Business Quotes

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.

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out all right.

Your margin is my opportunity.

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.

Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room.

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.

Focus on the big decisions. "As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do?" he asks. "You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.