Strategy Quotes

The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn't really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn't until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.

Our strategy is very horizontal. We're trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically, we're trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social, whether it's on the web or mobile or other devices. So inherently, our whole approach has to be a breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one.

Learn from the masses, and then teach them.

Sometimes all you need to do to win clever people over to a principle is to present it in the form of a shocking paradox.

If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.

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.

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.

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they're simpler for customers.

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

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.

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.

Starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, andhigh-velocity decision making.

Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.

Those quarterly results were fully baked three years ago. So today I'm working on a quarter that will happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter is done already and it's probably been done for a couple years.

Our judgment is that relentlessly returning efficiency improvements and scale economies to customers in the form of lower prices creates a virtuous cycle that leads over the long term to a much larger dollar amount of free cash flow, and thereby to a much more valuable Amazon.com.

It's always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it's the second.