Tidbits

Kazem Khosrowshahi was an Iranian Minster of Commerce who pursued MBA from Harvard and had Ph.d in Economics and Law. Later, his business suffered a major setback with almost $500 million confiscated during Iranian Revolution.

His children lifted the mantle to new heights. Hassan started Future Shop that was later acquired by Best Buy for $580 million. His children Behzad founded DRI Healthcare and Golnar became the founder of Reservoir Media Management. Firouz pursued Ph.D in Physics, Shahram went onto become CEO for 4 companies including Arbor Labs. His children Ali and Hadi co-founded Code.Org, Ali was also the CEO of Neo. Hadi also became an advisor to FB and Dropbox.

Sharam’s son, Darian would become the first intern hired by Facebook in early 2000s. Shahram’s nephews/nieces - Avid Larizadeh became the MD of Google Ventures, Farzad became the CTO of Notion and sold a company to Google that became Google Sheets, Amir sold a company to Intel named Nervana.

Kazem’s second child Azhar’s children - Mehrad became the COo of OceanX, Kaveh became the MD of Allen and Company Investment group and Dara, whoops go onto lead as CEO of Expedia and Uber.

The man who eventually identified the accused, Ross Ulbritch, who had been FBI Most wanted Man for 2 years+ was Gary Alford, the IRS officer. The most amazing thing was that Gary used Google search to do his job.

Gary’s habit was to read every document two times strictly. According to him, he remembered the stuff well and was able to decipher the information better. He started hunting down information from online chat forums regarding the chatter about Silk Road, the Dark Web market for Drugs that did a million dollar business a year.

He came across a user “altoid” who first talked about the website. After inspection, Gary discovered a chat reply from 2011, where the person used his personal email as a contact. And that’s how Gary hit the bullseye which the DEA and FBI had been trying to do after spending millions of dollars of tax money!

But as Roman kingdoms fell, and trade routes disrupted, it disappeared & remained a staple diet with Southeast Asia. By 16th century, Chinese merchants transported the recipe back to mainland called “ke-chiap”.

Dutch and British colonisers transported back this recipe which was a mass hit. Fish was substituted with any local flavours that could give the dark pasty. By 1800s, the recipe had been perfected with a tomato paste by James Maese.

By 1876, John Heinz developed the famous Heinz ketchup with salt and vinegar and sugar that remains to this day!

This all started in 1980s when Apple took out an open letter when IBM launched its PC to Apple’s Lisa. Though it couldn’t cater to home desktops, IBM quickly flourished in enterprise market, having the last laugh.

In 2015, when Apple launched Apple Music, rival to Spotify, a similar startup named Rdio welcomed it through again a sarcastic open letter to Apple. But the punch came when few months later, Rdio filed for bankruptcy - owing to loses with stiff competition from Spotify & Apple.

Andronico Luksic, was one of the wealthiest man in Chile with a net worth of $4.2 billion during the 1960s. He was the founder of the present Luksic group, a Chilean conglomerate with hand in mining, railways, banking, smelting and even fisheries & food processing.

It is said that he arrived in Chile in 1915 as an immigrant & started prospecting about copper mines in the Atacama Desert. He acquired a mine in 1954 but couldn’t develop it and sold it to Japan’s Nippon Steel.

He asked for 500,000 Chilean Pesos (roughly $45,000). The Japanese company misinterpreted it as USD and readily paid him $500,000. And it was game on for Andronico!

MCD entered Russia via Moscow outlet in 1990. It slowly grew and caught on with the rest leading to long line of people waiting to eat its cheesy burgers and fries.

Yet, it had to somehow source 80% of all the 300 or so ingredients needed to keep its outlets running. The fall of Soviet Union had completely decimated the private businesses leading to shortage of raw materials.

So it spent $50 million in building a food factory - McComplex to make the ingredients from scratch. There were 9 production lines that produced various things.

Slowly, the local farmers selling raw ingredients and meat joined in with MCD exclusively outsourcing all of its ingredients to them. This spawned a food industry in itself with dozens of businesses supplying and dealing with processed food products!

Despite its intricate design, it took time before people noticed it.

In 1790s, Napoleon took home the painting at his palace which was later given to Louvre Museum in France. The period saw the emergence of art and fantasy that catapulted men and art lovers to deeply look into Mona Lisa.

Then, in 1911, it was stolen from the museum. It took more than a day before anyone noticed. Pablo Picasso and J P Morgan were both held as suspects to the theft of the painting.

Later it was revealed to be stolen by Vincenzo, a museum worker who for 2 years attempted to sell it but couldn’t and was finally ratted out by a buyer in 1913.

By that time, the painting was so much in news and media, that it ultimately drew visitors from around the world leading to the actual fanfare it has today!

In 1979, Sony and Philip joined hands to cooperate and launch a standard format for the CD market.

It so happened, that a legendary opera conductor - Herbert Von Karajan - wanted to endorse CDs only if it could record the entire Ninth Symphony composition by Beethoven without interruption. Sony found the longest recording of the song at 74 mins - conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1951.

Sony Chairman, Norio Ohga and CEO, Akio Morita urged others to build a format keeping those specifications. A dilemma came between producing an 11.5 cm (Phillip) vs 12 cm (Sony) disc.

Finally, the diametric length was decided to be 12 cm that recorded 74 mins of audio. But, when it was launched, the limit was set to 72 mins. In 1997, the standard of 74 mins was implemented.

The Tokyo-Shinkansen is one of the busiest train routes in the World. This required the trains to be highly reliable and punctual, running at speeds over 220 km/hr.

Eiji Nakatsu was a GM at Japanese Railways. He looked for changes in train design to reduce turbulence and improve speeds. But more speed caused high air drag & loud noise when train passed a tunnel.

Nakatsu was an avid bird watcher. He knew that a Kingfisher dived at high speeds from air to water with streamlined-pointy beak to cut through air & fly smoothly without a noise. This gave an idea.

Using this, he experimented & made design changes in new train - Shinkansen 500 - launched in 1997 that registered a world record speed of 300 km/hr. The design led to 15% reduction of power and kept noise level below 70 DB!

In 2003, Niklas Hed, Kim Dikert & Jarno Väkeväinen built a mobile game - “King of the Cabbage World”. They set up their company, Relude and sold the game, which became one of the first real-time multiplayer games.

By 2005, it renamed to “Rovio” & got Angel funding. They released 50+ games within 6 years but failed to get attention. With rising debt, they were on the verge of shutting down their business.

In 2007, Apple launched iPhone. They decided to focus on iPhone users, brainstormed & hit upon the idea of “Angry Birds”. They worked on it as a side project with budget of €25,000 & launched it in 2009 . The rest is history.

Today, with 3 billion+ downloads, and $300 million in revenues, it has become an icon of the mobile gaming industry!

A. P. Giannini, an immigrant, was Director at Columbia Savings. Till then, banks only catered to rich, ignoring the poor. He urged his bank to help them but in vain.

In 1904, he founded “Bank of Italy” to provide banking services to the needy. Slowly, his business thrived. But later, an earthquake hit the city, causing deaths & damages.

He collected all deposits & resumed his operations from home. He also started the concept of bank branches. In 1928, he bought Bank of America and merged it with his. By 1945, BoA became the largest bank in the US with over $3.2 trillion deposits.

Highly successful, it financed $6 million for construction of Golden Gate Bridge in 1930s, loaned $2 million to Disney to produce Snow White movie & invested in a small startup that later became HP!

By 1980s, McDonald’s was a dominant fast food chain in US & commanded a high market share. Its iconic red & yellow strips on its products was famous.

In 1984, it changed the colour of its straw from red & yellow to brown & yellow. Few months later, fishermen living along the Gulf of Mexico became angry.

Unbeknownst to many, the red & yellow straw was a popular fishing bait used by those fishermen. Its unique colour & design helped them to easily lure and catch “Spanish Mackerel” fishes.

Post change, the fishing produce dipped as the new straw-bait wasn’t effective. In 1985, the Penascola community appealed to McDonald’s to revert back to its original design but in vain.

Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian Chess Teacher, was fascinated by geniuses. From research, he found that giving a young child with intense education in a field can turn them into a future genius.

He married a Ukrainian teacher, Klara and had three daughters - Zsuzsa, Zsofia and Judith. From 1970s, he homeschooled them quite early on in “Chess” for years.

In 1991, Zsusan was one of the youngest woman to become the “Grandmaster”. Zsofia, also became a Chess Grandmaster but retired. Later, Judith broke the Guinness Record for the youngest female Grandmaster (1991) & was in Top 100 list by the age of 12!

In fact, to this day, Laszlo’s experiments are regarded as one of the most amazing experiments in the history of human education!

In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, was researching on strong adhesives. Instead, he found a light & pressure sensitive adhesive that peeled off easily from surfaces without damaging it.

Art Fry, another scientist at 3M, was frustrated for forgetting his Church Choir Songs. He looked for a removable bookmark that easily stuck to a paper. Knowing about Spencer’s research, the two partnered to explore it further.

They developed a product using yellow paper (which became a standard) & wrote notes on it to communicate in offices. Later, the entire company began using it!

In 1980, it debuted in US markets as “Post-It” notes which became highly popular. Today, 3M globally sells 50 billion notes per year!

Jef Raskin was an User Interface expert. He joined Apple as a writer & prepared Programming Manuals and Documentations.

He became a Director & started the “Macintosh Project” in 1980s that led to the development of iMac. During this, he invented the “Drag-and-Drop” feature for PCs.

His son, Aza Raskin, former Mozilla Firefox UI Head, launched Songza app - which was acquired by Google to develop Google Music. Songza also pioneered the design of mindfulness apps.

Aza also invented “Infinite Scrolling” - the most addictive feature used by all social media apps. As an advocate of ethical technology, he coined the phrase - “Freedom of Speech is not Freedom of Reach”.

Feruccio Lamborghini, was a bullfighting enthusiast. His zodiac sign was also Taurus - leading him to name every car he developed to be associated with bulls.

During his tractor business, he bought a Ferrari which had faulty parts. When he offered an idea to make it better, Enzo insulted him.

Feruccio, feeling angry, setup a small plant, quickly gathered former Ferrari engineers and built the first car - 350 GT - within 4 months. The rest is history.

A genius & clever mechanic, he also worked as a vehicle supervisor in the Italian Army. To assert dominance, he read up the manuals and burned them - leaving only him with the knowledge to repair any vehicle.