Following the leader. 50 best quotes from Jeff Bezos

When you’re a multi-billionaire, running successful companies with almost 1.5 million employees, and flying into space on your own rocket on weekends, people take note of what you say. Your actions become an example to follow, and words are parsed into quotes. And when the multi-billionaire is Jeff Bezos, the Amazon and Blue Origin founder, philanthropist, and one of the richest men in the world, every word gets studied. Despite this status, though, the billionaire has never been secretive about his life. He willingly shares his wisdom on business, innovation, motivation, success, wealth, etc. We’ve picked 30 Jeff Bezos quotes that can really inspire and motivate.

Jeff Bezos famous quotes on business

At 30, Jeff abandoned a successful career on Wall Street to start his own business. In 1994, he stepped down as senior vice president of investment firm DE Shaw & Co and moved to Seattle, Washington. The idea to create Amazon came to him on the way from New York to Seattle, when he could not find anything interesting to read. He thought of an online bookstore that would offer a wide selection of books with quick and affordable shipping.

Amazon’s success needs little introduction. Let’s just say that the company’s first office was located in a garage. Today it is one of the largest e-commerce platforms globally, and has an annual turnover of $470 billion. Here are some Jeff Bezos quotes about Amazon.

Jeff Bezos quotes on Amazon

• “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.”
• “We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees.”
• “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.”
• “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”  
• “We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I was in doubt whether it would be interesting enough, but the team had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.” 
• “Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day.”
• “Feel free to cover Amazon any way you want. Feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.”

Jeff Bezos quotes about customers

Any entrepreneur knows that the success of his business is directly proportional to his concern for the clients. Amazon’s success proves that this rule always works. This is what Jeff Bezos says about the customers treatment.

• “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.”
• “If you’re long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.”
• “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 do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful”
• “We don’t raise the prices, 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.”
• “Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win.”
• “One of the things that gets me up in the morning is knowing that customer expectations are always rising, and I find that very exciting.”

Jeff Bezos leadership and risk quotes

To stay in the lead, you must constantly move forward, never relax, and always have a good eye for the details. Otherwise, you will be overtaken by more agile and strong competitors. Jeff Bezos’s quotes on leadership and risk-taking confirm this business axiom.

• “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room”.
• “All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.”
• “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.”
• “A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.”
• “If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.”
• “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 opportunities on the table.”
• “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.”
• “If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon.”
• “If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake don’t do anything new.”
• “We need big failures in order to move the needle. If we don’t, we’re not swinging enough. You really should be swinging hard, and you will fail, but that’s okay.”
• “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.”
• “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well”.
• “It’s perfectly healthy-encouraged, even- to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.”
• “Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.”
• “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.”

Jeff Bezos quotes on innovation and space

In 2000, when Amazon was already making billions, Jeff Bezos finally got the opportunity to fulfill his lifelong dream of starting an aerospace company. This is how Blue Origin, the first of the famous trio of New Space pioneers — Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic — came to exist. After 20 years of trial and error, he was rewarded with private suborbital tourist flights. This amazing history, in particular, has created many Jeff Bezos quotes on technology and Jeff Bezos space quotes.

• “I do get asked, quite frequently: ‘what’s gonna change in the next 10 years? I rarely get asked,…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.”
• “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.”
• “To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.”
• “To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
• “Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.”
• “We’re going to build a road to space so that our kids and their kids can build the future. And we need to do that. We need to do that to solve the problems here on Earth. It’s not about escaping.”
• “We’re working to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take time, and we’re working on it methodically.”
• “Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional.”
•  “People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’.”
• “There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.”
• “There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.”
• “We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

And, finally, one of the top Jeff Bezos space quotes that became Blue Origin’s motto.

Jeff Bezos inspirational quotes

Today, Jeff Bezos is 58 years old and second on the Forbes list after Elon Musk. Last year, he stepped down as CEO of Amazon to found Altos Labs, a biotech research company aiming to develop a therapy that could reverse the process of ageing. Bezos is still passionate about space and plans to keep sending tourists to orbit, even building a hotel there. Besides, he is a philanthropist and regularly donates money to charity. In 2020, he founded the Bezos Earth Fund to use its money to combat climate change.

“I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change.” Bezos said.

The billionaire is engaged in a rather unusual hobby in his free time. He searches for sunken parts of NASA rockets in the ocean and often takes his three children on these adventures. At 58, Jeff Bezos is still full of energy and inspires millions of people with his quotes about life, work, career, and success. Many of those are really worth taking as a call to action.

• “Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.”
•  “Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you’re missionary about.”
• “In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.”
• “Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard.”
• “Do something you’re very passionate about, and don’t try to chase what is kind of the “hot passion” of the day.”
• “We all know that distinctiveness — originality — is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.” What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical — in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.”
• “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”.
• “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.”
• “Are you lazy or just incompetent?”

And what other famous quotes from Jeff Bezos do you know?