Jeff Bezos: Amazon's Business Is Better Than Baseball, You Can Score 1,000 Runs With One Swing

Rebecca Sheppard

April 7, 2016 at 4:11 PM

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN)'s CEO Jeff Bezos isn't afraid of taking risks. And clearly, he understands that risk and reward are precariously balanced, but the potential rewards in the marketplace can far exceed those on the grassy diamond.

Optimism and risk-taking have been a part of Bezos' story from the very beginning, and that willful driver is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

In Bezos' recent letter to shareholders, he elaborated upon the baseball-business connection and his passion for taking risks, being willing to fail and making something:

"Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10 percent change of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten.

"We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments."

Amazon has been the fastest company to reach $100 billion in revenue. Amazon currently has a market cap of $287.79 billion.

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