On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

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.

Advertising is the price you pay for unremakable thinking.

I don't buy stocks, I make stocks.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people, But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavours that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

What's dangerous is not to evolve.