Jeff Bezos Quotes

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

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.

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.

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.

I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category.

I’m a genetic optimist.

Our motto at Blue Origin is ‚Gradatim Ferociter‘: ‚Step by Step, Ferociously.‘

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‚why?‘ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‚why not?‘

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 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.

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.

The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.

If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.

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.

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don’t actually improve their lives.

People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it’s cool.

If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.

I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.

Two kids in their dorm room can’t start anything important in space today. That’s why I want to take the assets I have from Amazon and translate that into the heavy-lifting infrastructure that will allow the next generation to have dynamic entrepreneurialism in space, to build that transportation network.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

I have won this lottery. It’s a gigantic lottery, and it’s called Amazon.com. And I’m using my lottery winnings to push us a little further into space.

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.

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.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

I think that, ah, I’m a very goofy sort of person in many ways.

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.

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

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.

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.

The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that it basically just says, ‚Look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let’s do it close to each other.‘ That way… you can go over to the European Union lunar outpost and say, ‚I’m out of eggs. What have you got?‘

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.

You want your customers to value your service.

I’ve always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

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.

No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it’s government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.

A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.

The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That’s approaching evil.

Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.