If you look at academic studies, you can see that stock prices are most closely correlated with cash flow. It's such a straightforward number. Cash flow is what will drive shareholder returns.

I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.

People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.

I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online.

Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that, because we believe -- and we have to take this as an article of faith -- that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.

We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.