100 Best Jeff Bezos Quotes On Business Strategy

Jeff Bezos built one of the most influential companies of our time through a relentless focus on customers, long-term thinking, and experimentation.

These quotes reflect his core business beliefs and offer practical insight for anyone navigating growth and scale.

Top Jeff Bezos Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’

If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.

Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.

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.

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

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.

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.

Your margin is my opportunity.

The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called – which only a nerd would call – a ‘regret minimization framework’. I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.’

If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake don’t do anything new.

One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

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.

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.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.

Customer Obsession Quotes

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

Your margin is my opportunity. ~ Jeff Bezos

Start with the customer and work backward. ~ Jeff Bezos

The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company. ~ Jeff Bezos

If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience. ~ Jeff Bezos

We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards. ~ Jeff Bezos

The keys to success are patience, persistence, and obsessive attention to detail. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail. ~ Jeff Bezos

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away. ~ Jeff Bezos

We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent. ~ Jeff Bezos

One of the things we don’t do very well at Amazon is a me-too product offering. We need to be uniquely inventive, or we’re not going to be here in the future. ~ Jeff Bezos

The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it’s so easy to be motivated. ~ Jeff Bezos

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well. ~ Jeff Bezos

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’ ~ Jeff Bezos

Innovation Philosophy Quotes

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake don’t do anything new. ~ Jeff Bezos

If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting. ~ Jeff Bezos

One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out. ~ Jeff Bezos

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery. ~ Jeff Bezos

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine. ~ Jeff Bezos

Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. ~ Jeff Bezos

If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table. ~ Jeff Bezos

Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. ~ Jeff Bezos

Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. ~ Jeff Bezos

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy. ~ Jeff Bezos

If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. ~ Jeff Bezos

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details. ~ Jeff Bezos

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate. ~ Jeff Bezos

Long-term Thinking Quotes

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. ~ Jeff Bezos

It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work. ~ Jeff Bezos

We are willing to go down a bunch of dark passageways, and occasionally we find something that really works. ~ Jeff Bezos

I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ~ Jeff Bezos

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’ ~ Jeff Bezos

A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last. ~ Jeff Bezos

If you’re long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned. ~ Jeff Bezos

In the end, we are our choices. ~ Jeff Bezos

The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible, more or less simultaneously. ~ Jeff Bezos

We’ve done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don’t do that, because we believe — and we have to take this as an article of faith — that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term. ~ Jeff Bezos

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. ~ Jeff Bezos

I think long term. I’ve always believed that there’s more innovation ahead of us than behind us. ~ Jeff Bezos

We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode. ~ Jeff Bezos

We’ve always been at the intersection of technology and retail. ~ Jeff Bezos

When we make mistakes, it’s usually because we’re moving too quickly. ~ Jeff Bezos

We’ve always focused on the long term, and we’ve been very stubborn on that front. ~ Jeff Bezos

I think one thing I find very motivating — and I think this is probably a very common form of motivation or cause of motivation — is… I love people counting on me, and so, you know, today it’s so easy to be motivated, because we have millions of customers counting on us. ~ Jeff Bezos

Part of company culture is path-dependent—it’s the lessons you learn along the way. ~ Jeff Bezos

Business Leadership Quotes