Business History

How a Bad Boss Kickstarted Silicon Valley

William Shockley was an electronics genius - he even won a Nobel Prize - but he was an awful boss. Shockley was a cruel, paranoid micromanager. And this annoyed the staff of brilliant young engineers he'd assembled in a quiet town in Northern California. In fact, they quit and set up a company of their own inventing silicon chips.    Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and the rest of "The Traitorous Eight" transformed computing, but also blazed a trail for the tech founders who would flock to Silicon Valley and change the world. Members of "The Traitorous Eight" set up Intel and AMD, while also funding businesses such as Google and Slack.   See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Sears: Cocaine Wine, Shotguns, and the World’s Tallest Tower

Richard Warren Sears started off selling pocket watches - then published a catalog full of hundreds and hundreds of products from shotguns to cocaine wine. Sears & Roebuck offered even Americans living on remote farms the chance to shop like city dwellers. The catalog became an American institution - the Amazon of the 1890s - but as the nation changed, Sears adapted too and built a vast chain of physical stores.  Sears felt so secure that it built the world's tallest office building to house all its staff - but then came competition from specialist big-box stores and out-of-town megastores. Sears found itself in a death spiral and couldn't pull out. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

De-Nazifying the Love Bug: The VW Beetle Story Part II

It's 1945. The Volkswagen factory has been bombed and members of the staff have been arrested as war criminals. So how did the company turn around in just a few years and begin making Beetle cars that became a global sensation? Big political and economic moves helped - but a British Army officer, Walt Disney and a New York ad agency also played pivotal roles in turning a car that Hitler had championed into the favourite ride of surfers, school teachers and hippies.       See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Hitler's Gift to the Hippies: The VW Beetle Story Part I

The VW Beetle was the biggest selling car of all time - and it found particular favor with people like hippies and surfers. But this icon of the 60s counterculture had its roots in Nazism. The Volkswagen - the People's Car - was an obsession of Adolf Hitler. He wanted to transform Germany into a land of drivers - and needed an affordable, but reliable automobile.    Germany's private auto manufacturers knew the project was doomed to failure. So Hitler assembled a team of designers and factory managers to enact his vision - even if that meant enslaving workers and committing murder.   See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

How Jim Simons Built a Machine That Beat the Market

Jim Simons loved cigarettes and math. He started out as an academic mathematician and a Cold War code breaker - but decided to use his skills to write computer programs to spot investment opportunities in the financial markets.  Simons and his fierce nerds bought up all the data sets they could find - reports, books, magnetic tapes - and built machine learning algorithms to hunt for tiny market discrepancies they could exploit. The investment funds Simons started made extraordinary profits - so is this the end for human emotions in financial trading? See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.