Businesses formed in a recession

December 4, 2009 by Mark T Littlewood

Some businesses that were started in a recession.

1870 – Standard Oil – now Exxon & Chevron

1873 – GE

1923 – Disney

1928 – Motorola

1939 – HP

1940 – McDonalds

1975 – Microsoft

1976 – Apple

1977 – Oracle

1980 – CNN

1981 – MTV

1984 – Dell

1984 – Cisco

2000 – Baidu

2001 – Wikipedia

2002 – Skype

One response to “Businesses formed in a recession”

  1. Mark Littlewood says:
    December 10, 2009 at 10:10 AM

    Or in fact more correctly, Businesses that were formed at difficult times that others may not have considered starting a business or in times when setting up a business in that particular sector was not widely regarded as being sane. (e.g. conventional wisdom in 2002 was that investors were not backing new dot com start ups, only ones that had been strong enough to make it through the bust of 2000/2001.

    HP For example is widely quoted as being formed ‘at the end of the Great Depression’ e.g. http://www.insidecrm.com/features/businesses-started-slump-111108/

    In fact the Great Depression finished in March 1933 [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States ] according to official figures (although the effects were felt by many for much longer). However, there was another recession, widely regarded as one of the worst in the US in the 20th Century, that ran from May 1937 – June 1938.