Top 160 Jeff Bezos Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.”

— Jeff Bezos

52. “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.”

— Jeff Bezos

53. “If you are going to do large-scale invention, you have to be willing to do three things: You must be willing to fail; you have to be willing to think long term; and you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

— Jeff Bezos

54. “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.”

— Jeff Bezos

55. “But there’s still so much you can do with technology to improve the customer experience. And that’s the sense in which I believe it’s still Day One, and that it’s early in the day. If anything, the rate of change is accelerating.”

— Jeff Bezos

56. “The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past – no matter how good it was.”

— Jeff Bezos

57. “No communication is terrible!”

— Jeff Bezos

58. “The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.”

— Jeff Bezos

59. “My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.”

— Jeff Bezos

60. “There’s 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

61. “Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.”

— Jeff Bezos

62. “Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process.”

— Jeff Bezos

63. “If you’re truly obsessed over customers, it’ll cover a lot of errors.”

— Jeff Bezos

64. “The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.”

— Jeff Bezos

65. “Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.”

— Jeff Bezos

66. “Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It’s not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win.”

— Jeff Bezos

67. “If you build a great product or service, people will talk about it. But it starts with having something that’s worth talking about.”

— Jeff Bezos

68. “I don’t buy stocks, I make stocks.”

— Jeff Bezos

69. “Seek instant gratification – or the elusive promise of it – and chances are you’ll find a crowd there ahead of you.”

— Jeff Bezos

70. “The three most important things in retail are location, location, location. The three most important things for our consumer business are technology, technology, technology.”

— Jeff Bezos

71. “Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.”

— Jeff Bezos

72. “My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.”

— Jeff Bezos

73. “The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.”

— Jeff Bezos

74. “Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.”

— Jeff Bezos

75. “I’m going to go do this crazy thing. I’m going to start this company selling books online.”

— Jeff Bezos

76. “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.”

— Jeff Bezos

77. “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.”

— Jeff Bezos

78. “Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.”

— Jeff Bezos

79. “For every leader in the company, not just for me, there are decisions that can be made by analysis. These are the best kinds of decisions!”

— Jeff Bezos

80. “Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes.”

— Jeff Bezos

81. “If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.”

— Jeff Bezos

82. “You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.”

— Jeff Bezos

83. “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.”

— Jeff Bezos

84. “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.”

— Jeff Bezos

85. “The Net is pretty cool, but the physical world is the best medium ever.”

— Jeff Bezos

86. “People loved their horses, too. But you don’t keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.”

— Jeff Bezos

87. “Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.”

— Jeff Bezos

88. “If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.”

— Jeff Bezos

89. “We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don’t is because it is detrimental to teamwork.”

— Jeff Bezos

90. “Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for companies.”

— Jeff Bezos

91. “If you’re going to invest in an Internet stock, you must be a long-term investor.”

— Jeff Bezos

92. “I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.”

— Jeff Bezos

93. “I’m not prepared to make any multi-decade commitments.”

— Jeff Bezos

94. “I told all of our original investors that they would lose their money for sure.”

— Jeff Bezos

95. “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.”

— Jeff Bezos

96. “We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.”

— Jeff Bezos

97. “In Seattle you haven’t had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it’s running.”

— Jeff Bezos

98. “You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.”

— Jeff Bezos

99. “But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.”

— Jeff Bezos

100. “I’m not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that’s going to invert.”

— Jeff Bezos