Jeff Bezos Quotes

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.

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

Two kids in their dorm room can’t start anything important in space today. That’s why I want to take the assets I have from Amazon and translate that into the heavy-lifting infrastructure that will allow the next generation to have dynamic entrepreneurialism in space, to build that transportation network.

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 don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.

I have won this lottery. It’s a gigantic lottery, and it’s called Amazon.com. And I’m using my lottery winnings to push us a little further into space.

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

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.

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.

Everything you are comes from your choices.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

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

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

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.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

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.

The strategic objective of New Shepard is to practice, and a lot of the subcomponents of New Shepard actually get directly reused on the second stage of New Glenn.

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

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

Work hard, have fun and make history.

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.

I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category.

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.

If you’re not doing something that people will remark on, then it’s going to be hard to generate word of mouth.

We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

When it comes to space, I see it as my job, I’m building infrastructure the hard way. I’m using my resources to put in place heavy lifting infrastructure so the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space.

I’m a genetic optimist.

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 reason we chose vertical landing as our recovery architecture is that vertical landing scales really well.

Of course humans like to explore, and we should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s more than that. It’s essential for your children and your children’s children.

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

A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.

Beautiful speech doesn’t need protection, it’s ugly speech that needs protection. We have these cultural norms that allow people to say really ugly things. You don’t have to invite them to your dinner party, but you should let them say it.

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.

Today I continue with my science-fiction reading habit and find it very mind-expanding. Always makes me think.

I grew up reading science fiction.

Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.

One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn’t work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.

I’ve always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

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

We need to know what the resources of the moon are. We have great evidence now because of different kinds of radar and spectroscopic analysis that people have been able to do. But we really do need to go visit there, and we can do that with a robot craft without any problem.

I think that, ah, I’m a very goofy sort of person in many ways.

No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it’s government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.

You know you’re not anonymous on our site. We’re greeting you by name, showing you past purchases, to the degree that you can arrange to have transparency combined with an explanation of what the consumer benefit is.

I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

If your payloads cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they actually cost more than the launch. It puts a lot of pressure on the launch vehicle not to change, to be very stable. Reliability becomes much more important than the cost. It’s hard to get off of that equilibrium.

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.

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.

People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it’s cool.

I read ‘The High Frontier’ in high school. I read it multiple times, and I was already primed. As soon as I read it, it made sense to me. It seemed very clear that planetary surfaces were not the right place for an expanding civilization inside our solar system.

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.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

In this industry, there’s a lot of cases of being a competitor in one way, but you’re often a customer and a vendor in another way. It’s not atypical in aerospace. Actually, it’s not that atypical in a lot of industries.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

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.

Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room

The question really is, are you improving the world? And you can do that in many models. You can do that in government, you can do that in a nonprofit, and you can do it in commercial enterprise.

We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.

You want your customers to value your service.

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

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.

If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.

We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.

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

The Apollo program certainly had no real commercial value. It was done for very different reasons and, I think, very good reasons for the time. It’s an extraordinary achievement of mankind, but it wasn’t sustainable.

We fly to 106 kilometers. We’ve always had as our mission that we always wanted to fly above the Karman line because we didn’t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you’re an astronaut or not.

The special ops guys and the firefighters around the world have this great phrase. They say, ‘Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,’ and that is true. Everything I’ve accomplished in my life has been because of that attitude.

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.

I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

When we build our own colonies, we can do them in near-Earth vicinity, because people are going to want to come back to Earth. Very few people – for a long time, anyway – are going to want to abandon Earth altogether.

In just a few hundred years, we will have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells if we want to continue to grow our energy usage.

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.

Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.

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.

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.

Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.

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

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

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.

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

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

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