Word of mouth is very powerful.
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.
We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don’t is because it is detrimental to teamwork.
If you're truly obsessed over customers, it'll cover a lot of errors.
Are you lazy or just incompetent?
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
I'm skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.
We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.
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.
We're building a unique global platform...In the last 18 months we found that sellers and partners are interested in complementing their online and offline businesses with Amazon's platform
If you look at academic studies, you can see that stock prices are most closely correlated with cash flow. It's such a straightforward number. Cash flow is what will drive shareholder returns.
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.
The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.” So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.”
I love my life. I love being an inventor.
It's perfectly healthy-encouraged, even- to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today
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.
I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.
We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that, because we believe -- and we have to take this as an article of faith -- that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.
We're not competitor obsessed, we're customer obsessed. We start with the customer and we work backwards.
If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out all right.
One of the things that I hope will distinguish Amazon.com is that we continue to be a company that defies easy analogy. This requires a lot of innovation, and innovation requires a lot of random walk.
When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.
E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.
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."
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.
