141–150 of 204 posts
Warren Buffet turned a textile manufacturing company into a holding. An automatic loom manufacture got turned into one of the biggest automobile companies: Toyota Nokia was initially a pulp mill. Microsoft initially sold a BASIC interpreter, then a Unix, then MS-DOS.
Warren Buffet turned a textile manufacturing company into a holding. An automatic loom manufacture got turned into one of the biggest automobile companies: Toyota Nokia was initially a pulp mill. Microsoft initially sold a BASIC interpreter, then a Unix, then MS-DOS.
Warren Buffet was always a investor he didn’t himself pivot anything. He didn’t found Berkshire he just bought a old public not very healthy textile company and used it as his investment vehicle /holding company and dumped its assets.
I really dislike these stories because virtually all these companies lose the script (no second act). It seems that companies that start with a larger vision have multiple acts. Microsoft with software going from programming tools to OS to office to cloud. Apple with computing going from computers to iPods, phones, and tablets. Google with organizing the worlds information and making it accessible. Perhaps it is surv…
They exited not too long ago for about 150M after firing the CTO just before their big payday. I guess the co-founders spending a lot of their early seed money on strip clubs didn't deter later investors.
I worked in a place before, that I won't name due to legal unpleasantness, but started life as a travel marketing company, and pivoted to some banking/finance customer management when the pandemic properly took hold. They exited not too long ago for about 150M after firing the CTO just before their big payday. I guess the co-founders spending a lot of their early seed money on strip clubs didn't deter later investors…
HotMail (remember that?) started this way. The founders had an idea for a database hosted on the web(?), and pitched it to some VCs. They had been working on it as a side gig. Naturally, the VCs asked: did you do it on company time? Did you communicate via the company's email system? Nope, came the answer. We thought about that and built this email system to exchange messages while we worked on the product. And the V…
Try to build X
fail
Build one of the shovels you needed to build X
succeed!