Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos
Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezosis an American technology entrepreneur and investor. He has played a role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, an online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products and services, most recently video streaming. Amazon.com became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and a model for Internet sales...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth12 January 1964
CityAlbuquerque, NM
CountryUnited States of America
We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don’t is because it is detrimental to teamwork.
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
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 willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavours 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.
It's perfectly healthy-encouraged, even- to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today
You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.
We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.
We are pioneers and the history of pioneers is not that good.
The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.
If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.
But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.
There's so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.
People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.
Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency.