Investing
Jeff Bezos's 2018 letter to Amazon shareholders, one of the letters in Day 1: The Amazon Shareholder Letters, 1997–2020.
“We could not foresee with certainty what those programs would eventually look like, let alone whether they would succeed, but they were pushed forward with intuition and heart, and nourished with optimism.”
“[Builders] like to invent. Even when they’re experts, they are ‘fresh’ with a beginner’s mind. They see the way we do things as just the way we do things now.”
“A builder’s mentality helps us approach big, hard-to-solve opportunities with a humble conviction that success can come through iteration: invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again.”
“Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the ‘non-linear’ ones – are highly likely to require wandering.”
“The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf.”
“If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.”
“The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.”
“No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help.”