You may be surprised that a podcast that discusses venture capital and startups decided to do a post on Sam Walton, who started his first company in the 1950s, and Walmart, one of the most bloated and uninteresting businesses today.
In 1962, however, Walmart was just a plucky discounting store in Bentonville, Arkansas, a town of less than 5,000 people, that innovated its way to go from $0 in sales to $26 billion in sales in 1990. No company at the time grew at even close to the rate that Walmart did, and no company in the world was more valuable because of it.
Sam Walton’s autobiography, Made in America, is a timeless manual for entrepreneurs building in any industry in the 1990s, the 2020s, or even the 2050s regarding how to start and scale a business. If you’re hesitant to believe me, you will after you listen to this podcast. If you think it won’t be worth it, well, Jeff Bezos credits this book with inspiring him to get into retail and took many lessons from Sam Walton to build Amazon into the juggernaut it is today.
Today, I’m not only going to discuss what made Sam Walton and the early days of Walmart so exceptional, but I’m also going to analyze why I would invest in Walmart in 1962 when Sam Walton opened the first store. Walmart wasn’t his first venture; in fact, it was his third, and he showed exceptional signs of entrepreneurial excellence prior to founding the company we all know today.
In this episode, I’m going to describe the key traits of Sam Walton as an entrepreneur and his vision and operating principles for Walmart as to why I’d invest while relating it to many examples in today’s startup environment because, as I said, these lessons are still highly relevant today. Then, I’ll discuss some ROI scenarios of investing in Walmart at the founding moment before concluding with ten rules for running a business straight from Mr. Walton himself, which I argue are the only pieces of business advice you need to know.
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