Jeff Bezos Quotes

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

I’m a genetic optimist.

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 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.

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You want your customers to value your service.

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

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.

Ebooks had to happen.

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

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.

Our motto at Blue Origin is ‘Gradatim Ferociter’: ‘Step by Step, Ferociously.’

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

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.

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

I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.

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

I’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.

I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.

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

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.

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

But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I think the definition of a book is changing.

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

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

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.