98 Fun Facts About Business

How much was graphic design student Carolyn Davidson paid in 1971 for creating the Nike Swoosh?

$35 covered the hours she billed at $2 an hour; Phil Knight said he didn't love the logo but it might grow on him, and in 1983 he thanked her with a diamond Swoosh ring and 500 Nike shares.

Under what name did Jeff Bezos originally found Amazon in July 1994?

Cadabra, a name with a magical ring, lasted only a few months: Bezos dropped it after his lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver', and chose Amazon instead.

Google's name is a play on googol, the number 1 followed by how many zeros?

100 zeros make a googol, a word said to have been invented by a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew; the search engine itself had first been called BackRub.

Nike was founded in 1964 by Phil Knight and his coach Bill Bowerman under what name?

Blue Ribbon Sports began by importing Onitsuka Tiger running shoes, which Knight sold at track meets from his car; the Nike name, after the goddess of victory, came in 1971.

Which kitchen appliance did Bill Bowerman use to mould a new grippy sole for Nike running shoes?

A waffle iron gave Bowerman the idea over breakfast with his wife; the 1972 'Moon Shoe' that followed was so named because its tread was said to resemble astronauts' footprints on the Moon.

Which third Apple co-founder sold his stake back for $800 within two weeks of the company's 1976 founding?

Ronald Wayne drew Apple's first logo and drafted the partnership papers, then pulled out in under two weeks: burned by debts from a failed slot-machine business, he feared being liable for the new firm's.

Who led Apple when it became the first US company valued at over $1 trillion in 2018?

Tim Cook took over six weeks before Steve Jobs died in 2011; the trillion-dollar mark came 21 years after Apple had needed a $150 million investment from arch-rival Microsoft.

Which company did Fusajiro Yamauchi found in Kyoto in 1889 to make hanafuda playing cards?

Nintendo stuck to playing cards for some 70 years, then tried a taxi company and instant rice in the 1960s before toys, and later video games, took over.

IKEA is an acronym of founder Ingvar Kamprad's initials plus what?

His family farm and home village, Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd, supply the E and the A; Kamprad founded IKEA at 17 to sell things like picture frames and nylon stockings, adding furniture only five years later.

The name Lego derives from a Danish phrase meaning what?

Play well is 'leg godt' in Danish, which Ole Kirk Christiansen shortened to Lego in 1934; only later did he learn that lego can also be read in Latin as 'I put together'.

Which mobile phone maker began in 1865 as a riverside pulp mill and later moved into rubber and cables?

Nokia takes its name from the Finnish town where founder Fredrik Idestam built his second mill, drawn by the stronger river there; rubber and cables came long before phones.

Which South Korean conglomerate began in 1938 as a small firm trading dried fish and noodles?

Samsung, 'three stars' in Korean, moved from Lee Byung-chul's grocery trade into sugar refining after the Korean War, and only entered electronics in 1969.

Which carmaker began as part of a family loom firm and changed one letter of the family name?

Toyota was Toyoda until a 1936 logo contest that drew 27,000 entries; the new spelling is said to have appealed partly because it takes eight brush strokes, a lucky number, to write.

Which Seattle landmark is home to the store known as the Original Starbucks?

Pike Place Market has housed the store since 1976, when Starbucks moved from its first shop on nearby Western Avenue; for its first decade the firm sold coffee beans, not drinks.

Microsoft was founded in 1975 to sell BASIC interpreters for which early microcomputer?

The Altair 8800 was a machine Gates and Allen had never touched when they wrote its BASIC; Allen finished the loader on the flight to Albuquerque, and only at the maker's demo did they learn it worked.

Before Warren Buffett took control in 1965, Berkshire Hathaway was what kind of business?

A textile manufacturer in decline, it was meant as a quick trade; when its boss shaved an eighth of a dollar off an agreed buyback price, Buffett bought control out of spite, and later called it his dumbest purchase.

In which city was Warren Buffett born in 1930, giving him his famous nickname?

Omaha kept its 'Oracle': the house Buffett bought there in 1958 for $31,500 stayed his home even as he became one of the richest people in the world.

Which company introduced the first moving assembly line for cars in 1913 at its Highland Park factory?

Ford's moving line cut the time to build a Model T from more than 12 hours to about 93 minutes, and the savings let the touring car's price fall from $850 in 1908 to under $300 by 1925.

The 1792 pact among 24 brokers that gave rise to the New York Stock Exchange is named after what?

A buttonwood tree in lower Manhattan is where legend puts the signing; the brokers agreed to deal only with each other and to charge a fixed commission, cutting out the auctioneers.

Which stock market opened in 1971 as the world's first electronic exchange?

Nasdaq began as a screen-based quotation system: dealers' prices appeared on terminals, but trades were still agreed by telephone until electronic execution arrived in 1984.

Which US president was under eight months into office when Wall Street crashed in October 1929?

Herbert Hoover answered Black Tuesday by urging business leaders not to cut wages, expecting a short recession; instead the Depression deepened, and he lost the 1932 election to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Which accounting firm was dissolved after the 2001 Enron scandal?

Arthur Andersen was convicted in 2002 of obstruction for shredding Enron audit papers; the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the verdict three years later, too late to save the firm.

Which firm made the largest bankruptcy filing in US history on September 15, 2008?

Lehman Brothers failed with more than $600 billion in assets after being told there would be no government bailout; the very next day the Federal Reserve stepped in to support the insurer AIG.

What is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble in history?

Tulip mania ended early in 1637, when prices for rare bulbs collapsed almost overnight; historians now think later storytellers exaggerated the ruin it caused.

Which trading firm, established in 1602, is often called the first multinational?

The Dutch East India Company could build forts, keep its own armed forces and make treaties with foreign rulers; trading in its shares grew into the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.

Exxon and Chevron descend from which company, broken up in 1911?

Standard Oil was ruled an illegal monopoly, yet the breakup made John D. Rockefeller richer, because shares in the separate companies soon climbed in value.

George Eastman chose the name Kodak in 1888 partly because of his fondness for which letter?

K was Eastman's favourite, 'a strong, incisive sort of letter'; he said he tried out combinations of letters until he had a short word that both started and ended with it.

In 2000, Blockbuster turned down the chance to buy Netflix for how much?

$50 million was the asking price when Netflix's founders pitched Blockbuster in 2000; the video chain passed, and ten years later it was the one filing for bankruptcy.

Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph as what kind of service?

DVD rental by mail began with a test: the founders posted a music CD in a greeting-card envelope to see whether a disc would survive the post, and it arrived the next day unharmed.

Which company topped the very first Fortune 500 list in 1955?

General Motors led a list dominated by manufacturers and oil companies; 54 years later the one-time number one filed for bankruptcy and needed a government rescue.

Walmart opened its first store in 1962 in the town of Rogers, in which US state?

Arkansas suited Sam Walton's plan of putting big discount stores in rural towns where larger chains did not compete; he had run a five-and-dime in nearby Bentonville, which became the company's headquarters.

Elon Musk joined Tesla in 2004, the year after it was founded, by leading its first funding round and taking which role?

Chairman was Musk's first Tesla title; founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning ran the company, and Musk became chief executive only in 2008, after three others had held the job.

Which Chinese e-commerce company raised $25 billion in New York in 2014, then the largest share listing in history?

Alibaba's record stood until Saudi Aramco's flotation in 2019; Jack Ma, a former English teacher, had started the firm in his Hangzhou apartment 15 years before the listing.

Which sportswear brand did Rudolf Dassler found after falling out with his brother Adi, the founder of Adidas?

Puma set up across the river from Adidas in the small Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach, and the feud split the town so deeply that locals were said to check a stranger's shoes before talking.

How much starting capital did Hewlett and Packard have in their Palo Alto garage in 1938?

$538 was all they had; a coin toss put Hewlett's name first, and an early customer was Walt Disney's studio, which bought eight of their audio oscillators for the making of Fantasia.

Which swindler's 1920 Boston scheme promised 50% profit in 45 days from trading international postal reply coupons?

Charles Ponzi paid his early investors not from coupon profits but with money from later ones, the kind of fraud that has carried his name ever since.

Which 1776 book by Adam Smith is regarded as the founding text of modern economics?

The Wealth of Nations opens in a pin factory, where dividing the work lets ten people make 48,000 pins a day when each alone might manage one; its famous 'invisible hand' appears only once.

Shark Tank is the US version of Dragons' Den, which itself remade a show from which country?

Japan's Nippon TV launched the format in 2001 as The Tigers of Money; the investors became dragons in Britain and sharks in the American version, which reached ABC in 2009.

Brownie Wise built Tupperware's 1950s boom on which selling method?

Home parties worked because buyers needed to be shown how to 'burp' the airtight seal; Tupperware was pulled from shops in 1951, yet Earl Tupper abruptly fired Wise seven years later.

How long was Bernie Madoff's federal prison sentence?

150 years was the maximum the law allowed for his eleven crimes; Madoff had been arrested after his own sons reported him to the authorities.

In which California city did Richard and Maurice McDonald open the original McDonald's in 1940?

San Bernardino's drive-in sold barbecue until 1948, when the brothers rebuilt it around a nine-item menu led by a 15-cent hamburger and a streamlined system for making it fast.

Reporter John Carreyrou exposed Theranos in 2015 for which newspaper?

The Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos ran its blood tests on other firms' conventional machines rather than its own Edison device; by 2018 the company had been wound up, leaving investors with nothing.

Art Fry's idea for the Post-it note came from wanting page markers that stayed put in what?

His hymn book kept shedding its paper markers when he sang in his church choir, so Fry tried a weak glue that colleague Spencer Silver had spent five years failing to find a use for.

Zara's founder first named his shop after which 1964 film?

Zorba the Greek gave the shop its first name, but a business nearby was already called Zorba; with the sign's letter moulds already made, Amancio Ortega rearranged them to spell Zara.

Which milkshake-mixer salesman opened his first McDonald's franchise in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955?

Ray Kroc went to see the McDonald brothers because their one drive-in used eight of his mixers; he bought them out in 1961 for $2.7 million and built the worldwide chain.

Madoff funded his 1960 brokerage with $5,000 earned as a lifeguard and installing what?

He also borrowed $50,000 from his father-in-law, accountant Saul Alpern, who referred a circle of friends as early clients.

Britain's Bubble Act 1720 banned forming joint-stock companies without what?

A royal charter became the gate at the urging of the South Sea Company, which is thought to have wanted rival ventures shut out; its own shares collapsed that year, yet the ban lasted until 1825.

Which company's sticky notes struggled in 1977 test markets as Press 'n Peel before a free-sample blitz in Boise rescued them?

3M found that people had to try the notes to want them: about 90% of those handed free samples in Boise said they would buy, and Post-it notes went on sale across America in 1980.

Play-Doh was first made in 1930s Cincinnati as a putty for cleaning coal soot off what?

Wallpaper was the target: the grocer Kroger wanted a putty to lift coal residue from it. When demand for cleaning putty shrank after World War II, it was reworked as a modeling compound for schools.

The insurance market Lloyd's of London began in the 1680s in what kind of establishment?

A coffee house on Tower Street, owned by Edward Lloyd, drew ship owners and merchants trading news. It soon became the recognised place to buy marine insurance.

Which tire maker began publishing a restaurant and hotel guide in 1900 to encourage motorists to drive more?

Michelin launched the guide when France had fewer than 3,000 cars on its roads. More driving meant more demand for cars, and so for the tires the two founding brothers sold.

Which soft drink was created in wartime Germany after an embargo cut off supplies of Coca-Cola syrup?

Fanta was devised by Max Keith, head of Coca-Cola's German arm, from what he could still get: sugar beet, whey and apple pomace.

The first product scanned with a UPC barcode at a checkout, in Ohio in 1974, was a pack of what?

Chewing gum made retail history at a Marsh supermarket in Troy: a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit was scanned at 8:01 a.m. on 26 June 1974.

On Wall Street, a market that falls 20% or more from its peak is named after which animal?

Bear markets take their name from the 'bear-skin jobbers' of 18th-century London, traders who sold a bear's skin before catching the bear, meaning shares they did not yet own.

Ferruccio Lamborghini made his money building which machines before founding his sports car company in 1963?

Tractors came first: Ferruccio founded Lamborghini Trattori in 1948, and also made boilers and air conditioners before turning to supercars.

The convenience store chain 7-Eleven, once called Tote'm Stores, took its new name in 1946 from what?

Its opening hours gave the chain its name: stores began trading from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week, which was unprecedented at the time.

The energy drink Red Bull was adapted in the 1980s from Krating Daeng, a tonic first sold in which country?

Thailand is where Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz tried Krating Daeng in 1982 and found it cured his jet lag. The original was popular with truck drivers and laborers.

Ruth Handler named which Mattel doll, launched at a New York toy fair in 1959, after her own daughter?

Barbie was named after Barbara Handler, who reportedly hated being known as the inspiration. The design borrowed from a German doll, Bild Lilli, that Ruth Handler found on a trip to Europe.

The shopping day Black Friday got its modern meaning from police describing traffic chaos in which US city?

Philadelphia police used the phrase for the crowds and jams that opened the Christmas shopping season. In 1961 the city's merchants tried to rebrand the day 'Big Friday', and it flopped.

Which brewery's managing director dreamed up a famous book of records after an argument on a 1951 shooting trip?

Guinness boss Sir Hugh Beaver missed a golden plover, then argued over which game bird was Europe's fastest. He wanted a book that could settle such rows in pubs, and it first appeared in 1955.

Colonel Sanders sold the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in 1952 to a restaurant owner in which state?

Utah got there first: restaurant owner Pete Harman took the recipe, and his sign painter coined the name Kentucky Fried Chicken. Harman also introduced the cardboard bucket in 1957.

Which device did Kodak engineer Steven Sasson build in 1975, decades before it overtook film?

A digital camera, the first self-contained handheld one, came out of Sasson's lab at Kodak. The prototype was not shown to the public until a company presentation in 2000.

Wall Street is named after a defensive wall put up in 1653 by colonists from which European country?

The Netherlands ran the colony, then called New Amsterdam, and Peter Stuyvesant ordered a wooden palisade against an English attack by land. The wall came down in 1699.

The coffee chain Starbucks borrowed its name from the chief mate in which American novel?

Moby-Dick supplied Starbuck, the chief mate, though co-founder Gordon Bowker called the link coincidental: the founders mainly liked how the name sounded.

At which university did Mark Zuckerberg launch Facebook in 2004, at first for fellow students only?

Harvard students were the only people allowed to join at first. A year earlier Zuckerberg had built a site called Facemash there, and the new one began life as TheFacebook.

Which food company adopted the slogan '57 Varieties' in 1896, when it already sold more than 60 products?

Heinz chose the number although the true count was higher, and the reason for 57 is still unclear. The first product promoted under the slogan was prepared horseradish.

Which product was the only thing Amazon sold when its website went live in July 1995?

Books were the whole catalogue at first, sourced directly from wholesalers and publishers. The company later began its international operations by buying online booksellers in the UK and Germany.

Which photo-sharing app began development in San Francisco as Burbn, a mobile check-in app?

Instagram grew out of Burbn, built by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Systrom closed a $500,000 seed funding round in March 2010 while still working on the check-in version.

The word 'salary' comes from the Latin 'salarium', which is rooted in the Latin word for which commodity?

Salt gives us 'salary': the Latin 'salarium' is said to have begun as a soldier's allowance for buying it. Rome's Via Salaria was the road the Sabines used to fetch sea salt.

The word 'bankrupt' comes from the Italian 'banca rotta', which literally means a broken what?

Bench is the literal sense: a 'banca' was a moneylender's bench or shop. The tale that failed lenders had theirs smashed is probably a figure of speech, not a real custom.

The term 'blue chip', used for large and reliable companies, comes from which game?

Poker gave the stock market the phrase: in the simplest American chip sets, the blue chips are worth more than the white and the red ones.

Venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined which nickname in 2013 for a private startup valued at over $1 billion?

Unicorn was her choice because the mythical animal captured how rare such startups were. Those valued at over $10 billion have since been dubbed decacorns.

In a SWOT analysis, what does the T stand for, alongside strengths, weaknesses and opportunities?

Threats are outside factors that could cause trouble, and like opportunities they count as external. Strengths and weaknesses make up the internal half of the grid.

In E. Jerome McCarthy's '4 Ps' of marketing, which P joins product, price and place?

Promotion completes McCarthy's set. Service marketers later stretched the list to 7 Ps by adding people, process and physical evidence.

The term 'angel investor' first described wealthy backers who kept struggling productions alive in which industry?

Broadway theater producers called their wealthy rescuers angels, because the money saved shows that would otherwise have had to shut down. The label later moved to startup funding.

The word 'boycott' comes from Charles Boycott, an English land agent shunned by a whole community in which country?

Ireland's County Mayo was the scene: Boycott ran Lord Erne's estate near Lough Mask until locals ostracized him in 1880, and he left the country that December.

The Latin maxim 'caveat emptor' tells which party in a sale to beware?

The buyer is the one warned: the phrase means 'let the buyer beware'. Its mirror image, 'caveat venditor', shifts the burden to the person selling.

Which Franciscan friar, a collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci, is called the father of accounting for a 1494 book?

Luca Pacioli published one of the first printed descriptions of double-entry bookkeeping, the method Venetian merchants already used, inside a math textbook issued in Venice.

YouTube was founded in 2005 by three former employees of which technology company?

PayPal alumni Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim started the video site after growing wealthy when eBay bought their old employer.

Which animation studio was spun off from Lucasfilm's computer division in 1986 with funding from Steve Jobs?

Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group inside Lucasfilm. Jobs became its majority shareholder when it was set up as a separate corporation seven years later.

Andrew Carnegie made his fortune in which industry before paying for public libraries across the United States?

Steel made Carnegie one of the richest Americans in history. His giving was inspired by a colonel who opened a personal library of 400 volumes to working boys every Saturday night.

Madam C. J. Walker, often cited as America's first self-made woman millionaire, built her fortune selling what?

Hair care products for Black women were her line, prompted by her own scalp ailments and hair loss. She first learned the trade from her brothers, who were barbers.

James Dyson went through about 5,127 prototypes over five years before launching which household product in 1983?

A vacuum cleaner, the G-Force, was the result. Dyson was partly supported through those years by his wife's pay as an art teacher.

FedEx founder Fred Smith once took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 playing what?

Blackjack winnings covered a $24,000 fuel bill after a crucial loan was turned down, which kept the young delivery company going.

Which brother co-founded the Disney studio with Walt Disney in 1923 and looked after its finances?

Roy was recovering from tuberculosis in a Los Angeles veterans' home when Walt turned up late one night to ask for help starting a cartoon studio.

Airbnb's founders raised $30,000 in 2008 selling novelty boxes of what, named after Barack Obama and John McCain?

Breakfast cereal, sold mostly at the Democratic National Convention, brought in the cash. Soon afterwards Paul Graham invited the founders into his Y Combinator incubator.

The e-commerce platform Shopify grew out of an online store its founders built in 2004 to sell what?

Snowboarding gear was the product, sold through a shop called Snowdevil. Tobias Lütke built the store's software himself in two months, and it was relaunched as a platform in 2006.

Which British bank installed a pioneering cash machine at its Enfield branch in north London in June 1967?

Barclays beat a machine from Sweden's savings banks into service by just nine days. A rival system at Westminster Bank followed a month later.

Which car maker's logo of four linked rings stands for the four firms that merged in 1932 as Auto Union?

Audi shared the badge with Horch, DKW and Wanderer, the other three firms in the merger. Volkswagen revived the Audi name in 1965 after buying Auto Union.

Which car brand's name means 'I roll' in Latin and was first registered as a trademark for ball bearings?

Volvo was coined by the Swedish bearing maker SKF, which dropped the idea and used its own initials instead. The name came back in the 1920s, when car building began within the SKF group.

The German car maker BMW started out during World War I producing what?

Aircraft engines for the German air force were BMW's first products. The name dates from 1917, when Rapp Motorenwerke was renamed Bayerische Motoren Werke.

Which technology company, founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, is nicknamed 'Big Blue'?

IBM's nickname is usually traced to its blue logo and to an old unofficial dress code of white shirts with blue suits. The clumsy original name was dropped in 1924.

Which company did engineer Martin Cooper work for when he made the first public call from a handheld cell phone in 1973?

Motorola's Martin Cooper rang his counterpart at rival Bell Labs from a Manhattan sidewalk. It took his team ten more years to bring the phone to market.

The initials of South Korea's LG come from a 1983 merger of the electronics firm GoldStar with which company?

Lucky began in 1947 with Lucky Cream, the first Korean make-up cream, and later moved into plastics. GoldStar went on to produce South Korea's first radio.

The candy maker Haribo takes its name from founder Hans Riegel and which German city, where it began?

Bonn supplies the last two letters: Ha-ri-bo is short for Hans Riegel Bonn. The firm began in the city's Kessenich district.

Which English brewery's red triangle became the first trade mark registered under Britain's 1875 trade mark law?

Bass, legend has it, had an employee queue overnight on New Year's Eve to be first in line when the register opened in 1876. The triangle marked its pale ale.

The board game Monopoly was inspired by The Landlord's Game, patented in 1904 by which inventor?

Elizabeth Magie designed it to teach the land-tax ideas of Georgism, hoping children who played would learn to be suspicious of unfairness.

Which workplace chat app began as an internal tool at Tiny Speck, a studio building an online game called Glitch?

Slack outlived the game it was built for: by late 2012 founder Stewart Butterfield had realized that Glitch was never going to be profitable.