Best quotes by Jeff Bezos

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

Teachers, who are really good create that environment where you can be very satisfied by the process of learning. If you do something and you find it a very satisfying experience then you want to do more of it. The great teachers somehow convey in their very attitude and their words and their actions and everything they do that this is an important thing you're learning. You end up wanting to do more of it and more of it and more of it. That's a real talent some people have to convey the importance of that and to reflect it back to the students.

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

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

In the end, we are our choices.

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

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

People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.

Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.

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.

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

Percentage margins don't matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.

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 think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

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

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.

Determine what your customers need, and work backwards.

Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

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're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.

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.

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.

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy-they're given after all. Choices can be hard.

A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new.

What's dangerous is not to evolve.

Be proud of your choices, not your gifts.

It's hard to find things that won't sell online.

Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win.

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.

I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.

Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

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 want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail.

Go to bed early and wake up early. The morning hours are good.

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

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.

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

Things never go smoothly.

The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.” 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.”

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

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

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.

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

Seek instant gratification - or the elusive promise of it - and chances are you'll find a crowd there ahead of you.

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

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

Obsess about customers, not competitors.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

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 common question that gets asked in business is, why? That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, why not?

We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

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

Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room

Work hard, have fun and make history.

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 you never want to be criticized, for goodness sake don't do anything new.

Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.

Everything you are comes from your choices.

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

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

We can't be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.