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

-Jeff Bezos

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If You Do Build

Jeff Bezos

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

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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.

People Don't Want Gadgets, They Want Services.

Not The Outcome Any Of Us Wanted.

Focusing On The Customer Makes A Company More Resilient.

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

I Love My Life. I Love Being An Inventor.

Love Of My Life

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.

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.

Life's Too Short To Hang Out With People Who Aren't Resourceful.

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.

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!

It's Harder To Be Kind Than Clever

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

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.

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.

Are You Lazy Or Just Incompetent?

Your Margin Is My Opportunity.

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

Young Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship

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.

Word Of Mouth Is Very Powerful.

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

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

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.

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 It's Not Your Style To Stretch And Go The Extra Mile To Make Sure Our Customer Experience Is Great, You're Going To Have An Allergic Reaction To This Company. You Probably Won't Stay. If You Do Try And Stay, But Can't Adapt To The Culture Then It Will Reject You Like A Virus From A Healthy Immune System.

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're Not Competitor Obsessed, We're Customer Obsessed. We Start With The Customer And We Work Backwards.

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

Servant Leadership

I Feel Like In One Year It's Very Easy To Go From Internet Poster Boy To Internet Piсata.

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.

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

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

Your Brand Is What People Say About You When You're Not In The Room

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Feel Free To Cover Amazon Any Way You Want. Feel Free To Cover Jeff Bezos Any Way You Want.

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

Sense Of Urgency

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 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.

Our Biggest Cost Is Not Power, Or Servers, Or People. It's Lack Of Utilization. It Dominates All Other Costs.

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

Our Garage Was Basically Science Fair Central.

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

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.

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

I’m A Big Fan Of All-you-can-eat Plans, Because They’re Simpler For Customers.

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

Maintain A Firm Grasp Of The Obvious At All Times.

In The End, We Are Our Choices.

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 Doing Something That People Will Remark On, Then It's Going To Be Hard To Generate Word Of Mouth.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Everything You Are Comes From Your Choices.

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.

We Are Our Choices. Build Yourself A Great Story.

Strip Malls Are History.

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.

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.

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

You're Not Going To Make Hemingway Better By Adding Animations.

Work Hard, Have Fun And Make History.

Advertising Is The Price You Pay For Unremakable Thinking.

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

Invention Requires A Long-term Willingness To Be Misunderstood.

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

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.

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

If You Only Do Things Where You Know The Answer In Advance, Your Company Goes Away.

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.

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

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

The Human Brain Is An Incredible Pattern-matching Machine.

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.

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

You Know, We Love Stories And We Love Narrative; We Love To Get Lost In An Author's World.

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.

The Book Is Not Really The Container For The Book. The Book Itself Is The Narrative. It's The Thing That People Create.

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

Real Estate Is The Key Cost Of Physical Retailers. That's Why There's The Old Saw: Location, Location, Location.

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

For Many People, Extended Reading Sessions On An Lcd Display Cause Eyestrain.

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

Lowering Prices Is Easy. Being Able To Afford To Lower Prices Is Hard.

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

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.

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

I Never Worked On The School Newspaper.

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.

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.

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.

Cultures, For Better Or Worse, Are Very Stable.

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.

Ebooks Had To Happen.

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.

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.

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

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

Digital Marketing

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.

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 Build A Great Product Or Service, People Will Talk About It. But It Starts With Having Something That's Worth Talking About.

Failure Comes Part And Parcel With Invention. It’s Not Optional.

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'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.

What's Dangerous Is Not To Evolve.

What Consumerism Really Is, At Its Worst Is Getting People To Buy Things That Don't Actually Improve Their Lives.

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

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.

Entrepreneurs Must Be Willing To Be Misunderstood For Long Periods Of Time.

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

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.

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

Do Something You're Very Passionate About, And Don't Try To Chase What Is Kind Of The "hot Passion" Of The Day.

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

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 Double The Number Of Experiments You Do Per Year You're Going To Double Your Inventiveness.

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.

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

Infrastructure Web Services Had To Happen.

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

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

Go To Bed Early And Wake Up Early. The Morning Hours Are Good.

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.

Cleverness Is A Gift, Kindness Is A Choice.

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.

We Change Our Tools And Then Our Tools Change Us.

I Don't Buy Stocks, I Make Stocks.

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

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.

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

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.

I Like To Be Counted On.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Be Proud Of Your Choices, Not Your Gifts.

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.

Determine What Your Customers Need, And Work Backwards.

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.

I'm Not Prepared To Make Any Multi-decade Commitments.

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.

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

The Three Most Important Things In Retail Are Location, Location, Location. The Three Most Important Things For Our Consumer Business Are Technology, Technology, Technology.

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

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

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.

No, Communication Is Terrible!

No Communication

Effective Process Is Not Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy Is Senseless Process.

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.

There'll Always Be Serendipity Involved In Discovery.

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'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.

If You Have A Business Model That Relies On Customers Being Misinformed, You Better Start Working On Changing Your Business Model.

One Of The Things It Was Obvious You Could Do With An Online Store Is Have A Much More Complete Selection.

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.

E-mail Has Some Magical Ability To Turn Off The Politeness Gene In A Human Being.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

My Own View Is That Every Company Requires A Long-term View.

I Try To Spend My Time On Areas That I Think Are Important For The Future, And Where I Think I Can Add Value.

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.

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

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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