Inspirational Jeff Bezos Quotes & Sayings
Best selected inspirational Jeff Bezos quotes for your inspiration. These quotes by Jeff Bezos will motivate and inspire you and you will be much wiser.
To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.
The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.
What’s dangerous is not to evolve, not to invent, not to improve the customer experience.
A word about corporate cultures: for better or worse, they are enduring, stable, hard to change. They can be a source of advantage or disadvantage. You can write down your corporate culture, but when you do so, you’re discovering it, uncovering it — not creating it…..The reason cultures are so stable in time is because people self-select.
Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.
All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts... not analysis.
Your margin is my opportunity.
I’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.
The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.
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.
I want to see good financial returns, but also to me there’s the extra psychic return of having my creativity and technological vision bear fruit and change the world in a positive way.
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.
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.
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.
During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision…Will you admire this person?…Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?….Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?
Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.
If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think. Whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.
Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.
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.
I think one thing I find very motivating — and I think this is probably a very common form of motivation or cause of motivation — is… I love people counting on me, and so, you know, today it’s so easy to be motivated, because we have millions of customers counting on us at Amazon.com. 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.
I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.
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.
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 common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?'
We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs.
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 need a culture that high-fives small and innovative ideas and senior executives [that] encourage ideas. In order for innovative ideas to bear fruit, companies need to be willing to wait for 5-7 years, and most companies don’t take that time horizon.
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 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, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word-of-mouth is so very, very powerful.
We take risks all the time, we talk about failure. We need big failures in order to move the needle. If we don't, we're not swinging enough. You really should be swinging hard, and you will fail, but that's okay.
If you can somehow figure out how to have a calling, you have hit the jackpot, cause that’s the big deal.
You can do the math 15 different ways, and every time the math tells you that you shouldn’t lower prices because you’re going to make less money. That’s undoubtedly true in the current quarter, in the current year.
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures.
One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is 'one-size-fits-all' decision making...The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.
Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.
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.
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.
Me-too companies have not done that well over time.
If you're watching your competitors, you're unlikely to invent a bunch of stuff on your own.
One advantage — perhaps a somewhat subtle one — of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we’re at our best, we don’t wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to.
If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.
A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.
But it’s probably not true over a 10-year period, when the benefit is going to increase the frequency with which your customers shop with you, the fraction of their purchases they do with you as opposed to other places. Their overall satisfaction is going to go up.
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Seek to build a community–to make better choices in the people with whom you partner–that’s the only way to have greater long-term impact on the world.
People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a lot. People who are right a lot change their mind without a lot of new data. They wake up and reanalyze things and change their mind. If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot. People who are right a lot want to disconfirm their fundamental biases.
One of the things we don’t do very well at Amazon is a me-too product offering. So when I look at physical retail stores, it’s very well served, the people who operate physical retail stores are very good at it…the question we would always have before we would embark on such a thing is: What’s the idea? What would we do that would be different? How would it be better? We don’t want to just do things because we can do them…we don’t want to be redundant.
Amazon today remains a small player in global retail. We represent a low single-digit percentage of the retail market, and there are much larger retailers in every country where we operate. And that’s largely because nearly 90% of retail remains offline, in brick and mortar stores.
Jeff Bezos Sayings
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.
Great innovations, large and small, are happening everyday [at Amazon] on behalf of customers.
Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, ‘Good job, great quarter … And I’ll say, ‘Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago. I’m working on a quarter that’ll happen in 2021 right now.'
Working backwards from customer needs can be contrasted with a skills-forward approach where existing skills and competencies are used to drive business opportunities. The skills-forward approach says, We are really good at X. What else can we do with X?. However, if used exclusively, the company employing it will never be driven to develop fresh skills. Eventually the existing skills will become outmoded. …
I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.
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.
There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
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.
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.
Focus on cost improvement makes it possible for us to afford lower prices, which drives growth. Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions. Customers like this, and it’s good for shareholders. Please expect us to repeat this loop.
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.
It is difficult for us to imagine that ten years from now, customers will want higher prices, less selection, or slower delivery. Our belief in the durability of these pillars gives us the confidence required to invest in strengthening them.
If you never want to be criticized, for goodness' sake don't do anything new.
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon.
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.
We invent before we have to. These investments are motivated by customer focus rather than by reaction to competition. We think this approach earns more trust with customers and drives rapid improvements in customer experience – importantly – even in those areas where we are already the leader.
The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called – which only a nerd would call – a ‘regret minimization framework’.
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.
Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. But they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at.
In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.
We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.
You can have a job, or you can have a career, or you can have a calling.
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth's.
Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.
My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.
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 you double the number of experiments you do per year, you're going to double your inventiveness.
Inspirational Jeff Bezos Sayings
I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.
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.
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.
You know if you make a customer unhappy, they won’t tell five friends, they’ll tell 5,000 friends. So we are at a point now where we have all of the things we need to build an important and lasting company, and if we don’t, it will be shame on us.
I do get asked, quite frequently ‘What’s gonna change in the next 10 years?’ I’m rarely get asked, and it’s probably more important — and I encourage you to think about this — is the question what’s not going to change? The answer to that question can allow you to organize your activities. You can work on those things with the confidence to know that all the energy you put into them today is still going to pay dividends in the years to come.
Market research doesn't help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said, 'Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?' I guarantee you they'd have looked at you strangely and said, 'No, thank you.'
If I have three good decisions a day, that’s enough, he said. They should just be as high quality as I can make them
Amazon is not too big to fail … If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end … We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.
Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don’t do anything new.
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.
It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.
The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible. The hard part is figuring out when to be which.
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 keys to success are patience, persistence, and obsessive attention to detail.
If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.
Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.
Another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. I think this is something about which there’s a lot of controversy. A lot of people — and I’m just not one of them — believe that you should live for the now.
We don't focus on the optics of the next quarter; we focus on what is going to be good for customers.
Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard.
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.
I like treating things as if they’re small, you know Amazon even though it is a large company, I want it to have the heart and spirit of a small one.
If you’re very clear to the outside world that you’re taking a long-term approach, then people can self-select in.
Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort. When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, 'Are they right?' And if they are, you need to adapt what they're doing. If they're not right, if you really have conviction that they're not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It's a key part of invention.
If you can't tolerate critics, don't do anything new or interesting.
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. There are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works for you.
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.
What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.
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.
In some cases, things are inevitable. The hard part is that you don’t know how long it might take, but you know it will happen if you’re patient enough. Ebooks had to happen. Infrastructure web services had to happen. So you can do these things with conviction if you are long-term-oriented and patient.
The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.
So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.
When you think about the things that you will regret when you’re 80, they’re almost always the things that you did not do. They’re acts of omission. Very rarely are you going to regret something that you did that failed and didn’t work or whatever.
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. – William Butler Yeats.
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.
We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double-down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success.
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.
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.
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.
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 can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition, taste, heart.
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.
When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago…. There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.
We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees.
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.
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.
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.
If you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.
Wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided…and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the non-linear ones – are highly likely to require wandering.
It’s hard to remember for you guys, but for me it’s like yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself, and hoping one day we could afford a forklift.
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.
Our motto at Blue Origin is 'Gradatim Ferociter': 'Step by Step, Ferociously.'
You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.
My view is there's no bad time to innovate.
Sometimes we measure things and see that in the short term they actually hurt sales, and we do it anyway.
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.
People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it's cool.
I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.
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