Quotees Archive

Your margin is my opportunity.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

- Jeff Bezos

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don’t actually improve their lives.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

- Jeff Bezos

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

- Jeff Bezos

You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

- Jeff Bezos

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

- Jeff Bezos

You want your customers to value your service.

- Jeff Bezos

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

- Jeff Bezos

Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

- Jeff Bezos

You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.

- Jeff Bezos

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

- Jeff Bezos

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

- Jeff Bezos

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

- Jeff Bezos

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

Strip malls are history.

- Jeff Bezos

Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That’s why there’s the old saw: location, location, location.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.

- Jeff Bezos

Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove we’ll settle for intense.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

- Jeff Bezos

This is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com. Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and large markets.

- Jeff Bezos

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

- Jeff Bezos

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.

- Jeff Bezos

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

- Jeff Bezos

One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

- Jeff Bezos

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people’s progress.

- Jeff Bezos

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

- Jeff Bezos

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

- Jeff Bezos

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

- Jeff Bezos

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

- Jeff Bezos

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

- Jeff Bezos

If you want to be inventive — you have to be willing to fail.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos

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.

- Jeff Bezos