Acquired
00:00:00 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:00:00] S0: Have I ever shown you my Mickey Mouse impression? [00:00:05] S1: You've done your, Mario impression for me in the past, [00:00:08] S0: but I'm not similar. [00:00:10] S1: Alright. Alright. Give me give me Mickey. Give me Mickey. [00:00:13] S0: Oh, boy. Will you look at that? That [00:00:17] S1: is really good. You sound like Walt himself doing Mickey. [00:00:20] S0: Right? Didn't he do Mickey for, like, twenty years? [00:00:23] S1: Yep. Yep. Yep. He didn't at the very first, and then one of the animators convinced him to do it, and then, yeah, he did it for twenty years. [00:00:30] S0: Have I ever given you my Donald Duck impression? [00:00:33] S1: Oh, wow. Okay. Woah. Now I I'm do I need to sit down for this one? [00:00:36] S0: You you might need to. Alright. Here we go. [00:00:42] S1: Oh, it's about right. It's about right. I have a great Donald Duck trivia for you coming up. Oh. Save it. [00:00:47] S0: Alright. Save it. Save it. You're gonna be [00:00:49] S1: blown away. I'm pretty sure you [00:00:50] S0: didn't find it. Great. Alright. Onto the episode. [00:00:53] S1: Let's do it. [00:01:05] S0: Say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth? Welcome to the spring twenty twenty six season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. [00:01:19] S1: I'm David Rosenthal.
00:01:19 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:01:19] S1: I'm David Rosenthal. [00:01:20] S0: And we are your hosts. Today, listeners, we finally tell the story of the Walt Disney Company. Unbelievably, in eleven years of doing Acquired, we have never told Walt's story, and, it's been a glaring omission. It is the entertainment company different than all the rest. It's over a 100 years old, and it has played a prominent role in almost all of your childhoods. And if you're a parent, likely your parenting journey too. Oh, yes. I'm looking at you, David Rosenthal. [00:01:51] S1: Oh, yes. And it has played a prominent role in acquired history too. Our very first episode, Pixar, done Lucasfilm. We've done Marvel, done ESPN. [00:02:02] S0: Although those are a whole different version of Acquired, we may need to decanonize those and and redo them, the the proper way. [00:02:09] S1: As part of this. [00:02:10] S0: Listeners, since there are tons of biographies and documentaries and places analyzing Walt's psyche, we're gonna focus today on acquired sweet spot, which is the business. What is it that Walt's merry band did from the nineteen twenties 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 sort of classic Hollywood studios. The business of feature film production is a mediocre one, especially by the standards of, what we study on this show here with Acquired except for Disney. [00:02:48] S1: Yes. Exactly.
00:02:49 · Ben Gilbert
[00:02:49] S0: And I will say I am a huge Disney fan. I grew up on Aladdin and the Lion King. My first movie in theaters was Beauty and the Beast. I'm a huge Star Wars nerd, and my wall was plastered with Toy Story posters growing up. But somehow, I knew nothing about the company's early history before starting this research. Nor did I. For example, it started in Kansas City. There was a character that was supposed to be Mickey Mouse before Mickey Mouse, but was lost in a contract dispute, or that many of the movies I watched in my childhood are actually from fifty years before I was even born. Snow White was produced before World War two. Pinocchio, Bambi, these films are from the thirties and forties. They even predate the existence of televisions in people's homes. Yep. 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, of course, building a giant theme park in Anaheim when nothing else like it existed, and they really did invent the entire concept of the flywheel business model that so many entrepreneurs are trying to copy. Oh, yes. So today, listeners, is the Walt Disney Company part one, Walt's era. Woo. Well, big news from here at Acquired HQ. This episode has a companion PDF with visuals, charts, tables, and illustrations of key concepts, including Acquired's version of the Disney flywheel. We did a pilot of the idea after our Vanguard episode, and we got such overwhelming positive response that we are doing it again. So you can get access and follow along by clicking the link in the show notes.
00:04:42 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:04:42] S1: You might say we're, building out our own flywheel here. We are. Eating our own episode cooking. [00:04:47] S0: And we're we're taking this timeless IP that we are developing and figuring out even more things to do with it. That's right. Alright. So you can join the Acquired email list at Acquired dot FM slash email. That's where we'll send our big takeaways from each episode, past episode corrections, exclusive behind the scenes photos that we found in our research, and it's where you can vote on future episode topics. Plus, we will give away a little hint each time about the next episode topic. That's acquired.fm/email. Come talk about this episode with us in the Slack. That's acquired.fm/slack. And before we dive in, we wanna thank our presenting partner, JP Morgan. [00:05:24] S1: Yes. Just like how we say every company has a story, every company's story is powered by payments, and JPMorgan is a part of so many of their journeys from seed to IPO and beyond. [00:05:33] S0: So with that, the show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. David, take us in.
00:05:33 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:05:33] S0: So with that, the show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. David, take us in. [00:05:44] S1: Well, first, a thank you to my main source for facts and Walt quotes on this episode, Neil Gabler's biography, Walt Disney, the triumph of the American imagination. Gabler, I think, was the only author who had full access to the Disney archives, and all the research he did for that book is just incredible. Yes. Well, with that, we start in Chicago in December '1 where Walter Elias Disney is born. And the family lore is that the Disneys are descended from the French Disneys of Normandy. [00:06:19] S0: How do you spell that?
00:06:19 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:06:19] S0: How do you spell that? [00:06:20] S1: D, apostrophe, I s I g n y s of Normandy, who came over to England with William the Conqueror in October. That's family lore. Unverifiable. Yes. At this point, lost to history. Yes. So Walt's father, Elias, was sort of a frustrated entrepreneur. He was variously a carpenter, landlord, farmer, newspaper route owner, and eventually a failed jelly factory investor. But Elias' younger brother, Robert, Walt's uncle Robert, was the successful one in the family. He was a real estate speculator among other things, and that is what brought the family to Chicago at the turn of the century. He had invested in a bunch of real estate in Chicago in the Midwest, and so Elias came also to seek his fortune there. Now when Walt is four, Elias moves the family out of Chicago to an idyllic farm town also in the Midwest where Robert had just purchased another tract of real estate, Marceline, Missouri. And Lillian Disney, Walt's future wife, would say about Marceline, it was the most important part of Walt's life. He didn't live there very long. He lived in Chicago and Kansas City much longer. But there was something about the farm that was very important to him.