• Startup Archive
  • Posts
  • Jeff Bezos: “Be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details”

Jeff Bezos: “Be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details”

October 31, 2025

When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, the concept was “universal selection of books.” And as they added new product categories, Amazon kept their founding vision of universal selection.

But as Jeff explains:

“We realized very early that the only way we were going to get to universal selection of all product categories is if we invited third-party sellers to join us.”

Amazon’s first two implementations of this (Amazon Auctions and Z Shops) both failed. But their third attempt (Amazon Marketplace) succeeded.

This is an example of a principle Jeff stresses to all Amazon employees:

“What I ask people inside Amazon to do is be stubborn on the vision, and flexible on the details. We knew we needed to make third-party sellers successful on Amazon. We just didn’t know how to do it, and so we had to go through three iterations and it finally worked. Now it’s 40% of units sold on Amazon. It’s a huge part of our business.”