The world is littered with corpses that predicted technology in a particular arena was done. If there's another gigantic step change out there, we don't yet know what it is.

Determine what your customers need, and work backwards.

There's so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.

A lot of people – and I’m just not one of them – believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me.

If you're not doing something that people will remark on, then it's going to be hard to generate word of mouth.

But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.

We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and thy're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.