These Jeff Bezos quotes on success, leadership and entrepreneurship will inspire the hell out of you.
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is the founder, chairman, and former president & CEO of Amazon, the largest online retailer in the world. With a net worth of $140 billion as of May 2022, he is currently the second richest person in the world. He was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in Houston, Texas, Bezos always had a passion for invention and entrepreneurship. When he was a teenager, he sold newspapers to pay for his college tuition. After graduating from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, he worked on Wall Street for a few years. In 1994, he founded Amazon, the company went public in 1997 and revolutionized the way people shopped online becoming one of the world’s largest retailers.
Did you know that Amazon company began as an online book store and with time it has expanded to a variety of eCommerce products and services including AI, audio, and video streaming? Now it is the world’s largest internet sales company, an “everything store” we all love browsing through.
Being one of the leading business entrepreneurs, Bezos has received many awards including Time magazine’s Person of the Year (1999), Fortune’s 2012 Business Person of the Year, 2014 Best CEO in the World Harvard Business Review, Forbes’ #2 Richest in Tech, and 14th on their Powerful People list.
Here we are sharing a collection of best Jeff Bezos quotes and sayings on success, leadership, and entrepreneurship to inspire and motivate the fresh businessman out there.
Jeff Bezos Quotes
“Invention is by its very nature, disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don’t do anything new.” — Jeff Bezos
“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 how it works for me. There are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works for you.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“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, because very few companies are willing to do that.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“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
“What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.” — Jeff Bezos
“Focus on cost improvement makes it possible for us to afford lower prices, which drives growth. Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions. Customers like this, and it’s good for shareholders. Please expect us to repeat this loop.” — Jeff Bezos
“We have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
Jeff Bezos Motivational Quotes
“The people who are right a lot, often change their minds.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“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
“I think one thing I find very motivating — and I think this is probably a very common form of motivation or cause of motivation — is… I love people counting on me, and so, you know, today it’s so easy to be motivated, because we have millions of customers counting on us at Amazon.com. We’ve got thousands of investors counting on us. And we’re a team of thousands of employees all counting on each other. That’s fun.” — Jeff Bezos
“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 tailwind is now a headwind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” — Jeff Bezos
“But it’s probably not true over a 10-year period, when the benefit is going to increase the frequency with which your customers shop with you, the fraction of their purchases they do with you as opposed to other places. Their overall satisfaction is going to go up.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“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
Jeff Bezos Quotes On Success
“What we need to do is always look into the future.” — Jeff Bezos
“One advantage — perhaps a somewhat subtle one — of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we’re at our best, we don’t wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“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, and “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
“All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts… not analysis.” — Jeff Bezos
“If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition, taste, heart.” — Jeff Bezos
“The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called – which only a nerd would call – a ‘regret minimization framework’.” — Jeff Bezos
“Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.” — Jeff Bezos
“What’s dangerous is not to evolve, not to invent, not to improve the customer experience.” — Jeff Bezos
“Obsess about customers, not competitors.” — Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos Inspirational Quotes
“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
“Amazon today remains a small player in global retail. We represent a low single-digit percentage of the retail market, and there are much larger retailers in every country where we operate. And that’s largely because nearly 90% of retail remains offline, in brick and mortar stores.” — Jeff Bezos
“The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible. The hard part is figuring out when to be which.” — Jeff Bezos
“You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.” — Jeff Bezos
“We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“If you never want to be criticized, for goodness sake don’t do anything new.” — Jeff Bezos
“This has the potential to be bigger than anything we’ve ever done.” — Jeff Bezos
“I’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
Jeff Bezos Quotes On Leadership
“So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” — Jeff Bezos
“It’s hard to remember for you guys, but for me it’s like yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself, and hoping one day we could afford a forklift.” — Jeff Bezos
“It’ so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it.” — Jeff Bezos
“Frugality drives innovation.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.” — Jeff Bezos
“Patience, persistence, and obsessive attention to detail.” — Jeff Bezos
“The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.” — Jeff Bezos
“… seek to build a community–to make better choices in the people with whom you partner–that’s the only way to have greater long-term impact on the world.” — Jeff Bezos
“The keys to success are patience, persistence, and obsessive attention to detail.” — Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos Best Quotes And Sayings
“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
“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
“On the Internet, companies 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
“If you don’t understand the details of your business, you are going to fail.” — Jeff Bezos
“I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.” — Jeff Bezos
“A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny because shiny doesn’t last.” — Jeff Bezos
“I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.” — Jeff Bezos
“The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.” — Jeff Bezos
“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 backwards, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.” — Jeff Bezos
“Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn’t be in this business.” — Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos Business Quotes
“One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.” — Jeff Bezos
“If you’re very clear to the outside world that you’re taking a long-term approach, then people can self-select in.” — Jeff Bezos
“Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.” — Jeff Bezos
“My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.” — Jeff Bezos
“Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.” — Jeff Bezos
“I like treating things as if they’re small, you know Amazon even though it is a large company, I want it to have the heart and spirit of a small one.” — Jeff Bezos
“Wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided… and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.” — Jeff Bezos
“At Amazon we like things to work on for five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.” — Jeff Bezos
“One of the things we don’t do very well at Amazon is a me-too product offering. So when I look at physical retail stores, it’s very well served, the people who operate physical retail stores are very good at it…the question we would always have before we would embark on such a thing is: What’s the idea? What would we do that would be different? How would it be better? We don’t want to just do things because we can do them…we don’t want to be redundant.” — Jeff Bezos
“I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.” — Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos Quotes On Entrepreneurship
“There are two kinds of companies – those that work to raise process and those that work to lower them.” — Jeff Bezos
In some cases, things are inevitable. The hard part is that you don’t know how long it might take, but you know it will happen if you’re patient enough. E-books had to happen. Infrastructure web services had to happen. So you can do these things with conviction if you are long-term-oriented and patient.” — Jeff Bezos
“Amazon is not too big to fail … If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end … We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.” — Jeff Bezos
“I don’t think that you can invest 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
“Working backwards from customer needs often demands that we acquire new competencies and exercise new muscles, never mind how uncomfortable and awkward-feeling those first steps might be.” — Jeff Bezos
“The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.” — Jeff Bezos
“During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision…Will you admire this person?…Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?….What dimension might this person be a superstar?” — Jeff Bezos
“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
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about it. Word-of-mouth is very powerful.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Quotes
“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.” — Jeff Bezos
“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.” — Jeff Bezos
“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.” — Jeff Bezos
“You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“Work hard, have fun, and make history.” — Jeff Bezos
“It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
Jeff Bezos Customer Quotes
“Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.” — Jeff Bezos
“A word about corporate cultures: for better or worse, they are enduring, stable, hard to change. They can be a source of advantage or disadvantage. You can write down your corporate culture, but when you do so, you’re discovering it, uncovering it — not creating it…..The reason cultures are so stable in time is because people self-select.” — Jeff Bezos
“It is difficult for us to imagine that ten years from now, customers will want higher prices, less selection, or slower delivery. Our belief in the durability of these pillars gives us the confidence required to invest in strengthening them.” — Jeff Bezos
“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.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“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
“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
“Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, “Good job, great quarter … And I’ll say, ‘Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago. I’m working on a quarter that’ll happen in 2021 right now.” — Jeff Bezos
“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
“If you’re good at correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think. Whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.” — Jeff Bezos
“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.” — Jeff Bezos
“You can do the math 15 different ways, and every time the math tells you that you shouldn’t lower prices because you’re going to make less money. That’s undoubtedly true in the current quarter, in the current year.” — Jeff Bezos
Did you get inspired by these Jeff Bezos quotes?
Along with being an American technology and retail entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, Bezos is the second-wealthiest person in the world. He is not only the founder of Amazon but he also started Amazon Web Series, Blue Origin, and acquired (among others) The Washington Post and Whole Foods.
We hope these Jeff Bezos quotes and sayings on success, leadership, and entrepreneurship will inspire and motivate you to work hard and never give up on your dreams.
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