Top 100 Jeff Bezos Quotes
#1. E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.
Jeff Bezos
#2. Our garage was basically science fair central.
Jeff Bezos
#3. 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.
Jeff Bezos
#7. Part of company culture is path-dependent - it's the lessons you learn along the way.
Jeff Bezos
#8. I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'
Jeff Bezos
#9. Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.
Jeff Bezos
#11. I never worked on the school newspaper.
Jeff Bezos
#12. I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.
Jeff Bezos
#13. I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.
Jeff Bezos
#14. 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.
Jeff Bezos
#15. If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.
Jeff Bezos
#16. It's harder to be kind than clever
Jeff Bezos
#17. The people who are right a lot often change their minds.
Jeff Bezos
#18. I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.
Jeff Bezos
#19. 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
#20. It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.
Jeff Bezos
#21. 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
#22. To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.
Jeff Bezos
#23. Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
Jeff Bezos
#25. 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
#26. We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.
Jeff Bezos
#27. People don't want gadgets, they want services.
Jeff Bezos
#28. I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they're simpler for customers.
Jeff Bezos
#29. 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
#30. I wouldn't be surprised if history records Tim Berners-Lee as the second Gutenberg.
Jeff Bezos
#31. The Net is pretty cool, but the physical world is the best medium ever.
Jeff Bezos
#32. What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.
Jeff Bezos
#33. Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.
Jeff Bezos
#34. 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
#35. The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
Jeff Bezos
#36. I think technology advanced faster than anticipated. In that whirlwind, a lot of companies didn't survive. The reason we have done well is because, even in that whirlwind, we kept heads-down focused on the customers. All the metrics that we can track about customers have improved every year.
Jeff Bezos
#37. 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
#38. Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for companies.
Jeff Bezos
#39. 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
#40. People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.
Jeff Bezos
#41. 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
#42. Determine what your customers need, and work backwards.
Jeff Bezos
#43. Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.
Jeff Bezos
#44. For people who are readers, reading is important to them.
Jeff Bezos
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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.
Jeff Bezos
#49. If you're going to invest in an Internet stock, you must be a long-term investor.
Jeff Bezos
#50. I'm not prepared to make any multi-decade commitments.
Jeff Bezos
#51. People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.
Jeff Bezos
#52. 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
#53. My grandfather taught me that it is harder to be kind than it is to be clever.
Jeff Bezos
#54. I think that, ah, I'm a very goofy sort of person in many ways.
Jeff Bezos
#55. 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
#56. We change our tools and then our tools change us.
Jeff Bezos
#57. And I still buy books at B&N, Borders and Elliot Bay ... I probably shouldn't admit this. But I don't care. I love great bookstores.
Jeff Bezos
#58. Be proud of your choices, not your gifts.
Jeff Bezos
#59. 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.
Jeff Bezos
#60. If you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.
Jeff Bezos
#61. No business can continue to shrink. That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.
Jeff Bezos
#62. 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.
Jeff Bezos
#63. 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
#64. The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past
no matter how good it was.
Jeff Bezos
#65. You don't chose your passion, your passion choses you
Jeff Bezos
#66. In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running.
Jeff Bezos
#67. Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new.
Jeff Bezos
#68. Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.
Jeff Bezos
#69. Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win.
Jeff Bezos
#70. One of the things that I hope will distinguish Amazon 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
#71. 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
#72. We can't be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.
Jeff Bezos
#73. 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
#74. I think the definition of a book is changing.
Jeff Bezos
#75. If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail.
Jeff Bezos
#76. 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
#77. I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.
Jeff Bezos
#79. You know you're not anonymous on our site. We're greeting you by name, showing you past purchases, to the degree that you can arrange to have transparency combined with an explanation of what the consumer benefit is.
Jeff Bezos
#81. Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It's lack of utilization. It dominates all other costs.
Jeff Bezos
#82. 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
#83. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.
Jeff Bezos
#84. We're not competitor obsessed, we're customer obsessed. We start with the customer and we work backwards.
Jeff Bezos
#85. 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
#86. You cannot make a business case that you should be who you are not
Jeff Bezos
#87. It's perfectly healthy-encouraged, even- to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today
Jeff Bezos
#88. I'm skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.
Jeff Bezos
#89. You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.
Jeff Bezos
#90. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.
Jeff Bezos
#92. 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
#94. It's very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic. So if you believe on that first day while you're writing the business plan that there's a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt.
Jeff Bezos
#95. 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.
Jeff Bezos
#96. What's dangerous is not to evolve.
Jeff Bezos
#97. My view is there's no bad time to innovate.
Jeff Bezos
#98. Do something you're very passionate about, and don't try to chase what is kind of the "hot passion" of the day.
Jeff Bezos
#99. People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it's cool.
Jeff Bezos
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top