The 300-Year American Entrepreneurial Miracle of the Modern Age
A miracle that brought the world the steamboat, the revolver, the sewing machine, blue jeans, the telephone, the light bulb, the electrification of the world, air conditioning,
airplanes, refrigeration, the photocopy machine, personal computers, the internet, social media, and e-commerce.
But the American Entrepreneurial Miracle of the Modern Age is also a story of individual men and women who made America great and forever changed the world.
This 14-part series brings together the remarkable history of American business excellence,
economic world dominance, and individual achievement.
Hello, I'm Dr. Alphonse Kiesli and welcome to the 13th program of American Entrepreneurial Genes. While American entrepreneurs have changed little since the founding of the country, the businesses they have built have evolved and changed a great deal.
American entrepreneurs have not only responded to the economic demands of the world, but created the future in the process of establishing their businesses.
In this episode, America becomes the unparalleled leader of the Information Age.
Pleasant Roland showed us how to make socially conscious toys a business success.
The true genius behind America's phenomenal success in the world of nations is its incredible skill at building businesses.
The United States has always been a nation of entrepreneurs. From work and tile shipping at its founding, through its industrialization and transportation booms of the 19th century, to the present-day Information Age, entrepreneurs have moved the country to the head of the economic pack.
And the pinnacle of entrepreneurialism is the creation of a brand name.
Rockefeller and Standard Oil, DuPont and Chemicals, Sam Walton and Walmart, and Pleasant Roland and American Girl.
American Girl is the greatest entrepreneurial accomplishment for women the nation has ever seen.
From the beginning of the United States, women have always had a hand in the economy.
Enterprise women started cottage industries, ran hotels and stores, and created thousands of products for both men and women.
However, the story of American women and businesses only recently coming to light.
One of the most remarkable of these success stories is Pleasant Roland and the creation of American Girl.
At the core of American Girl is a collection of beautifully crafted dolls.
Each doll comes from a particular time in American history.
Each doll comes with history, a family, and a variety of products and books associated with her.
They uniquely combine American history, education, and play.
Pleasant Roland was born in 1941, grew up in Chicago, and graduated from Wells College in 1962.
After a varied career that included teaching, testbook writing, television news reporting, and publishing,
in 1985 Roland created Pleasant Company as a way to educate and entertain girls with quality books,
dolls, and toys that would enhance the learning and the play experience while emphasizing important traditional values.
Since then, American Girl has become one of the nation's most recognized brands,
with a loyal following of millions of girls and the praise and trust of parents and educators.
Using only word of mouth and direct marketing via catalog, American Girl sold $1.7 million a product in its first year.
But the next year, the number rose to $7 million, and was soon growing by $50 million a year.
In 1998, Roland sold American Girl to Mattel, the owner of the Barbie line of dolls for more than $700 million.
By 2005, with sales reaching $430 million, American Girl was second only to Barbie as the most popular doll brand in America.
Like Roland, many American women have been attracted to entrepreneurship and business since the 70s.
At that time, women owned businesses were 4% of the U.S. economy.
At the start of the 21st century, the number had grown by 40%, accounting for $4 trillion in sales and employing 27 million workers.
As for Pleasant Roland, the next phase of her life, like many successful entrepreneurs before her, is now focused on philanthropy.
Google, Facebook, and Apple are the iconic American entrepreneurial companies of the Information Age. Their stories and the stories of their founders make up the next three chapters.
It's ultra portable, and I book is really portable, but this is ultra portable.
And let me show you what I mean. iPod is the size of a deck of cards.
This amazing little device holds a thousand songs, and it goes right in my pocket.
This amazing combination of hardware and software was the singular vision of one man, Stephen Jobs.
On October 23, 2001, Jobs and his company, Apple, brought the digital revolution and portability together and changed the world.
Born on February 24, 1955, Stephen Jobs is one in a long line of visionary American entrepreneurs, whose innovations have transformed the country over the last 300 years.
Men like Robert Fulton in the steamboat, John Deere in the steel plow, Henry Ford and the automobile.
Jobs began his remarkable series of innovations when he co-founded Apple Computer in 1976.
This was followed by inventing a user-friendly graphic interface between the computer and the user.
The Macintosh computer, using a mouse for the first time, debuted in 1984.
On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh, and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.
However, in 1985, following a long power struggle, Jobs was forced out of Apple.
Ever the innovator and entrepreneur, Jobs took on a new challenge. He initiated the development of the visual effects industry when, in 1986, he funded the spin-off of the computer graphics division of George Lucas's company, Lucasfilm.
The new company, Pixar, would eventually produce the first fully computer animated film, Toy Story, an event made possible in part because of Jobs' financial support and drive.
The success, though, was not enough for Jobs.
His goal had always been to make the digital world accessible and usable for everyone by inventing beautiful machines.
This is exactly what Jobs did after returning to Apple in 1997.
He began with the iMac in 1998.
Three years later, he introduced the innovative and market-transforming iPod.
The iPod allowed people to carry their entire music collection in one device.
They could either copy their already existing music CDs, or through Apple's iTunes Store, buy additional songs.
Four years later, video capability was added to the iPod.
Using Apple's video format quick time, people could now watch TV shows or home videos in the palm of their hand.
Like the 1950s paperback books, which made books portable, the iPod put music, radio, and video programs at your fingertips, at any time, at any place.
Throughout the decade, the iPod's concept of ultra-portability would trickle through every aspect of American culture.
Cell phones would soon offer users the possibility of access to all the information on the Internet.
In 2003, Jobs told Apple executives that he believed the cell phone would become the most important device for portable information access.
Four years later, on June 29, 2007, Apple launched the iPhone.
It built on the iPod and iTunes software and hardware.
Jobs and Apple brilliantly designed the user interface, making the iPhone work like a portable computer.
Access full-page views of the Internet.
Send and receive emails.
Make text messaging easier.
Eventually run thousands of applications.
And of course, make phone calls.
However, Jobs wasn't done innovating.
On April 3, 2010, Apple released an iOS-based line of tablet computers.
The user interface was built around the device's multi-touch screen, including a virtual keyboard.
The iPad includes built-in Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity on select models.
An iPad can shoot video, take photos, play music, and perform Internet functions such as web browsing and emailing.
That's what it looks like.
This first-of-its-kind device brought the future of science fiction to the present day.
Portable digital devices have changed the way Americans act, think, and handle their lives.
Americans are free to go anywhere, do anything, and have at their fingertips information, entertainment, and communication with work and loved ones.
Sadly, Steve Jobs, perhaps America's greatest entrepreneur, died on October 5, 2011, at the young age of 56.
The whole world mourned his passing.
The horizon for digital portability is unlimited thanks to American entrepreneur Steve Jobs.
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At the opening of the 1990s, computers and the Internet offered unlimited opportunities for people with the skills and drive to exploit the information superhighway.
And Jewish Americans were ready to seize those opportunities.
It started early with entrepreneurs like Larry Ellison, who founded Oracle, the world's largest enterprise software company in 1977.
Then, in 1996, Sergey Brin founded Google.
In the 21st century, the Internet would take a new tack.
Virtual social networking.
Using cyberspace, virtual social networking enables people to expand friendships, business partnerships, and acquaintances into online virtual communities.
And once again, Jewish Americans would take the lead in creating this powerful new Internet interface.
None more than Jewish American Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.
Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York.
It was while he was a sophomore at Harvard University, that he came up with a revolutionary idea of Facebook.
It began, curiously enough, as a prank.
In October 2002, Zuckerberg created a social networking site he called Face Mash.
It placed two Harvard students' photos next to each other and asked users to choose the hotter person.
Harvard officials removed Face Mash and reprimanded Zuckerberg, but Facebook was born.
Zuckerberg, with fellow entrepreneurs Dustin Moskowitz, and Chris Hughes, launched Facebook four months later in February 2003.
On the Facebook website, members can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with others who share their interests.
In 2008, Facebook became the largest social networking website in the world.
It has been larger, and we're now at more than two-thirds international, and you can take a look at where people are here.
For Zuckerberg, Facebook has an altruistic mission.
So Facebook's mission, and the mission of the whole community, is to give people the power to share in order to make the world more open and connected.
In succeeding decades of the 21st century, Zuckerberg's goal is simple, the whole world being networked together.
As time goes on, less of this movement is going to be about the site Facebook.com, and more of it is going to be about other people's apps and the experiences that we're all building together.
As the internet expands, and more opportunities arise to use it to improve the planet, increase communication, and make the world a safer, better place.
Jewish Americans' commitment to education, drive for excellence and compassion for all people, will undoubtedly place them at the center of the new businesses in the 21st century.
They will walk in the footprints of brilliant men like Ellison, Bryn, and Zuckerberg.
At the start of the 21st century, the word "Google" suddenly appeared everywhere.
It was a new word that entered the world's vocabulary with unimaginable swiftness.
Behind Googling is a remarkable American company, Google.
Over the last 150 years, America has had a long history of successful corporations, standard oil, Ford, AT&T, General Electric, GM,
Boeing, and Microsoft.
Each has defined an era's business model.
Each has defined an era's successful corporate culture, a corporate culture that has also defined America.
And in doing so, these corporations have made America the world's economic leader with their hard-nosed, tough approach to business.
But in the first decade of the 21st century, a new kid appeared on the block, Googling Corporation.
Google tapped into the basic foundation of the 21st century's information age by making it possible to bring all the world's information to everybody for free.
As a result, Google has become the leader of the American corporate world in the first decade of the 21st century.
And in doing so, it has stood the American business model on its head.
Google is the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
In January 1996, Page and Brin PhD candidates at Stanford University
decided to develop a more efficient internet search engine,
one that produced a better ranking of web pages than existing search engines.
Instead of relying on the outdated concept of editor's choices, or on the frequency with which certain terms appear,
Google relies on the millions of people using the web.
In other words, Google empowered the people who actually used the internet and democratized the web.
It was a brilliant design that changed the speed of finding information on the web from slow to warp speed.
And for the first time, Google made it possible to bring all the world's information to everybody.
And they did it for free.
The way Google did it for free was another brilliant idea.
Google saw text-based advertising that was directly associated with an individual's key search words.
Text-based advertising loads fast, much faster than graphic led ads on other search engines.
And it creates an uncluttered page that is easy to read and navigate.
In doing so, Page and Brin monetized the internet in a breakthrough way.
Google's ad revenues shot through the roof.
By 2008, the company had 21.8 billion in revenue with 6.63 billion in profits.
In 2004, Google went public.
And three years later, hit a huge milestone.
It became the most used search engine on the web.
Google achieved the highest tier of American business.
It completely dominated its industry.
Indeed, not since Microsoft in the 1980s, had any American corporation dominated the competition the way Google did.
Google achieved dominance because it does not do business as usual.
Google's corporate philosophy has a Zen-like quality not found anywhere else.
Never settle for the best.
As Google co-founder Larry Page explains,
"The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want."
This is Google's goal.
While Google has been changing the corporate world's way of thinking, it has also been changing the way it works.
To begin with, Google has cultivated an informal work culture with a saying, "You can be serious without a suit."
And in 2007 and 2008, Fortune Magazine placed Google at the top of its hundred best places to work.
But perhaps its greatest innovation in corporate culture has been its two mantras.
Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun.
And you can make money without doing evil.
Expanding on its goal of making all information available to everyone,
it purchased YouTube, an online video sharing website, in 2006 for $1.65 billion.
Indeed, Google, an American company, is changing the world faster than any innovative technology in history.
While at the same time changing American corporate culture from its narrow-minded focus on the bottom line,
to the philosophy of "do no evil" and change the planet for the better.
But I feel like we should not only congratulate these technologies on how good they are for the environment,
but also how much they improve our quality of life.
In the final program of American entrepreneurial genius,
the new American entrepreneur becomes the decisive heroic figure in the American economy.
Thanks for watching. I'm Dr. Alphonse Keesley.
Thank you.
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