Too Fun Media / The Founder Files · 11 episodes
The true stories of the founders who built the modern world, and the lessons behind them.
The Founder Files Podcast tells the true stories of the builders, inventors and entrepreneurs behind the companies and inventions we use every day, and the failures they survived on the way.
The series starts with the pioneers: Rowland Macy, the Nantucket whaler who failed again and again before Macy's, helped by Margaret Getchell; Levi Strauss, the merchant behind blue jeans; Thomas Edison at Menlo Park with the phonograph and the light bulb; and Wilbur and Orville Wright, who went from a Dayton bike shop to the first airplane.
Then come the modern founders: Jim Sinegal and Jeff Brotman of Costco, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple, Pixar and NeXT, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Elon Musk of Zip2, PayPal and SpaceX. Coming soon: Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Dell.
Founder of Macy's, 1822-1877
Inside: Nantucket Whaler, Four and a Half Failures, Margaret Getchell
He failed in Boston, broke even at best in the California Gold Rush, went under in Haverhill and lost out in Wisconsin. Then, at thirty-five, he opened one more little shop on an "unlucky" corner of Sixth Avenue and took in about $11 on day one.
Levi Strauss & Co., blue jeans, 1829-1902
Inside: The Merchant, the Tailor
His name is stitched onto more pants than anyone's in history, but he never sewed the first pair and he never invented the rivets.
Inventor, behind General Electric, 1847-1931
Inside: Menlo Park, the Phonograph, the Light Bulb Myth
He promised the press an electric light before he had one, raised the money anyway, and then went out and built it.
Wilbur and Orville Wright, first airplane, 1903
Inside: Bike Shop, Wind Tunnel
Two brothers with a bicycle shop in Dayton, no college degrees and less than $1,000 to spend beat the best-funded scientist in America to the first airplane. Then they tried to turn it into a business.
Co-founder of Costco
Inside: Sol Price, FedMart, Price Club, Jeff Brotman
He came to a brand-new discount store to put away a load of mattresses for $1.25 an hour, figured it would be a one-day job, and stayed in the business for the rest of his life.
Co-founder of Oracle
Inside: Edgar Codd's Big Idea, Version Two, the 1990 Crash
He was told he'd never amount to anything, he left college twice without a degree, and he built one of the most important software companies on Earth out of a research paper anybody could have read.
Co-founder of Microsoft
Inside: Paul Allen, Altair BASIC, the IBM Deal, Windows
Two young programmers wrote software for a computer they had never touched, and the first thing it ever printed was a question: "MEMORY SIZE?"
Co-founder of Apple
Inside: Woz, the Garage Myth, the Mac, Getting Pushed Out, NeXT, Pixar
He was adopted by a machinist and a bookkeeper who promised in writing to send him to college. He dropped out after one semester, slept on friends' floors and, less than a decade later, was worth more than $200 million.
Co-founder of NVIDIA
Inside: Denny's, the Sega Flop, RIVA 128, the First GPU, CUDA
In 1993 three engineers sat in a Denny's booth in San Jose and sketched out a graphics chip company. Within a few years it was reportedly about thirty days from going broke.
Founder of Amazon
Inside: The Garage in Bellevue, Door Desks, the Dot-Com Crash, Prime
In 1994 he had one of the best jobs on Wall Street, and he quit it to sell books out of a garage in a city where he barely knew anyone.
Founder of SpaceX, Tesla CEO
Inside: Zip2, PayPal, Three Failed Rockets
He sold his first video game at twelve, slept in his office at twenty-four, and at thirty-seven was nearly out of money, with a rocket company that had failed three times and a car company days from missing payroll.
