Sony, every mention
346 scenes (2022), the whole family · ← back to Sony
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2022 anyone David Rosenthal 193Ben Gilbert 187Michael Ovitz 8Mitch Lasky 5David Senra 3Blake Robbins 2Brad Gerstner 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Sony comes up
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 11:40 David Rosenthal Sony, Sony Corporation.
- ▶ 21:42 David Rosenthal Just to, if you have not listened to the Sony episode, I'm sure most of you have, but like, it's so good.
- ▶ 21:54 David Rosenthal Sony.
- ▶ 22:07 David Rosenthal Ok, Sony.
Enron · Acquired
- ▶ 44:59 Ben Gilbert Hey, Sony, will you spin up a new venture that we'll co-invest in to make flip phones that use CDMA so we can prove to everyone else in the market that CDMA is viable technology?
Qualcomm · Acquired
- ▶ 1:28:43 David Rosenthal Our friends Sony, I guess, uh, Akio Morita was running it.
- ▶ 1:28:48 David Rosenthal The Sony corporation to partner in a JV to make handsets.
- ▶ 1:29:06 David Rosenthal That was made by the JP with Sony.
- ▶ 1:29:08 David Rosenthal That was a Sony phone, um, with Qualcomm branding.
- ▶ 1:30:54 David Rosenthal They would have had to do the same thing they did with Sony and Nortel.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 3:00:54 David Rosenthal I don't know, we've probably done it more than once, but in my mind the canonical acquired episode, Coda, is the PlayStation on the Sony episode.
- ▶ 3:01:11 David Rosenthal Regardless of how good we, you and I, did or didn't do on it, like just the story of Sony is one of the most incredible of all time.
Walmart · Acquired
- ▶ 0:00 Ben Gilbert I love how this book is called Made in America, and the Sony story is Made in Japan.
- ▶ 0:57 Ben Gilbert When we did our Sony episode, we discovered that many Steve Jobs-isms really started as Accio Morita-isms.
- ▶ 35:04 David Rosenthal The war has just ended, and unlike 1945 in Japan, like we talked about with the Sony story, retail in the US is booming.
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.
- ▶ 8:52 David Rosenthal So as we said, there's not a lot of reasons looking out at the landscape at the markets right now to be an optimist, but the Sony story reminds us that things were much, much, much worse than they are today in the recent past.
- ▶ 9:06 David Rosenthal So Sony was founded in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in,
- ▶ 10:51 David Rosenthal These two men and Sony changed the course of Japanese history, changed the course of world history, and, um, again, we talked about this on the episode, but, uh, Steve Jobs was, was mentioned earlier tonight, Akio Morita was the…
- ▶ 11:17 David Rosenthal And I think, uh, you know, no Morita, no Sony, no iPhone.
Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022) · Acquired
- ▶ 39:25 David Rosenthal We didn't talk about this as much in the Sony episode, but my impression of the whole Android
- ▶ 2:03:14 Ben Gilbert Walmart, Coca-Cola, Nestle, and as we mentioned on our Sony episode, Sony.
- ▶ 2:11:41 Ben Gilbert Actually, for the episode we did with Brad Gerstner on Altimeter, we needed a third camera, and so I went out and bought a Sony RX 100, a little point-and-shoot camera, and, ah, recently took it to Disneyland.
- ▶ 2:13:04 Ben Gilbert So the Sony RX-X-X-X-X, great little device, it's like the seventh generation of it, and they've really refined the industrial design at this point.
- ▶ 2:13:12 David Rosenthal I actually just bought my first camera cube, like a travel camera cube thing for our, uh, uh, Alpha-Seven C's now that we have, uh, literally it's four acquired for when, after the altimeter episode, I was like, oh, wow.
Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006) · Acquired
- ▶ 35:22 David Rosenthal And as we know from our Sony episode, not quite the Sega Genesis, not quite the Sega Genesis.
- ▶ 1:04:53 Ben Gilbert I think Sony had, like, sort of used it about the PlayStation, but no one's marketing this idea.
- ▶ 1:08:45 David Rosenthal Microsoft's got a secret project that they're working on at this time, the Xbox, which we talked about a lot on the Sony episode and so many times on the show.
Altimeter (with Brad Gerstner) · Acquired
- ▶ 53:26 Brad Gerstner The Sony board hack where, I think it was Colin Powell, if memory serves me correct, his email was hacked, and in his email was the target list for Salesforce's M&A activity.
SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours) · Acquired
- ▶ 0:55 Ben Gilbert Listeners, today we are telling the story of the company that Steve Jobs idolized and modeled Apple Computer after, the Sony Corporation.
- ▶ 1:07 David Rosenthal You know the story, right, of the black turtlenecks and the Sony connection.
- ▶ 1:15 David Rosenthal Steve idolized Sony, went over to visit, and saw that there was a uniform that Sony employees had, and he was like, that's a great idea.
- ▶ 1:36 Ben Gilbert And didn't the Sony employees have uniforms because, like, clothing was scarce after World War II?
- ▶ 1:49 David Rosenthal And so he went to Issei Miyake, the famous Japanese designer who had made the Sony uniform and got him to make him a hundred black turtlenecks.
- ▶ 1:59 Ben Gilbert There's so much about our generation that we remember from Sony growing up, the Trinitron TVs, Discmans with advanced CD skip protection, 30 seconds worth,
- ▶ 2:10 Ben Gilbert You know, even more recently, the excellent professional line of cameras that Sony makes, and actually, David and I are both recording on right now.
- ▶ 2:17 David Rosenthal As well as Sony headphones right now, right?
- ▶ 2:21 Ben Gilbert But Sony goes so much deeper than that, and also so much more broad than that today, expanding into a very special type of conglomerate.
- ▶ 2:31 Ben Gilbert David, did you know that they own a division that exclusively makes a tiny dog robot?
- ▶ 2:38 David Rosenthal Do they still make that thing?
- ▶ 2:39 Ben Gilbert Yeah, they do.
- ▶ 2:45 Ben Gilbert They are the second largest Japanese company by market cap behind only Toyota.
- ▶ 2:51 Ben Gilbert They're the largest video game console company and the largest video game publisher in the world.
- ▶ 2:57 Ben Gilbert They're the largest music publisher and the second largest record label, which for those of you who listened to the T-Swift episode, you now know the difference.
- ▶ 3:05 Ben Gilbert And they have the third largest Hollywood film studio on top of all of that.
- ▶ 16:58 Ben Gilbert I think they even say either in the Sony book by John Nathan or in Akio Morita's book that his younger brothers were actively sort of training to be kamikaze pilots like that would have been his future.
- ▶ 27:00 Ben Gilbert The company, by the way, if you go to Sony's website, they have meticulously maintained corporate archives.
- ▶ 30:04 David Rosenthal Still, I believe, owned about 10% of Sony.
- ▶ 30:15 David Rosenthal The question is, what's worth more, the Morita Saki empire or the 10% stake in Sony?
- ▶ 30:22 Ben Gilbert The 10% stake in Sony.
- ▶ 30:27 Ben Gilbert Yeah, Sony had some dark years in the future.
- ▶ 33:25 David Rosenthal At this point in time, the company is known as the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, TTC, with their tape recorders.
- ▶ 34:21 David Rosenthal Well, the Morita family's initial investment in Sony was a 190,000 yen, and now they're selling their first product for a 160,000 yen.
- ▶ 37:50 David Rosenthal It takes two years, but two years later, in August of 1955, TTC releases their first transistor radio product, the TR 55
- ▶ 37:50 David Rosenthal It takes two years, but two years later, in August of 1955, TTC releases their first transistor radio product, the TR 55
- ▶ 38:36 David Rosenthal Sony, soon to be Sony is all in on this idea of like, if we can shrink this down, people can take it with them.
- ▶ 40:28 Ben Gilbert Like that is exactly what the Sony logo evolution over time represents.
- ▶ 40:46 David Rosenthal So they release the TR-Five.
- ▶ 41:30 David Rosenthal So two years later, they come out with the next version of the product, the TR-SIX.
- ▶ 41:51 David Rosenthal They have, they have the Sony sales force that sells the products to, you know, the distributors of the retailers.
- ▶ 42:18 David Rosenthal Ultimately, the TR-sixty-three ends up selling 1.5 million units at 25 dollars each, which is I don't actually don't have any financial data on like the scale of the certainly not the radio repair business, but the tape recorder business.
- ▶ 42:43 David Rosenthal The company grows to 1200 employees, the newly named Sony corporation.
- ▶ 44:26 David Rosenthal You can sell the Sony TR-XIII or you can sell nothing.
- ▶ 45:41 David Rosenthal So ultimately what that leads to is a couple of years later, Marita and Sony decide we need to establish our own corporation in America so that we don't have to work with distributors.
- ▶ 45:54 David Rosenthal We can just directly have a Sony operation in America.
- ▶ 47:00 David Rosenthal But it really sets up the business relations between Sony and US corporations, and, and
- ▶ 47:17 David Rosenthal Like, there are American executives in Sony.
- ▶ 47:21 David Rosenthal At 1.1 of them becomes the CEO of Sony, Howard Stringer.
- ▶ 47:32 Ben Gilbert Pure focus on the Japanese economy, if you think about what Sony did for Japan as a nation, were unprecedented.
- ▶ 48:10 Ben Gilbert No, the state that Japan was in when they started Sony and how massive and impressive and successful they grew it to over the course of Akio's whole life.
- ▶ 49:01 David Rosenthal So, you know, Sony, what's it all about at this point?
- ▶ 49:25 David Rosenthal There's obviously the devices and the consumption that Sony is in at this point with their radios, but there's also the recording industry.
- ▶ 50:16 Ben Gilbert I looked this up because I wanted to bust this out for you and be like, did you know that Sony Music and Sony Pictures were reuniting the original Columbia?
- ▶ 50:43 Ben Gilbert And yet, Sony ended up buying both of them in their future.
- ▶ 51:25 David Rosenthal JV between CBS and Sony will be super flexible on whatever terms you want, and we will make this happen as fast as humanly possible.
- ▶ 52:05 David Rosenthal Which is the Japanese distribution arm of CBS's recorded music in Japan, becomes such a cash cow that within just a few years, it is the most profitable division for both Sony and CBS.
- ▶ 53:25 David Rosenthal Who would succeed Morita as CEO of Sony.
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 53:42 David Rosenthal Even after he was CEO and chairman of Sony, he would still like conduct the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra.
- ▶ 53:54 David Rosenthal And in the early days of Sony, when he was still a student, they would bring him into the factory to help test the products and get the musicians input on the quality of the products.
- ▶ 54:24 David Rosenthal They were, because it's a JV, they both had to agree to do distributions, both Sony and CBS, to get the cash back to the parent companies, and they weren't always on the same page.
- ▶ 56:19 David Rosenthal So Sony goes to work for years trying to make a really, really great color TV, like a color TV that could live up to the Sony name and engineering culture, and the result of that is the Sony Trinitron, which is their
- ▶ 56:46 Ben Gilbert He sort of like parachuted in and said, I know I'm effectively the CTO of all of Sony, and we've got all these product lines.
- ▶ 57:13 Ben Gilbert The run of those that were, that actually did make it cost Sony way more to manufacture than it actually was priced at at retail because their yields were so terrible.
- ▶ 57:45 David Rosenthal Sony is the number one by market share TV manufacturer in the world.
- ▶ 57:56 Ben Gilbert But I mean, I remember growing up in the nineties, it was like there were Sony TVs and there was everything else.
- ▶ 58:06 Ben Gilbert That was just some random Sony brand the same way that
- ▶ 59:09 David Rosenthal Sony engineering teams do for several years.
- ▶ 1:01:44 David Rosenthal And so Sony wanted to create an ad that like, hey, with the Betamax, you can watch both of these shows that you normally have to pick.
- ▶ 1:02:25 David Rosenthal We're going to go full on scorched earth on Sony who's trying to take our power here.
- ▶ 1:03:16 David Rosenthal Against Sony for enabling copyright infringement.
- ▶ 1:04:53 Ben Gilbert I mean, at the end of the day, I, in the nineties grew up recording television on my VHS, my, my, I think my Sony VHS cassette player video, you know, VCR.
- ▶ 1:05:20 David Rosenthal Sony.
- ▶ 1:06:54 Ben Gilbert Okay, so Sony lost Betamax versus VHS.
- ▶ 1:07:01 Ben Gilbert Interestingly, the seventies had a lot going on for Sony.
- ▶ 1:07:11 Ben Gilbert And so Americans actually could become shareholders of the Sony corporation.
- ▶ 1:07:19 Ben Gilbert So Sony's now tradable in Tokyo in the stock exchange there, on the New York stock exchange in the US.
- ▶ 1:07:47 David Rosenthal And the origin of this was that Oga, who we've talked about, who would become CEO of Sony, he in 1966 had negotiated a cross licensing deal with Phillips, the Dutch company, where the companies could share their tech and share their…
- ▶ 1:09:05 David Rosenthal Yeah, and it truly is Philips and Sony working together to create the CD format and lasers and all the technology going into it.
- ▶ 1:09:26 David Rosenthal In 1982, Sony brings the first CD player to market, and then lots of other manufacturers follow suit.
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