Guy Louzon - a Podcast about business

The Dyson story More stuff here: https://guylouzon.substack.com buy me a coffee What does it take to build a billion-pound company? For James Dyson, it took 5,127 failed prototypes, a wife who paid the bills for five years, and an entire industry that said no. This is the full Dyson origin story: how a frustrated vacuum owner in 1978 turned a cardboard cyclone into the bagless vacuum that beat Hoo...

Lego Part 2 More stuff here: https://guylouzon.substack.com/ Buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/guylouzon More sponsored stuff Summary LEGO nearly went bankrupt in 2003 — then engineered one of the most studied brand turnarounds in business history. After a costly innovation binge left the company $800 million in debt, a McKinsey-trained outsider tore the business back down to its core: the...

Prologue: A Carpenter, Three Fires, and a Word Every founding story needs an origin myth, but the LEGO one is unusual in that it’s told almost entirely through disaster. Three separate fires. A world war. A depression. A dead wife. A company that, by any reasonable 1930s standard, should not exist. And yet, out of the wreckage of a small-town Danish carpentry shop comes the best-selling toy brand...

Canva: The Rectangle That Ate the World more stuff here https://guylouzon.substack.com/ Sponsored links here https://rebrand.ly/podcastBP1 How Melanie Perkins Turned a Perth Yearbook Startup Into Canva, a $42 Billion Design Empire In 2007, a 19-year-old Australian university student dropped out to build a yearbook design tool from her mom's living room — and got rejected by over 100 investors befo...

The story of Sandisk ! more stuff here: https://guylouzon.substack.com/ referral link how physicist Eli Harari's invention of the floating-gate EEPROM led to the founding of SunDisk in 1988 and the rise of flash memory. Explore key milestones from CompactFlash and the SD card format wars to the Sansa vs. iPod battle and the $16B Western Digital acquisition, with quotes and anecdotes from the execu...

AppLovin vs. ironSource: How Two Mobile Adtech Rivals Went From the Same Playbook to Opposite Fates more stuff here https://guylouzon.substack.com/ Surprise links here: https://rebrand.ly/podcastBP1 AppLovin and ironSource started as near-identical mobile adtech rivals — founded a year apart, both built through acquisition, both public within months of each other in 2021. Then their paths split. A...

The Booking.com origin story: how founder Geert-Jan Bruinsma built a hotel booking site from his Amsterdam apartment in 1996, survived the dot-com bust, sold to Priceline for $133M, and grew into a $165B travel giant through mobile and global expansion More stuff here https://guylouzon.substack.com/ Semi random stuff here https://rebrand.ly/podcastBP1 This is a public episode. If you would like to...

ServiceNow More stuff here: https://guylouzon.substack.com/ Sponsor link ServiceNow's origin story traces how founder Fred Luddy, rebuilding after enterprise software company Peregrine Systems collapsed in an accounting scandal, built a cloud-based IT service management platform from a spare bedroom in 2004 — years before "cloud" was a mainstream enterprise bet. This deep-dive covers ServiceNow's...

Bending Spoons! More stuff here https://guylouzon.substack.com/ Other things here link Bending Spoons didn't build a hit product — it bought other people's. Founded in Milan in 2013 by four Italian engineers with just $40,000 left over from a failed journaling app, the company turned a $10,000 keyboard-app purchase into a playbook: acquire stalled consumer software, rebuild the tech stack, cut cos...

Nebius origin story: Arkady Volozh's journey from Yandex founder to AI infrastructure billionaire. Explore how EU sanctions, the Ukraine invasion divestiture, and the Finland data center became the foundation for $50B in Microsoft and Meta contracts. The complete history of the AI infrastructure company disrupting cloud computing. More stuff here https://guylouzon.substack.com/ Sponsor link This i...

The Accidental Founders In 1980, Ken Williams was not thinking about starting a video game company. He was working as a programmer at IBM, earning a solid salary, living a comfortable upper-middle-class life in California. He had the kind of job that was supposed to be secure, prestigious, and ultimately, soul-crushing in the way that only corporate programming in the early 1980s could be. His wif...

The FIFA World Cup: How a Frenchman's Obsession Built the World's Most Watched Sporting Event A sponsorhip link ! https://rebrand.ly/podcastBP1 More stuff here https://guylouzon.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com

Prologue: The Accidental Meeting In the autumn of 2004, at a business school mixer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, a woman made a decision that would reshape how millions of companies market their products. She was attending an event that she likely found tedious—the kind of networking function designed to circulate ambitious people past each other for precisely five minutes each. She was Dha...

The origin story of Airbnb is not a story of inevitable success. It is, rather, a story of desperation, creativity, and the willingness of three people to do something slightly insane when their conventional product wasn’t working. It is the story of how a design problem—”how do we pay rent?”—became a multibillion-dollar business that fundamentally reshaped lodging, travel, and the concept of the...

Stack Overflow: The Internet's Most Valuable Accident More stuff here: https://guylouzon.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com

AMD: The Forty-Year Overnight Success ! more stuff here https://guylouzon.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com

Youtube ! More stuff here: Https://guylouzon.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com

IBM: A Century of Dominance, Adaptation, and the Weight of Legacy more stuff here: https://guylouzon.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com

Spotify: How a Swedish Programmer Built the Future of Music by Learning to Say "Yes" to Piracy more stuff here: https://guylouzon.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com

The Rise of Ridesharing: How Uber and Lyft Built the $100B Taxi Disruption more stuff here: https://guylouzon.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com

From snowboards to reinventing e-com: Shopify more interesting stuff here: https://guylouzon.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com

The Story of McDonald's ! more stuff here: https://guylouzon.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com

Harvey: When an O'Melveny Litigator and a DeepMind Researcher Built AI's Most Ambitious Legal Startup more stuff here: https://guylouzon.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com

Nubank: How a Colombian Outsider Built the World's Largest Digital Bank and Is About to Reshape American Banking This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com

How a Failed Game Became a $27.7B Digital Headquarters for the World: The Slack Origin Story This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit guylouzon.substack.com