If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.
My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.
Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes.
Good ideas will always get funded, so that’s not going to be a problem. But you will see that it will be harder and harder for bad ideas to get funded.
I like to be counted on.
Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It’s lack of utilization. It dominates all other costs.
Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process.
I’m going to go do this crazy thing. I’m going to start this company selling books online.
Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.
We like to pioneer, we like to explore, we like to go down dark alleys and see what’s on the other side.
There are multiple ways to be externally focused that are very successful. You can be customer-focused or competitor-focused. Some people are internally focused, and if they reach critical mass, they can tip the whole company.
For every leader in the company, not just for me, there are decisions that can be made by analysis. These are the best kinds of decisions!
No communication is terrible!
Percentage margins don’t matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.
We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and thy’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.
Are you lazy or just incompetent?
Advertising is the price you pay for unremarkable thinking.
Determine what your customers need, and work backwards.
It’s very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic. So if you believe on that first day while you’re writing the business plan that there’s a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt.
The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible. The hard part is figuring out when to be which.