Founders

You take over the family pastry shop and transform it into one of the most valuable privately held businesses in the world. Your father dies young. Your uncle does too. Everyone is relying on you and this keeps you up at night. You insist on differentiation and refuse to make me too products. You obsess over quality. You run tens of thousands of experiments. The products you invent will sell successfully for decades. You shroud your entire operation in secrecy. You study your competitors but never tell them what you’re doing. You go to great — almost absurd — lengths to control everything about your business. You have no outside shareholders and no debt. You commute by helicopter so you can perform quality control in person. You insist on constant customer contact and invent new ways to collect information from the customers you obsess over. You build your own machines, control all of your raw materials, and invest so heavily in distribution and logistics that you own the largest private fleet of vehicles in