Jeff Bezos

“The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.”

“No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it's government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.”

“The reason we chose vertical landing as our recovery architecture is that vertical landing scales really well.”

“I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.”

“Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.”

“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy.”

“Strip malls are history.”

“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.”

“The special ops guys and the firefighters around the world have this great phrase. They say, 'Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,' and that is true. Everything I've accomplished in my life has been because of that attitude.”

“Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.”

“What's dangerous is not to evolve.”

“The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.”

“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”

“Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.”