If you bought Home Depot's shares at IPO, you'd own a greater percent of the company today than you did 45 years ago. Even with all the stock they issued to fund growth, they've now bought back enough stock to counteract it.

.@gilbert and @djrosent recently shared the story of Home Depot on @AcquiredFM, which is another masterclass on building a customer obsessed culture. Home Depot has had the highest total stock return since IPO in modern U.S. market history, even more than others like Apple or Microsoft. Some examples of their customer obsessed culture: - They called their central office in Atlanta the “Store Support Center” instead of “headquarters,” because the central office exists to support the front-line associates who serve customers - They hired trained tradespeople who could actually help customers with the nuances of home projects, instead of retail associates who did not have that expertise - They gave all front-line associates equity so that everyone’s incentives were aligned Future leadership changed these policies to pump revenue and margins (hiring non-tradespeople to lower costs, not aligning executive compensation with stock value, etc), and it led to Home Depot almost dying. Their next leader got them back to their basics. It’s neither a surprise nor coincidence that the legendary retail stores of today (Home Depot, Amazon, Walmart, etc) are all legendary for their customer obsession. The episode is worth a listen, as always.

The U.S. housing supply is increasingly old. Median age of a home was 42 years in 2024, up from 23 years in 1980. This has been a meaningful tailwind for Home Depot, which IPO'd almost exactly when housing started to age. Older homes = more home-improvement spending. @AcquiredFM, @gilbert, @djrosent

Home Depot is a much bigger business than you think it is. And unbelievably, it has generated the highest total return of any company in the S&P 500 since it's IPO in 1981. Episode live in your podcast players now!

When the Toy Story team was making the army men in 1994, it would have been very difficult to put the 'chutes inside their backpacks. So instead... They just made two different variants! And used some clever "camera" work to switch between the two models, and hide when the swap occurred.

“Walt Disney built his company over his entire lifetime, from age 21 until he died in 1966. And if you look at the company's market cap today, compared to where it was in 1966, 99.95% of the value was created after Disney died. There was just so much more running room with his concept than he had time on this earth to execute” - @AcquiredFM

On our episode, we mentioned that there's some footage floating around of Toy Story scenes that have gone through the layout phase, but not full animation. Here's one. The characters are lifeless and just getting dragged around the screen. But even in low-fidelity, the team can still use it to get a sense of if the story's working enough to proceed through the rest of the pipeline.

Amazing video of a young Pete Docter animating Woody during the making of Toy Story. Because of computational limits in 1994, if you viewed a character in full-res, you couldn't get real-time feedback while animating. So they used these basic polygon approximations instead. Which are... a little terrifying.

We're about to tick into waitlist-only territory for our big 500-person Acquired meetup in SF. We've got a great night planned for all of you with our friends at @sentry!

The Disney Renaissance illustrated: From 1989 to 1997 operating income nearly 4x'd, growing at a 17.7% CAGR. During this time, Disney released: 👉🏾 The Little Mermaid ('89) 👉🏾 Beauty and the Beast ('91) 👉🏾 Aladdin ('92) 👉🏾 The Lion King ('94) @AcquiredFM