The Home Depot
Home Depot's founders turned a firing into a category-defining big-box format, backed by a financier, with the top-returning US stock since its 1981 IPO.
Summary
Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank were fired from their previous hardware chain and teamed with financier Ken Langone to found The Home Depot. The story covers the big-box DIY home-improvement model and a stock described as the top performer in the US market since its 1981 IPO. Detail is limited to the overview and links.
Editor's opinion
A genuinely rich case study, elevated well beyond the typical founding story by two things: a rigorous account of the Nardelli years as a cautionary tale of imported operational discipline destroying the informal culture that scale economies alone couldn't sustain (associates per store cut 15%, customer satisfaction falling to last place among major retailers even as revenue doubled), and the hosts' closing "founding tactics vs. founding values" framework -- a sharp, reusable lens for thinking about which parts of an early playbook to keep and which to discard as a company scales.
Key concepts
Big-box retail · DIY category · Founder-investor partnership