Quotes About Bezos

With "unlimited selection," "unfiltered customer reviews," and "ultimate personalization," the three unmatchable and innate advantages of the Internet, Bezos was confident that no physical bookstores, no matter how big they were then, could be serious competitors in the long run.

I've known Bezos for decades, since the very early days of Amazon, so it's no surprise to me that he's smart or willing to make big bets.

Uber, and Airbnb to a different extent, implemented the same battle plan. Bezos is an investor in both companies and, to some degree, has relationships with both CEOs. It is not a surprise that they are heirs to Amazon.

Bezos personifies a new breed of executive that arose with the emergence of the game-changing technologies in the 1980s and 1990s ... a 'productive narcissist'. ... These executives have big enough egos to make up seemingly random rules of business leadership. However, unlike other narcissists, they get the job done.

Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce—at a total annual savings of what Bezos himself made in two hours.

If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it's this," Bezos says, veering into a familiar Jeffism: "We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent.

Bezos dismissed those objections and insisted that to succeed in books as Apple had in music, Amazon needed to control the entire customer experience,

Bezos is a fan of e-mail newsletters such as VSL.com, a daily assortment of cultural tidbits from the Web, and Cool Tools, a compendium of technology tips and product reviews written by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired. Both e-mails are short, well written, and informative.

Get Big Fast. The bigger the company got, Bezos explained, the lower the prices it could exact from Ingram and Baker and Taylor, the book wholesalers, and the more distribution capacity it could afford. And the quicker the company grew, the more territory it could capture in what was becoming the race to establish new brands on the digital frontier.

Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn't want to repeat "Steve Jobs's mistake" of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.

Bezos dismissed those objections and insisted that to succeed in books as Apple had in music, Amazon needed to control the entire customer experience, combining sleek hardware with an easy-to-use digital bookstore. "We are going to hire our way to having the talent," he told his executives in that meeting. "I absolutely know it's very hard. We'll learn how to do it.

Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals' investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible.

At the same time, Bezos became enamored with a book called Creation, by Steve Grand, the developer of a 1990s video game called Creatures that allowed players to guide and nurture a seemingly intelligent organism on their computer screens.

These were typically Amazonian names: geeky, obscure, and endlessly debated inside AWS, since according to an early AWS exec, Bezos had once mused, "You know, the name is about 3 percent of what matters. But sometimes, 3 percent is the difference between winning and losing.

Bezos didn't believe anyone could make a good decision about a feature or a product without knowing precisely how it would be communicated to the world—and what the hallowed customer would make of it.

Miller knew nothing about toy retailing, but in a pattern that would recur over and over, Bezos didn't care. He was looking for versatile managers—he called them "athletes"—who could move fast and get big things done. Miller was given

Bezos insisted the company needed to master anything that touched the hallowed customer experience, and he resisted any efforts to project profitability.

Bezos also had a few strange notions about how the journalism process might be streamlined. He wondered aloud whether the paper would need so many editors if it simply hired great writers. Baron responded that if anything, the paper probably needed more editors. Bezos repeated that refrain so often that a few editors took to sending him the raw copy of high-profile journalists. Amazon said Bezos never received or read any such emails, but he eventually came to agree with Baron.

The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories.

from his company. After the stock market crash in 2000, Amazon went through two rounds of layoffs. But Bezos didn't want to stop recruiting altogether; he just wanted to be more efficient. So he framed the kind

Just like Creation author Steve Grand had predicted, the creatures were evolving in ways that Bezos could not have imagined. It was the combination of EC2 and S3—storage and compute, two primitives linked together—that transformed both AWS and the technology world.

In the spring of 2011, Amazon was valued at $80 billion. Buoyed by the rise of his stock holdings, the forty-seven-year-old Bezos was the thirtieth richest person in the world, with an $18.1 billion net worth.

And on the other side of the world, there was Mohammed bin Salman—the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who was embittered at Bezos for the Washington Post's coverage of the murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, and who some cybersecurity experts would come to believe had hacked Bezos's cell phone.

Bezos's counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them.