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.
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.
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 think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.
We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with the customer and we work backwards.
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
What characteristics do I look for when hiring somebody? That’s one of the questions I ask when interviewing. I want to know what kind of people they would hire.
Not the outcome any of us wanted.
Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.
Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
I like having the digital camera on my smart phone, but I also like having a dedicated camera for when I want to take real pictures.
Part of company culture is path-dependent. It’s the lessons you learn along the way.
Seek instant gratification – or the elusive promise of it – and chances are you’ll find a crowd there ahead of you.
If you are going to do large-scale invention, you have to be willing to do three things: You must be willing to fail; you have to be willing to think long term; and you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
Feel free to cover Amazon any way you want. Feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.
I never worked on the school newspaper.
The three most important things in retail are location, location, location. The three most important things for our consumer business are technology, technology, technology.
If you’re not doing something that people will remark on, then it’s going to be hard to generate word of mouth.
If you look at academic studies, you can see that stock prices are most closely correlated with cash flow. It’s such a straightforward number. Cash flow is what will drive shareholder returns.
If you’re going to invest in an Internet stock, you must be a long-term investor.
There are a whole bunch of people who don’t like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time.