Jeff Bezos: My name is Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos: I studied electrical engineering and computer science,

Jeff Bezos: graduated in 1986 from Princeton, and my current job,

Jeff Bezos: I'm the founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

Jeff Bezos: The Kindle is a wireless electronic reader.

Jeff Bezos: We started working on it more than three years ago now,

Jeff Bezos: more than, probably, almost five years ago now.

Jeff Bezos: The idea is to take the key features of a physical book,

Jeff Bezos: capture those and then go beyond that.

Jeff Bezos: The number one feature of a physical book is that it

Jeff Bezos: disappears while you're reading it.

Jeff Bezos: You're not thinking about the ink and the glue and the

Jeff Bezos: stitching and the paper.

Jeff Bezos: You're entering the author's world and the physical object

Jeff Bezos: just goes away. And that's what we wanted to

Jeff Bezos: achieve with Kindle, to have a device so simple that

Jeff Bezos: it too would disappear and let you enter the author's world.

Jeff Bezos: Failure is an essential component of innovation and

Jeff Bezos: invention. If you know it's going to work,

Jeff Bezos: it's not an experiment.

Jeff Bezos: And so if you want to invent, if you want to innovate,

Jeff Bezos: failure is part and parcel with that.

Jeff Bezos: There is no escape from that.

Jeff Bezos: If I were to go back in time and give myself one piece of

Jeff Bezos: advice as an undergraduate it would be: Take pride in your

Jeff Bezos: decisions and hard work, but not in your gifts.

Jeff Bezos: Celebrate your gifts.

Jeff Bezos: Enjoy them.

Jeff Bezos: But don't take pride in them.

Jeff Bezos: Take pride in your decisions and hard work.

Jeff Bezos: My best memory of Princeton is finishing problem sets in

Jeff Bezos: partial differential equations.

Jeff Bezos: And my worst memory of Princeton is starting my problem sets

Jeff Bezos: in partial differential equations. (laughter)

Jeff Bezos: For anybody who is starting -- for anybody,

Jeff Bezos: it's their freshman week, and they are starting at Princeton --

Jeff Bezos: I think the advice as to what to focus on is pretty simple,

Jeff Bezos: which is to figure out -- which is not always easy -- but

Jeff Bezos: try to figure out what you're genuinely interested in.

Jeff Bezos: And then pursue those things. Alternative techniques might be

Jeff Bezos: to try to figure out what you think is going to be most

Jeff Bezos: lucrative. And I think those techniques tend

Jeff Bezos: not to work. It's very, very difficult to chase after a wave.

Jeff Bezos: What's better is to plant yourself in the middle of

Jeff Bezos: something that you genuinely love and then wait for the wave

Jeff Bezos: to come find you.

(music)

Jeff Bezos: That just makes the video better, you guys.

Jeff Bezos: You realize that, right, if there's a little bit of laugther that you can't quite cut out.

Jeff Bezos: It's like the "Today Show," and the cameramen can't help but laugh.

Mike Wood: And then the boom drops in the frame.

Jeff Bezos: (laughter)