Quotes from Richard L. Brandt

His goal (Bezos's)was not just to make browsing for books easy, but an enjoyable experience. "People don't just buy books because they need books," he has said. "There are products like that. Pharmaceuticals are that way. Nobody enjoys browsing the Preparation H counter. But people will gladly spend hours in a bookstore, so you have to make the shopping experience fun and engaging.

His mother echoed that sentiment. "You become really self-sufficient when you work with the land," she said. "One of the things [Jeff] learned is that there really aren't any problems without solutions. Obstacles are only obstacles if you think they're obstacles. Otherwise, they're opportunities.

One of the things that you learn in a rural area like that is self-reliance," he said. "People do everything themselves. That kind of self-reliance is something you can learn, and my grandfather was a huge role model for me: If something is broken, let's fix it. To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.

The site had to be simple, fast, and intuitive.

We used to joke that the ideal Amazon site would not show a search box, navigation links, or lists of things you could buy. Instead, it would just display a giant picture of one book, the next book you want to buy. —Greg

The focus should be on the customer, not on the Web site. It's pretty obvious that a simple Web site is easier to use than one with of a bunch of fancy gadgets. He was adamant about that.

In school, you're getting a grade. Whenever you're getting a grade for something, you always feel slightly pressured.

That's actually a very liberating expectation, expecting to fail," he has said.

It's a philosophy promoted by Silicon Valley start-ups that the best people are those who don't know that something "can't be done," and therefore will figure out how to do it.

The general strategy was to be conservative when estimating when a book would be shipped, so that surprises would be positive—shipped sooner than the customer expected—rather than negative.

In June 2008, Amazon.com filed for a new patent with a Microsoft Kinect–like feature for making purchases with body movements. Anticipating computers and other devices that can track a user's movements, the new Amazon patent is titled "Movement recognition as input mechanism." Forget keypads and mice, you may soon be able to make a purchase simply by nodding your head at your computer, Kindle, or cell phone. Industry wags have dubbed it the "1-Nod patent.