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Jeff Bezos on the 4 principles that differentiated Amazon from other companies

December 02, 2025

“The thing that connects everything that Amazon does — our #1 conviction, philosophy, and principle — is customer obsession, as opposed to competitor obsession. We are always focused on the customer, working backwards from the customer’s needs, and developing new skills internally so that we can satisfy what we perceive to be future customer needs.”

Jeff Bezos continues:

“It seems like we’re in a bunch of different businesses. We have Amazon Web Services, which is completely different from our Amazon Prime business or Amazon Marketplace or Amazon Studios and so on. But really the way that those businesses run are very similar, and it all starts with customer obsession. But it’s not just customer obsession.”

Pioneering is another critical principle for Amazon:

“We have a very inventive culture. We like to pioneer and invent. There are other very effective business strategies. Pioneering is not the only effective business strategy. In fact, some people would argue it’s not the most effective one. Close-following can be a very good business strategy, and it’s worked many times if you look at the history of business. But it just isn’t who we are.”

Willingness to think long-term is another one:

“That’s another common thread that runs through everything we do. We are very happy to invest in new initiatives that are very risky for 5-7 years. Most companies won’t do that. Companies will invest for very long periods of time in the cases where the outcomes are more certain, but it’s the combination of the risk-taking and the long-term outlook that make Amazon special.”

Taking pride in operational excellence is the final one:

“Doing things well. Finding defects and working backwards. That’s all the incremental improvement that most successful companies are very good at. If you’re not good at finding the root cause of defects and fixing that root cause — you don’t ever want to let defects flow downstream — that’s a key part of doing a good job in any business, in my opinion.”