Indeed, the failure of the Fire Phone did not cause Jeff to question the process that created it. “We all know that if you swing for the fences,” he wrote, “you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs.” Unlike baseball, where a home run can bring in no more than four runs, a big business hit can score an almost infinite number of runs. What’s crucial to understand is that a small number of very big winners can pay for a large number of experiments that fail or succeed only modestly.
