Jeff Bezos Quotes
Founder of Amazon.com
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.
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.
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.
The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.
Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.
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.
What's dangerous is not to evolve.
If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
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.
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.
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.
It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.
The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
If you can't tolerate critics, don't do anything new or interesting.
I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.
The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'
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 is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.
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.
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.
If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
You don't want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.
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.
A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.
Our motto at Blue Origin is 'Gradatim Ferociter': 'Step by Step, Ferociously.'
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.
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 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.
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
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.
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 Moon Village concept has a nice property in that it basically just says, 'Look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let's do it close to each other.' That way... you can go over to the European Union lunar outpost and say, 'I'm out of eggs. What have you got?'
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.
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
Part of company culture is path-dependent - it's the lessons you learn along the way.
I think that, ah, I'm a very goofy sort of person in many ways.
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.
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.
The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we'd have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.
Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.
You want your customers to value your service.
I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It's really a different product category.
In just a few hundred years, we will have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells if we want to continue to grow our energy usage.
I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.
The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author's world.
Strip malls are history.
My view is there's no bad time to innovate.
Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.
The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.
My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.
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.
Infrastructure web services had to happen.
You cannot make a giant space company in your dorm room. Not today. And the reason is that the heavy lifting infrastructure isn't in place.
I'm a genetic optimist.
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.
I have won this lottery. It's a gigantic lottery, and it's called Amazon.com. And I'm using my lottery winnings to push us a little further into space.
Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.
I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.
I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they're simpler for customers.
In this industry, there's a lot of cases of being a competitor in one way, but you're often a customer and a vendor in another way. It's not atypical in aerospace. Actually, it's not that atypical in a lot of industries.
Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it's cool.
I know Elon, we're very like minded in many ways. We're not conceptual twins. One thing I want us to do is go to Mars, but for me it's one thing. He's singularly focused on that. I think motivation wise, for me I don't find that Plan B idea motivating. I don't want a plan B for Earth, I want Plan B to make sure Plan A works.
The reason we chose vertical landing as our recovery architecture is that vertical landing scales really well.
The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.
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.
I'm skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.
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.
One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.
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.
When we build our own colonies, we can do them in near-Earth vicinity, because people are going to want to come back to Earth. Very few people - for a long time, anyway - are going to want to abandon Earth altogether.
For people who are readers, reading is important to them.
Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.
You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.
I grew up reading science fiction.
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.
Ebooks had to happen.
I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.
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.
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.
The Apollo program certainly had no real commercial value. It was done for very different reasons and, I think, very good reasons for the time. It's an extraordinary achievement of mankind, but it wasn't sustainable.
We're working on New Glenn, which is our orbital vehicle, but we have in our mind's eye an even bigger vehicle called New Armstrong.
I don't know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.
One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn't work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.
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.
Today I continue with my science-fiction reading habit and find it very mind-expanding. Always makes me think.
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.
The question really is, are you improving the world? And you can do that in many models. You can do that in government, you can do that in a nonprofit, and you can do it in commercial enterprise.
I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.
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.
I read 'The High Frontier' in high school. I read it multiple times, and I was already primed. As soon as I read it, it made sense to me. It seemed very clear that planetary surfaces were not the right place for an expanding civilization inside our solar system.
We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we'll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.
Two kids in their dorm room can't start anything important in space today. That's why I want to take the assets I have from Amazon and translate that into the heavy-lifting infrastructure that will allow the next generation to have dynamic entrepreneurialism in space, to build that transportation network.
We will have to leave this planet, and we're going to leave it, and it's going to make this planet better.
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.