How Jeff Bezos used baseball math to build Amazon's empire
Why swinging for the fences in business beats playing it safe
Time: 3.40 Minutes
A Silicon Valley legend once struck out 90% of the time. But that same "failure rate" built the world's most valuable company and made him the richest man alive.
Here's the counter-intuitive story of Jeff Bezos…
In baseball, perfection is capped. Hit a grand slam? You get 4 runs max. The game has built-in limits that keep even the greatest hitters humble.
But business? Business has no ceiling.
While baseball players dream of .300 batting averages, Bezos embraced a .100 success rate and transformed it into trillion-dollar dominance.
But how he did this?
The Amazon Formula:
9 experiments fail spectacularly
1 experiment pays for everything (and then some)
Repeat relentlessly
This "long-tailed distribution" thinking separated Amazon from every competitor playing small ball.
Remember the Fire Phone? Epic flop.
Amazon Auctions? Dead on arrival.
Countless other "failures" nobody talks about.
But then came AWS…
One massive home run that now generates $90+ billion annually, more than most countries' GDP.
The Bezos Insight:
Conventional wisdom works 90% of the time, so most people follow it. But that remaining 10%? That's where fortunes hide.
European giants like ASML get this.
They bet big on extreme ultraviolet lithography when everyone said it was impossible. Now they're the only company that can make the world's most advanced chips.
Spotify did the same, challenging the entire music industry's distribution model when everyone said streaming wouldn't work.
The difference between winners and everyone else:
Most people optimize to be right 90% of the time
Winners optimize for the 10% that changes everything
Big winners pay for endless experiments with massive asymmetric upside
Amazon's "failure" rate would get any baseball player benched. But in business, those same odds created the everything store.
So here some takeaways…
Budget for bold bets, not just safe plays
Measure potential upside, not just probability of success
Let your winners run wild—don't cap your home runs
Use small wins to fund big swings
Playing it safe keeps you in the minor leagues. Swinging for 1,000-run games builds your empire.
So, stay curious and swing for the big hit.
Your favourite Domi.
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