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The Rejected Game Console That Accidentally Built the PlayStation: How Sony's Worst Business Deal Became Its Greatest Triumph Before Sony dominated living rooms worldwide, it got publicly humiliated…
Read Article →The Rejected Animated Short That Accidentally Built Pixar: How a Lunch Meeting Changed Movies Forever Before Pixar was a studio, it was a hardware division nobody wanted. Before Toy Story was a…
Read Article →In 1997, Reed Hastings owed Blockbuster $40. He'd rented Apollo 13, forgotten to return it for six weeks, and walked out of the store embarrassed and annoyed. That embarrassment, as he later told it,…
Read Article →You've probably clicked one open today. Maybe you chewed the cap. Chances are there are three buried in a drawer somewhere in your home right now. The Bic Cristal ballpoint pen is the best-selling…
Read Article →In 2013, Philip Krim and four co-founders were pitching a mattress startup to anyone who would listen. Most investors laughed them out of the room. Mattresses, the logic went, were a dinosaur…
Read Article →In April 2010, Kevin Systrom was running out of time and money. His location-sharing app, Burbn, was a cluttered mess of check-ins, points, and social features that nobody could figure out how to…
Read Article →In August 2013, Stewart Butterfield gathered his small team and delivered news that would have crushed most founders: their game was dead. Glitch, a whimsical, browser-based multiplayer game that had…
Read Article →In 1980, three street musicians in Santa Cruz, California, were broke, idealistic, and convinced that the world needed better orange juice. What they built over the next fifteen years would redefine…
Read Article →In the summer of 1994, a 30-year-old hedge fund analyst named Jeff Bezos drove across the country from New York to Seattle in a rented car while his wife MacKenzie took the wheel. He was typing a…
Read Article →In January 2013, four Stanford students set out to build a small business software tool for local merchants. They had no intention of delivering food. Within a decade, their accidental pivot would…
Read Article →In 2005, a mild-mannered programmer named Paul Graham sat down to write a check that would quietly rewrite the rules of Silicon Valley. What happened next wasn't just the birth of a new company — it…
Read Article →In 1889, a young Japanese entrepreneur named Fusajiro Yamauchi began hand-crafting playing cards in Kyoto from the bark of mulberry trees. He had no idea he was laying the foundation for one of the…
Read Article →In early 2005, three former PayPal employees were wrestling with a frustratingly simple problem: they couldn't easily share video clips online. The internet had no good answer. What followed was one…
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