Jeff Bezos

It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.

I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

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.

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

People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it's cool.

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.

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.

If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.

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.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.

The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'

The Post is famous for its investigative journalism. It pours energy and investment and sweat and dollars into uncovering important stories. And then a bunch of websites summarize that [work] in about four minutes and readers can access that news for free. One question is, how do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you can't, it's difficult to put the right resources behind it. ... Even behind a paywall, websites can summarize your work and make it available for free. From a reader point of view, the reader has to ask, 'Why should I pay you for all that journalistic effort when I can get it for free from another site?'

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past -- no matter how good it was.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

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.

When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, __re they right?_ And if they are, you need to adapt what they__e doing. If they__e not right, if you really have conviction that they__e not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It__ a key part of invention.

I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, __K, I__ looking back on my life. I want to minimise the number of regrets I have._ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn__ regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.

Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.