Some of us enjoy the excitement of taking a big risk in the hopes of a massive payoff.

Others prefer sure and steady.

As you saw in the replay video I've been sending out, the approach to Amazon we're discussing these days, while technically entrepreneurial in the Austrian sense, is almost not entrepreneurial in the colloquial sense, because it's so risk averse.

So if you get a thrill from going to a roulette wheel in Vegas and putting half your savings on red, this isn't going to do that for you.

(Incidentally, my friend who's a professional poker player in Vegas says he has a foolproof way to approach not losing your shirt in roulette. As you're heading to the roulette table, he says, just keep on walking past it.)

This approach starts out small, and compounds.

Suppose you and I bet on 18 holes of golf. On the first hole we bet one penny. On each successive hole we double the bet and add it to the wager from the previous hole. So the bet on the second hole would be two cents, but the winner would get three cents (the wager from the first and second holes combined).

That seems too trivial to talk about, right?

Yet by hole 18, the winner would have $1310.72.

That reminds me of this approach to Amazon: it's subtle, but when you see it, you see it.

Here's the replay of the demonstration. The doors close on it tomorrow so they can start teaching.

Take a look and see what you think: