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Company Origins · 8

Canonical · Company Origins

Fairchild Semiconductor Founding

Eight engineers quit Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 because its founder, Nobel laureate William Shockley, was abrasive and paranoid to the point of being nearly unmanageable. They wanted to start their own company but had no personal capital and no existing playbook for funding something like this — banks didn't lend to unproven engineers with no product, and there was no venture capital industry yet to call. Arthur Rock, then a young banker, spent weeks pitching roughly 35 existing corporations to back the group as a new subsidiary. All 35 passed. Fairchild Camera and Instrument finally agreed, fronting the capital in exchange for the right to buy the whole new company outright later if it succeeded.

Arthur Rock / Eugene Kleiner · 1957 swipe · next · J/K

Canonical · Company Origins

A Proposal to American Research and Development

In 1957, two MIT Lincoln Laboratory engineers, Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, wanted to build smaller, cheaper computers to challenge IBM's expensive mainframes. IBM and other established players had already turned them down, and at the time 'the computer business' was widely seen by investors as a money-loser — only giant, well-capitalized companies could survive it. So instead of asking for money to build computers, they proposed building profitable digital circuit modules first, using that revenue to prove the team and the technology worked, and only later building full interactive computers. American Research and Development Corporation (ARD), one of the first venture firms in the US, funded them: $70,000 in equity for 70% of the new company, Digital Equipment Corporation, plus a further loan.

Ken Olsen / Harlan Anderson · 1957

Canonical · Company Origins

YouTube Investment Memo

In 2005, YouTube was a tiny startup with almost no revenue model, uploading videos that mostly weren't theirs to license. Roelof Botha, a Sequoia partner, wrote an internal memo arguing the firm should invest anyway, because the sheer volume and growth rate of user-generated video uploads was a leading indicator that YouTube was becoming the default place people went to watch and share video online — a position worth being early to regardless of how monetization would eventually work. Sequoia invested $1 million, followed by a $4 million Series A. Google acquired YouTube about eighteen months later for $1.65 billion, returning roughly 57x to Sequoia.

Roelof Botha / Sequoia Capital · 2005

Canonical · Company Origins

Facebook (thefacebook) Media Kit / Early Pitch

Shortly after thefacebook.com launched in 2004, cofounder Eduardo Saverin put together a media kit to pitch advertisers directly, arguing the site's value wasn't its size (it had roughly 70,000 users at the time) but its density: students were spending hours a day on it, checking it obsessively, and it gave advertisers a precisely targetable, captive young audience segmented by school. The deck leaned on real usage data — about 90 million pageviews a month within its first year — to make the case that attention, not raw headcount, was the sellable asset.

Facebook · 2004

Canonical · Company Origins

UberCab Pitch Deck

After spending nearly $800 hiring a private driver in Paris on New Year's Eve, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp pitched 'UberCab' in 2008 as a members-only, invite-only black-car service you could summon from your phone — explicitly positioned as the 'NetJets of car services,' aimed at professionals in a handful of American cities, not as a mass-market taxi replacement. The deck's own financial projections were modest by today's standards: a best-case scenario of $1 billion in revenue, a more realistic target of reaching 5% of top US cities and $20 million in profit. It raised roughly $200,000.

Uber (Garrett Camp / Travis Kalanick) · 2008

Canonical · Company Origins

Airbnb Series A Pitch Deck

By 2009, Airbnb's founders had already nearly run out of money and options, having bootstrapped through selling branded cereal boxes to survive. Their Series A deck laid out a simple structure — problem, solution, market size, early traction, team, and the ask — pitching a web platform where travelers could book rooms with local hosts instead of hotels. It secured $600,000 from Sequoia Capital and Y Ventures, arriving in the middle of the 2008-09 financial crisis, when investors were unusually risk-averse.

Airbnb (Brian Chesky et al.) · 2009

Canonical · Company Origins

The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)

Musk laid out a deliberately sequenced plan for Tesla: first build an expensive, low-volume sports car (the Roadster) for buyers willing to pay a premium, use the money and credibility from that to fund a medium-volume, lower-priced car (which became the Model S and Model X), and use that to eventually fund a high-volume, affordable car (the Model 3) — with the explicit end goal of accelerating the world's transition away from a 'mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy' toward solar-electric energy, not just building cars for their own sake.

Elon Musk · 2006

Canonical · Company Origins

LinkedIn Series B Pitch Deck (Greylock)

In the summer of 2004 LinkedIn had no revenue, no revenue-capable product, modest organic growth, and was routinely dismissed as 'Friendster for business' while Friendster and MySpace had millions of users. Reid Hoffman still raised a $10 million Series B from Greylock — and in 2013, on LinkedIn's tenth anniversary, he published the full deck with slide-by-slide commentary. Its first move is the tell: instead of showing the product, the deck goes straight to revenue — ads, listings, subscriptions — because the loudest question from investors still nursing dot-com wounds was whether a consumer internet company could make money at all.

Reid Hoffman · 2004