Atlas Trail
Ten Companies, Two Economies: How Founding Eras Compare
Every company on this atlas was founded into a specific economy, and that starting condition still shapes how each one operates. This trail follows five companies founded before television existed and five founded after the internet did, in the order each one first opened its doors, so a reader can see two very different sets of rules for building a business side by side.
Stop 1 of 10.
Companies and Brands
Procter and Gamble was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1837 by William Procter and James Gamble, and has operated across beauty, grooming, health care and fabric and home care ever since, the oldest company on this trail by nearly six decades.
Stop 2 of 10.
Companies and Brands
General Electric was formed in 1892 through the merger of Thomas Edison's Edison General Electric Company with a rival firm, becoming one of the most influential industrial conglomerates of the twentieth century.
Stop 3 of 10.
Companies and Brands
The Coca-Cola Company was founded in 1892 when Asa Griggs Candler purchased the formula and brand for a soft drink developed six years earlier by the pharmacist John Stith Pemberton, then built it out through a franchised bottling system that has run since 1889.
Stop 4 of 10.
Companies and Brands
IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, a holding company that only later took the name International Business Machines, headquartered today in Armonk, New York.
Stop 5 of 10.
Companies and Brands
Toyota Motor Corporation was incorporated on August 28, 1937 by Kiichiro Toyoda, and it later pioneered the Toyota Production System, the manufacturing approach the West came to know as lean manufacturing. It closes the trail's pre-internet half.
Stop 6 of 10.
Companies and Brands
Amazon was founded on July 5, 1994 by Jeff Bezos as an online bookstore, initially under the name Cadabra, opening the trail's second half: five companies founded after the commercial internet existed, each built in years rather than the decades the first five took.
Stop 7 of 10.
Companies and Brands
Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph as a DVD-by-mail rental service, a full decade before it launched the subscription video streaming service that eventually replaced the business it started as.
Stop 8 of 10.
Companies and Brands
Tesla was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, with Elon Musk joining a year later as an early investor and chairman before becoming its defining public figure and chief executive, a founding team of engineers rather than an existing industrial base.
Stop 9 of 10.
Companies and Brands
Uber Technologies was founded in 2009 by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick in San Francisco, and its treatment of drivers as independent contractors rather than employees has made it the subject of extensive regulatory and legal dispute worldwide.
Stop 10 of 10.
Companies and Brands
Stripe was founded in 2010 by the Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison in Palo Alto, California, and by 2026 had grown into the largest privately held financial technology company, valued at approximately 159 billion dollars, the trail's youngest company by more than a decade.
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