Quotes by Jeff Bezos

“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”

“A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.”

“All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.”

“All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts… not analysis.”

“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.”

“Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard.”

“Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.”

“Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”

“Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.”

“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.”

“I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.”

“I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If I have three good decisions a day, that’s enough. They should just be as high quality as I can make them.”

“If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out all right.”

“If you can somehow figure out how to have a calling, you have hit the jackpot, cause that’s the big deal.”

“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.”

“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.”

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000.”

“If you never want to be criticized, for goodness' sake don't do anything new.”

“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.”

“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’re long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.”

“If you’re watching your competitors, you’re unlikely to invent a bunch of stuff on your own.”

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

“It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.”

“It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it.”

“It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online.”

“Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.”

“Luck plays an outsized role in every endeavour, and I can assure you we’ve had a bountiful supply.”

“Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.”

“Me-too companies have not done that well over time.”

“My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, ‘Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.’”

“No business can continue to shrink. That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.”

“No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help.”

“Obsess about customers, not competitors.”

“One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions. Your passions choose you.”

“Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.”

“People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.”

“People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature.”

“Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you're missionary about.”

“Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.”

“The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”

“The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’”

“The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past — no matter how good it was.”

“The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called a ‘regret minimization framework.’”

“The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.”

“The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.”

“The keys to success are patience, persistence, and obsessive attention to detail.”

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

“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.”

“The three most important things in retail are location, location, location. The three most important things for our consumer business are technology, technology, technology.”

“The world is littered with corpses that predicted technology in a particular arena was done. If there’s another gigantic step change out there, we don’t yet know what it is.”

“There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be second.”

“There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.”

“We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees.”

“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”

“We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.”

“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.”

“We have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter.”

“We humans coevolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us.”

“We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.”

“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.”

“We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices.”

“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.”

“What’s dangerous is not to evolve, not to invent, not to improve the customer experience.”

“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.”

“Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.”

“You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn’t amazing, it won’t matter. Nobody will watch.”

“You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.”

“You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.”

“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”