I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.
Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you’re missionary about.
No business can continue to shrink. That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.
Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.
We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.
E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.
We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details….
Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past — no matter how good it was.
The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’
I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.
If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
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.
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.
People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it’s cool.
Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.
I have won this lottery. It’s a gigantic lottery, and it’s called Amazon.com. And I’m using my lottery winnings to push us a little further into space.
I’ve always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.
It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.
The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.
The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.
We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category.
Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don’t have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.
The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That’s approaching evil.