Any Business Plan Won't Survive Its First

If Your Customer Base Is Aging With You, Then Eventually You Are Going To Become Obsolete Or Irrelevant. You Need To Be Constantly Figuring Out Who Are Your New Customers And What Are You Doing To Stay Forever Young.

You Want To Look At What Other Companies Are Doing. It's Very Important Not To Be Hermetically Sealed. But You Don't Want To Look At It As If, 'ok, We're Going To Copy That.' You Want To Look At It And Say, 'that's Very Interesting. What Can We Be Inspired To Do As A Result Of That?' And Then Put Your Own Unique Twist On It.

If Everything You Do Needs To Work On A Three-year Time Horizon, Then You’re Competing Against A Lot Of People, But If You’re Willing To Invest On A Seven-year Time Horizon, You’re Now Competing Against A Fraction Of Those People, Because Very Few Companies Are Willing To Do That. Just By Lengthening The Time Horizon, You Can Engage In Endeavours That You Could Never Otherwise Pursue. At Amazon We Like Things To Work In Five To Seven Years. We’re Willing To Plant Seeds, Let Them Grow—and We’re Very Stubborn. We Say We’re Stubborn On Vision And Flexible On Details.

If You Look At Academic Studies, You Can See That Stock Prices Are Most Closely Correlated With Cash Flow. It's Such A Straightforward Number. Cash Flow Is What Will Drive Shareholder Returns.

We've Got Thousands Of Investors Counting On Us. And We're A Team Of Thousands Of Employees All Counting On Each Other. That's Fun.