Jeff Bezos (born January 12, 1964) is a visionary American entrepreneur, business pioneer, and investor – best known as the founder of e-commerce behemoth Amazon.com. Bezos is one of the richest people in the world and was the wealthiest from 2017 – 2021 according to Forbes and Bloomberg. In addition to Amazon, Bezos also formed a private space company called Blue Origin. Blue Origin is an aerospace manufacturer, defense contractor, rocket launch service provider, and space systems provider. Bezos famously flew into space for approximately ten minutes on a Blue Origin vehicle in 2021, crossing the Karman Line. Bezos is committed to furthering human space exploration and the development of human colonies in space. Finally, through Bezos’s private investment company, he is also the owner of the Washington Post newspaper and media company, purchasing the company in 2013.
The road to Amazon ran through an engineering degree at Princeton and a fast rise at the New York hedge fund D. E. Shaw, where he became a senior vice president before he turned thirty. In 1994 he read that web usage was growing by thousands of percent a year, quit his job, and worked out the business plan during a cross-country drive to Seattle, asking himself which decision he would least regret at age eighty. He started the company in a garage in Bellevue, Washington, selling books online when the site opened in July 1995, and then spent the next decades widening it into the everything store: third-party sellers, Prime, Kindle, and Amazon Web Services. The working habits stayed small as the company grew. Teams were kept to a size two pizzas could feed, new ideas began as a mock press release written from the customer’s side, meetings opened in silence over a written memo, and from the first letter in 1997 onward he explained the whole approach to shareholders once a year, always insisting that it was still Day 1.
Bezos was born in New Mexico and graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked primarily on Wall Street until 1994 when he formed Amazon in his garage, initially intending to create the world’s largest online bookstore. His vision quickly grew to be the online retailer of all things. In addition to the massive e-commerce business, Amazon plays a large role in enterprise cloud computing and infrastructure services, video/audio streaming and media production, and artificial intelligence.
Bezos practices a business methodology best characterized by a relentless focus on customer satisfaction and providing innovative technology and customer experiences. Through the Amazon Prime program, he changed the way customers shop with things like 1, 2, or even same-day shipping, one-click purchasing, automatic recurring orders/subscriptions of everyday items, and hassle-free returns. He also allowed Amazon to act as a virtual store front for millions of small and large businesses through the Amazon interface and infrastructure, thus created innumerable ancillary businesses and jobs.
From his work at Amazon and at Blue Origin, Bezos left a permanent mark on the business world and space exploration. Bezos epitomizes practical and long-term thinking. He is unquestionably one of the most influential entrepreneurs of our time, continues to push boundaries, and is a pioneer in multiple fields.
Core Ideas
- Work backwards from the customer. Decide what people need, then build toward it, even when that means learning entirely new skills.
- Judge the big choices by regret. Project yourself to age eighty: the regrets that sting are the chances never taken, so favor the path you would be proud to have tried.
- Stubborn on vision, flexible on details. Hold the direction firmly for years while staying willing to change the route whenever the facts ask for it.
- Decide at seventy percent. Most decisions can be reversed, so waiting for near certainty usually costs more than moving and correcting course.
- Plant seeds and be patient. Keep standards unreasonably high, tolerate the failed experiments invention requires, and give good ideas years to grow into trees.
Jeff Bezos Quotes
“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”
“We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees.”
“If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.”
“Most decisions should probably be made with around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.”
— Letter to Shareholders (2016)
“Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.”
“I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.”
“We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.”
“If you’re long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.”
“All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts… not analysis.”
“There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you are good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backwards, even if it requires learning new skills.”
“I do get asked, quite frequently: ‘what’s gonna change in the next 10 years?’ I rarely get asked, and it’s probably more important — and I encourage you to think about this — is the question what’s not going to change? The answer to that question can allow you to organize your activities. You can work on those things with the confidence to know that all the energy you put into them today is still going to pay dividends in the years to come.”
“When you think about the things that you will regret when you’re 80, they’re almost always the things that you did not do. They’re acts of omission. Very rarely are you going to regret something that you did that failed and didn’t work or whatever.”
“The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.”
Jeff Bezos Books
“Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson” – by Walter Isaacson. Bezos in his own words: the shareholder letters, speeches, and interviews gathered in one volume.
“The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” – by Brad Stone. The standard account of Amazon’s first two decades and the founder who drove them.
“Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire” – by Brad Stone. Stone’s sequel follows the second act: AWS, Alexa, and a retailer becoming an empire.
“Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon” – by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. Two longtime Amazon executives explain the working methods, from writing the press release first to the two-pizza team.
You can browse all of Jeff Bezos’s quotes in the SAGE QUOTE LIBRARY. For additional information, quotes, and books on similarly relevant famous individuals, please visit the SAGE PROFILES page on the site. Please also visit the SAGE BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS page for many other great reads sure to add to your worldly wisdom. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
