Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.
The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.
The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible. The hard part is figuring out when to be which.
If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out all right.
We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
The common question that gets asked in business is, why? That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, why not?
There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.
Our vision is every book ever printed in any language [fetched and viewable on our eBook Kindle device] in under 60 seconds.
The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'
Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It's not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win.
The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth's most customer-centric company.
Any business plan won't survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.
If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.
If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.
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.
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.
If you build a great product or service, people will talk about it. But it starts with having something that's worth talking about.
We're working on New Glenn, which is our orbital vehicle, but we have in our mind's eye an even bigger vehicle called New Armstrong.
And I still buy books at B&N, Borders and Elliot Bay ... I probably shouldn't admit this. But I don't care. I love great bookstores.
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.
We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can.
With the amount of fixed expense that goes into developing something like the BE-4 engine, you want it to be used as much as possible.
One of the things that gets me up in the morning is knowing that customer expectations are always rising, and I find that very exciting.
For every leader in the company, not just for me, there are decisions that can be made by analysis. These are the best kinds of decisions!
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.
You cannot make a giant space company in your dorm room. Not today. And the reason is that the heavy lifting infrastructure isn't in place.
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 frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
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.
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're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.
You have to use your judgment. In cases like that, we say, 'let's be simple minded. We know this is a feature that's good for customers. Let's do it.
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.
Good ideas will always get funded, so that's not going to be a problem. But you will see that it will be harder and harder for bad ideas to get funded.
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.
We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and thy're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.
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.
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.
What characteristics do I look for when hiring somebody? That's one of the questions I ask when interviewing. I want to know what kind of people they would hire.
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.
Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
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.
I have a strongly held belief that one of the reasons that Amazon has been successful is because we do not obsess over competitors. Instead we obsess over customers.
Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
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.
Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don't have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.
Read the Declaration of Independence to your children as a tradition every Fourth of July. Make sure they understand why the word "pursuit" precedes the word "happiness."
If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience.