Quotes by Jeff Bezos

“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. Its our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

“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.”

“We were hoping to build a small, profitable company. And of course, what weve done is build a large, unprofitable company.”

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

“We will continue to invest in systems, people and product expansion, each of which helps us better serve customers, ... For the rest of 1999, we expect to invest more heavily than we have in the past.”

“We are thrilled to have Joe at Amazon.”

“We believe theres a tremendous opportunity ahead across the $5 trillion retail market globally.”

“We did a lot this quarter. For the rest of 1999 we expect to invest more heavily than we have in the past.”

“Were standing behind the transaction with our own pocketbook,”

I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Lifes too short to hang out with people who arent resourceful.

Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that youre missionary about.

The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people… Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue

No business can continue to shrink. That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.

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

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

We cant be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.

E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details….