A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
Jeff Bezos
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.
Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.
What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.
What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy.
It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.
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.
What's dangerous is not to evolve.
The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
If you can't tolerate critics, don't do anything new or interesting.
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.
I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.
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.
The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'
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.
If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
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.
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 you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
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.
There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
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.
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
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.
Our motto at Blue Origin is 'Gradatim Ferociter': 'Step by Step, Ferociously.'
Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.
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.
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.
I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.
Part of company culture is path-dependent - it's the lessons you learn along the way.
It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.
My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.
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.
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.
My view is there's no bad time to innovate.
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.
I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.
A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.
A life of stasis would be population control, combined with energy rationing. That is the stasis world that you live in if you stay. And even with improvements in efficiency, you'll still have to ration energy. That, to me, doesn't sound like a very exciting civilization for our grandchildren's grandchildren to live in.
I'm a genetic optimist.
You don't want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.
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.
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.
On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.
I don't know all the future steps, but I know one of them: we need to build a low-cost, highly operable, reusable launch vehicle. No matter which path we take, it has to include that gate, and so that's why that's Blue Origin's mission.
Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.
People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it's cool.
The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we'd have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.
