The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos And The Age Of Amazon Quotes
"You can work long, hard, and smart, but at Amazon.com you can pick only two out of three."
"When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff."
"I knew when I was eighty that I would never... think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time."
"At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event."
"When I thought about it that way... it was incredibly easy to make the decision."
"We don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions."
"You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can't choose two out of three."
"Great merchants have never had the opportunity to understand their customers in a truly individualized way."
"When you are small, someone else that is bigger can always come along and take away what you have."
"It seemed like goofy fun, but there was an undercurrent of intense competition."
"Breier’s tenure at Amazon was short and rocky."
"Over the first decade at Amazon, marketing VPs were the equivalent of the doomed drummers in the satirical band Spinal Tap."
"With venture capital in the bank, Bezos fixated on taking the company public."
"You have no physical presence, that is going to hold you back."
"We are going to take this thing to the moon."
"A hyperintelligent but alienated child... she had run away from home."
"One morning she parked her car in the office garage and was so distracted that she inadvertently left it running—all day."
"We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership."
"Those days in the nineties were the most intense, fun time I ever had at the company."
"For many years we were on a journey to figure out if we could get to same-day delivery."
"It was the craziest quarter in Amazon’s history."
"If you are planning for more than twenty minutes ahead in this kind of environment, you are wasting your time."
"We were sitting on fifty million dollars of toy inventory."
"Most companies have priority lists of forty-five good ideas and triage is easy."
"I won’t say they were prima donnas but they weren’t used to it, they didn’t expect it, and a lot couldn’t handle it."
"Those were cases where products had been sold on the website but had not yet shipped."
"He was looking for versatile managers—he called them "athletes"—who could move fast and get big things done."
"He decided to spend the next umpteen years of his life building the company, as opposed to gradually withdrawing to pursue other interests."
"We were all running around the halls with our hair on fire thinking, What are we going to do? But not Jeff."
"If you’re not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you’re good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground."
"The biggest message here is, his cash flow prediction is wrong. It’s just completely wrong."
"I have never seen anyone so calm in the eye of a storm. Ice water runs through his veins."
"It’s like balancing on greased lightning and dancing all at the same time."
"Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance."
"If somebody else can sell it cheaper than us, we should let them and figure out how they are able to do it."
"In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine. In the long run, it’s a weighing machine."
"You want to account for Jeff’s success, look at Jackie," says Bezos’s childhood friend Joshua Weinstein. "She’s the toughest lady you’ll ever meet and also the sweetest and most loyal."
"I was constantly booby-trapping the house with various kinds of alarms and some of them were not just audible sounds, but actually like physical booby traps," Bezos said.
"Jeff laughs too loud." It would be some Disney movie, and his laughter was drowning out everything.
"He was excruciatingly focused," says Weinstein. "Not like mad-scientist focused, but he was capable of really focusing, in a crazy way, on certain things. He was extremely disciplined, which is how he is able to do all these things."
"If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s best to do it quickly," says Bezos.
"I have realized about myself that I’m very motivated by people counting on me," he answered. "I like to be counted on."
"Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I’m CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?"
"This document was clearly written by the B team. Can someone get me the A team document? I don’t want to waste my time with the B team document."
"Jeff doesn’t tolerate stupidity, even accidental stupidity."
"You have to start somewhere. You climb the top of the first tiny hill and from there you see the next hill."
"Think of two bookstores, one where all the books are shrink-wrapped and one where you can sit as long as you want and read any book you want. Which one do you think will sell more books?"
"Search is not a solved problem. There are lots more things that can be done. This is just the beginning."
"It’s far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it."
"Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy."
"It would always start out fun and happy, with Jeff’s laugh rebounding against the walls. Then something would happen and the meeting would go south and you would fear for your life."
"I might be wrong but at the same time I’ve got a bit more to stand on than you have."
"We are going to hire our way to having the talent. I absolutely know it’s very hard. We’ll learn how to do it."
"If you are running both businesses you will never go after the digital opportunity with tenacity."
"Publishers didn’t really understand Amazon. They were very naïve about what was going on with their back catalog."
"Most didn’t know their sales were up because their backlist was getting such visibility."
"Amazon had an easy way to demonstrate its market power."
"Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle."
"Publishers were horrified by this. The company they had once viewed as a welcome counterbalance to the book chains was now constantly presenting new demands."
"They risked losing control of their own business to the well-capitalized Internet companies on the West Coast."
"I like to do business where both parties feel like they are going to get something valuable out of it."
"We would constantly meet with authors, so we’d know who would be watching their rankings."
"The company is also known for specifying just how much it will pay for products and for demanding severe concessions."
"Now suppliers needed Amazon more than Amazon needed them."
"That summer, the duo finally convinced Bezos they couldn’t hide the ball any longer: they had to tell publishers about the Kindle."
"Customers are smart, and we felt like they would expect and deserve digital books to be lower priced than physical books."
"The Kindle was supposed to go on sale for the 2006 holidays. But it was delayed another year as Bezos relentlessly pressured Steve Kessel and his team for fixes, new features, and a larger catalog of e-books."
"Amazon had battled and mastered chaos; eBay was engulfed by it."
"Amazon had now accomplished many of his early goals, like turning Amazon into the primary storefront on the Web."
"At the same time that Bezos hired Herrington, he brought in veteran apparel executive Steven Goldsmith and acquired the luxury-goods website Shopbop to help Amazon learn the byzantine ways of the clothing business."
"Amazon knew quite well that publishers would absolutely hate the $9.99 price."
"It was just the kind of price pressure from Walmart that Amazon executives had always worried about—but it came ten years too late to do Amazon any harm."
"Amazon’s dawning monopoly in e-books was terrifying."
"Amazon had spent much of the last two years cajoling and threatening them to embrace its new digital format."
"If you look at why Amazon is so different than almost any other company that started early on the Internet, it’s because Jeff approached it from the very beginning with that long-term vision."
"The notion that he can accomplish a huge amount with a larger time frame, if he is steady about it, is fundamentally his philosophy."
"The rest of us try to muddle around with complicated contradictory goals and it makes it harder for people to help us."
"We may be able to find actionable tasks that will increase our odds of being a stand out in that first group of companies."
"We research each of them because they tell us something about our metrics and processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers."
"There’s no extra points for headcount, budget size or fixed expense."
"Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting."
"We don’t have a single big advantage, so we have to weave a rope of many small advantages."
"I didn’t know where he was, if he had a good job or not, or if he was alive or dead."
"He invests in things where information technology can disrupt existing models."