We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.

If you're watching your competitors, you're unlikely to invent a bunch of stuff on your own.

AWS is customer obsessed, inventive and experimental, long-term oriented, and cares deeply about operational excellence.

You gotta earn your keep in this world. When you invent something new, if customers come to the party, it's disruptive to the old way.

Long-term thinking levers our existing abilities and lets us do new things we couldn't otherwise contemplate. It supports the failure and iteration required for invention, and it frees us to pioneer in unexplored spaces. Seek instant gratification-or the elusive promise of it-and chances are you'll find a crowd there ahead of you.

The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don't know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap intoour own inner imagination about what's possible.