3 ms·

This is a great article, but really only applies to a small subset of companies for whom organic growth is the only way to grow huge. An abbreviated list of co

• nostrademons 13y ago
  Honda and Vanguard absolutely grew through word of mouth, and NBC probably did too but it was before I was born. I compare notes with friends when buying a car, and people are not shy about recommending Honda or Toyota. Very few of them recommend GM or Ford. I also heard about Vanguard through word-of-mouth, where everybody gave the general advice that indexing funds are much more sane than other investing systems, and Vanguard was the leader in that space.
  • jmduke 13y ago
    This doesn't really contradict your point, but I was more thinking about the arc from 'small to huge', not the arc from 'huge to ginormous' -- after all, how did Vanguard become the leader in the space? Honda competed on price and efficiency to secure government industrial contracts; for Vanguard's first five years its only investors were institutional[^1], where their success laid much more in being a (massively successful) niche fund that no other firm offered than having any household success. Other commenters have argued that repeated success in an RFP environment comes from reputation (and thus word-of-mouth), but I think that's stretching too far from the original thrust of the article. [^1] I read this in a book but Wikipedia says that its first index fund in 1976, was available to individual investors, so I'm not 100% on this.
• CCs 13y ago
  Epic still keeps winning "Best in Klas"[1] which is based on user vote. [1] http://www.klasresearch.com/Vendor/54 http://www.klasresearch.com/Vendor/54