Name: Insights: Jeff Bezos’ Tips for Being an Entrepreneur
Uploaded: 2020-01-15
Duration: 1 min 53 s
Description: He spoke at the 2019 re:MARS conference. (June 2019)

[MUSIC PLAYING] If you want to be an entrepreneur, the most important thing is to be customer-obsessed. So don't satisfy your customers. Figure out how to absolutely delight them. That is the number one thing, whoever your customers are. Passion-- you have got to have some passion for the arena that you're going to develop and work in, because, otherwise, you're going to be competing against people who do have passion for that. And they're going to build better products and services. You can't be a mercenary. You have to be a missionary. Missionaries build better products and services. They always win. The mercenaries are just trying to make money. And paradoxically, the missionaries always end up making more money. You have to pick something that you actually have a genuine passion for. You have to take risk. You have to be willing to take risk. If you aren't going to take risk-- if you come up with a business idea, but there's no risk there, you're probably-- you know, it's probably already being done. Those ideas already being done. And they're being done well by many, many people. So you've got to have something that might not work. And so you have to accept that your business is going to be, in many ways, an experiment. And it might fail. And that's OK. That's what risk is. The good news is, at Amazon, we still take risks all the time. And we encourage it. And we talk about failure. We should be failing. Our failures have to grow with the company. We need big failures if we're going to be moving the needle. We need to have billion-dollar scale failures. And if we're not, we're not swinging hard enough. 

Insights: Jeff Bezos’ Tips for Being an Entrepreneur

Tech

Jeff Bezos’ Tips for Being an Entrepreneur

He spoke at the 2019 re:MARS conference. (June 2019)

If you want to be an entrepreneur, the most important thing is to be customer obsessed. So don't satisfy your customers. Figure out howto absolutely delight them. That is the number one thing. Whoever your customers are passion, you have got to have compassion for the arena that you're going to develop and work in because otherwise you're gonna be competing against people who do have compassion for that and they're gonna build better products. And service is you can't be a mercenary. You have to be a missionary. Missionaries build better products, and service is they always win. The mercenaries were just trying to make money, and paradoxically, the missionaries always end up making more money to pick something that you actually have a genuine passion for. You have to take risk. I have to be willing to take risk if you art gonna take risks. If you come with the business ideo there's there's no risk there. You're probably, you know, it's probably already being done Those ideas already being done there being done well by many, many people. So you gotta have something that might not work. And so you have to accept that your business is going to be, in many ways, an experiment and it might fail and that's OK. That's what risk is. The good news Is it Amazon? We still take risks all the time and we encourage it. We talk about failure. We should be filling. Our failures have to grow with the company. We need big failures. If we're gonna be moving the needle, we need to have a $1,000,000,000 scale failures. And if we're not, we're not swinging. We're not swinging hard enough.