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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.

-Jeff Bezos

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If Everything You Do

Jeff Bezos

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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.

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Invention Requires A Long-term Willingness To Be Misunderstood.

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.

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.

The Thing About Inventing Is You Have To Be Both Stubborn And Flexible. The Hard Part Is Figuring Out When To Be Which.

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.

People Don't Want Gadgets, They Want Services.

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!

Work Hard, Have Fun And Make History.

Our Point Of View Is We Will Sell More If We Help People Make Purchasing Decisions.

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 Net Is Pretty Cool, But The Physical World Is The Best Medium Ever.

Not The Outcome Any Of Us Wanted.

We Change Our Tools And Then Our Tools Change Us.

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.

Cultures Aren’t So Much Planned As They Evolve From That Early Set Of People.

My View Is There's No Bad Time To Innovate.

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.

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.

Mediocre Theoretical Physicists Make No Progress. They Spend All Their Time Understanding Other People's Progress.

Our Garage Was Basically Science Fair Central.

The Common Question That Gets Asked In Business Is, Why? That’s A Good Question, But An Equally Valid Question Is, Why Not?

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 Were Hoping To Build A Small Profitable Company; And Of Course, What We've Done Is Build A Large, Unprofitable Company.

Where You Are Going To Spend Your Time And Your Energy Is One Of The Most Important Decisions You Get To Make In Life.

Amazon.com Strives To Be The E-commerce Destination Where Consumers Can Find And Discover Anything They Want To Buy Online.

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 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.

I'm Skeptical That The Novel Will Be 're-invented.'

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.

It's Perfectly Healthy-encouraged, Even- To Have An Idea Tomorrow That Contradicted Your Idea Today

I'm Skeptical Of Any Mission That Has Advertisers At Its Centerpiece.

We Like To Pioneer, We Like To Explore, We Like To Go Down Dark Alleys And See What's On The Other Side.

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.

For People Who Are Readers, Reading Is Important To Them.

We Are Our Choices. Build Yourself A Great Story.

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.

In Seattle You Haven't Had Enough Coffee Until You Can Thread A Sewing Machine While It's Running.

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If We Think Long Term, We Can Accomplish Things That We Couldn't Otherwise Accomplish.

If You Don't Understand The Details Of Your Business You Are Going To Fail.

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'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

You Don't Chose Your Passion, Your Passion Choses You

Read The Declaration Of Independence To Your Children As A Tradition Every Fourth Of July. Make Sure They Understand Why The Word "pursuit" Precedes The Word "happiness."

I'm Going To Go Do This Crazy Thing. I'm Going To Start This Company Selling Books Online.

Infrastructure Web Services Had To Happen.

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It's Harder To Be Kind Than Clever

Am I Going To Regret Leaving Wall Street? No. Will I Regret Missing The Beginning Of The Internet? Yes.

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Above All Else, Align With Customers. Win When They Win. Win Only When They Win.

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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.

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.

It's Not An Experiment If You Know It's Going To Work.

Advertising Is The Price You Pay For Unremakable Thinking.

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It's Hard To Find Things That Won't Sell Online.

Digital Marketing

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

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.

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.

There'll Always Be Serendipity Involved In Discovery.

We Can't Be In Survival Mode. We Have To Be In Growth Mode.

No, Communication Is Terrible!

No Communication

If You're Going To Invest In An Internet Stock, You Must Be A Long-term Investor.

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.

Web 1.0 Was Making The Internet For People, Web 2.0 Is Making The Internet Better For Companies.

Your Margin Is My Opportunity.

You Can Work Long, Hard, Or Smart, But At Amazon.com You Can’t Choose Two Out Of Three.

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.

If You Never Want To Be Criticized, For Goodness Sake Don't Do Anything New.

I Think If People Read More, That Is A Better World.

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.

Invention Is By Its Very Nature Disruptive. If You Want To Be Understood At All Times, Then Don't Do Anything New.

The Great Thing About Fact-based Decisions Is That They Overrule The Hierarchy.

A Brand For A Company Is Like A Reputation For A Person. You Earn Reputation By Trying To Do Hard Things Well.

I Don't Buy Stocks, I Make Stocks.

The People Who Are Right A Lot Often Change Their Minds.

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.

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 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.

To Get Something New Done You Have To Be Stubborn And Focused, To The Point That Others Might Find Unreasonable.

Our Vision Is Every Book Ever Printed In Any Language [fetched And Viewable On Our Ebook Kindle Device] In Under 60 Seconds.

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.

You Cannot Make A Business Case That You Should Be Who You Are Not

I Told All Of Our Original Investors That They Would Lose Their Money For Sure.

The Human Brain Is An Incredible Pattern-matching Machine.

If You're Not Doing Something That People Will Remark On, Then It's Going To Be Hard To Generate Word Of Mouth.

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.

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.

Strip Malls Are History.

You Don't Choose Your Passions; Your Passions Choose You.

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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.

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.

Cleverness Is A Gift, Kindness Is A Choice.

All Businesses Need To Be Young Forever. If Your Customer Base Ages With You, You're Woolworth's.

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 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.

If You Do Build A Great Experience, Customers Tell Each Other About That. Word Of Mouth Is Very Powerful.

We Are At The 1908 Hurley Washing Machine Stage With The Internet.

I Think There Are Going To Be A Bunch Of Tablet-like Devices. It's Really A Different Product Category.

You Don't Want To Negotiate The Price Of Simple Things You Buy Every Day.

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.

Cleverness Is A Gift, Kindness Is A Choice. Gifts Are Easy-they're Given After All. Choices Can Be Hard.

If You Want To Be Inventive, You Have To Be Willing To Fail.

Our Alliance With Toysrus.com Has Proven To Be A Great Win For Customers, And We've Looked Forward To Taking The Next Step By Introducing The New Babiesrus.com Teamed With Amazon.com Store Since We Forged The Alliance Last August.

I Think That, Ah, I'm A Very Goofy Sort Of Person In Many Ways.

Obsess About Customers, Not Competitors.

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.

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.

If You Think About The Long Term Then You Can Really Make Good Life Decisions That You Won’t Regret Later.

One Of The Huge Mistakes People Make Is That They Try To Force An Interest On Themselves. You Don't Choose Your Passions; Your Passions Choose You.

Young Entrepreneurs

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're Truly Obsessed Over Customers, It'll Cover A Lot Of Errors.

Servant Leadership

Your Brand Is Formed Primarily, Not By What Your Company Says About Itself, But What The Company Does.

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.

I Don't Want To Use My Creative Energy On Somebody Else's User Interface.

Market Leadership Can Translate Directly To Higher Revenue, Higher Profitability, Greater Capital Velocity And Correspondingly Stronger Returns On Invested Capital.

The Best Customer Service Is If The Customer Doesn't Need To Call You, Doesn't Need To Talk To You. It Just Works.

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.

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.

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.

Be Proud Of Your Choices, Not Your Gifts.

Amazon Pages And Amazon Upgrade Leverage Amazon's Existing 'search Inside The Book' Technology To Give Customers Unusual Flexibility In How They Buy And Read Books, .. In Collaboration With Our Publishing Partners, We're Working Hard To Make The World's Books Instantly Accessible Anytime And Anywhere.

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.

People Who Were Right A Lot Of The Time Were People Who Often Changed Their Minds.

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.

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.

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.”

Millions Of People Were Inspired By The Apollo Program. I Was Five Years Old When I Watched Apollo 11 Unfold On Television, And Without Any Doubt It Was A Big Contributor To My Passions For Science, Engineering, And Exploration.

I Believe You Have To Be Willing To Be Misunderstood If You're Going To Innovate.

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.

I’d Rather Interview 50 People And Not Hire Anyone Than Hire The Wrong Person.

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.

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.

We Are Pioneers And The History Of Pioneers Is Not That Good.

Seek Instant Gratification - Or The Elusive Promise Of It - And Chances Are You'll Find A Crowd There Ahead Of You.

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.

I Wouldn't Be Surprised If History Records Tim Berners-lee As The Second Gutenberg.

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.

We Are Stubborn On Vision. We Are Flexible On Details.

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.

We Also Have No Incentive Compensation Of Any Kind. And The Reason We Don’t Is Because It Is Detrimental To Teamwork.

If You're Long-term Oriented, Customer Interests And Shareholder Interests Are Aligned.

If We Can Keep Our Competitors Focused On Us While We Stay Focused On The Customer, Ultimately We'll Turn Out All Right.

Customer Satisfaction

If You Can't Feed A Team With Two Pizzas, It's Too Large.

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.

Though We Are Optimistic, We Must Remain Vigilant And Maintain A Sense Of Urgency.

Sense Of Urgency

Determine What Your Customers Need, And Work Backwards.

Any Business Plan Won't Survive Its First Encounter With Reality. The Reality Will Always Be Different. It Will Never Be The Plan.

Part Of Company Culture Is Path-dependent. It’s The Lessons You Learn Along The Way.

Things Never Go Smoothly.

I Knew That If I Failed I Wouldn't Regret That, But I Knew The One Thing I Might Regret Is Not Trying.

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.

People Loved Their Horses, Too. But You Don't Keep Riding Your Horse To Work Just Because You Love It.

A Company Shouldn't Get Addicted To Being Shiny, Because Shiny Doesn't Last.

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.

The Death Knell For Any Enterprise Is To Glorify The Past -- No Matter How Good It Was.

What We Want To Be Is Something Completely New. There Is No Physical Analog For What Amazon.com Is Becoming.

Will You Be Clever At The Expense Of Others, Or Will You Be Kind?

Effective Process Is Not Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy Is Senseless Process.

I Went To Princeton Specifically To Study Physics.

Word Of Mouth Is Very Powerful.

We're Working To Lower The Cost Of Spaceflight So That Many People Can Afford To Go And So That We Humans Can Better Continue Exploring The Solar System. Accomplishing This Mission Will Take Time, And We're Working On It Methodically.

My Grandfather Taught Me That It Is Harder To Be Kind Than It Is To Be Clever.

Every New Thing Creates Two New Questions And Two New Opportunities.

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