The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
There are multiple ways to be externally focused that are very successful. You can be customer-focused or competitor-focused. Some people are internally focused, and if they reach critical mass, they can tip the whole company.
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.
Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts
It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.
I feel like in one year it's very easy to go from Internet poster boy to Internet piсata.
I’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.
People don't want gadgets, they want services.
When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.
You cannot make a business case that you should be who you are not
I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.
My grandfather taught me that it is harder to be kind than it is to be clever.
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.
Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.
You don't chose your passion, your passion choses you
There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.
The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.
We are pioneers and the history of pioneers is not that good.
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.
Our vision is every book ever printed in any language [fetched and viewable on our eBook Kindle device] in under 60 seconds.
Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.
Ebooks had to happen.
I don't buy stocks, I make stocks.
