The three most important things in retail are location, location, location. The three most important things for our consumer business are technology, technology, technology.
I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.
When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.
If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people, But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavours that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.
Determine what your customers need, and work backwards.
Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It's lack of utilization. It dominates all other costs.
In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running.
Do something you're very passionate about, and don't try to chase what is kind of the "hot passion" of the day.
If you build a great product or service, people will talk about it. But it starts with having something that's worth talking about.
If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
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.
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.
A lot of people – and I’m just not one of them – believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me.
If you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.
People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.
The Net is pretty cool, but the physical world is the best medium ever.
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy - they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
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.
If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.
Percentage margins don't matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.
The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth's most customer-centric company.
It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.
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're going to invest in an Internet stock, you must be a long-term investor.
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.
