American industrialist & Amazon founder (1964- )
I have been passionate about certain things forever, and I fell in love with computers in fourth grade. I got very lucky: My elementary school had a teletype that was connected to a mainframe computer that some business in downtown Houston donated a little bit of computer time to. You can picture these teletypes: They had the punch tape and they had a 300-baud modem. You would dial up the phone and put it in the cradle, and so we had some time-sharing on that mainframe computer, and none of the teachers knew how to use it, so me and two other kids stayed after school and sort of figured out how to do it, and kind of taught ourselves programming from books.
JEFF BEZOS
interview, Business Insider, April 28, 2018
I think of the internet like this big, new, powerful technology.... We haven't learned as a civilization and a human species how to operate that yet. We as a civilization are still figuring all of that out. It gives us fantastic capabilities. The fact that I can look up almost anything on Wikipedia in five seconds is an unbelievable capability that just simply didn't exist 20 years ago. And so on and so on. But we're also finding out that these powerful tools enable some very bad things, too, like letting authoritarian governments interfere in free democratic elections in the world. This is an incredibly scary thing.
JEFF BEZOS
Business Insider, April 28, 2018
All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth's.
JEFF BEZOS
Business Insider, July 16, 2015
You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.
JEFF BEZOS
Inc., May 7, 2014
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
Business Insider, July 16, 2015
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
Inc., May 7, 2014