Top 100 Bezos Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Feel free to cover Amazon any way you want. Feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.
Jeff Bezos
#3. Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.
Reed Hastings
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.
Steve Yegge
#8. If Bezos wanted to be a true owner and entrepreneur, with significant equity in his creation and the potential to achieve the same
Anonymous
#9. 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
#10. I know Jeff Bezos because I cater at his home.
Tom Douglas
#11. 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
#12. I have never seen Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, or Reed Hastings complain about being public. Nor have they ever argued that being public prevented them from doing things with a long-term focus.
Bill Gurley
#13. While he was charming and capable of great humor in public, in private, Bezos could bite an employee's head right off.
Brad Stone
#14. Thus did Jeff Bezos become one of the original investors in Google, his company's future rival,
Brad Stone
#15. 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
Brad Stone
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Did you know that Jeff Bezos, in place of PowerPoint presentations in meetings, requires his execs to write six-page narrative memos?
Bryan Eisenberg
#19. 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
#20. Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals' investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible.
Brad Stone
#21. 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
#22. Bezos does not fear plunging prices for storage and computing cycles; he wants to be the guy who leads it there!
J.B. Wood
#23. I'm always open to new, innovative stuff and people trying to do stuff in a different way. I knew that the theatrical release would be like getting on the launch pad for Amazon Prime but I was okay with that because I think what Jeff Bezos and Ted Hope are doing is innovative.
Spike Lee
#24. 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
#25. Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.
Aaron Levie
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories.
Anonymous
#29. MacKenzie later said it was she who targeted Bezos, not the other way around.
Anonymous
#30. 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
#31. Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. "It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini
Brad Stone
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Is there anyone out there who is the next Steve Jobs? I think Jeff Bezos is pretty close. He is very smart. He is extremely creative. He has completely reinvented the way in which commerce is done online.
John Sculley
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.
Jeff Bezos
#39. Our garage was basically science fair central.
Jeff Bezos
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#46. One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.
Jeff Bezos
#47. Part of company culture is path-dependent - it's the lessons you learn along the way.
Jeff Bezos
#48. 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
#49. I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'
Jeff Bezos
#50. Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.
Jeff Bezos
#52. I never worked on the school newspaper.
Jeff Bezos
#53. I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.
Jeff Bezos
#54. I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.
Jeff Bezos
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.
Jeff Bezos
#58. Advertising is the price you pay for unremakable thinking.
Jeff Bezos
#59. 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
#60. You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.
Jeff Bezos
#61. It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.
Jeff Bezos
#62. It's harder to be kind than clever
Jeff Bezos
#63. The people who are right a lot often change their minds.
Jeff Bezos
#64. A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.
Jeff Bezos
#65. Cultures aren't so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.
Jeff Bezos
#66. We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff Bezos
#67. 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
#68. I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.
Jeff Bezos
#69. 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
#70. I don't know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.
Jeff Bezos
#71. It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.
Jeff Bezos
#72. I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.
Jeff Bezos
#73. A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
Jeff Bezos
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.
Jeff Bezos
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
Jeff Bezos
#81. 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
#82. We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.
Jeff Bezos
#83. People don't want gadgets, they want services.
Jeff Bezos
#84. I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they're simpler for customers.
Jeff Bezos
#85. 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
#86. I wouldn't be surprised if history records Tim Berners-Lee as the second Gutenberg.
Jeff Bezos
#87. The Net is pretty cool, but the physical world is the best medium ever.
Jeff Bezos
#88. What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.
Jeff Bezos
#89. Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.
Jeff Bezos
#90. 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
#91. The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
Jeff Bezos
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Go to bed early and wake up early. The morning hours are good.
Jeff Bezos
#95. There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
Jeff Bezos
#96. Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for companies.
Jeff Bezos
#97. Our vision is every book ever printed in any language in under 60 seconds.
Jeff Bezos
#98. 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
#99. If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
Jeff Bezos
#100. People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.
Jeff Bezos
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
