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Jeff Bezos: The founder’s job is to build a “heavy” company

October 09, 2025

Jeff Bezos recalls how Amazon’s stock price fell from $113 to $6 when the Internet bubble burst.

“Shareholders were upset; employees were nervous; their parents were calling our employees and asking if they were ok,” Jeff remembers.

“This was an environment of great nervousness. But I looked at the numbers in the business and every month — as the stock price went from $113 to $6 — our number of customers went up, our gross profits went up, and our losses as a % of sales went down. Every single business metric we were monitoring for that entire period (new customers, repeat purchases, etc.) kept getting better.”

He offers founders the following advice:

“As entrepreneurs, you’re focused on the fundamentals of the business. The stock price is an ultimate output that you have very little control over. The great investor Benjamin Graham is famous for saying that the stock market is a voting machine in the short run but a weighing machine in the long run. As founders, entrepreneurs, and business people, our job is to build a heavy company. We want to build a company that when it is weighed, it is a very heavy company. We do not want to focus on the stock price. That would be misleading because [the stock price] can be disconnected from the fundamentals.”