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

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 opportunity on the table.

Obsess about customers, not competitors.

Everything you are comes from your choices.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

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.

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.

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.

We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.

Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It’s lack of utilization. It dominates all other costs.

To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and thy’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

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.

If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail.

If we fight in the ocean, we lose, but if we fight in the river, we win.

With a lot of success comes a lot of negativity.

If you don’t have daily objectives, you qualify as a dreamer.

Continued innovation is the best way to beat the competition.

The most important thing is to keep your team as small as possible.

You never want to fail because you didn’t work hard enough.

The customer is number one, the employee is number two and the shareholder is number three. If the customer is happy, the business is happy, and the shareholders are happy.

Excellence is a continuous process and not an accident.