Inspirational Jeff Bezos Quotes & Biography

Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is an American businessman who started the online shopping giant Amazon.com. The company started out selling books on the Internet and has since grown to offer a wide range of goods and services, including, most recently, video streaming and audio streaming. Amazon.com is the largest company in the world that sells things over the Internet.

Being a pioneer in e-commerce, Jeff Bezos has shared his ideas and thoughts through his writing, interviews, and quotes. He is one of the most inspirational business leaders today. we bring you a collection of his amazing Jeff Bezos quotes on technology, service, customer, invention, growth marketing, and adversity that are sure to inspire and motivate you.

• 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

• “Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.” –– 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

• “I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.” –– 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

• “I’m skeptical that the novel will be ‘re-invented.’” –– Jeff Bezos

• “What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don’t actually improve their lives.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “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.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.” –– Jeff Bezos

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

• “I grew up reading science fiction.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “In just a few hundred years, we will have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells if we want to continue to grow our energy usage.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “What’s dangerous is not to evolve.” –– 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

• “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

• “Our motto at Blue Origin is ‘Gradatim Ferociter’: ‘Step by Step, Ferociously.’” –– 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

• “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

• “The Apollo program certainly had no real commercial value. It was done for very different reasons and, I think, very good reasons for the time. It’s an extraordinary achievement of mankind, but it wasn’t sustainable.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.” –– 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

• “A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “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.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “The special ops guys and the firefighters around the world have this great phrase. They say, ‘Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,’ and that is true. Everything I’ve accomplished in my life has been because of that attitude.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it’s cool.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “A life of stasis would be population control, combined with energy rationing. That is the stasis world that you live in if you stay. And even with improvements in efficiency, you’ll still have to ration energy. That, to me, doesn’t sound like a very exciting civilization for our grandchildren’s grandchildren to live in.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “One of the things that I’m very excited about with New Shepard, which is our suborbital tourism vehicle, is using that to get a lot of practice. One of the equilibria that we’re at today with space launch is that we don’t get to practice enough.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “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.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.” –– 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

• “If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.”” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That’s why there’s the old saw: location, location, location.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I don’t think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you’re willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, and if you’re going to experiment, you’re going to fail, and if you’re going to fail, you have to think long term.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “When it comes to space, I see it as my job, I’m building infrastructure the hard way. I’m using my resources to put in place heavy lifting infrastructure so the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “If your payloads cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they actually cost more than the launch. It puts a lot of pressure on the launch vehicle not to change, to be very stable. Reliability becomes much more important than the cost. It’s hard to get off of that equilibrium.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “For people who are readers, reading is important to them.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn’t be in this business.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet – how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Beautiful speech doesn’t need protection, it’s ugly speech that needs protection. We have these cultural norms that allow people to say really ugly things. You don’t have to invite them to your dinner party, but you should let them say it.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I have won this lottery. It’s a gigantic lottery, and it’s called Amazon.com. And I’m using my lottery winnings to push us a little further into space.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don’t have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “You know you’re not anonymous on our site. We’re greeting you by name, showing you past purchases, to the degree that you can arrange to have transparency combined with an explanation of what the consumer benefit is.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.” –– Jeff Bezos
• “I don’t know all the future steps, but I know one of them: we need to build a low-cost, highly operable, reusable launch vehicle. No matter which path we take, it has to include that gate, and so that’s why that’s Blue Origin’s mission.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Strip malls are history.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Of course humans like to explore, and we should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s more than that. It’s essential for your children and your children’s children.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren’t thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about – they weren’t putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.” –– 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

• “The strategic objective of New Shepard is to practice, and a lot of the subcomponents of New Shepard actually get directly reused on the second stage of New Glenn.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That’s approaching evil.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I’ve always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people’s progress.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “The question really is, are you improving the world? And you can do that in many models. You can do that in government, you can do that in a nonprofit, and you can do it in commercial enterprise.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Two kids in their dorm room can’t start anything important in space today. That’s why I want to take the assets I have from Amazon and translate that into the heavy-lifting infrastructure that will allow the next generation to have dynamic entrepreneurialism in space, to build that transportation network.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “When we build our own colonies, we can do them in near-Earth vicinity, because people are going to want to come back to Earth. Very few people – for a long time, anyway – are going to want to abandon Earth altogether.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.” –– Jeff Bezos
• “We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “The reason we chose vertical landing as our recovery architecture is that vertical landing scales really well.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I think that, ah, I’m a very goofy sort of person in many ways.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Today I continue with my science-fiction reading habit and find it very mind-expanding. Always makes me think.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn’t work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “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.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I’m a genetic optimist.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “You want your customers to value your service.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “I think the definition of a book is changing.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “We’re taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.”

• “We fly to 106 kilometers. We’ve always had as our mission that we always wanted to fly above the Karman line because we didn’t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you’re an astronaut or not.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “In this industry, there’s a lot of cases of being a competitor in one way, but you’re often a customer and a vendor in another way. It’s not atypical in aerospace. Actually, it’s not that atypical in a lot of industries.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “With the amount of fixed expense that goes into developing something like the BE-4 engine, you want it to be used as much as possible.” –– Jeff Bezos

• “The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that it basically just says, ‘Look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let’s do it close to each other.’ That way… you can go over to the European Union lunar outpost and say, ‘I’m out of eggs. What have you got?’” –– Jeff Bezos

if you enjoy reading these quotes then don’t forget to see our collection of William Shakespear Quotes and Mitch Hedberg Quotes.

Jeff Bezos Biography:

Childhood and School Years

Jeff Bezos’ parents, Jacklyn Gise and Ted Jorgensen, had him on January 12, 1964. His mother’s ancestors were early settlers in Texas. Over time, they bought a 25,000-acre ranch near Cotulla. When Bezos’s mother married his father, she was still in high school. After her marriage to Ted Jorgensen ended, she married Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who went to school at the University of Albuquerque. Miguel Bezos legally took Jeff in after they got married. Then, Miguel got a job as an engineer for Exxon and moved his family to Houston, Texas.

Bezos got his Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University with the highest grades and a Phi Beta Kappa award. He was also chosen to be a part of Tau Beta Pi while he was at Princeton. He was the leader of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space group at Princeton.

Personal Life

Jeff Bezos married MacKenzie Tuttle in 1993. He met her when he started working at the D.E. Shaw investment firm. They live in Seattle with their four kids and are getting more and more involved in charitable work.

Bezos is one of the world’s richest people, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His estimated net worth is $28 billion. He was named the second best CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review. In 2016, Bezos played an alien in Star Trek Beyond as a cameo. Bezos has liked Star Trek since he was a child, and IMDb lists him as a Starfleet Official.

Professional career

After he graduated, he worked at a number of firms on Wall Street, including Fitel Bankers Trust and D.E. Shaw, an investment firm. Bezos could have made a lot of money in finance, but he chose to take a risk and move into the new world of e-commerce. He quit his job in 1994, moved to Seattle, and opened an online bookstore to take advantage of the market’s untapped potential. At first, he ran the business out of his garage.

Bezos is known for paying close attention to the details of business. Portfolio.com says that he is “both a happy-go-lucky mogul and a well-known micromanager.” This means that he wants to know everything, from the smallest details of contracts to how he is quoted in all Amazon press releases. In May 2016, Bezos sold a little more than a million shares of the company for $671 million. As of September 21, 2016, Bezos owned 80.9 million shares of Amazon stock, which was 16.9% of all outstanding shares and was worth $62.1 billion on the market.

When Amazon.com went public in 1997, many market analysts wondered if the company would still be able to compete when traditional stores started their own online shopping sites. Two years later, the start-up not only kept up with competitors, but also beat them and became a leader in e-commerce.

Successes and the Growth of Amazon

A profile of him that came out in 2013 talked about an interview he gave to the Miami Herald in 1982 after he was named valedictorian of his high school class. Bezos, who was 18 at the time, said he wanted to build hotels, amusement parks, and colonies in space for 2 million or 3 million people. He told the newspaper, “The whole point is to protect the earth.” The goal was to get people out of there. The whole world would turn into a park.” Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Group and Chairman of Virgin Galactic, and Jeff Bezos reportedly talked about commercial spaceflight opportunities and plans in 2013.

On November 23, 2015, Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft successfully went into space. It reached its planned test altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 kilometers) before making a historic vertical landing back at the launch site in West Texas. The company hopes to start flying “test passengers” in 2017 and commercial flights in 2018. Blue is currently building six of these vehicles so that they can be used for all phases of testing and operations, including flights with no passengers, flights with test passengers, and weekly operations with commercial passengers.

Bezos was in charge when Amazon released the Fire Phone in 2014. It was criticized for being too gimmicky, so it was taken off the market the next year. But Bezos did win when Amazon Studios started making its own movies and TV shows. The first original movie that the company made and put out was Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, which came out in 2015. He is one of the most inspirational personalities throughout the world. Jeff Bezos quotes are very famous in today’s generation to get some inspiration or motivation.

Prizes and Awards

In 2008, Carnegie Mellon University gave Bezos an honorary Ph.D. in Science and Technology. He was also chosen as one of the best leaders in America by U.S. News & World Report. In 2011, Bezos and Gregg Zehr got an Innovation Award from The Economist for the Amazon Kindle. Fortune named him Businessperson of the Year the next year. In December 2012, the National Retail Federation named Amazon the best retailer of the year and gave him the Gold Medal Award, which is given to someone who has done a lot for the industry.