Best quotes by Jeff Bezos

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

Our garage was basically science fair central.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.

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.

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

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

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.

People don't want gadgets, they want services.

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

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.

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

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

I don't buy stocks, I make stocks.

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

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.

It's harder to be kind than clever

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

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.

Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

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.

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

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.

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.

Are you lazy or just incompetent?

What characteristics do I look for when hiring somebody? That's one of the questions I ask when interviewing. I want to know what kind of people they would hire.

Any business plan won't survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.

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

I have a strongly held belief that one of the reasons that Amazon has been successful is because we do not obsess over competitors. Instead we obsess over customers.

The people who are right a lot often change their minds.

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

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.

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.

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

We change our tools and then our tools change us.

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.

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.

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

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.

Word of mouth is very powerful.

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

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.

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.

In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running.

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

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

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

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

I've not seen an effective manager or leader who can't spend some fraction of time down in the trenches... If they don't do that they get out of touch with reality, and their whole thought and management process becomes abstract and disconnected.

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.

I think technology advanced faster than anticipated. In that whirlwind, a lot of companies didn't survive. The reason we have done well is because, even in that whirlwind, we kept heads-down focused on the customers. All the metrics that we can track about customers have improved every year.

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

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

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy - they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

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

Advertising is the price you pay for unremakable thinking.

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

One of the things that gets me up in the morning is knowing that customer expectations are always rising, and I find that very exciting.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.