Jeff Bezos Quotes

American business magnate (born 1964)

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Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born January 12, 1964) is an American technology and retail entrepreneur, investor, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and philanthropist, best known as the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, the world's largest online shopping retailer. The company began as an Internet merchant of books and expanded to a wide variety of products and services, most recently video and audio streaming. Amazon.com is currently the world's largest Internet sales company on the World Wide Web, as well as the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure services, which is available through its Amazon Web Services arm. In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post newspaper.

Bio from: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen

Alternative Names: Jeffrey Preston Bezos • Jeffrey Bezos • Jeffrey Jorgensen • Jeff Jorgensen

From Wikidata (CC0)

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If you have a really good idea, stick to it, but be flexible on how you get there. Be stubborn on your vision but flexible on the details... People who are right a lot change their mind... They have the same data set that they had at the beginning, but they wake up, and they re-analyze things all the time, and they come to a new conclusion, and then they change their mind.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year horizon, you’re competing against a lot of people.

But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because few companies are willing to do that.

The telescope was an invention, but looking through it at Jupiter, knowing that it had moons was a discovery...It's interesting to me that large language models in their current form are not inventions. They're discoveries.

We’re building what’s called a private cloud for them [the C.I.A.], … because they don’t want to be on the public cloud.

And I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth.

Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.

When we think our critics are right, we change. When we make mistakes, we apologize. But when you look in the mirror, assess the criticism, and still believe you’re doing the right thing, no force in the world should be able to move you.

Your margin is my opportunity.

Customers are always wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and a constant desire to delight customers drives us to invent on their behalf.

That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better.

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. If you replace ‘customer’ with ‘reader,’ that approach, that point of view, can be successful at The Post, too..

Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out ways for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.

I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one.

"I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time…

"In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible.

"And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it."

Amazon accounts for less than 1% of the $25 trillion global retail market and less than 4% of retail in the U.S. Unlike industries that are winner-take-all, there’s room in retail for many winners.

If you absolutely can't tolerate critics, then don't do anything new or interesting.