random rules of business leadership. However, unlike other narcissists, they get the job done. — Richard L. Brandt

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. — 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

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. — Richard L. Brandt

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