Jeff Bezos Quotations | Page 2

Internet company stocks in general are very volatile, and Amazon is definitely included in that,

In September, 6 of the 10 top-selling items on Amazon.com were from our electronics store.

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

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.

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

If you're going to invest in an Internet stock, you must be a long-term investor.

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.

There are a whole bunch of people who don't like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time.

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

Ebooks had to happen.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.

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

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

We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that, because we believe -- and we have to take this as an article of faith -- that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.

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

The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.

We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don’t is because it is detrimental to teamwork.

We are pioneers and the history of pioneers is not that good.

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

We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.

I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimise the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.

Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.

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.

I feel like in one year it's very easy to go from Internet poster boy to Internet piсata.

To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.

The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

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

If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.

If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.

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

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

Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It's not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win.

I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

It's harder to be kind than clever

You want to look at what other companies are doing. It's very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don't want to look at it as if, 'OK, we're going to copy that.' You want to look at it and say, 'That's very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?' And then put your own unique twist on it.

We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can.

If you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.

I wouldn't be surprised if history records Tim Berners-Lee as the second Gutenberg.

You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.

It's perfectly healthy-encouraged, even- to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

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.

One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.

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

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

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

I'm skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.

I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It's really a different product category.

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.

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.

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.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

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.

There's so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.

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

Percentage margins are not one of the things we are seeking to optimize. It’s the absolute dollar free cash flow per share that you want to maximize, and if you can do that by lowering margins, we would do that. So if you could take the free cash flow, that’s something that investors can spend. Investors can’t spend percentage margins.

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.

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

A lot of people – and I’m just not one of them – believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me.

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.

Are you lazy or just incompetent?

We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and thy're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

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

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

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.

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

Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.

I don't buy stocks, I make stocks.

I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online.

Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process.

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

I like to be counted on.

People who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds.

Good ideas will always get funded, so that's not going to be a problem. But you will see that it will be harder and harder for bad ideas to get funded.

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.

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

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!

No communication is terrible!

Our garage was basically science fair central.

And I still buy books at B&N, Borders and Elliot Bay ... I probably shouldn't admit this. But I don't care. I love great bookstores.

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.

We've got thousands of investors counting on us. And we're a team of thousands of employees all counting on each other. That's fun.

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.

My view is there's no bad time to innovate.

Obsess over customers.

Do something you're very passionate about, and don't try to chase what is kind of the "hot passion" of the day.

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.

You cannot make a business case that you should be who you are not

Be proud of your choices, not your gifts.

I told all of our original investors that they would lose their money for sure.

Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for companies.

Our vision is every book ever printed in any language [fetched and viewable on our eBook Kindle device] in under 60 seconds.

Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency.

Strip malls are history.