Business Quotes
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.
Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com's success.
We had so many orders that we weren't ready for that we had no real organization in our distribution center at all. In fact, we were packing on our hands and knees on a hard concrete floor.
We want to make money when people use our devices-not when people buy our devices. We think this aligns us better with customers. For example, we don't need our customers to be on the upgrade treadmill. We can be very happy to see people still using four-year-old Kindles!
To be clear, we take these financial outputs seriously, but we believe that focusing our energy on the controllable inputs to our business is the most effective way to maximize financial outputs over time.
Outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is usually right.
All my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, and guts, not analysis. When you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so, but it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, and heart, and that's what we'll do with this Day One Fund too.
One of the things that gets me up in the morning is knowing that customer expectations are always rising, and I find that very exciting.
Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It's lack of utilization. It dominates all other costs.
I think technology advanced faster than anticipated. In that whirlwind, a lot of companies didn't survive. The reason we have done well is because, even in that whirlwind, we kept heads-down focused on the customers. All the metrics that we can track about customers have improved every year.
I told all of our original investors that they would lose their money for sure.
If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet,they can each tell 6,000 friends.
The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth's most customer-centric company.
Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.
If you're not doing something that people will remark on, then it's going to be hard to generate word of mouth.
Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency.
You know, if you make a customer unhappy they won't tell five friends, they'll tell 5,000 friends. So, we are at a point now where we have all of the things we need to build an important and lasting company, and if we don't, it will be shame on us.
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