A teenage blacksmith forging pitons in his parents' backyard in Burbank. A company that told customers not to buy its bestselling product — and watched sales double. A founder who gave away $3 billion to the earth and called it the obvious thing to do. Patagonia is not a conventional company story. It is the story of a reluctant businessman — a French-Canadian kid from Maine, raised in California — who accidentally built one of the most influential companies in American history by consistently doing the thing that every business school would tell you not to do.

# Zoom: The Video Call That Conquered The World

It is April 2020. The entire world is locked inside. Three hundred million people are logging into Zoom meetings every single day. And the company that holds all of it together is under attack — the FBI has issued a public warning, Google has banned it from corporate devices, and the CEO is staring at his screen about to write the most important letter of his life.

This is the story of Eric Yuan: a mining engineer's son from Shandong Province who applied for a U.S. visa eight times and was rejected eight times, who spent fourteen years building someone else's video conferencing product, and who left a safe corporate job at forty-one to start over with forty engineers and a conviction that the world deserved better software.

From the ten-hour train rides that inspired the idea, to the $3M seed round that almost nobody wanted to fund, to the IPO that made Yuan a billionaire on day one, to the single most explosive period of growth in software history — and the security crisis that nearly ended it all — this is the full story of Zoom.

# Rakuten: The Optimism Empire

Full episode content coming soon.

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There is a moment in 1996 that defines everything about the Marvel story. The company that created Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, the X-Men, the Avengers, Thor, Black Panther, and the Hulk — the company that had invented more beloved characters than any other publisher in the history of American fiction — had just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The stock had collapsed from eighteen dollars to twenty-five cents. The toy division was failing. The comics market had imploded. The banks were circling. And the people running the company had sold the movie rights to their best characters to rival studios for whatever cash they could get, prices that would later look like the worst deals in Hollywood history.

This is the story of how that company came back. How it went from bankruptcy to a four-billion-dollar acquisition by Disney. How it built the most successful film franchise in cinema history. And how the people who believed in it — through decades of creative genius, commercial disaster, legal chaos, and financial ruin — were ultimately proven right about something that everyone else had missed: that these characters, if handled with care and intelligence, were worth more than anyone had imagined.

The beginning is not glamorous. In 1939, a man named Martin Goodman was running a pulp magazine business in New York. Goodman was a publisher, not a visionary. He was good at identifying trends and flooding the market with cheap content that chased whatever was selling. When superhero comics started catching on after the debut of Superman in 1938, Goodman decided to try his hand. He founded a company called Timely Comics and hired a young writer named Joe Simon, who brought along his artistic collaborator, a twenty-two-year-old named Jack Kirby. In October 1940, Simon and Kirby created Captain America, a scrawny kid from Brooklyn who gets injected with a super-soldier serum and punches Hitler on the cover of the first issue. It sold close to a mi...

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# Netflix: The Streaming Revolution

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A German pharmacist who moved to Switzerland in 1839 mixed cow's milk and wheat flour to save a dying infant — and inadvertently founded the world's largest food company. From that single moment in 1867, Nestlé grew through relentless acquisition and distribution innovation into a 200-billion-dollar empire operating in 185 countries. Along the way: the invention of milk chocolate, Nescafé, Nespresso, KitKat's transformation into Japan's national good-luck charm, a decades-long infant formula boycott, a CEO fired with no severance for an undisclosed affair, and a global baby food recall unfolding at the same time. The machine is damaged. But the machine is still running.

Coming soon.