Company Origins
Almost none of the companies that dominate the market today started out looking like what they became. This exhibit collects the unlikely beginnings — a bookstore run out of a garage, a failing textile maker, an online snowboard shop — and traces the line from there to the businesses investors know now.
7 artifacts · Drawn from company histories and public filings. Each artifact links to its own sourced page.
Amazon launched in 1994 as an online bookstore run out of a garage. Jeff Bezos reportedly chose books because they were a huge, standardized market easy to ship.
Berkshire Hathaway began as a failing textile maker. Warren Buffett later called buying it his "dumbest" investment — yet the name stuck to what became one of history’s greatest holding companies.
Netflix launched in 1998 mailing DVDs to customers in red envelopes. It did not stream a single video until 2007 — a decade before it became a household word for online video.
Today’s Broadcom is really Avago: Hock Tan’s Avago Technologies bought the original Broadcom Corp in 2016 for $37 billion and kept the more famous name.
Shopify began as Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop. Its founders couldn’t find e-commerce software they liked, so they built their own — and ended up selling the platform instead of the snowboards.
NVIDIA was conceived in 1993 in a booth at a Denny’s in San Jose, where its three founders sketched out a company to make graphics chips for video games.
Tesla was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Elon Musk joined in 2004 as its largest early investor and chairman, later became CEO, and is now the company’s public face.