The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'

In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it and the board tried to fire me and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because I hadn't done a good job communicating. I don't want to blame them. I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I didn't, I wasn't thinking about that at the time.

Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost.

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.

If I have three good decisions a day, that's enough.

I think companies have a big problem making a big transition, so leaders get replaced.