Atari Becomes Sequoia Capital's Very First Investment

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Atari becomes Sequoia Capital's very first investment. Nolan and the team of Atari start bringing on additional folks to build an engineer games that they can sell. They hire a young kid named Steve Jobs. To come in and design a one player, a solo version of Pong that you can play. That ends up being called breakout that he does with his buddy Steve Wozniak.

You may think you know the Nintendo story: a plumber named Mario, a princess named Zelda… and didn’t they buy the Seattle Mariners at some point? We thought we knew it too. And then we started researching and were blown away.

The lovable Disney-like Nintendo that we know today is a 130 year-old a playing card company (i.e. gambling), forged in the shadowy world of the Yakuza and shaped by a four-generation cycle of bitter family betrayal. And its unlikely transformation into a global multi-billion dollar media monopoly was led by an iron-fisted patriarch who — amazingly — never played a video game in his life! Get ready for one of our favorite stories Acquired has ever told — we couldn’t make this one up if we tried!

ACQ2 Show: