If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you’re missionary about.
If you’re doing anything interesting in the world, you are going to have critics. You can’t stop it. Move forward. It’s not worth losing any sleep over.
We see our customers as invited guests to a party and we are the hosts.
The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money.
You’ve worn me down” is an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead – it’s better.
Purchase the book of Penster in the Amazon and Kindle Store and read, we hope you enjoy the benefits of the knowledge and wisdom of the Penster.
You collect as much data as you can, you immerse yourself in that data but then you make the decision with your heart.
Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day.
People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’.
I think it’s true that big government institutions should be scrutinized, big non-profit institutions should be scrutinized, big universities should be scrutinized. It just makes sense.
My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.
Most big technology companies are competitor focused. They see what others are doing, and then work to fast follow. In contrast, 90 to 95 percent of what we build in AWS is driven by what customers tell us they want.
We humans coevolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us.
As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.
AWS is customer obsessed, inventive and experimental, long-term oriented, and cares deeply about operational excellence.
Why focus on cash flows? Because a share of stock is a share of a company’s future cash flows, and, as a result, cash flows more than any other single variable seem to do the best job of explaining a company’s stock price over the long term.
You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality,” he says. “But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on. So, that’s the first step.
We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.
Theodor Seuss Geisel: “When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.
Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.