Jeff Bezos, the innovative mind behind Amazon.com, revolutionized e-commerce and led Amazon to become the largest online retailer.
Born in 1964, Bezos displayed an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age, fostering creative thinking among students through his Dream Institute.
Graduating with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University, he delved into various jobs before joining D.E. Shaw & Co.
His role in exploring Internet investment opportunities sparked his interest in launching a virtual bookstore in 1994, giving birth to Amazon.
Under Bezos’ guidance, Amazon expanded beyond books, selling CDs, videos, consumer electronics, apparel and more.
It even established Amazon Web Services (AWS), a leading cloud-computing service and introduced the Kindle, a digital book reader.
Related: Richard Branson Quotes and Elon Musk Quotes.
The company’s net sales escalated from $510,000 in 1995 to nearly $233 billion in 2018, partly due to the COVID-19-induced surge in online shopping.
Beyond Amazon, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a spaceflight company and acquired The Washington Post in 2013.
Despite stepping down as CEO in 2021, Bezos continues his influential role as executive chairman.
Below you will find some of the best quotes of Jeff Bezos.
Top Jeff Bezos Quotes on Success
1. “We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
2. “Work hard, have fun and make history.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
3. “Your margin is my opportunity.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
4. “If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake don’t do anything new.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
5. “You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
6. “Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
7. “I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
8. “People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
9. “Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don’t do anything new.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
10. “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).
11. “If you build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
12. “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).
13. “If you think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
14. “If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
15. “It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
16. “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).
17. “I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
Best Jeff Bezos Quotes
18. “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
19. “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).
20. “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).
21. “Everything you are comes from your choices.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
22. “Go to bed early and wake up early. The morning hours are good.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
23. “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
24. “We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
25. “Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
26. “If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we’ll turn out all right.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
27. “Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
28. “We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer-obsessed. We start with the customer and we work backwards.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
29. “Be proud of your choices, not your gifts.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
30. “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).
31. “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
32. “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).
33. “If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
34. “Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy-they’re given after all. Choices can be hard.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
35. “All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
36. “It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
Famous Jeff Bezos Quotes
37. “If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
38. “If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
39. “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).
40. “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).
41. “Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
42. “Determine what your customers need, and work backwards.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
43. “If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
44. “Advertising is the price you pay for unremakable thinking.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
45. “Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
46. “Obsess over customers.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
47. “Word of mouth is very powerful.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
48. “If we think long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn’t otherwise accomplish.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
49. “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).
50. “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).
51. “The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
52. “One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
53. “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).
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. “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).
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).
Popular Jeff Bezos Quotes
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. “Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
62. “The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
63. “Seek instant gratification – or the elusive promise of it – and chances are you’ll find a crowd there ahead of you.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
64. “Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
65. “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).
66. “Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
67. “If you’re truly obsessed over customers, it’ll cover a lot of errors.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
68. “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).
69. “I don’t buy stocks, I make stocks.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
70. “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).
71. “Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
72. “My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
73. “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).
74. “I’m going to go do this crazy thing. I’m going to start this company selling books online.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
75. “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).
Inspiring Jeff Bezos Quotes
76. “Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
77. “Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
78. “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).
79. “Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
80. “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).
81. “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).
82. “We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don’t is because it is detrimental to teamwork.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
83. “The Net is pretty cool, but the physical world is the best medium ever.” ~ (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. “If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.” ~ (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. “If you’re going to invest in an Internet stock, you must be a long-term investor.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
88. “Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
89. “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).
90. “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).
91. “Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for companies.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
92. “I’m not prepared to make any multi-decade commitments.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
93. “I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
94. “In Seattle, you haven’t had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it’s running.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
95. “You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
96. “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).
97. “You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
98. “I told all of our original investors that they would lose their money for sure.” ~ (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 the primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
100. “Strip malls are history.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
101. “We’re working to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take time, and we’re working on it methodically.” ~ (Jeff Bezos).
