Jeff Bezos Quotes

When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.

In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.

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

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

We can't be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.

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

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.

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

Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you're missionary about.

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past -- no matter how good it was.

The Post is famous for its investigative journalism. It pours energy and investment and sweat and dollars into uncovering important stories. And then a bunch of websites summarize that [work] in about four minutes and readers can access that news for free. One question is, how do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you can't, it's difficult to put the right resources behind it. ... Even behind a paywall, websites can summarize your work and make it available for free. From a reader point of view, the reader has to ask, 'Why should I pay you for all that journalistic effort when I can get it for free from another site?'

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

I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimise the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.

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

Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.