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Humble Garage Beginnings —–————
When I talked about domestic portal for exposing craft, garage sales and the like, that may have sounded humble and a bit unappealing. There is something to be said however about enterprising and humble garage beginning in America. Some may or may not know that there is a list of big fortune 500 companies with humble beginnings this kind in their track record. In fact, many of today’s Big Tech companies had nothing but these modest and uncertain beginnings, but full of hope, energy, initiatives and enterprising. Below is a quick recount of just a few.
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1.- Harley Davidson Motor Co started in a garage in 1903.
“William Harley and Arthur Davidson sold their first motorcycle in the backyard of the Davidson family home in Milwaukee in 1903. That same year, they were joined by Arthur’s brother Walter. By 1907, their brother William joined them. They could have scarcely imagined what they had started.” –
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-founders-of-harley-davidson/9wLSe_e7UuPiIA
The group had settled the Co in the very garage in the Davidson home back yard. It was 1903, yet that was kind of a little bold, if not unusual.
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Harley Davidson garage
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2.- Worldwide famous Disney World started in such a small garage.
In the summer of 1923, 22-year-old Walt Disney moved from Kansas City to Los Angeles. He rented a room in his uncle Robert Disney‘s cottage, located at 4406 Kingswell Ave., paying him $5/week for the room—plus an extra $1 per week for the attached garage where he would realize his dream. Legend has it that in the conspicuous space lived a pesky mouse which gave Walt the idea for a little cartoon character he would eventually call Mickey. In that windowless space, Disney managed to cobble together a crude camera stand and was able to film a series of 30-second joke reels with stick figures.
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Garage Disney rented from his uncle.
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3.- HP started in this garage back in 1939.
Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP in Packard’s garage in Palo Alto, California in 1939. The site was later designated a historic site in 1987, and HP went on to buy the property in 2000 for $1.7 million.
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The tiny garage that birthed HP
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4.- Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft out of a garage.
“Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft in their small garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a company that recently in 2019 hit the $1 trillion market cap. Back then, the garage offered them as much space as they needed to use their programming skills to build their very first operating system. Gates and Allen even went on to found a program to encourage others to work on projects and new ideas they were passionate about, which they named Microsoft Garage.”
https://www.garagedoorssandiego.net/5-famous-companies-that-started-in-a-garage
Paul Allen and Bill Gates in their Microsoft founding garage
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5.- Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented this Menlo Park garage, where they started their search engine in 1998.
The garage was rented from Susan Wojcicki for $1700/month. She later became head of YouTube, an online streaming property acquired and streamlined by Google.
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6.- Apple started in a modest home in mid 1970’s, which was Steve Job’s childhood home.
“The single-story house on quiet Crist Drive in Los Altos, CA, is where a young Steve Jobs built the first Apple computers in the mid-1970s in his family’s garage. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, along with Ronald G. Wayne, formed the Apple Computer Company on April Fools’ Day, 1976. Apple Headquarters moved from Jobs’ garage to a building on Stevens Creek Boulevard in nearby Cupertino where the rest is history.”
https://www.sanjose.org/attraction/original-apple-garage
In fact, as admitted by Steve Wozniak, they conducted business in the house and only occasionally used the garage to discuss ideas about their project.
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7.- It is interesting that eBay got a start in the earliest days of the Internet as something like a giant garage sale under the business name AuctionWeb. The first item to sell on the platform, in 1995, was a broken laser pointer for the price of $14.83.
Obviously, owner Pierre Omidyar, a French-born Iranian American, was at the time sitting at home in all likelihood, remotely managing his novel virtual auction website.
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8.- Working out of his home and attached garage with a handful of employees, Jeff Bezos began developing the software for his virtual bookstore, which he called Amazon.com. It sold its first book in 1995. Bezos had borrowed $245K from his parents to develop the venture, after leaving his job at the Wall Street stock exchange.
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9.- Founded more recently in 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Facebook is another firm with such modest beginnings. Facebook founder Mark Zokerberg reportedly nurtured and worked on versions of what became the Facebook realization while in his dorm room at Harvard University.
At left what a Harvard dorm room looks like.
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The lesson is: never underestimate the potential of your garage, basement, attic, and even yard whose primary function is leisure, in building personal wealth. More than spare space, they are hard pieces of real estate representing indeed hard assets. There is an infrastructural character to all hard assets. This is the sense that guided all these characters to drive home the realization that these artifacts will tremendously help them solidify that personal creative initiative, as they quickly seize them to put them to work as facilitators or leverage in the pursuit of their project or the opportunity they saw. A bit of that is what we do when we manage to put a yard sale together. By embedding network-server-based information technology in that home infrastructure, we fortify and otherwise dramatically empower it for wealth building.
How much more successful a one-off one-home yard sale could be if it could become part of a coordinated whole-street multiple-home yard sale, well planned and advertised thru local neighborhood peer channels, with the potential to attract more people because they know they would not be visiting just one shopping display at a place but a good dozen or more right there.