Passion And Customer-Centricity: What Jeff Bezos Says Entrepreneurs Need To Have In Order To ‘Start’

If we think long term, we can accomplish things we couldn’t otherwise accomplish.

For instance, if we say that one needs to solve world hunger in five years, nobody will dare take up the challenge. But, if we say, that this needs to be done in 100 years, then chances are, people will give it a try.. Because you started creating conditions under which such change can occur. And all we have done is change the time horizon.

We didn’t change the challenge. We changed the time horizon.

Time horizons matters a lot…

We humans are getting awfully sophisticated in technological ways and have a lot of potential to be dangerous to ourselves. And, it seems to me, that as a species we should start thinking for the longer term…

Every approach has its own pros and cons. You need reusability. So, When you go look at any approach that doesn’t have reusability, is never gonna be low cost.

These two things – passion and customer-centricity will take you an awful long way.

The above transcript is taken from a video clip from the AWS Invent 2012 conference – a fireside chat with Amazon Founder & CEO Jeff Bezos and CTO Werner Vogels. Bezos is the face of world’s largest online shopping site, Amazon. The company began as an Internet merchant of books and expanded to a wide variety of products and services, most recently video streaming and audio streaming.

Bezos’s other diversified business interests include aerospace and newspapers. He is the founder and manufacturer of Blue Origin (founded in 2000), with test flights to space beginning in 2015, and plans for commercial suborbital human spaceflight beginning in 2018. In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post newspaper. A number of other business investments are also managed through Bezos Expeditions.

Bezos currently ranks as the third richest person in the world (excluding royalty and dictators), with an estimated net worth of $73.3 Bn as of February 17, 2017, just behind fellow Americans, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet who have the number one and two spots, respectively.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.