Domain 11 · 15 cases
Great Entrepreneurs
Founder arcs from near-death to dominance, from Jobs and Bezos to Estée Lauder, Sara Blakely and Madam C.J. Walker, and the one habit each turned into a compounding edge.
- Borrow the one habit that built each company
- See how conviction survives near-death
- Turn a problem you live with into a durable edge
Steve Jobs
In 1985, Apple's board fired the man who had built the company. He started over with an overpriced computer company few remember and a struggling animation…
Jeff Bezos
In 1997, Amazon went public and Wall Street was baffled: the company had never turned a profit and seemed determined not to. Bezos had quit a hedge fund job,…
Walt Disney
Walt Disney went bankrupt in Kansas City, then lost his most popular character to a contract dispute, losing most of his animators in a single meeting. On…
Sam Walton
Sam Walton built the top-performing Ben Franklin store in a six-state region, then his landlord refused to renew the lease and handed it to his own son.…
Estée Lauder
Estée Lauder walked into luxury department stores and gave her products away for free. Every competitor thought she was burning money. When the Saks buyer…
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey was told early on that she was too emotional and too personally involved to be a good broadcaster. She took a struggling Chicago morning show…
Phil Knight
Phil Knight sold running shoes out of the trunk of his car at Pacific Northwest track meets, financing growth on debt so thin the company lived in…
Sara Blakely
Sara Blakely was selling fax machines door to door when she cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose to wear under cream-colored pants. With $5,000 in savings,…
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett started investing at age 11, filed his first tax return at 13, and bought farmland before he graduated high school. He learned to hunt cheap…
Ray Kroc
In 1954, a 52-year-old milkshake-machine salesman drove to San Bernardino because a small burger stand had ordered eight of his machines. Most people would…
Coco Chanel
Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel grew up in an orphanage where the nuns taught her to sew, then spent her early adulthood as a seamstress and cabaret singer. While…
Madam C.J. Walker
Born in 1867 to parents who had been enslaved in Louisiana, Sarah Breedlove was orphaned by seven, widowed at twenty, and raised her daughter alone on…
Akio Morita
In 1979, Sony's engineers told Akio Morita that a portable cassette player with no recording function and no speaker would not sell. The market research…
Yvon Chouinard
Yvon Chouinard never intended to be a businessman. He was a climber living out of his car in Yosemite, teaching himself blacksmithing so he could forge…
Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 at a Denny's in San Jose around a single thesis: that graphics processing would become a distinct and important…
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