Interesting thoughts from Jeff Bezos

Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen; January 12, 1964) is the founder of Amazon.com, Inc. He was also the chairman, president, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Amazon.com. However, Bezos said in a blog post he would soon step down from this position and become Executive Chair of the Amazon Board.

Education and career Bezos graduated from Princeton University as he was also a member of the Tau Beta Pi Association, he hired at D. E. Shaw & Co. as a financial analyst before founding Amazon.com in 1994.

On February 2, 2021, Bezos announced that he would step down as the CEO of Amazon, to be replaced by Andy Jassy. Bezos became executive chairman on July 5, 2021.

On July 19, 2021 Blue Origin successfully conducts its first human test flight with Bezos going to space. [Wikipedia]

Here are some of the quotes by Jeff Bezos himself. We hope you find them useful and inspiring.

1. A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
2. Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.
3. If you can't tolerate critics, don't do anything new or interesting.
4. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
5. It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.
6. There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.
12. 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.
13. The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author's world.
14. 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.
15. Today I continue with my science-fiction reading habit and find it very mind-expanding. Always makes me think.
16. Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.
20. What's dangerous is not to evolve.
21. What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.
22. 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.
23. A life of stasis would be population control, combined with energy rationing. That is the stasis world that you live in if you stay. And even with improvements in efficiency, you'll still have to ration energy. That, to me, doesn't sound like a very exciting civilization for our grandchildren's grandchildren to live in.
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.
27. Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
28. The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we'd have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.
29. For people who are readers, reading is important to them.
30. It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.
31. 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.
32. 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.
33. 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.
34. The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?' - Jeff Bezos The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'
35. 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.
36. 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.
37. The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
38. 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.
39. If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
40. Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners. - Jeff Bezos Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.
41. I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It's really a different product category.
42. I'm skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.
43. 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.
44. 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.
45. I know Elon, we're very like minded in many ways. We're not conceptual twins. One thing I want us to do is go to Mars, but for me it's one thing. He's singularly focused on that. I think motivation wise, for me I don't find that Plan B idea motivating. I don't want a plan B for Earth, I want Plan B to make sure Plan A works.
46. 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.
47. The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.
48. 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.
49. Our motto at Blue Origin is 'Gradatim Ferociter': 'Step by Step, Ferociously.'
50. If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
51. 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.
52. A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.
53. You don't want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.
54. My view is there's no bad time to innovate.
55. You want your customers to value your service.
56. I think that, ah, I'm a very goofy sort of person in many ways.
57. 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.
58. I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.
59. I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.
60. 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.