You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.
Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes.
If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail.
The people who are right a lot often change their minds.
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.
Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for companies.
What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.
Seek instant gratification - or the elusive promise of it - and chances are you'll find a crowd there ahead of you.
Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.
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.
Advertising is the price you pay for unremakable thinking.
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.
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.
I think technology advanced faster than anticipated. In that whirlwind, a lot of companies didn't survive. The reason we have done well is because, even in that whirlwind, we kept heads-down focused on the customers. All the metrics that we can track about customers have improved every year.
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.
We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.
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.
If you're not doing something that people will remark on, then it's going to be hard to generate word of mouth.
Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy-they're given after all. Choices can be hard.
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.
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.
I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimise the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.
If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness.
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
