Jeff Bezos Quotes

It was something of a personal challenge for me to come up with a business suitable for the Internet world and the Internet age.

Mike Krieger and I started talking, and he decided he liked the idea of helping start the company. Once he joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood.

When we launched the WineLibrary website in 1996, I didn't even own a computer yet. I just understood that there was an opportunity here to market in a different way.

I went online with winelibrary.com in July of 1997; that was my first professional online play.

It's when you take that first step opening a business or making an investment that it becomes real.

Jeff Bezos was one of those best and brightest who came to N.Y. to work in finance. He didn't need to know anything about retail bookselling to start Amazon.

'Your Life Calling' is the first thing in my long career I've ever actually invented. It is my entrepreneurial debut.

When I started my first company, I still had a 40-hour a week job. I was working on my company on nights and weekends before I took the plunge and gave up a salary.

EBay gave me the framework to discover I was an e-commerce entrepreneur. I touched everything, from shipping to logistics.

My first real venture was a paintball company I started in Grade 10, when I was 16. After hearing about it from a friend, I realized my town didn't have a playing field. I did some research, spoke with other paintball company owners, and I started my own field the following summer.

E-commerce is applicable to Russia, just as it's applicable to any other market.

I opened up a frozen-yogurt business out of college. I didn't finish college; I went halfway, and then I worked for Joel Silver, the producer, as a driver for a year.

My co-founder Dylan Smith and I left our junior year of college to move to the Bay Area. To the horror of our friends' parents, we actually had two other friends drop out of college to work on the product. The four of us were just working non-stop growing Box.

Pizza made me who I am. In the summer of 1998, I dropped out of college and started a pizza restaurant called Growlies in my hometown in rural Canada. My seed money: a credit card with a $20,000 limit.

I think economics is about passion. Economic progress, whether it is a two-person coffee shop or whether it is Netscape, is about people with brave ideas. Because it is brave to mortgage the house, when you've got two kids, to start a coffee shop.

Guess what? The world changes. eBay has defined e-commerce.

When I got out of college, I gave myself till I was 30 to invent a product. If I couldn't do it by then, I would just get a real job. And that fear - the fear of a real job - motivated me to be an entrepreneur.

So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'

The Web and new technology offer more opportunities to reach a world market at a lower price. Today, a person can start a business at home and reach the world market.

If you asked would I have done a startup in India, the answer is yes.

Being an entrepreneur means being a creative businessperson.

I think a lot of people might've and probably did have the idea of renting clothes before me. I was the only one who was crazy enough to attempt it.

It's gotten more open and easy to create a business on the Internet. That's a really awesome thing for entrepreneurs and for the world.

I didn't wake up one day and want to become an entrepreneur. I had the idea for Rent the Runway and thought it would be fun to work on and also thought if it was successful, it would make women feel great about themselves.

E-commerce is a powerful means to connect the unconnected to global trade.