Jeff Bezos quotes: Amazon founder and world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos’ best quotes.
“The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.”
“In business, what’s dangerous is not to evolve.”
“The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”
“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.”
“If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.”
“I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”
“The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘Why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘Why not?'”
“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.”
“Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.”
“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”
“Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.”
“One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.”
“We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: (1) Put the customer first; (2) Invent; (3) Be patient.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Keep our competitors focused on us, while we stay focused on the customer.”
“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.”
“The people who are right a lot, often change their minds.”
“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.”
“It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online.”
“You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.”
“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.”
“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.”
“My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.”
“Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.”
“I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.”
“If you never want to be criticized, for goodness sake, don’t do anything new.”
“I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.”
“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.”
“Your margin is my opportunity.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.”
“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.”
“Kindness is a choice.”
“One of the things we don’t do very well at Amazon is a me-too product offering. So when I look at physical retail stores, it’s very well served, the people who operate physical retail stores are very good at it… the question we would always have before we would embark on such a thing is: what’s the idea? What would we do that would be different? How would it be better? We don’t want to just do things because we can do them… we don’t want to be redundant.”
“A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.”
“Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.”
“If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.”
“Another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. I think this is something about which there’s a lot of controversy. 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; there are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works for you.”
“Work hard, have fun, and make history.”
“The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.”
“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’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.”
“I think one thing I find very motivating – and I think this is probably a very common form of motivation or cause of motivation – is… I love people counting on me, and so, you know, today, it’s so easy to be motivated, because we have millions of customers counting on us at Amazon.com. 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.”
“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
“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.”
“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word-of-mouth is very powerful.”
“If there’s one reason we have done better than our peers in the internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word-of-mouth is so very, very powerful.”
