Business Quotes
Our motto at Blue Origin is 'Gradatim Ferociter': 'Step by Step, Ferociously'.
I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work.If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.
Percentage margins don't matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.
We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business.
I'm skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.
There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.
I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it's not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that's not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.
No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it's government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.
You know you're not anonymous on our site. We're greeting you by name, showing you past purchases, to the degree that you can arrange to have transparency combined with an explanation of what the consumer benefit is.
You don't want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.
The question really is, are you improving the world? And you can do that in many models. You can do that in government, you can do that in a nonprofit, and you can do it in commercial enterprise.
Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.
On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.
If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out all right.
The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past - no matter how good it was.
Most big technology companies are competitor focused. They see what others are doing, and then work to fast follow. In contrast, 90 to 95 percent of what we build in AWS is driven by what customers tell us they want.
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