Entrepreneurs
60 Inspiring Jeff Bezos Quotes About Business
Looking for the best Jeff Bezos quotes? Then look no further.
I’ve compiled 60 of the best quotes about business from the founder of Amazon.com.
Starting back in 1994, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com, originally selling books but then expanding literally from everything A to Z.
Not only has Jeff Bezos been successful in making Amazon the worlds biggest online retailer, but in creating the platform that Amazon is today he has helped thousands of other entrepreneurs to successfully create their own businesses.
As of 2018 Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $123 billion.
The following quotes about business from Jeff Bezos show exactly why Amazon has been so successful and there are plenty of inspiring business lessons one can learn by reading through them.
Jeff Bezos Quotes
1. “I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.” – Jeff Bezos
2. “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.” – Jeff Bezos
3. “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.” – Jeff Bezos
4. “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” – Jeff Bezos
5. “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos
6. “The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?'” – Jeff Bezos
7. “My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.” – Jeff Bezos
8. “There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.” – Jeff Bezos
9. “If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.” – Jeff Bezos
10th Jeff Bezos Quote: “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.” – Jeff Bezos
11. “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.” – Jeff Bezos
12. “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
13. “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” – Jeff Bezos
14. “It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.” – Jeff Bezos
15. “What’s dangerous is not to evolve.” – Jeff Bezos
16. “I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.” – Jeff Bezos
17. “The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it’s so easy to be motivated.” – Jeff Bezos
18. “I’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.” – Jeff Bezos
19. “There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.” – Jeff Bezos
20th Jeff Bezos Quote: “Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.” – Jeff Bezos
21. “I don’t think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you’re willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, and if you’re going to experiment, you’re going to fail, and if you’re going to fail, you have to think long term.” – Jeff Bezos
22. “A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.” – Jeff Bezos
23. “My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.” – Jeff Bezos
24. “Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.” – Jeff Bezos
25. “We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn’t be in this business.” – Jeff Bezos
26. “You want your customers to value your service.” – Jeff Bezos
27. “Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.” – Jeff Bezos
28. “I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.” – Jeff Bezos
29. “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
30th Jeff Bezos Quote: “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…” – Jeff Bezos
31. “If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.” – Jeff Bezos
32. “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
33. “On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It’s very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.” – Jeff Bezos
34. “If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.” – Jeff Bezos
35. “If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.” – Jeff Bezos
36. “Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.” – Jeff Bezos
37. “Your margin is my opportunity.” – Jeff Bezos
38. “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
39. “If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.” – Jeff Bezos
40th Jeff Bezos Quote: “If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.” – Jeff Bezos
41. “If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake don’t do anything new.” – Jeff Bezos
42. “If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.” – Jeff Bezos
43. “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.” – Jeff Bezos
44. “It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.” – Jeff Bezos
45. “Work Hard, have fun, make history.” – Jeff Bezos
46. “Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.” – Jeff Bezos
47. “We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.” – Jeff Bezos
48. “Any business plan won’t survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.” – Jeff Bezos
49. “The framework I found, which made the decision (to start Amazon in 1994) incredibly easy, was what I called a regret minimization framework. I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimize 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.” – Jeff Bezos
50th Jeff Bezos Quote: “Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you’re missionary about.” – Jeff Bezos
51. “When (competitors are) in the shower in the morning, they’re thinking about how they’re going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we’re thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.” – Jeff Bezos
52. “If you’re long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.” – Jeff Bezos
53. “Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort. 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.” – Jeff Bezos
54. “You want to look at what other companies are doing. It’s very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don’t want to look at it as if, ‘OK, we’re going to copy that.’ You want to look at it and say, ‘That’s very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?’ And then put your own unique twist on it.” – Jeff Bezos
55. “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
56. “Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.” – Jeff Bezos
57. “Another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. I think this is something about which there’s a lot of controversy. A lot of people — and I’m just not one of them — believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me. There are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works for you.” – Jeff Bezos
58. “You need a culture that high-fives small and innovative ideas and senior executives (that) encourage ideas. In order for innovative ideas to bear fruit, companies need to be willing to “wait for 5-7 years, and most companies don’t take that time horizon.” – Jeff Bezos
59. “I want to see good financial returns, but also to me there’s the extra psychic return of having my creativity and technological vision bear fruit and change the world in a positive way.” – Jeff Bezos
60. “You know if you make a customer unhappy, they won’t tell five friends, they’ll tell 5,000 friends. So we are at a point now where we have all of the things we need to build an important and lasting company, and if we don’t, it will be shame on us.” – Jeff Bezos
