Jeff Bezos Quotes

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

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional.

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.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

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.

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness.

Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.

It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.

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

If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large.

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.

Advertising is the price you pay for unremakable thinking.

Word of mouth is very powerful.

I don't buy stocks, I make stocks.

We're not competitor obsessed, we're customer obsessed. We start with the customer and we work backwards.

Work hard, have fun and make history.

Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.

It's harder to be kind than clever

Be proud of your choices, not your gifts.

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 Net is pretty cool, but the physical world is the best medium ever.

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

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

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.

If you're truly obsessed over customers, it'll cover a lot of errors.

If you look at academic studies, you can see that stock prices are most closely correlated with cash flow. It's such a straightforward number. Cash flow is what will drive shareholder returns.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'

E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.

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 build a great product or service, people will talk about it. But it starts with having something that's worth talking about.

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

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.

I don't know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

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.

In the end, we are our choices.

If we think long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn't otherwise accomplish.

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.

We change our tools and then our tools change us.

I try to spend my time on areas that I think are important for the future, and where I think I can add value.

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

My grandfather taught me that it is harder to be kind than it is to be clever.

You have to use your judgment. In cases like that, we say, 'let's be simple minded. We know this is a feature that's good for customers. Let's do it.

Our garage was basically science fair central.

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

Part of company culture is path-dependent. It’s the lessons you learn along the way.

We are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet.

If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.

If you're not doing something that people will remark on, then it's going to be hard to generate word of mouth.

Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It's lack of utilization. It dominates all other costs.

We like to pioneer, we like to explore, we like to go down dark alleys and see what's on the other side.