Top 40 Brad Stone Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.” – Alan Kay.”

— Brad Stone

2. “Slow steady progress can erode any challenge over time.”

— Brad Stone

3. “In the end, we are our choices.”

— Brad Stone

4. “We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.”

— Brad Stone

5. “Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.”

— Brad Stone

6. “We pay attention to what our competitors do but it’s not where we put our energy.”

— Brad Stone

7. “We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent.”

— Brad Stone

8. “Steve Jobs was known for the clarity of his insights about what customers wanted, but he was also known for his volatility with coworkers. Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs.”

— Brad Stone

9. “Get Big Fast. The bigger the company got, Bezos explained, the lower the prices it could exact from Ingram and Baker and Taylor, the book wholesalers, and the more distribution capacity it could afford. And the quicker the company grew, the more territory it could capture in what was becoming the race to establish new brands on the digital frontier.”

— Brad Stone

10. “Wow, you guys are like cockroaches,” Graham finally said. “You just won’t die.”16.”

— Brad Stone

11. “Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop.”

— Brad Stone

12. “It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,” said Diego Piacentini in a speech at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business a few years later. “We didn’t want to be Kodak.” The reference was to the century-old photography giant whose engineers had invented digital cameras in the 1970s but whose profit margins were so healthy that its executives couldn’t bear to risk it all on an unproven venture in a less profitable frontier.”

— Brad Stone

13. “The production philosophy pioneered by Toyota calls for a focus on those activities that create value for the customer and the systematic eradication of everything else.”

— Brad Stone

14. “Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. “It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,” said Diego Piacentini.”

— Brad Stone

15. “AWS helped introduce the ethereal concept known as the cloud, and it is viewed as so vital to the future fortunes of technology startups that venture capitalists often give gift certificates for it to their new entrepreneurs.”

— Brad Stone

16. “Scott noted that Walmart had similar techniques. It could measure whether a certain item, such as a globe for children, could lift the sale of another item, like a coloring book, if they were placed next to each other on a store display. Both companies had a deep interest in testing these combinations.”

— Brad Stone

17. “We found a loophole,” he said. “Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn’t have to receive ten books, you only had to order ten books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, ‘Sorry, but we’re out of the lichen book.”

— Brad Stone

18. “Prime would eventually justify its existence. The service turned customers into Amazon addicts who gorged on the almost instant gratification of having purchases reliably appear two days after they ordered them. Signing up for Amazon Prime, Jason Kilar said at the time, “was like going from a dial-up to a broadband Internet connection.”

— Brad Stone

19. “It’s the tale of how one gifted child grew into an extraordinarily driven and versatile CEO and how he, his family, and his colleagues bet heavily on a revolutionary network called the Internet, and on the grandiose vision of a single store that sells everything.”

— Brad Stone

20. “These are not fever dreams. They are near inevitabilities. It’s an easy prediction to make – that Jeff Bezos will do what he has always done. He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets, and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon – that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company.”

— Brad Stone

21. “That either-or mentality, that if you are doing something good for customers it must be bad for shareholders, is very amateurish,” he said in our interview that summer.”

— Brad Stone

22. “To me Amazon is a story of a brilliant founder who personally drove the vision,” says Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google and an avowed Amazon competitor who is personally a member of Amazon Prime, its two-day shipping service. “There are almost no better examples. Perhaps Apple, but people forget that most people believed Amazon was doomed because it would not scale at a cost structure that would work.”

— Brad Stone

23. “What we do is hard. This is not where people go to retire.”

— Brad Stone

24. “There is so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There’s so much new that’s going to happen. People don’t have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way. Jeff Bezos.”

— Brad Stone

25. “Bezos is like a chess master playing countless games simultaneously, with the boards organized in such a way that he can efficiently tend to each match.”

— Brad Stone

26. “The high-tech community was getting a lesson in the dynamics of network effects – products or services become increasingly valuable as more people use them.”

— Brad Stone

27. “I see companies these days where thoughts of “exits” are foremost in the minds of top management and board, and it is so clear that this value will infect the decision making down to the smallest choice by the most junior employee. Do we create something that is good, or just that seems good and might get us acquired or funded?”

— Brad Stone

28. “McAdoo and Graham were discussing that most essential characteristic of great entrepreneurs: mental toughness, the ability to overcome the hurdles and negativity that typically accompany something new. McAdoo and his partners had identified this kind of true grit as the most important attribute in the founders of their successful portfolio companies, like Google and PayPal.”

— Brad Stone

29. “IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress.”

— Brad Stone

30. “Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer.”

— Brad Stone

31. “The goal was to get employees to distill a pitch into its purest essence, to start from something the customer might see – the public announcement – and work backward.”

— Brad Stone

32. “It’s about a crucial era during which old regimes fell, new leaders emerged, new social contracts were forged between strangers, the topography of cities changed, and the upstarts roamed the earth.”

— Brad Stone

33. “If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it’s this,” Bezos says, veering into a familiar Jeffism: “We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent.”

— Brad Stone

34. “If you want to build a truly great company you have got to ride a really big wave. And you’ve got to be able to look at market waves and technology waves in a different way than other folks and see it happening sooner, know how to position yourself out there, prepare yourself, pick the right surfboard – in other words, bring the right management team in, build the right platform underneath you. Only then can you ride a truly great wave.”

— Brad Stone

35. “Great merchants have never had the opportunity to understand their customers in a truly individualized way,” he said. “E-commerce is going to make that possible.”13.”

— Brad Stone

36. “Nevertheless, Blecharczyk came through with a new version of a site on March 3, a week before the annual conference in Austin, Texas. The new slogan was “A friend, not a front desk.”

— Brad Stone

37. “Averages are bad measures. I want to see actuals, highs, lows and why – not an average. An average is just lazy.”

— Brad Stone

38. “You know, the name is about 3 percent of what matters. But sometimes, 3 percent is the difference between winning and losing.”

— Brad Stone

39. “They used an old internal Microsoft term to describe it: “cookie licking,” or the act of claiming to do something before you actually do it, in order to capture notoriety and prevent others from following.”

— Brad Stone

40. “Do you trust storytellers, or do you trust data; the ingenuity of artists or the wisdom of the crowd?”

— Brad Stone

41. “Jeff always said that when you focus on the business inputs, then the outputs such as revenue and income will take care of themselves.”

— Brad Stone