A biography for Jeff Bezoshasn’t been written yet.
“The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'”
“I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'”
“There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.”
“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.”
“I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.”
“Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.”
“I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.”
“I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.”
“What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.”
“The reason we chose vertical landing as our recovery architecture is that vertical landing scales really well.”
“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.”
“What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.”
“Two kids in their dorm room can't start anything important in space today. That's why I want to take the assets I have from Amazon and translate that into the heavy-lifting infrastructure that will allow the next generation to have dynamic entrepreneurialism in space, to build that transportation network.”
“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.”
“I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.”
“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.”
“I don't know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.”
“We're taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.”
“If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.”
“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”