Learning from Jeff Bezos: Never chase the hot thing!”

"Never chase the hot thing", goes one of the quotes from Jeff Bezos. The Amazon CEO is being celebrated in the US as Businessperson of the Year and has been dubbed “The Ultimate Disrupter”.

Last Thursday, he had a “fireside chat” with his CTO Werner Vogels at “re: Invent” the first big Amazon Web Services conference. There he presented Amazon as the master of the narrow margin.

The session contains a sort of “best-of” of Jeff Bezos' insights. Many have been heard before in one form or the other. Notable was his advice to entrepreneurs at the end of the talk:

"Never chase the hot thing (whatever it is). That's like trying to catch the wave. And you'll never catch it. You need to position yourself and wait for the wave. The way you do that: You pick something you're passionate about.

Make sure it is something you're passionate about. Missionaries build better products. I would take a missionary over a mercenary any day. Mercenaries wanna flip the company and get rich, missionaries want to build a great product or service. One of those great paradoxes: it's usually the missionaries who are going to make more money anyway."

More recent insights from Jeff Bezos are also to be found on Charlie Rose.

In addition, a sort of biography has come out this year called One Click (“Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com”).

Related posts:

• Shopbop and the Growth of Amazon’s Fashion Empire
• Amazon Applies For Themed Domain Names
• Inside Amazon: How They Are Doing Behind the Scenes
• Shopping Devices: What Does The Amazon Tablet Deliver?
• A Look at Amazon’s Tablet Strategy

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Comments

[Drew Johnson]

Bezos summed up the world of e-commerce with "never chase the hot thing". What we're doing at Flash Purchase is exactly that: creating a new form of commerce where buyers and sellers come together.

Playing catch-up is never the way to go.

[Religion Dissertation]

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