Jeff Bezos

“Bezos has, he doesn't have a majority, but he has effective control of the company. He's got a large stake in it. He doesn't need to raise money from the stock market. He does need the share price to be stable, or at least not fall, because that's how he pays …”

“And for Amazon, you've got exactly the opposite story, that instead of taking, putting a hundred and fifty billion dollars in the bank, he's put a hundred and fifty billion dollars into building new warehouses, and AWS, and new countries, and new categories, a…”

“The stock price and the compensation is the only risk to the strategy. Because if the stock price falls, then you have a problem keeping people.”

“Very smart, very focused, interested in physics, totally captivated by the fact that I met with Edward Teller, wanted to know everything about that Star Wars program.”

“If you asked Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to name their favorite childhood books, they both picked Lord of the Rings. Jeff Bezos and Sheryl Sandberg both said A Wrinkle in Time.”

“We actually went and pitched one of our early investors, Jeff Bezos, and he actually asked us, do you guys really want to go back to kindergarten?”

“So Jeff Bezos never does a turnaround at Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg never does a turnaround at Facebook. If the company gets in trouble, the answer is, what's the next big new breakthrough product?”

“And then everything else sits on top of that and is radically decentralized. So everything is a team. There's a team of, like, three people. So shoes in Germany are three people, and makeup in France is four people. And music players, well, pick a category. It…”

“Jeff Bezos will never build a five billion dollar campus because he doesn't care about what the doorknob looks like.”

“He did not necessarily believe himself that commerce was better in a virtual environment. But once he proved it, so like run it, starting with books and running Amazon was almost like this test that he was running to himself. And then because we see as soon as…”

“And then we got a long tail, which was, like, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt into the funds.”