Jeff Bezos on stress

Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over.

So, if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that's a warning flag for me.

What it means is there's something that I haven't completely identified perhaps in my conscious mind that is bothering me, and I haven't yet taken any action on it.

I find as soon as I identify it, and make the first phone call, or send off the first e-mail message, or whatever it is that we're going to do to start to address that situation -- even if it's not solved -- the mere fact that we're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it.

So, stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't be ignoring, I think, in large part. So, stress doesn't come -- people get stress wrong all the time in my opinion.

Stress doesn't come from hard work, for example. You know, you can be working incredibly hard and loving it, and, likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that.

And, likewise, if you use that as an analogy for what I was just talking about, if you're out of work but you're going through a disciplined approach, a series of job interviews and so on, and working to remedy that situation, you are going to be a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it and doing nothing.

~ Jeff Bezos

Barron's on Jeff Bezos: "he's just another middleman"

The idea that Jeff Bezos has pioneered a new industry is silly.  He's just another middleman, and the stock market is beginning to catch on to that fact.  The real winners on the 'net will be firms that sell their own products directly to consumers.

~ Barron's, "Amazon.bomb," May 31, 1999

Fortune: "Can Amazon be saved? The answer is probably, No." (2001)

Bezos no longer calls Amazon.com an [e-commerce] incubator.  He's done with that now - he's busy writing a new script.  The big news now is that during the past eight months he and his team in Seattle hav signed a flurry of deals with brick-and-mortar retailers like Target, Circuit City, and Borders.  Amazon will run all or part of their e-commerce operations.  It will sell the retailer's products on Amazon.com, and in some cases it will warehouse products, distribute orders, and run the partner's Website.  Unlike the dot-coms, these new partners won't go out of business in a year, and they will pay Amazon in cash instead of rapidly falling stock.  Bezos would like us to believe that this time it's different, that Amazon's new "commerce platform" will put the company firmly on the road to profitability - and restore to it a market cap worthy of an Internet superstar.  The question anyone who owns or cares about Amazon's stock needs to ask is simple: Should we believe him?

The answer is probably, No.  Whichever of Bezos' stories you read, the numbers don't look good.

[...]

Bezos' Amazon is a land of eternal hope.  The CEO still avers that Amazon can eventually generate operating margins of 10%, despite the fact that it is still miles from that goal...  So yes, there is a chance that someday Amazon will grow up to be a company with real profits.  But it will never be the high-growth, wildly profitable, super-efficient company of Internet lore.  The only place that company lives is in the history books, and in the powerful imagination of Jeff Bezos.

~ Melanie Warner, "Can Amazon by saved? Jeff Bezos writes a new script. Too bad for investors it is more fiction than fact.," Fortune, November 26, 2001

Jeff Bezos on passion

If you don't love your work, you're never going to be great at it.

~ Jeff Bezos

John Doerr on his early investments in Amazon and Google

I met Jeff [Bezos] when he was thirty years old and he and I were both computer science kinds of geeks. And Amazon had a business plan: it was growing to be the best bookseller online. And so I invested - I think it was $8 million for 15% of Amazon - and Jeff and I set out to build an amazing, world-class team.  And he had a vision, which is true to this day, that if he had the broadest selection with the most affordable prices and the best customer experience, that flywheel he could get to grow by obsessing on the customer.  And yes, I believed he was successful.  No, I had no idea that it would be worth $1.2 trillion today.

But the same thing happened a few years later when I met two 21-year old Stanford University PhD dropouts, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.  And in that case I invested $11 million for 11% of the company, which was very controversial.  They had no business plan, no revenues.  And I asked Larry Page.  He sat across the table from me.  I said, "Larry, how big do you think this can be?"  Without batting an eyelash he said $10 billion.  I said, "Surely you mean market cap, right?"  He said, "No, I'm talking revenues."  He said to me, "John, you have no idea how much we're going to be able to improve search and how important search is for finding all the world's information and services.

~ John Doerr, Bloomberg Wealth inverview with David Rubenstein, August 23, 2022

Jeff Bezos on keeping an open mind

Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.

~ Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos on regret

I always ask myself: when I’m 80 years old will I regret not doing that?  I knew for certain that by 80, I would regret not leaving my job and opening an online book store, even if I failed, so I did it.

~ Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos on life's passions

One of the mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves.  You don't choose your passions; they choose you.

~ Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos on success

If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with.  Any business that doesn’t create value for those it touches, even if it appears successful on the surface, isn’t long for this world.  It’s on the way out.

~ Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com 2020 Letter to Shareholders, April 15, 2021

Jeff Bezos on expectation

Given a 10% chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time.

~ Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos on investments in AWS

We think it's going to be a very meaningful business for us one day.  What we've historically seen is that the seeds we plant can take anywhere from three, five, seven years.

~ Jeff Bezos, "Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet," BusinessWeek, November 13, 2006

BusinessWeek on Amazon Web Services (2006)

Yes, Amazon founder and Chief Executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, the onetime Internet poster boy who quickly became a post-dot-com piñata, is back with yet another new idea.  Many people continue to wonder if the world's largest online store will ever fulfill its original promise to revolutionize retailing.  But now Bezos is plotting another new direction for his 12-year-old company, which he will lay out on Nov. 8 at San Francisco's Web 2.0 Conference, the annual gathering of the digerati crème.  Judging from an advance look he gave BusinessWeek on one recent gray day at Amazon's Seattle headquarters, it's so far from Amazon's retail core that you may well wonder if he has finally slipped off the deep end.

~ Robert D. Hof, "Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet," BusinessWeek, November 13, 2006

Kevin Duffy compares laissez faire to social democracy

Quora question: Why does free market economy win against centrally planned & controlled economy?

Pascal Morimacil: The laissez-faire ideology is to let the totalitarian power structures created by private owners have full reign over the planet without having any democracy hinder them.

Kevin Duffy: This is Orwellian: freedom = control. 

There is a critical difference between Jeff Bezos and modern day social democracies. Bezos can’t force anyone to do anything. He can persuade investors to invest in his money-losing scheme in the late 1990s, with the promise that they’ll someday be rewarded. He can hire people to work for him, often enticing them with stock options which would be worthless if the company failed. He can persuade customers to buy his company’s products. Of course the only way he’ll succeed is to give them better value, either with service, quality or lower price. He also has to make his suppliers happy. 

All of these transactions are uncoerced and, as a result, mutually beneficial. They also involve a certain amount of risk from both parties, but if they’re not satisfied (or if a better deal comes along), they can leave. E.g., a customer can return an order or employee can quit and go work for a competitor. And, yes, it also means Bezos can, and does, fire employees. I’m sure he’s also terminated suppliers as well, and replaced them with others. 

How do social democracies pass the coercion test? Not well. Everything the government does involves force. K-12 public schooling is a good example. The entire system is based on compulsory funding, curriculum and attendance. If, as a parent, you object to what the school teaches (which is increasingly pro-government propaganda, especially regarding history), you can’t get a tax refund and decide how your child spends his formative years. The closest you can come is homeschooling, but you are still under the thumb of the state. 

But what about “democracy?” Doesn’t this give people choice? It gives a majority the ability to choose between two candidates who may or may not represent their views. In fact, it’s statistically impossible for ANY candidate to represent one’s views and choices fully. 

The Founders were fearful of democracy and tried (unsuccessfully) to limit its abuses. Madison warned, “Democracy was the right of the people to choose their own tyrants.” Jefferson was just as harsh: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” 

The evidence that government-run schools are a danger is that these lessons have been lost.

~ Kevin Duffy, Quora answer, October 26, 2020

Bill Bonner on the rise and fall of Amazon.com (2003)

[Jeff Bezos] was 35 when Time magazine awarded him its "Person of the Year" title in January 2001.  When the going was good, Time gushed, "Jeffrey Preston Bezos... peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him... Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do," rattled Time, "vibrations so strong they demand action - actions that can seem rash, even stupid."  Well, yes.  Very stupid.

[...]

Some people get rich in a revolution.  Some people get killed.  By October 2001, it was becoming clear who would be the victims - those who believed in Amazon.com and the Information Revolution.

Bezos was of course one of the victims.  In 2001, he was awarded the "Fame is Fleeting Award," by Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times, "for one of the fastest falls from grace in recent history."  She considered it sadly ironic that he was facing irate shareholders only a year after being honored as Time's Person of the Year.

For at the end of 2000, Amazon's stock prices showed a decline of 89 percent to the $7 to $10 range (from its December 1999 high of $113).  Thus, a pin had pierced the bubble in high technology, and those who "got it" were getting it good and hard.  Their day of reckoning had come.

~ Bill Bonner, Financial Reckoning Day, pp. 23-24

Jeff Bezos on change

I very frequently get the question: "What’s going to change in the next 10 years?"  That’s a very interesting question. I almost never get the question: "What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?" And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two.

~ Jeff Bezos

(As quoted by Ryan Krueger in "Driving Around the Change Machine," Krueger & Catalano blog

Jeff Bezos on high profit margins

Your margin is my opportunity.

~ Jeff Bezos