Jeff Bezos

“What I'm telling you is that the anecdotes typically show you that your metric is incomplete, that it's not capturing some part of the customer's experience that actually matters, and both the metric is right and the customer is right. The metric is just incom…”

“When Jeff Bezos raised Amazon's first million bucks in ninety-five-ish, he took 60 meetings, he got 40 rejections, and he told every investor the same thing. He figured there was a 70% chance they would lose their entire investment.”

“I had lunch years ago, decades ago, with Jeff Bezos. I was invited to a lunch, and someone smarter than me said, what do you spend your time doing? And he said, 50% of my time is bums on seats. That's never left me.”

“One of my very many failed investor pitches was in 2015 when Jeff Bezos passed on our seed round at Boom. And then he wrote the 2015 Amazon shareholder letter about how there's certain things that only big companies can do. And he cited airliners as one of the…”

“He was laughed at internally and laughed at by his board when he launched Amazon Web Services. He was laughed at by the world for e-commerce.”

“The one company that I've really admired and, you know as the kind of like outlier entrepreneurs, we, in my history going back, like you look at the companies that became great, you know, when I was early days of client, there was like, you know Jeff Bezos and…”

“Like, if the only thing you do is money, I'm skeptical of you. If you've built things and you've made money, let's talk. But if it's just about the money and the allocation, I don't know. I'd rather talk to some builders, and Jeff is certainly a builder.”

“Like we've given him his money back many, many, many times over, and he still owns the plot. And every quarter or so we send him another check. Here's your dividends. And we keep on doing that.”

“We could not have gotten Jeff's offer, and six months later, some VC would have given us a massive check that sounded super impressive, and it would have destroyed the business, and then we would have sold our independence, and we would have been fucking miser…”

“Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. The most successful companies make the core progression to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets, a part of their founding narrative, just lik…”

“Founder mode is for Every founder. I like to say to founders, you went and became a founder to bet on yourself, and now you don't, you shouldn't abdicate that to somebody else, to your board or your investors.”

“Jeff Bezos was recently doing an interview and he said he said, I think what I do in the private sector is going to outweigh whatever I could do charitably. I disagree with that.”

“So when you think about, like, the Jeff Bezos of the world and the Larry and Sergey Brin, or Larry Page and Sergey Brin you're, they're typically G-seven hundred, global 8000 category.”

“I didn't create any of this, I didn't invent any of these parts. The I just brought the parts together, which is what a great merchant does. Like Jeff Bezos didn't write the books. He just put the books together on a platform that you could, we all could buy a…”

“And in fact, Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the C staff used to be someone who'd been the tech assistant to Bezos.”

“I've seen people at Amazon actually tell Jeff Bezos, you run an evil company while working for it. Like, why are we evil? I had an all hands, a guy, you know, said, we seem to avoid taxes. Why are you such a tax dodger?”

“I'd rather pay to get two of something because I find when I force people to collaborate too soon, they gridlock and argue about priorities, and what I actually get is nothing. And so I'd rather pay for two Then get zero, and if we're so lucky as to get two wo…”

“He often said we need to be strategically patient, but tactically impatient. And what he meant by that was really valuable things take time to build.”

“Jeff hated PowerPoint and the famous story why it it's old now, but when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, They went and found the PowerPoint slide had been used to justify the launch. And this PowerPoint had like seven levels of nested bullets and the ti…”

“The, another thing I learned from Jeff, he always spoke last because he realized very quickly that even though he wanted strong leaders who would disagree with him, once the great Jeff Bezos says, I like this idea, Everyone else is more or less going to line u…”

“One lesson I learned that really, I hate management, so I don't do one-on-ones. My friend Bing told me that Jeff Bezos wouldn't ever do one-on-ones, because he created politics, and it was a huge waste of his time. I was like, I love that. No one-on-ones”

“In fact, I believe every C staff member at Amazon was at one point Jeff Bezos' tech assistant, And Andy Jassy was, and the CEO.”

“Jeff Bezos retweeted me, which I was ecstatic about.”

“The big news this year was one of the honorary co-hosts were the Bezoses, and specifically Lauren. And this led to, it seemed, you know, from behind the scenes, just externally protests, internally a lot of consternation, people refusing to come.”

“There are a lot of people upset that Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos, or Lauren Sanchez Bezos and Jeff Bezos are hosting. This, and there would be a lot of protests, a lot of anti-tech sentiment, and apparently they're not selling tickets.”

“Jeff Bezos's Project Prometheus establishes AI Lab in London.”

“Jeff Bezos, which is a big investor for us at Figure and, you know, I get to basically have access to and talk with.”

“He's one of the only titans of industry who I've ever met. When he looked me in the eye, he was never looking around to see who else was in the room. And he was like, I was a little, kind of a small fry compared to all the people who could be around. He looked…”

“This is in, you know, March or April of 2000, sorry, in 1998, right? And Jeff wants us to launch in October, right? And so, roll forward. October of 1998, we launch Amazon. I'm in every mahogany boardroom for every movie studio. So I went from, like, can't get…”

“I always subscribe to the fact that the senior folks, including myself, I always speak less. I always ask, give my takeaways or my questions at the end of the meeting. To make sure that there's no biased thinking. I think Jeff Bezos had a similar perspective w…”

“Jeff Bezos in talks to raise a hundred billion for AI manufacturing fund. The Amazon founders traveled to the Middle East Singapore in fundraising after linked to Project Prometheus.”

“It's aiming to buy companies in major industrial sectors, such as chip making, defense, aerospace.”

“We took money out from day one, almost, not quite. Year two, at the very latest, we were pulling out profits and then we had Bezos buying secondaries from Jason and I that just set a baseline.”

“Elon putting in a hundred million dollars bought early runway, but Bezos poured much more into Blue Origin, and legacy primes Had multiples of this amount.”

“And if you see these reviews of this car, and you see the founding principles that work inside of Lei Jun's head, he's special. You know, he's very, very special. Every bit as special as Toby or Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos.”

“There's no difference in lifestyle whatsoever. For most of the people, there'd be no difference in lifestyle between a hundred million and a hundred billion. You know, you're, you have too many houses, you have planes, you have everything you could want.”

“It's not just emerging, it's exploding, I would say. That's the better term, because I know you go from investments into like in the hundreds of millions, now in the billions. So there's now actually a startup by Jeff Bezos that, you know, is that 6.2 billion …”

“And Dara just did that better than almost any CEO I've seen since Bezos.”

“I don't think you choose to be an entrepreneur. I think, like, there's this great line from Jeff Bezos where he says, we don't choose our passions choose us. That's how I kind of think about it. So I think even if they, that entrepreneur type didn't even have …”

“Bezos's analogy for this. Cause he's all like, all he thinks about is AI all day long now. Is he calls it these thin horizontal enabling layers. And he thinks AI is more akin to electricity than it is to anything else. The internet was a thin horizontal enabli…”

“SpaceX doesn't have to lose for Blue to succeed. What the U.S. Needs is it needs two SpaceX's. It needs two launch companies competing vigorously against each other to try to give us the most capabilities as a country, commercially, civilly, from a defense per…”

“If asked, we will step up, and we will move heaven and earth to get to the moon first.”

“Google's also looking at it. Jeff Bezos is looking at doing it through, you know, through his blue blue origin rocket company.”

“Bezos-backed Blue Origin is launching a satellite network for enterprise data center and government customers, TerraWave. The company aims to begin deploying the first of 5400 and Eight satellites in the fourth quarter of 2027, so little over, a little under t…”

“You gotta be very careful with decisions that are irreversible. They're gonna have lasting consequences. And be much less choosy and picky and analytical about decisions that are reversible and whatnot.”

“Regret minimization means that Bezos didn't set annual goals early on. He set irreversible direction Goals.”

“And that is every bit as successful in my mind and in my book as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or, you know, pick the people that we all worship. In the business world, I'm amazed by them too, but there are flavors of success, and to me, that sort of devotion, even …”

“Well, yeah, it's the first round of funding, so six billion dollars raised, and they got a hundred people, and they're building AI for, like, the physical world, so it's not just robots, but basically, like, the manufacturing of airplanes and ships and Things …”

“And by the way, like whatever, like, you know, people always make you into cartoon when you get to that level, he is, you know, for sure, like a top two or three best CEO in the last 40 years.”

“He has started this company called Project Prometheus. It is being funded by six point, with 6.2 billion in funding, according to the Times, making it one of the most well-financed early stage startups in the world.”

“He said, you have to at your age, Ari, now know when you're on the field and know when you're off the field. The problem in the past, It was helpful to a point, but you can't get really successful. I was always on the field.”

“I don't believe that business people have legacies. I think Elon will have a legacy. I think, Jeff Bezos will have a legacy. I think Steve Jobs has a legacy. Probably mostly it's, you know, presidents, leaders, maybe some actors”

“If Bezos were no longer CEO of Amazon, you know, the businesses, I think the business would suffer, but I don't think that the business, like, if Elon were no longer the CEO of SpaceX, I think that would be a huge problem. Amazon is in really tough spaces, tou…”

“They gotta bring Bezos back.”

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

“I think the hard part is it's kind of isolated. You can, you kind of have to go out to get to it. And so what I'm interested in is can you do these societally inspiring things, but in major cities and major thoroughfares, like how can you be central? To where …”

“I certainly tried to mimic Steve Jobs. I certainly tried to mimic Bezos and Gates, and all of the great ones you know, the very charismatic ones, like Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and, you know, I've learned from all of them, and in a way I've tried to imitate…”

“Are you really genuinely valuing the people working in your warehouses, or are you not? It would seem that you're not, or rather you could be doing that better when plenty of your warehouses are like, yo, our conditions are horrible. We can't even have a momen…”

“And this is, I think, a problem with people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and others is there's all these, like public education in America, Bill Gates just acknowledges he wasted, like, billions of dollars because he wouldn't do things to fight against the b…”

“Jeff Bezos at Amazon used to have this saying that two is better than zero. So he, we would have redundant systems at Amazon, but then work to consolidate them over time.”