Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, is a billionaire who’s had an amazing life and career: He’s building a mysterious 10,000-year clock in a West Texas cave.
Earlier this year, he bought the Washington Post for $250 million. You wouldn’t want to get on his bad side. Bezos achieved so much success by being incredibly smart and business savvy, and so we rounded up some quotes that show his genius.
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.
On complacency: “A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.”
On innovation: “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.”
On progress: “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.”
On developing company culture: “Part of company culture is path-dependent—it’s the lessons you learn along the way.”
On new ideas: “There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.”
On haters: “If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake don’t do anything new.”
On motivation: “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.”
On choosing friends: “Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.”
On morals: “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.”
One strategy: “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.”
On growth: “All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.”
On pivoting: “If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And 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.”
On marketing: “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.”
On pricing: “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.”
Originally on businessinsider
