Top 100 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
#4. 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.
Jeff Bezos
#5. 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
#9. One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.
Jeff Bezos
#10. Part of company culture is path-dependent - it's the lessons you learn along the way.
Jeff Bezos
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'
Jeff Bezos
#14. Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.
Jeff Bezos
#16. I never worked on the school newspaper.
Jeff Bezos
#17. I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.
Jeff Bezos
#18. I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.
Jeff Bezos
#19. Feel free to cover Amazon any way you want. Feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.
Jeff Bezos
#20. 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
#21. 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.
Jeff Bezos
#22. If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.
Jeff Bezos
#23. Advertising is the price you pay for unremakable thinking.
Jeff Bezos
#24. 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.
Jeff Bezos
#25. You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.
Jeff Bezos
#26. It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.
Jeff Bezos
#27. It's harder to be kind than clever
Jeff Bezos
#28. The people who are right a lot often change their minds.
Jeff Bezos
#29. A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.
Jeff Bezos
#30. Cultures aren't so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.
Jeff Bezos
#31. We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff Bezos
#32. 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
#33. I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.
Jeff Bezos
#34. 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
#35. I don't know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.
Jeff Bezos
#36. It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.
Jeff Bezos
#37. I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.
Jeff Bezos
#38. A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
Jeff Bezos
#39. Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.
Reed Hastings
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.
Jeff Bezos
#44. If you're not doing something that people will remark on, then it's going to be hard to generate word of mouth.
Jeff Bezos
#45. Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: "Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.
Brad Stone
#46. 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
#47. Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
Jeff Bezos
#49. 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
#50. We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.
Jeff Bezos
#51. People don't want gadgets, they want services.
Jeff Bezos
#52. I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they're simpler for customers.
Jeff Bezos
#53. 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
#54. I wouldn't be surprised if history records Tim Berners-Lee as the second Gutenberg.
Jeff Bezos
#55. The Net is pretty cool, but the physical world is the best medium ever.
Jeff Bezos
#56. What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.
Jeff Bezos
#57. Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.
Jeff Bezos
#58. 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
#59. The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
Jeff Bezos
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Go to bed early and wake up early. The morning hours are good.
Jeff Bezos
#63. 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
#64. There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
Jeff Bezos
#65. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.
Steve Yegge
#66. Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for companies.
Jeff Bezos
#67. Our vision is every book ever printed in any language in under 60 seconds.
Jeff Bezos
#68. If Bezos wanted to be a true owner and entrepreneur, with significant equity in his creation and the potential to achieve the same
Anonymous
#69. 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
#70. If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
Jeff Bezos
#71. People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.
Jeff Bezos
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. You can't simply will yourself to like things, either. As Jeff Bezos has observed, 'One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves.
Angela Duckworth
#75. The three most important things in retail are location, location, location. The three most important things for our consumer business are technology, technology, technology.
Jeff Bezos
#76. I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.
Jeff Bezos
#77. Determine what your customers need, and work backwards.
Jeff Bezos
#78. 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
#79. For people who are readers, reading is important to them.
Jeff Bezos
#80. I know Jeff Bezos because I cater at his home.
Tom Douglas
#81. If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
Jeff Bezos
#82. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details ... .
Jeff Bezos
#83. 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
#84. There's so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.
Jeff Bezos
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.
Jeff Bezos
#89. 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
#90. Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you're missionary about.
Jeff Bezos
#91. 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
#92. If you're going to invest in an Internet stock, you must be a long-term investor.
Jeff Bezos
#93. I'm not prepared to make any multi-decade commitments.
Jeff Bezos
#94. People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.
Jeff Bezos
#95. Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
Jeff Bezos
#96. 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
#97. The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author's world.
Jeff Bezos
#98. Virgin Galactic, which will be operating SpaceShipTwo, will be only one of several spacelines. The competitors for Virgin include the Russians, Bezos's Blue Origin, and possibly Rocketplane Kistler. And likely a couple of others who are smart enough not to tell people what they are doing!
Burt Rutan
#99. My grandfather taught me that it is harder to be kind than it is to be clever.
Jeff Bezos
#100. I think that, ah, I'm a very goofy sort of person in many ways.
Jeff Bezos
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