Entrepreneur Origin Stories

In September 1943, a chemical company in Brooklyn bought an old ice factory. It wanted the refrigeration. Penicillin is grown in tanks of broth that have to be stirred, kept cold and fed clean air, an…

In late 1966, a Texas businessman named Rollin King walked into his lawyer's office in San Antonio to close down an airline. The airline was the Wild Goose Flying Service, which flew small planes betw…

In the spring of 1946, in a Tokyo that was mostly ashes, an engineer named Masaru Ibuka rented a room on the third floor of the Shirokiya department store in Nihonbashi and put twenty people to work i…

Amadeo Peter Giannini was born in San Jose, California, in 1870, the son of immigrants from Genoa. He was a boy when a labourer his father had quarrelled with over a dollar or two shot him dead. He we…

Ren Zhengfei was forty-three when he registered Huawei in Shenzhen in 1987 with twenty-one thousand yuan, about five thousand dollars, and began reselling telephone equipment imported from Hong Kong.…

IKEA began as a mail-order business on a farm in Småland and became the world's largest furniture retailer by holding to a single promise: a lower price than anyone else could offer. Ingvar Kamprad re…

The Coca-Cola origin story begins with a slow pharmacy experiment, not a spectacular launch. John Stith Pemberton developed the drink in Atlanta in 1886, Frank M. Robinson gave it its name and distinc…

A garage twelve feet wide and eighteen feet long became the first workshop of Hewlett-Packard. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started with a technical problem, a handful of improvised tools, and a ques…

In 2009, Jan Koum was building an app that hardly anyone knew how to use. It displayed a contact’s status before a call or message, but downloads were not the same as behavior. The breakthrough came w…

A restaurant in San Bernardino changed its menu, its labor model, and the meaning of a fast meal. The McDonald brothers did not begin with a global brand. They began with a slow barbecue drive-in, a f…

Toyota did not begin with a car. It began with Sakichi Toyoda, a carpenter’s son who spent decades trying to make a loom stop when something went wrong. His inventions improved the work itself, but th…

LEGO began in 1932 as Ole Kirk Kristiansen's small woodworking business in Billund, Denmark. The Great Depression pushed the master carpenter toward wooden toys; a 1942 fire then destroyed his factory…