Words matter. These are the best Jeff Bezos Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.
You cannot make a giant space company in your dorm room. Not today. And the reason is that the heavy lifting infrastructure isn’t in place.
You want your customers to value your service.
Strip malls are history.
Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.
I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.
We’re taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.
The reason we chose vertical landing as our recovery architecture is that vertical landing scales really well.
Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.
If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don’t actually improve their lives.
Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
What’s dangerous is not to evolve.
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.
Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people’s progress.
The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.
No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it’s government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.
I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.
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.
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
I read ‘The High Frontier’ in high school. I read it multiple times, and I was already primed. As soon as I read it, it made sense to me. It seemed very clear that planetary surfaces were not the right place for an expanding civilization inside our solar system.
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.
Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.
I think that, ah, I’m a very goofy sort of person in many ways.
Ebooks had to happen.
Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
Today I continue with my science-fiction reading habit and find it very mind-expanding. Always makes me think.
Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.
The Apollo program certainly had no real commercial value. It was done for very different reasons and, I think, very good reasons for the time. It’s an extraordinary achievement of mankind, but it wasn’t sustainable.
Infrastructure web services had to happen.
For people who are readers, reading is important to them.
We need to know what the resources of the moon are. We have great evidence now because of different kinds of radar and spectroscopic analysis that people have been able to do. But we really do need to go visit there, and we can do that with a robot craft without any problem.
I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.
I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.
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.
The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren’t thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about – they weren’t putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.
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.
In just a few hundred years, we will have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells if we want to continue to grow our energy usage.
You know you’re not anonymous on our site. We’re greeting you by name, showing you past purchases, to the degree that you can arrange to have transparency combined with an explanation of what the consumer benefit is.
My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.
It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.
The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’
Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don’t have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.
When it comes to space, I see it as my job, I’m building infrastructure the hard way. I’m using my resources to put in place heavy lifting infrastructure so the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space.
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.
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That’s why there’s the old saw: location, location, location.
A life of stasis would be population control, combined with energy rationing. That is the stasis world that you live in if you stay. And even with improvements in efficiency, you’ll still have to ration energy. That, to me, doesn’t sound like a very exciting civilization for our grandchildren’s grandchildren to live in.
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.
The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.
One of the things that I’m very excited about with New Shepard, which is our suborbital tourism vehicle, is using that to get a lot of practice. One of the equilibria that we’re at today with space launch is that we don’t get to practice enough.
When it comes to space, I see it as my job, I’m building infrastructure the hard way. I’m using my resources to put in place heavy lifting infrastructure so the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space.
The strategic objective of New Shepard is to practice, and a lot of the subcomponents of New Shepard actually get directly reused on the second stage of New Glenn.
If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
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.
We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.
You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.
With the amount of fixed expense that goes into developing something like the BE-4 engine, you want it to be used as much as possible.
