Top 15 Jeff Bezos Quotes

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

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.

We were right about AWS, but we’ve also taken plenty of risks that didn’t pan out. In fact, Amazon has made billions of dollars of failures. Failure comes with invention and risk-taking, which is why we try to make Amazon the best place in the world to fail.

In 1999, Barron’s headlined a story about our impending demise “Amazon.bomb.” My annual letter for 2000 started with a one-word sentence: “Ouch.” Our stock price peaked at $116, and then after the bubble burst our stock went down to $6

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.

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.

Because customers are always beautifully, 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 constantly invent on their behalf.

We were right about AWS, but the truth is we’ve also taken plenty of risks that didn’t pan out. In fact, Amazon has made billions of dollars of failures. Failure inevitably comes along with invention and risk-taking, which is why we try to make Amazon the best place in the world to fail.

In 1999, after we’d been in business for nearly five years, Barron’s headlined a story about our impending demise “Amazon.bomb.” My annual shareholder letter for 2000 started with a one-word sentence: “Ouch.” At the pinnacle of the internet bubble our stock price peaked at $116, and then after the bubble burst our stock went down to $6.

When I'm 80 and reflecting back, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life. And most of our regrets are acts of omission—the things we didn't try, the paths untraveled. Those are the things that haunt us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it.