Jeff Bezos

In His Own Words

Helena Hunt

• Publisher: Agate B2
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781572842656
• eBook ISBN: 9781572848306
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

Over five hundred quotations from the man Warren Buffett called "the most remarkable businessperson of our age."
Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore based out of his garage. Since then, the ever-expanding enterprise has revolutionized shopping and, in many important ways, invented e-commerce as we know it. Today, Bezos's vast empire includes everything from cloud computing and fresh food delivery to movie production and consumer electronics. In recent years, Bezos also has invested in rocket technology, newspaper publishing, and artificial intelligence. Every arm of his business, however, is guided by a fundamental goal: to give customers what they want before they even think to ask for it.
Jeff Bezos: In His Own Words offers a unique look into the mind of one of history's most successful entrepreneurs by collecting more than five hundred of Bezos's quotes on business, technology, customer service, e-commerce, innovation, entrepreneurship, and more. Meticulously curated from interviews, speeches, shareholder letters, and other sources, this book creates a comprehensive picture of Jeff Bezos, his obsessions, and what makes his ventures thrive.
After all these years, Bezos still operates on what he calls "Day One time," in order to maintain the early experimental spirit of his business. Jeff Bezos: In His Own Words reveals in detail a man who wants to push the future forward—and will inspire readers to do the same.

PART ONE: GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Entrepreneurship

DEFINING ENTREPRENEURSHIP

ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS REALLY more about a state of mind than it is about working for yourself. It’s about being resourceful, it’s about problem solving. If you meet people who seem like really good problem solvers, step back, and you’ll see that they are self-reliant.

—Inc., April 1, 2004

A BEGINNER’S MIND

THAT ABILITY TO look at things with a fresh mind, a beginner’s mind, is very useful for entrepreneurs.

—Foreign Affairs, January/February 2015

EASY IDEAS, HARD RESULTS

IT’S EASY TO have ideas. It’s very hard to turn an idea into a successful product. There are many steps in between, and it takes persistence.

—Edison Nation video series, April 2011

OVERNIGHT SUCCESSES

I’ve noticed all overnight successes take about 10 years.

—Internet Association charity gala, May 2, 2017

THE INITIAL BUSINESS PLAN

WRITING THE BUSINESS plan, the initial hiring, getting the company incorporated. In a way they’re sort of, you know, simple, almost pedestrian tasks. But that’s how you start, one step at a time.

—American Academy of Achievement interview, May 4, 2001

MAINTAINING OPTIMISM

MY WIFE SAYS, “If Jeff is unhappy, wait three minutes.” I believe that optimism is an essential quality for doing anything hard—entrepreneurial endeavors or anything else. That doesn’t mean that you’re blind or unrealistic, it means that you keep focused on eliminating your risks, modifying your strategy, until it is a strategy about which you can be genuinely optimistic.

—Inc., April 1, 2004

BE REALISTIC WITH YOUR BUSINESS

YOU CAN’T SIT down to write a business plan and say you’re going to build a multibillion-dollar corporation; that’s unrealistic. A good entrepreneur has a business idea that they believe they can make work at a much more reasonable scale and then proceeds adaptively from there, depending on what happens.

—Foreign Affairs, January/February 2015

IT’S VERY IMPORTANT for entrepreneurs to be realistic. And so if you believe on that first day, while you’re writing the business plan, that there’s a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt. I mean, it’s sort of like, I don’t have any doubt about whether we’re going to fail. That’s the likely outcome. And it just is. And to pretend that it’s not will lead you to do strange and, you know, unnatural things.

—American Academy of Achievement interview, May 4, 2001

WHAT TO DO WITH EARLY INVESTMENTS

WHAT YOU DO with those early, precious capital resources, is you go about systematically trying to eliminate risk.

—American Academy of Achievement interview, May 4, 2001

BE STUBBORN AND FLEXIBLE

THE TRICK TO being an entrepreneur is to know when to be stubborn and when to be flexible. And my rule of thumb on that is to be stubborn on the big things and very flexible on the details.

—Wired’s Disruptive by Design, June 15, 2009

PROFESSIONAL SWASHBUCKLING

Without professionalism, swashbuckling just gets you killed.

—Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, October 20, 2016

HOW? WHAT? WHO?

WHEN YOU START out, it’s a one-person thing, at least on the first day, and you’re not only figuring out what to do but actually doing it. At a certain point the company gets bigger, and you get to where you’re mostly figuring out what to do but not how it’s done. Eventually you get to the point where you’re mostly figuring out who is going to do it, not even what to do. So one way to think about this is as a transition of questions, from “How?” to “What?” to “Who?”

—Harvard Business Review, October 2007

LASER FOCUS

START-UP COMPANIES NEED to be absolutely laser-focused, you know. So many start-up companies I see—and I talk to entrepreneurs and I see them—they have too many things going at once. And it’s really, really important when you have these initial precious resources, and they’re so very finite, that you need to be very focused.

—92nd Street Y in New York City, April 11, 2001

START-UPS NEED LUCK

I BELIEVE THAT all start-up companies require huge amounts of luck.

—Charlie Rose, June 28, 2000

THERE ARE A lot of entrepreneurs. There are a lot of people who are very smart, very hardworking. Very few ever have, you know, the planetary alignment that leads to a tiny little company growing into something substantial. So that requires not only a lot of planning, a lot of hard work, a big team of people who are all dedicated, but it also requires that not only the planets align, but that, you know, you get a few galaxies in there aligning, too.

—American Academy of Achievement interview, May 4, 2001

THE DANGER OF MANAGERS

ONE OF THE differences between, sort of, founder/entrepreneurs and professional managers is that, you know, founder/entrepreneurs are stubborn about the vision and keep working on the details. And, you know, I think one of the dangers of bringing in professional managers to companies at times is that, if something’s not working, the first thing they do is change the vision, and usually that’s not the right thing to do.

—Wired’s Disruptive by Design, June 15, 2009

VISION TRIAGE

ONCE YOU HAVE the big vision, you’ll see that within it there are hundreds of smaller ones, and you need the ability to do brutal triage, to be able to say, “No, we don’t do this, that, and that; we’re going to focus exclusively on these three things.”

—Success, July 1998

PART ONE: GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Business Principles

KNOW THE OBVIOUS

Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.

—Wired, November 13, 2011

LOOKING FOR ANSWERS

IF YOU ONLY do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

—Esquire, September 25, 2008

STICK TO THE STRATEGY

AT THE END of the day, you don’t change your strategy because certain audiences don’t understand it.

—Wired’s Disruptive by Design, June 15, 2009

BE A MISSIONARY

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.

—Fortune, June 29,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Guiding Principles
• Part II: Building an Empire
• Part III: Legacy
• Milestones