Posts by Tim Brinkhof:
-
The surprising business model of Alibaba
Posted on: 10 Jan 2023
The company that would eventually blossom into Alibaba Group Holding Limited was founded on June 28, 1999, by Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma in Hangzhou, the capital city of China’s Zhejiang province. The plan was to launch an online marketplace that could capitalize on and improve upon China’s nascent e-commerce market by connecting manufacturers, sellers, and […]
-
The surprising business model of Costco
Posted on: 22 Dec 2022
On September 15, 1983, Jim Sinegal and Jeffrey Brotman opened the first Costco location in Seattle. The concept, a membership-only store that sells goods at a discount, was borrowed from retailer Sol Price and his son, who ran a similar business called Price Club. Sinegal had worked with the Prices, who operated Price Club out […]
-
How Amazon made $200 billion a year in pure profit
Posted on: 14 Dec 2022
In 1994, a successful but relatively unknown businessman named Jeff Bezos resigned from his position as senior vice-president of the Wall Street-based hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. when he learned that World Wide Web usage was growing at a staggering annual rate of 2,300%. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bezos was convinced that the […]
-
How do movie theaters make money?
Posted on: 05 Dec 2022
In order to make money, movie theaters must do more than show entertaining movies. They also have to differentiate themselves from their competitors who are generally showing the same movies. As such, it’s no surprise that cinemas have evolved at a rapid clip, developing from nickelodeons (cheap but highly social venues that showed films in […]
-
What makes a piece of art worth $450 million dollars?
Posted on: 20 Oct 2022
Many philosophers, not to mention artists, believe art has some kind of intrinsic value. They argue that works of art should be considered valuable in and of themselves because of aesthetic and conceptual qualities that exist independently of the sensibility or knowledgeability of the audiences interacting with them. It’s a neat idea. Unfortunately, art history […]
-
How the Dutch East India Company inadvertently created the world’s first stock market
Posted on: 16 Sep 2022
To tell the story of the world’s first stock exchange is to tell the story of the Dutch East India Company, as the creation of the latter led directly to the formation of the former. The Dutch East India Company was formed to solve numerous problems plaguing the Dutch shipping industry. For one, the voyage […]
-
How Genghis Khan’s grandson introduced paper money in Mongolian China
Posted on: 08 Sep 2022
When the Venetian merchant Marco Polo traveled to Asia in the late thirteenth century, he was shocked to learn that the inhabitants of Mongolian China went about their daily business using paper money. This currency, commonly known as the chao, had been introduced to the region in 1260 by Kublai Khan, grandson of the fabled […]
-
How the invention of coins changed daily life in ancient Greece
Posted on: 07 Sep 2022
It’s hard to imagine life without the concept of money. But for most of human history, there was no money, in the modern sense of the word. For a better look into the role money plays in our world today, let’s turn back the clock to the dawn of money. The oldest written references to […]
