#386 Akio Morita: Founder of Sony

Founders

David Senra

Steve Jobs, Founders, James Dyson, Company Builders, Technology, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Business Professional Biography, How I Built This, The History Of Entrepreneurship, Jim Clark, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurs, History, Founder, Business Autobiography, Jeff Bezos, Entrepreneur, Biography, Biographies Of Entrepreneurs, Biographies, Business, Business Biography

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2025

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Akio Morita was a visionary entrepreneur and co-founder of Sony. Born as the first son and fifteenth-generation heir to a 300-year-old sake-brewing family in Japan, Akio eschewed the traditional path to forge his own legacy in electronics. In post-war Japan, Akio joined forces with Masaru Ibuka to found Sony. They started in a burned-out department store with limited resources—to build their first product they had to buy supplies on the black market. Akio was determined to change the global perception of Japanese goods as poor quality. From day one he set out to build high-quality, differentiated products, targeted at affluent markets. Akio believed in long-term vision over short-term profits, product innovation without market research, and brand building over immediate profits. Against all opposition, including inside of his own company, Akio invented one of the most successful consumer products of all time: The Walkman. It sold over 400 million units and inspired countless other entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, James Dyson, and Phil Knight. This episode is what I learned from rereading Akio's classic 1986 autobiography Made In Japan.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Akeo is a great example of this maxim that all of history's greatest founders studied history's greatest founders.
0:05.2	Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, studied Akeo, as did James Dyson, as did Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos.
0:11.0	And a few months ago, I was spending time with John Mackey, who was the founder of Whole Foods.
0:14.8	John also relentlessly studies the great founders that came before him.
0:18.9	And it was during one of our conversations that John
0:21.0	told me one of the craziest things that anyone has ever said about the podcast. He had listened to over
0:26.4	100 episodes before we met and he told me that if founders existed when he was young, that Whole Foods
0:31.6	would still be an independent company. That since the podcast and all of history's great founders
0:35.9	constantly emphasized the importance
0:37.6	of controlling expenses, that he would have actually put
0:39.9	more of a priority on it, especially during good times,
0:43.1	during boom times.
0:43.8	I think it's very natural for a company and for human nature
0:46.6	to just not watch your costs as closely
0:49.1	because everything is going so well.
0:50.7	This is actually something that Andrew Carnegie noticed
0:53.1	over 130 years ago.
0:55.3	Carnegie would repeat this mantra over and over again. He said profits and prices are cyclical,
0:59.8	subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly
1:04.8	controlled and any savings achieved in costs were permanent. This is something I was talking about
1:10.0	with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast. I've gotten to
1:16.2	know all the co-founders of Ramp and I spent a ton of time with them. They all listen to the
	...

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