Bezos’s perpetual message is that it’s Amazon’s nature to swing for the fences on a regular basis. But the analogy is wrong: in baseball, a grand slam only scores four runs. By comparison, the home runs of Amazon Prime and AWS produced several thousand runs when the Seattle firm connected with the ball. As Bezos wrote in Amazon’s first annual letter, in 1997, “Given a 10 percent chance of a hundred times payout, you should take that bet every time.”
