Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Jeff Bezos. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Jeff Bezos
Jeffrey Preston Bezos ( BAY-zohss; né Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American internet entrepreneur, businessman, media proprietor, and investor. Bezos is the founder and CEO of the multi-national technology company Amazon. With a net worth of more than $200 billion as of April 2021, he is the richest person in the world according to both Forbes and Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.
Born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston and later Miami, Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. Bezos founded Amazon in late 1994, on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a wide variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is currently the world's largest online sales company, the largest Internet company by revenue, and the world's largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.
Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000. Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle reached space in 2015, and afterwards successfully landed back on Earth. The company has upcoming plans to begin commercial suborbital human spaceflight. He also purchased the major American newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million, and manages many other investments through his Bezos Expeditions venture capital firm.
The first centibillionaire on the Forbes wealth index, Bezos was named the "richest man in modern history" after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018. In August 2020, according to Forbes, he had a net worth exceeding $200 billion. In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos's wealth grew by approximately $24 billion.
On February 2, 2021, Bezos announced that he would step down as the CEO of Amazon sometime in the third quarter of 2021, and transition into the role of executive chairman. He is due to be replaced as CEO by Andy Jassy, the chief of Amazon's cloud computing division.
One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'
Longer Version:
I'm skeptical that the novel will be "reinvented." If you start thinking about a medical textbook or something, then, yes, I think that's ripe for reinvention. You can imagine animations of a beating heart. But I think the novel will thrive in its current form. That doesn't mean that there won't be new narrative inventions as well. But I don't think they'll displace the novel.
Infrastructure web services had to happen.
The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.
With the amount of fixed expense that goes into developing something like the BE-4 engine, you want it to be used as much as possible.
You want your customers to value your service.
Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.
We fly to 106 kilometers. We've always had as our mission that we always wanted to fly above the Karman line because we didn't want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you're an astronaut or not.
Today I continue with my science-fiction reading habit and find it very mind-expanding. Always makes me think.
You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can't choose two out of three.
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.
One of the things that I hope will distinguish Amazon.com is that we continue to be a company that defies easy analogy. This requires a lot of innovation, and innovation requires a lot of random walk.
Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process.
Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new.
People don't want gadgets, they want services.
The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.
I think that, ah, I'm a very goofy sort of person in many ways.
I'm a genetic optimist.
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 went to Princeton specifically to study physics.
We change our tools and then our tools change us.
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.
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.
Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.
The reason we chose vertical landing as our recovery architecture is that vertical landing scales really well.
The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money.
I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.
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.
The strategic objective of New Shepard is to practice, and a lot of the subcomponents of New Shepard actually get directly reused on the second stage of New Glenn.
We're taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.
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.
All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth's.
If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.
It's very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic. So if you believe on that first day while you're writing the business plan that there's a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I definitely believe people should pay for copyrighted works. And the laws are sufficient: They already require you to pay for copyright work. There's no confusion. The problem is...it's a heck of a lot easier to steal MP3s than to buy them.
My grandfather taught me that it is harder to be kind than it is to be clever.
In the end, we are our choices.
No, communication is terrible!
But there's still so much you can do with technology to improve the customer experience. And that's the sense in which I believe it's still Day One, and that it's early in the day. If anything, the rate of change is accelerating.
A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.
Our garage was basically science fair central.
I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online.
We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.
Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win.
I wouldn't be surprised if history records Tim Berners-Lee as the second Gutenberg.
The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author's world.
Seek instant gratification -- or the elusive promise of it -- and chances are you'll find a crowd there ahead of you.
If you are going to do large-scale invention, you have to be willing to do three things: You must be willing to fail; you have to be willing to think long term; and you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible. The hard part is figuring out when to be which.
Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It's not optional.
Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.
We like to pioneer, we like to explore, we like to go down dark alleys and see what's on the other side.
We're building a unique global platform...In the last 18 months we found that sellers and partners are interested in complementing their online and offline businesses with Amazon's platform.
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.
To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.
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.
Longer Version:
If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you're competing against a lot of people, But if you're willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you're now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavours that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We're willing to plant seeds, let them grow--and we're very stubborn. We say we're stubborn on vision and flexible on details.
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.
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.
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.
Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It's lack of utilization. It dominates all other costs.
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.
We are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet.
If you're not doing something that people will remark on, then it's going to be hard to generate word of mouth.
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.
If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large.
It's harder to be kind than clever.
Our motto at Blue Origin is 'Gradatim Ferociter': 'Step by Step, Ferociously.'
Are you lazy or just incompetent?
If you never want to be criticized, for goodness sake don't do anything new.
Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
If we think long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn't otherwise accomplish.
Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency.
Word of mouth is very powerful.
Obsess over customers.
Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.
We're not competitor obsessed, we're customer obsessed. We start with the customer and we work backwards.
I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.
If you think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later.
If you build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.
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.
Everything you are comes from your choices.
I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.
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.