Sycamore > Sycamore 's Quotes

“By the time he was in high school, his family had moved to Miami. Bezos was a straight-A student, somewhat nerdy, and still completely obsessed with space exploration. He was chosen as the valedictorian of his class, and his speech was about space: how to colonize planets, build space hotels, and save our fragile planet by finding other places to do manufacturing. “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!” he concluded. He went to Princeton with the goal of studying physics. It sounded like a smart plan until he smashed into a course on quantum mechanics. One day he and his roommate were trying to solve a particularly difficult partial differential equation, and they went to the room of another person in the class for help. He stared at it for a moment, then gave them the answer. Bezos was amazed that the student had done the calculation—which took three pages of detailed algebra to explain—in his head. “That was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist,” Bezos says. “I saw the writing on the wall, and I changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science.” It was a difficult realization. His heart had been set on becoming a physicist, but finally he had confronted his own limits.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“After graduation Bezos went to New York to apply his computer skills to the financial industry. He ended up at a hedge fund run by David E. Shaw, which used computer algorithms to discover pricing disparities in the financial markets.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“When he told David Shaw that he wanted to leave the hedge fund to pursue this idea, Shaw took him on a two-hour walk through Central Park. “You know what, Jeff, this is a really good idea. I think you’re onto a good idea here but this would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.” He convinced Bezos to think about it for a couple of days before making a decision.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“You know you can count me in 100 percent,”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Bezos then consulted his wife, MacKenzie, whom he had met at the hedge fund and married the year before. “You know you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do,” she said.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“To make the decision, Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk-calculation process. He called it a “regret minimization framework.” He would imagine what he would feel when he turned eighty and thought back to the decision. “I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have,” he explains. “I knew that when I was eighty, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“At first Jeff and MacKenzie and a few early employees handled everything, including packing, wrapping, and driving the boxes off to be shipped. “We had so many orders that we weren’t ready for that we had no real organization in our distribution center at all,” Bezos says. “In fact, we were packing on our hands and knees on a hard concrete floor.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Keeping his focus on the customer, he emailed one thousand of them to see what else they would like to be able to buy.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“At the end of 1999 I was the editor of Time, and we made a somewhat offbeat decision to make Bezos our Person of the Year, even though he wasn’t a famous world leader or statesman. I had the theory that the people who affect our lives the most are often the people in business and technology who, at least early in their careers, aren’t often found on the front pages. For example, we had made Andy Grove of Intel the Person of the Year at the end of 1997 because I felt the explosion of the microchip was changing our society more than any prime minister or president or treasury secretary. But as the publication date of our Bezos issue neared in December 1999, the air was starting to go out of the dot.com bubble. I was worried—correctly—that internet stocks, such as Amazon, would start to collapse. So I asked the CEO of Time Inc., the very wise Don Logan, whether I was making a mistake by choosing Bezos and would look silly in years to come if the internet economy deflated. No, Don told me. “Stick with your choice. Jeff Bezos is not in the internet business. He’s in the customer-service business. He will be around for decades to come, well after people have forgotten all the dot.coms that are going to go bust.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM. Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.… Bezos’ vision of the online retailing universe was so complete, his Amazon.com site so elegant and appealing, that it became from Day One the point of reference for anyone who had anything to sell online. And that, it turns out, is everyone.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“As I watched the stock fall from 113 to 6, I was also watching all of our internal business metrics:”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Amazon was indeed hit hard by the internet-bubble collapse. Its stock was at $106 a share in December 1999 when our Person of the Year issue came out. A month later it was down 40 percent. Within two years it had fallen to as low as $6 a share.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“We’ve made mistakes, doozies like the Fire Phone and many other things that just didn’t work out. I won’t list all of our failed experiments, but the big winners pay for thousands of failed experiments.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“because you’re going to have a lot of failures along the way.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos