I think Amazon is the preeminent pioneer in building a new way of doing commerce: personalized, database-driven commerce, where the big value is not in the purchase fulfillment, but in knowing as much about a customer base of ten or twenty million people as a corner store used to know about a customer base of a few hundred. In today's mass-merchandising world, that's largely gone; Amazon is trying to use computer technology to re-establish it.

With all due respect to Microsoft and Intel, there is no substitute for being in the right place at the right time.

Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age.

So give me a turbulent world as opposed to a quiet world and I'll take the turbulent one.

The Internet doesn't change everything. It doesn't change supply and demand. It doesn't magically allow you to build businesses by turning investors' money into operating expenses indefinitely. The money always runs out eventually.. the Internet doesn't change that, as we have seen.

I believe in the value of paranoia. Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left.

Growth is kinda built into everyone's genes. It's built into management's genes, the salesman's genes, the investors' desires. People expect companies to grow.