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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.

-Jeff Bezos

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The Balance Of Power

Jeff Bezos

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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.

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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.

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

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

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'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.

Your Margin Is My Opportunity.

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

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.

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

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.

Effective Process Is Not Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy Is Senseless Process.

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.

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 Went To Princeton Specifically To Study Physics.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Ebooks Had To Happen.

In The End, We Are Our Choices.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

... 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.

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

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.

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!

Are You Lazy Or Just Incompetent?

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.

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

Be Proud Of Your Choices, Not Your Gifts.

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

We Innovate By Starting With The Customer And Working Backwards. That Becomes The Touchstone For How We Invent.

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.

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

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

We Change Our Tools And Then Our Tools Change Us.

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

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

Word Of Mouth Is Very Powerful.

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

The Most Important Single Thing Is To Focus Obsessively On The Customer. Our Goal Is To Be Earth's Most Customer-centric Company.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Digital Marketing

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

Maintain A Firm Grasp Of The Obvious At All Times.

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.

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

Infrastructure Web Services Had To Happen.

Everything You Are Comes From Your Choices.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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Entrepreneurship

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.

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

Servant Leadership

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Strip Malls Are History.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Invention Requires A Long-term Willingness To Be Misunderstood.

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

Work Hard, Have Fun And Make History.

It Is Very Difficult To Get People To Focus On The Most Important Things When You're In Boom Times.

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

I Never Worked On The School Newspaper.

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

I Like To Be Counted On.

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.

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

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 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

There'll Always Be Serendipity Involved In Discovery.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Obsess About Customers, Not Competitors.

I Don't Buy Stocks, I Make Stocks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Focusing On The Customer Makes A Company More Resilient.

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.

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.

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

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

Sense Of Urgency

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It's Harder To Be Kind Than Clever

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

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 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.

Determine What Your Customers Need, And Work Backwards.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 Watch Our Competitors, Learn From Them, See The Things That They Were Doing For Customers And Copy Those Things As Much As We Can.

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

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.

Cultures, For Better Or Worse, Are Very Stable.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

People Don't Want Gadgets, They Want Services.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Things Never Go Smoothly.

Not The Outcome Any Of Us Wanted.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

People Who Are Right Most Of The Time Are People Who Change Their Minds Often

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

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

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

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

What's Dangerous Is Not To Evolve.

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.

No, Communication Is Terrible!

No Communication

Our Garage Was Basically Science Fair Central.

Cleverness Is A Gift, Kindness Is A Choice.

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

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

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