The Walt Disney Company

Listeners, since there are tons of biographies and documentaries and places analyzing Walt's psyche, we're gonna focus today on Acquired's sweet spot, which is the business. What is it that Walt's merry band did from the 1920s onward that made them succeed uniquely well in Hollywood? And when you look at Disney's profits today, it is in a whole different league than Paramount or Universal or Warner Brothers or any of the other sorta classic Hollywood Disney.

And importantly for Acquired's roots, this really is a technology story. Giant innovations that often bet the whole company on things like synchronized sound, or the crazy idea of a feature-length animated movie at all, or the multiplane camera to photograph the whole thing and turn it into a movie. And they really did invent the entire concept of the flywheel business model that so many entrepreneurs are trying to copy.

Marceline's gonna grow. So Marceline was, like, basically a Disney movie. There's orchards and ponds and animals and farmhouses. But that's getting ahead of ourselves. So while the family's living there, Uncle Robert's wife, Walt's Aunt Maggie, every time that they would come visit Marceline to check up on their real estate investments, she would bring Walt gifts. And one year, when Walt is probably 6 or 7 years old, Aunt Maggie brings him a Big Chief drawing tablet and pencil set, and Walt is enraptured. He starts sketching all the time, drawing, sketching everything he can see. And as the legend goes, one day Walt's retired neighbor asked the young boy to draw him a picture of his favorite horse. And the neighbor loves what Walt draws so much that he pays him a nickel for it and he hangs it in a frame in his house. And Walt, his mind is blown. Young Walt, he's like, my hobby, my art, it can make me money. Now, whatever the exact truth of that story is, there is no doubt that somewhere in Marceline, in prepubesc