Masaru Ibuka, every mention
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every year anyone David Rosenthal 29Ben Gilbert 9
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Masaru Ibuka comes up
The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories · Acquired
- ▶ 8:29 David Rosenthal So, the person on the left is Akio Morita, and the person on the right is Masaru Ibuka, and they were the co-founders of the Sony Corporation, and, ah, we told this story in about three hours, ah, earlier this year on Acquired.
SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours) · Acquired
- ▶ 10:23 David Rosenthal Engineer, a man who's 13 years older than him, is a man named Masaru Ibuka, and he is a prototypical engineer's engineer.
- ▶ 10:43 Ben Gilbert Yeah, it's so right that Morita, while he does have a physics background, and he's definitely a engineer, it is right to say that Ibuka is the engineer's engineer, and Akio has much more of a sort of marketing sensibility, and while he…
- ▶ 11:02 David Rosenthal You might say that Ibuka is like the Waz, and Akio and Morita is like the Jobs.
- ▶ 11:11 David Rosenthal So, Ibuka loves technology, and particularly he is fascinated at this point in time by radio and all of the applications of radio.
- ▶ 12:51 David Rosenthal Ibuka though.
- ▶ 21:44 David Rosenthal Ibuka goes right back to Tokyo.
- ▶ 21:58 David Rosenthal He founds a company.
- ▶ 22:00 David Rosenthal He's like, and you know, I think part of his vision, Marita would contribute to this too, but I think Ibuka really saw a huge opportunity after the war in that all this technology that had been focused on military and industrial use, but…
- ▶ 22:31 Ben Gilbert This is the moment where we realize that Ibuka is truly an irrational optimist.
- ▶ 22:36 Ben Gilbert The national tenor couldn't be more bleak, and yet Ibuka is like, let's start a company.
- ▶ 25:08 David Rosenthal Who reads this article, but Akio Morita who's back home in Nagoya, he reads it and he's like, Ibuka, he's created a company.
- ▶ 25:23 David Rosenthal So he writes Ibuka and says that he wants to come to Tokyo and quote, be of service to him and the company.
- ▶ 26:16 Ben Gilbert I'm reading between the lines a little bit, but I think he's a little bit, like, searching for signal on, does Ibuko want me?
- ▶ 26:43 David Rosenthal Nobody really like knows why the speculation in some of the books and things I read are just that Ibuka really is just kind of a dreamer and like, he just might not, uh,
- ▶ 28:49 David Rosenthal Marita and Abuka, they want to join up.
- ▶ 29:20 Ben Gilbert You can tell that this is very important to Ibuka because Ibuka goes to the family dinner with Akio.
- ▶ 29:34 David Rosenthal Akio's father's blessing for him to become partners with Ibuka in this new venture.
- ▶ 30:48 David Rosenthal In 1949, shortly after this, Ibuka gets a chance to see an American tape recorder machine
- ▶ 31:03 David Rosenthal I don't know if they actually manufactured this machine that Ibuka got to see is the company Ampex in the US.
- ▶ 31:33 David Rosenthal So Ibuka comes back and is like, Akio, well, I've seen the future.
- ▶ 32:24 David Rosenthal So, through some of the family connections, both from Morita and Ibuka's father-in-law had been a minister in the government before the war, they start making these tape recorders, and there are all sorts of stories about how they do it,…
- ▶ 34:42 David Rosenthal In 1952, Ibuka hears that the world famous renowned institution that everybody respects, and especially nobody more than Ibuka and Morita
- ▶ 36:16 David Rosenthal So the transistor is available for license and a book is like
- ▶ 36:54 David Rosenthal And Ibuka and Radar are like, we're going to make miniature radios with the transistor.
- ▶ 37:16 Ben Gilbert And Ibuka and, and Marita are like, uh, well, no, the hearing aid market in Japan will not be a viable one for us.
- ▶ 40:58 David Rosenthal Ibuka has this vision of he wants a truly pocketable radio, a radio that you can fit in your shirt pocket and take with you, walk around, have with you all the time.
- ▶ 41:37 David Rosenthal So Ibuki has this vision of fitting in the shirt pocket.
- ▶ 53:29 David Rosenthal So Oga, he was not a founder of Sony, but Ibuka, Morita, and Oga were really the triumvirate for a long time.
- ▶ 56:43 Ben Gilbert Which this was like a Buka thing.
- ▶ 57:25 Ben Gilbert And so the company lost a lot of money on that, but it was totally like, okay, Ibuka is jumping back in and rolling up his sleeves and handpicking a team.
- ▶ 58:18 David Rosenthal So the Trinitron was a huge success and Ibuka was very much behind it.
- ▶ 58:24 David Rosenthal Marita and Ibuka get together and they're like, you know,
- ▶ 1:12:44 David Rosenthal And amazing that it was Merida who did like, this is the kind of stuff that Ibuka usually does.
- ▶ 1:39:26 David Rosenthal Ibuka dies in 1997.
- ▶ 2:35:38 David Rosenthal Like what would Ibuka and Morita be thinking about the current state of the company?
- ▶ 2:35:43 Ben Gilbert I bet Ibuka would be excited about the PSVR too.
- ▶ 2:56:12 David Rosenthal Ibuka's founding prospectus, you know, to create a place for engineers to work in the joy of their pursuit of technology and, you know, benefit to society that I think was probably Sony for decades.