Little-known and surprising stories of how all sorts of institutions began. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks to business professor Pino Audia and Fast Company magazine columnist Dan Heath about corporate creation myths and why so many of them involve garages. (7 minutes)Act One: Sarah Koenig tells the story of her father, Julian Koenig, the legendary advertising copywriter whose work includes the slogan "Timex takes a licking and keeps on ticking" and Volkswagen's "Think Small" ads. For years, Sarah has heard her dad accuse a former partner of stealing some of his best ideas, but until recently, she never paid much attention. Then she started asking her dad for details of this fight for his legacy, and what she learned surprised her. (20 minutes)Act Two: Producer Sean Cole visits Chad's Trading Post in Southampton, Massachusetts. One person who works there wears a shirt that says "Chad's Brother;" other shirts say "Chad's Best Friend," "Chad's Cousin," and "Chad's Father." Pictures of Chad are everywhere. Chad's dead. The family explains. (14 minutes)Act Three: Peter Sagal, host of NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me, tells Ira the origin story of one of the worst movie sequels ever made. (5 minutes)Act Four: Reporter Mary Wiltenburg tells the story of a little boy stymied by the question "Where do you come from?" (8 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.
Why are garages central to corporate creation myths?
Pino Audia teaches in the business school at Dartmouth, and he researches the question, how do entrepreneurs get created? And at some point, he noticed that his students and many of his colleagues actually have an opinion about this. They believe entrepreneurs make themselves. You know, you head off on your own, you write a business plan, you start in your own garage.
And the garage, by the way, is not a metaphorical garage. It is a garage, a literal garage. Hewlett Packard started in a garage. Apple Computer had a garage. Disney, the Mattel Toy Company, the Wham-O Toy Company.
It is about big dreams and humble beginnings and success in the face of adversity and doubters. And also the idea that regardless of who you are, regardless of how humble your beginnings are, you can turn something into an immense success story if you work hard. And that was the point in time in which I got interested in the story of the garage as a myth.
A garage is a place of possibilities. It's a place where things can get invented. and a place where entrepreneurs begin.
This is a promotional video that Hewlett Packard put together after it spent millions to buy and restore the original garage where its two founders started a company that is still one of the largest technology firms in the world.
In 1938, in a garage in Palo Alto, California, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set to work to start a new company. They had a few hand-operated punches, a used Sears Roebuck grill press that had just made the trip west in the back of one of their cars, and they had a rented flat with a garage.
Professor Adia doesn't argue with any of this, but he says that when you ask actual entrepreneurs, and this is true in survey after survey, you find that most of them began not by going off into their garage, but by working for somebody else. making contacts, learning the business.
So this is a very robust finding which tells us that actually if you want to become an entrepreneur, the obvious thing to do is to first go get a job in an industry you're interested in and learn and then eventually later try to create a company.
Even Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard weren't exactly outsiders. They studied electrical engineering at MIT and Stanford. Packard had worked at General Electric. A former professor of theirs from Stanford gave them leads and hooked them up, for example, with a firm called Lytton Engineering, who let them use equipment that they didn't know themselves yet.
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