Retail is detail, and that plays out throughout the international business as well. Today's portfolio has got omnichannel businesses in Mexico, Central America, Canada, China, but we also have an e-commerce marketplace in India with Flipkart and our financial services business in India, PhonePe - those are a bit different, but the other markets have a lot of commonality strategically.

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 backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that because we believe, and we have to take this as an article of faith, that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.

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 willingto invest on a seven-year time horizon, you're now competing against a fraction of those people... Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in 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.

When everyone is looking for gold, it's a good time to be in the pick and shovel business.

We grew this business with the store operators and the merchants making all the decisions, I got to be one of the merchants and it was a lot of fun. But to put the customer in charge, you have to start with design.