Thread by @mar15sa

The best quotes from the @JeffBezos interview in 'How to Lead' by David M. Rubenstein:

"[Tom Brokaw] was interviewing all of us, and he finally turned to me and he said, 'Mr. Bezos, can you even spell profit?' I said, 'Sure. P-r-o-p-h-e-t.' And he burst out laughing."

"With your loved ones, you bet on them. You're not betting on the idea. You are betting on the person."

"I've seen small things get big. I like treating things as if they're small."

"When you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, heart."

"It is a huge advantage to any company if you can stay focused on your customer instead of your competitor. Then you have to identify who your customer is...

At the Washington Post, for example, are the customers the people who buy advertisements from us? No. The customer is the reader. Full stop.

Where do advertisers want to be? Advertisers want to be where there are readers. So it's really not that complicated."

"When the stock is up thirty percent in a month, don't feel thirty percent smarter. Because when the stock is down thirty percent in a month, it's not going to feel so good to feel thirty percent dumber."

"[T]he stock is not the company and the company is not the stock. As I watched the stock fall from $113 to $6, I was also watching all of our internal business metrics, number of customers, profit per unit. Every single thing about the business was getting better, and fast...

So as the stock price was going the wrong way, everything inside the company was going the right way... A financial bust like the Internet bubble bursting makes it really hard to raise money, but we already had the money we needed. We just needed to continue to progress."

"We'll have a good quarterly conference call or something, and Wall Street will like our quarterly results. People will stop me and say, 'Congratulations on your quarter,' and I say, 'Thank you.' But what I'm really thinking is, 'That quarter was baked three years ago.'...

Right now I'm working on a quarter that's going to reveal itself sometime in 2021. That's what you need to be doing. You need to be working two or three years in advance."

"I love team inventing; it is my favorite thing. I get to live two to three years in the future. Somebody has an idea, then other people improve the idea, other people come up with objections why it can never work, then we solve those objections. It's a very fun process."

"So I'll ask the team to do a case study and find the real root cause or causes, and then find real root fixes, so that when you fix it, you're not fixing it for that one customer, you're fixing it for every customer. That process is a gigantic part of what we do."

"We've made doozies, like the Fire Phone and many other things that just didn't work out. We don't have enough time for me to list all of our failed experiments. But the big winners pay for thousands of failed experiments."

"I go to bed early. I get up early. I like to putter in the morning. I like to read the newspaper. I like to have coffee. I like to have breakfast with my kids before they go to school.

So I have my puttering time... That's why I set my first meeting for ten...

I like to do my high-IQ meetings before lunch...

By 5 p.m. I'm like, 'I can't think about that today. Let's try this again tomorrow at 10.' I need 8 hours of sleep. I think better. I have more energy. My mood is better."

"And think about it - as a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day. If I make three good decisions a day, that's enough...

Warren Buffett says he's good if he makes three good decisions a year. I really believe that."