Company stories worth the long drive
Sven Balnojan recommends these
thdpth.comI keep these around for people who tell me they don't have four hours for a podcast.
The length is the whole point. Three or four hours is what it takes to follow a decision through to its consequences instead of stopping at the anecdote — and most business content stops at the anecdote.
Start with Costco if you have never tried one. It is the shortest here and the clearest example of what the format buys you.
4 episodes · 14h 16m total
Updated 4 hours ago
- 1Listen
The Home Depot
Acquired3 hr 35 min
Two men get fired at 48 and 35, go broke, and stack empty paint cans ten feet high so the shelves look full to customers. That is the first hour and it is the part I would keep.
What makes it more than a founding anecdote is that they keep going: you get the whole arc through to a company big enough that its problems become boring, and the boring problems turn out to be the instructive ones.
- 2Listen
Costco
Acquired2 hr 53 min
Munger's favourite company, and a real puzzle: the cheapest prices in American retail alongside the wealthiest customers. Most of the episode is how those two facts hold together, which is far more interesting than either one on its own.
- 3Listen
Vanguard
Acquired3 hr 48 min
An ownership structure — not a product — ended up the largest equity owner of most of the S&P 500, on behalf of fifty million people. If you take one thing from this, take the structure.
- 4Listen
Ferrari
Acquired3 hr 59 min
330,000 cars in 79 years at an average of half a million dollars each. Scarcity manufactured on purpose, and the genuinely hard part is what it costs to keep holding that line when you could obviously sell more.
That's what Sven Balnojan keeps coming back to. What do you keep telling people to listen to?
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