Did you know that the $14 billion Nordstrom chain stores were started by a sixteen year old who fled to America with only $5.00 (roughly $119.00 in today’s currency) in his pocket?
His name was John W. Nordstrom, who’s dad died when he was eight. In need of money John fled his home at 16 and emigrated to New York City in 1887.
WATCH:
Nordstom Did a Series of Back Breaking Jobs Just to Get By….
John labored in mines and logging camps for years as he crossed the country to California and Washington. In 1897, he headed north to Alaska and the Klondike in search of gold. Two years later, he returned to Seattle with a $13,000 in Alaskan gold ready to make his next move.
Nordstrom partnered up with business partner Carl F. Wallin, a Seattle shoemaker Nordstrom had met in Alaska. Wallin offered him a partnership in a shoe store with zero retail experience. In 1901, the gold rush veterans had opened their first store, Wallin & Nordstrom, on Fourth and Pike in Seattle.
Then Nordstrom’s Son Scaled the Family Business into an Empire…
Nordstrom’s sons took over in 1928. By 1960, two stores had grown into eight. The Seattle flagship was the largest shoe store in the country, and Wallin & Nordstrom became the nation’s largest independent shoe chain.
Under a third generation of Nordstrom sons, Nordstrom, Inc. entered into new markets well beyond Seattle. Clothing was added to the shelves in the 1960s and the company was renamed Nordstrom Best in 1969. In 1971, the company went public with its first stock offering and by 1973, Nordstrom Best formally changed its name to Nordstrom
Today, Nordstrom is doing $14.79 billion in revenue. The family still runs the chain of 247 rack stores across 40 states from their headquarters in Seattle.
The ‘finger-lickin’ good’ chicken has been dominating the American fast food fried chicken for decades after a man named Harland Sanders mastered his 11 herbs and spices recipe. But not many people these days know, that he did it from inside his gas station during the Great Depression.
It started way back in the 1930s when Colonel Sanders, who went by his name Harland Sanders back then was running a gas station in his home town in Kentucky.
Here’s the full story…
WATCH:
From Gas Station to Multi Billion KFC Franchise
Harland was born in 1890 and raised quick on a farm outside Henryville, Indiana. His father died when he was just five years old. The oldest child, Sanders was left to care for his two siblings.
His mother taught him how to cook when he was seven. By 13, Sanders left home to pursue a series of professions including railroad worker and insurance salesman. Neither panned out.
In 1930, he took over a Shell filling station on US Route 25 just outside North Corbin, a small city on the edge of the Appalachian Mountains. It was at this gas station when he converted a storeroom into a small eating area using his own dining table, originally serving home cooked meals like steaks, country ham, and fried chicken to his gas station customers. He called his side hustle, Sander’s Café.
Things were going great until one day when became absolutely obsessed with the thought of mass producing fried chicken. Here’s why…
The Simple Invention That Made KFC Immortal
Sanders was supper dissatisfied with the 35 minutes it took to prepare his chicken in an iron frying pan. Time is money and during the Great Depression, his customers couldn’t didn’t have either to spare.
To make matters more complicated, Harlen refused to deep fry. Although a much faster process, in Sanders’ opinion it produced dry and crusty chicken that was unevenly cooked.
The on the other hand, if he prepared the chicken in advance of an order, there was sometimes waste at the end of the day. Then a new product emerged…
In 1939, the first commercial pressure cookers were released, predominantly designed for steaming vegetables. Sanders bought one and modified it into a pressure fryer, which he then used to prepare chicken. The new method reduced his production time to be comparable with deep frying, while simultaneously retained the quality of pan-fried chicken. Now he could prepare high volumes of quality fried chicken at scale.
That is, as long as he could get anyone to buy into the his franchise model.
How Did Harland Sanders Franchise KFC?
In July 1940, Sanders finalized what later became known as his Original Recipe of 11 herbs and spices. Although he never publicly revealed the recipe, he admitted to the use of salt and pepper, and claimed that the ingredients “stand on everybody’s shelf”.
Sanders hit the highways pitching his chicken concept to as many restaurant owners he could meet. Independent restaurant owners would pay four cents on every piece of chicken sold as a franchise fee, in exchange for Sanders’ his recipe and method, and the right to advertise using his name and likeness.
Coined the name “Kentucky Fried Chicken”. Sanders adopted the name because it distinguished his product from the deep-fried “Southern fried chicken” product found in restaurants. Tripling his sales in the first year alone.
That’s when he met Wendy’s future founder Dave Thomas…
The Time Sanders Met the Future Founder of Wendy’s
By 1956, Sanders had six or eight franchisees, including Dave Thomas, who eventually founded the Wendy’s restaurant chain. Thomas developed the rotating red bucket sign, was an early advocate of the take-out concept that Harman had pioneered, and introduced a bookkeeping form that Sanders rolled out across the entire KFC chain. Thomas sold his shares in 1968 for $1 million and became regional manager for all KFC restaurants east of the Mississippi before founding Wendy’s in 1969.
Then, in another random series of cosmic associations, here’s the brief time a serial killer was made a KFC franchise manager at the request of his father in law..
The Time When a Serial Killer Became a KFC Manager…
In the 1960s, John Wayne Gacey was made manager of several Iowa KFC franchises where also around this time and would start his murder spree raping, torturing and murdered at least 33 young men and boys. Gacy regularly performed at children’s hospitals and charitable events as “Pogo the Clown” or “Patches the Clown”, personas he had devised.
There’s currently a documentary that covers the story on Netflix called Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacey Tapes.
It looks absolutely freaking terrifying…
Outside of the documentary, it’s often claimed that Gacy was such a fan of his workplace, he would provide free fried chicken to his colleagues and even insisted on being called the ‘Colonel’.
It would seem his love for the chain continued right up until he was put to death by lethal injection at the age of 52. His last meal request? A bucket of original recipe KFC.
The Fast Rise of the KFC Franchise
In 1960 the company had around 200 franchised restaurants; by 1963 this had grown to over 600, making it the largest fast food operation in the United States. At 73 years old, Harland Sanders sold KFC for $2 million in 1964 ($17.5 million in today’s dollars).
The company went through multiple acquisitions over the years to eventually Pepsico than Yum Brands who still owns and operates the franchise today. Yum Brands operates KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and The Habit Burger Grill.
Today KFC is pulling in $2.793 billion in revenue with 22,621 locations across 150 countries. And it all started in a gas station in Kentucky…
Jan Koum is a Ukrainian-American billionaire businessman and computer engineer. He’s the co-founder and former CEO of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging app that was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for an absolutely mind boggling $19.3 billion.
Facebook paid $12 billion in stock and the rest in cash. What’s even more badass than the exit was the fact that Koum arranged for the $19 billion deal to be signed at the same welfare center he used to collect his welfare checks in his teens. Only this time, he drove there in his Porsche.
Jan moved to California from Ukraine when he was 16. As a young immigrant, Koum and his mother had to rely on food stamps. Koum became interested in programming and eventually landed a job at Yahoo! Where he worked for 9 years.
Then in January 2009, Koum bought an iPhone and realized that the then seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry for app creators.
WhatsApp was initially unpopular, but it quickly became one of the fastest growing apps on the market. WhatsApp allows user to send messages, images, audio or video at a cost significantly less than texting.
The app gained a large user base. So large Facebook was monitoring the app for years obsessively. They were paranoid WhatsApp could eventually be a Facebook killer.
Blackrock is a company that virtually no one had heard of until recently. They have become one of the largest organizations on the planet with $9 trillion in assets under management.
That’s larger than the gross domestic product (GDP) of every single country around the globe, with the exception of China and the United States.
WATCH:
For perspective, the grand total of wealth funds managed by over 91 funds across the world is projected to be worth approximately 8.2 Trillion US Dollars. A single investment management firm based out of New York manages more funds than all the sovereign wealth funds in the world.
Crazy right? In fact…
If you were to make $1 every second, you’d be worth as much as BlackRock in about 240,000 years.
What’s more, if you research every major publicly traded company in the world and you’ll find that BlackRock is its first, second or third-largest shareholder. They also apparently own part of CNN and FOX.
How Much of the Media Does BlackRock and Vanguard Own?
18% of Fox
16% of CBS (and therefore also ofSixty Minutes)
13% of Comcast (which owns NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and the Sky media group)
12% of CNN
12% of Disney (which owns ABC andFiveThirtyEight)
Between 10-14% of Gannett (which owns more than 250 Gannett daily newspapers plusUSA Today)
10% of the Sinclair local television news (which controls 72% of U.S. households’ local TV)
So yeah they own a pretty influential piece of the news.
Where Did Blackrock Come From Anyway?
The Company was co-founded in 1988 by a very well-connected billionaire by the name of Larry Fink, who has been described as “a defacto middleman and lynchpin between Washington, DC, and Wall Street.” The firm operates globally with 70 offices in 30 countries and clients in 100 countries.
BlackRock started making headlines during the 2008 financial meltdown.
When the financial crisis of 2007-2008 hit, the US government hired BlackRock to clean up the mess from the crisis by managing the toxic assets that were owned by firms like the Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac. In fact, even amidst the current financial crisis caused due to the Coronavirus outbreak starting in 2020, the Trump administration turned to Blackrock to bail out companies overleveraged in debt. the government is once again looking for BlackRock’s expertise.
Given the company’s habit of forming shadow cabinets ahead of presidential transitions and its involvement in the new Federal reserve programs, Bloomberg even went as far as calling BlackRock our “fourth branch of government.”
Pretty impressive positioning for a company that’s only 34 years old.
The video conference app (Zoom) that brought the world together during COVID was invented by a guy named Eric Yan who built it to video call his girlfriend.
Here’s how it happened…
WATCH:
Who Invented Zoom?
Eric Yuan is the Founder and CEO of Zoom. He was born and raised in Tai’an, Shandong Province, China.
Eric had been inspired to find a solution to visit his girlfriend, so he developed a piece of video telephone software in 1987. A decade later, Eric moved to San Francisco and was one of the first 20 hires on the WebEx team. In fact, Eric was one of the founding engineers and proved crucial to the success of its online meetings product.
Ouch. Cisco Turned it Down?
WebEx was acquired by security and networking giant, Cisco, in 2007 for $3.2 billion. Under Cisco’s new ownership Eric became Cisco’s VP of engineering. At Cisco, Eric pitched them his original idea for a mobile-friendly video system. They turned it down…
This mobile friendly video system is what became Zoom.
They Couldn’t Have Gone Public at a Better Time…
In April 2019, Zoom went public. Zoom stock shot above its $36 IPO price almost immediately and peaked at $104.49 in mid-2019.
In early 2020, the world was rocked by the coronavirus pandemic, with millions of people forced to work from home. In March, Zoom was downloaded 2.13 million times in just one day.
Today, Zoom has some staggering usage stats with over 300 million daily meeting participants and 3.5 trillion annual meeting minutes,
Thanks to Eric’s girlfriend in 1987, Zoom has become the world’s biggest video conferencing giant.
It goes without saying, Netflix has been dominated streaming videos like BlockBuster dominated movie rentals. However new players are catching up and giving the iconic brand a real run for their money.
In a shocking reveal, instead of achieving the target of adding 2 million new subscribers in Q1 2022 that it set for itself three months earlier, they ended up losing 200,000 subscribers…Ouch
This is the first time the company has net loss of subscribers.
This could just be the tip of the ice burg as Netflix is expecting to lose an additional 2 million more subscribers in the ongoing quarter. The market response was brutal. Netflix lost ¼ of its value as the stock price tanked 25% in 1 day.
Competition is cut throat with the emergence of Disney, Hulu, HBO, Paramount, Peacock, Apple and Amazon. This has presented a serious challenge now as people are ditching Netflix for those streaming services that are available at much more competitive prices (Netflix premium is up to $19.99/month which is almost double the competition).
Pricing be damned, the other problem plaguing Netflix is their competitors are reducing the pool size of originalHollywood content they got to pick from over the last decade.
TV and film companies have more options of providers to negotiate with.
Once the world’s 6th richest billionaire in 2008 with a net worth of $42 billion, Anil Dhirubhai Ambani, lost it all by 2019.
Here’s how…
Anil Ambani was born June 4th, 1959 in Bombay India as the youngest son of the founder of one of the most powerful companies on the planet. His father, Dhirubhai Ambani, was the founder of a company called Reliance Industries Limited which today is doing $7.366 trillion as a conglomerate, headquartered in Mumbai. It has diverse businesses including energy, petrochemicals, natural gas, retail, telecommunications, mass media, and textiles.
Dhirubhai raised his 2 sons to eventually take over the “family business”. Mukesh and Anil started as executives at Reliance in their twenties. The two couldn’t have been more different. Mukesh was more of a reserved family man while Anil earned a reputation as a flashy playboy who enjoyed rubbing shoulders with Bollywood’s elite.
Tragedy strikes the Ambhani family
Dhirubhai Ambani passed away on July 6th 2002 of a sudden heart attack at the age of 69. At the time of his passing he was the 138th richest man in the world with a net worth of $2.9 billion.
Mukesh, the older brother assumed role of chairman and Anil took the office of Vice President. They were at each other’s throats almost immediately. Each had different ideas for what to do with the company and the two were making decisions without consulting each other.
It was a mess…
It became a real problem. So big that even India’s finance minister tried stepping in to get the bickering duo to make nice. After all, Reliance was one of the biggest economic powerhouses in India.
The sibling rivalry for the control for Reliance was resolved when the 2 decided to split the company down the middle. Mukesh would run the gas and petroleum businesses and Anil would run the communications and power businesses and ultimately leave each other alone.
But the proverbial sky was about to come crashing down.
That same year Anil Ambani made the decision to invest around $2 billion in advancing Reliance Communications Group, heavily leveraging his company into massive debt.
Then shit hit the fan…
In 2011, Anil’s Managing Director and two Vice Presidents were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to acquire mispriced mobile network licenses for companies Reliance Communications has invested in to illegally bolster the company’s share prices in an attempt to close the debt gap.
The following year In 2012, amidst scandals, Anil Ambani acquired even more debt to pay off the existing debts. Reliance Communications took a loan of over $1.2 billion from three Chinese Banks on Anil Ambani’s personal guarantee.
That’s one hell of a personal guarantee.
By 2016, many of Anil Ambani’s companies ran into debt and operational troubles. On the one hand, Reliance Power had to sell its assets. On the other, Reliance Communications lost 98% valuation in a period of just 3 short years.
RCom was unable to compete against the top reigning telecom companies and lost consumers. This brought down Anil Ambani’s net worth to $2.5 billion.
Still not a bad nest egg by anyone’s standards however, Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communication owed the Swedish network company, Ericsson, $80 million, which he failed to repay. Which shocker, lead to a major lawsuit.
In 2019, the Supreme Court of India ordered Anil Ambani to repay the debt along with interest or go to jail. In an unlikely intervention, Anil Ambani’s older brother Mukesh paid the money owed to Ericsson and yes little brother from going to jail.
Reliance Communications then filed bankruptcy in 2019. But Anil’s problems were still far from over.
He still owed over $700 million including interest to the 3 chinese banks he borrowed money from. In February 2020, Anil declared that his net worth has fallen to zeroafter considering his liabilities. He pleaded poverty and claimed that he didn’t hold any meaningful assets that could be liquidated to pay off the debts he owed to the Chinese Banks.
Who would have thought that a man who had a net worth of $42 billion in 2008 would claim poverty by 2020?
He still managed to turn out ahead. Today he and his wife Tina Ambani reside in one of the most luxurious homes in India. A 17 story home situated at Pali Hill in Mumbai.
It goes without saying, Netflix has been dominated streaming videos like BlockBuster dominated movie rentals. However new players are catching up and giving the iconic brand a real run for their money.
In a shocking reveal, instead of achieving the target of adding 2 million new subscribers in Q1 2022 that it set for itself three months earlier, they ended up losing 200,000 subscribers…Ouch
This is the first time the company has net loss of subscribers.
This could just be the tip of the ice burg as Netflix is expecting to lose an additional 2 million more subscribers in the ongoing quarter. The market response was brutal. Netflix lost ¼ of its value as the stock price tanked 25% in 1 day.
Competition is cut throat with the emergence of Disney, Hulu, HBO, Paramount, Peacock, Apple and Amazon. This has presented a serious challenge now as people are ditching Netflix for those streaming services that are available at much more competitive prices (Netflix premium is up to $19.99/month which is almost double the competition).
Pricing be damned, the other problem plaguing Netflix is their competitors are reducing the pool size of originalHollywood content they got to pick from over the last decade.
TV and film companies have more options of providers to negotiate with.
Once the world’s 6th richest billionaire in 2008 with a net worth of $42 billion, Anil Dhirubhai Ambani, lost it all by 2019.
Here’s how…
Anil Ambani was born June 4th, 1959 in Bombay India as the youngest son of the founder of one of the most powerful companies on the planet. His father, Dhirubhai Ambani, was the founder of a company called Reliance Industries Limited which today is doing $7.366 trillion as a conglomerate, headquartered in Mumbai. It has diverse businesses including energy, petrochemicals, natural gas, retail, telecommunications, mass media, and textiles.
Dhirubhai raised his 2 sons to eventually take over the “family business”. Mukesh and Anil started as executives at Reliance in their twenties. The two couldn’t have been more different. Mukesh was more of a reserved family man while Anil earned a reputation as a flashy playboy who enjoyed rubbing shoulders with Bollywood’s elite.
Tragedy strikes the Ambhani family
Dhirubhai Ambani passed away on July 6th 2002 of a sudden heart attack at the age of 69. At the time of his passing he was the 138th richest man in the world with a net worth of $2.9 billion.
Mukesh, the older brother assumed role of chairman and Anil took the office of Vice President. They were at each other’s throats almost immediately. Each had different ideas for what to do with the company and the two were making decisions without consulting each other.
It was a mess…
It became a real problem. So big that even India’s finance minister tried stepping in to get the bickering duo to make nice. After all, Reliance was one of the biggest economic powerhouses in India.
The sibling rivalry for the control for Reliance was resolved when the 2 decided to split the company down the middle. Mukesh would run the gas and petroleum businesses and Anil would run the communications and power businesses and ultimately leave each other alone.
But the proverbial sky was about to come crashing down.
That same year Anil Ambani made the decision to invest around $2 billion in advancing Reliance Communications Group, heavily leveraging his company into massive debt.
Then shit hit the fan…
In 2011, Anil’s Managing Director and two Vice Presidents were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to acquire mispriced mobile network licenses for companies Reliance Communications has invested in to illegally bolster the company’s share prices in an attempt to close the debt gap.
The following year In 2012, amidst scandals, Anil Ambani acquired even more debt to pay off the existing debts. Reliance Communications took a loan of over $1.2 billion from three Chinese Banks on Anil Ambani’s personal guarantee.
That’s one hell of a personal guarantee.
By 2016, many of Anil Ambani’s companies ran into debt and operational troubles. On the one hand, Reliance Power had to sell its assets. On the other, Reliance Communications lost 98% valuation in a period of just 3 short years.
RCom was unable to compete against the top reigning telecom companies and lost consumers. This brought down Anil Ambani’s net worth to $2.5 billion.
Still not a bad nest egg by anyone’s standards however, Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communication owed the Swedish network company, Ericsson, $80 million, which he failed to repay. Which shocker, lead to a major lawsuit.
In 2019, the Supreme Court of India ordered Anil Ambani to repay the debt along with interest or go to jail. In an unlikely intervention, Anil Ambani’s older brother Mukesh paid the money owed to Ericsson and yes little brother from going to jail.
Reliance Communications then filed bankruptcy in 2019. But Anil’s problems were still far from over.
He still owed over $700 million including interest to the 3 chinese banks he borrowed money from. In February 2020, Anil declared that his net worth has fallen to zeroafter considering his liabilities. He pleaded poverty and claimed that he didn’t hold any meaningful assets that could be liquidated to pay off the debts he owed to the Chinese Banks.
Who would have thought that a man who had a net worth of $42 billion in 2008 would claim poverty by 2020?
He still managed to turn out ahead. Today he and his wife Tina Ambani reside in one of the most luxurious homes in India. A 17 story home situated at Pali Hill in Mumbai.
Pepsi is a brand that everyone knows, because as their website states, their products are sold in 200 countries. Which is pretty freaking crazy considering Google says there are only 195 countries on earth…So it’s safe to assume they have officially saturated their target market.
But as big as they are, they’re even bigger than you might think.
Pepsi is no longer a beverage brand. They are now Pepsi Co, a conglomerate that consists of 23 brands that generate of $70B in annual revenue. Pepsi is one of the biggest companies on the planet.
A Brief History of Pepsi:
Pepsi was originally promoted as “Brad’s Drink” in New Bern, North Carolina in 1893 by Caleb Bradham, who crafted it at his drugstore. It was later renamed Pepsi-Cola in 1898, “Pepsi” because it was advertised to relieve dyspepsia (indigestion) and “Cola” referring to the cola flavor.
You read that right, Pepsi was originally marketed as a cure to an upset stomach.
As product sales increased, the company pivoted overtime to appeal to a larger audience and diversify its products.
Fast forward to 1950 Alfred N. Steele, a former VP of Coca-Cola Company, became the CEO. He focused on creating giant advertising campaigns to increase sales. His efforts increased Pepsi’s earnings 11-fold during the 50s and made it the instant competitor of Coca Cola.
In 1965 Pepsi-Cola merged with Frito-Lay, Inc. They then diversified further with the purchase of three restaurant chains:
Looking to add even more diversification PepsiCo acquired both the Tropicana and Dole juice brands from the Seagram Company in 1998, and in 2001 it then merged with Quaker Oats company.
Here is the massive list of brands Pepsi Co owns today.
