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 围观兄提到卖酱油的做高科技，我来ZT一篇从薯片到芯片的大佬。励志啊。 |
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作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Jack Simplot
Jun 12th 2008
Jack Simplot, potato- and memory-chip tycoon, died on May 25th, aged 99
JR Simplott Company
DOES the American Dream come with fries or hash browns? In Jack Simplot's version, it came with both. Starting out at 14 with little education and only $80 from his mother, Mr Simplot died a multi-billionaire. Much of his success he owed to the Russet Burbank that grows so well in Idaho's light volcanic soil, and Mr Spud, as he became known, never forgot this debt, nor rejected his roots: till the day he died his favourite restaurant was McDonald's, where he always ordered either french fries or hash browns.
Mr Simplot's was an all-American story, even involving a log cabin. That was the house built by his father, after the family moved to Idaho from Iowa in 1910. Dad, however, was stern and after a series of rows young Jack left home for the small town of Declo. The teachers in his boarding-house there were paid with IOUs that carried interest if held long enough. With money raised from rearing orphaned lambs, Jack bought these notes for 50 cents on the dollar and used them as collateral for a bank loan. That money bought him several hundred pigs, which he fattened with swill made from potato peelings and the meat of wild horses: “I shot 'em, jerked the hides off and cooked 'em myself,” he said. He sold the pigs for $7,800.
Next came farming and a half share in a machine that sorted potatoes. Unwilling to let Jack rent the machine out, his partner, who was “about half alcoholled up”, agreed to see outright ownership settled by the toss of a coin. Jack won. Mass sorting then began, followed by processing and drying, not just of potatoes but of other vegetables, too. A trip to California to collect a debt resulted in Mr Simplot coming back with an order for 500,000lb (227 tonnes) of dried onions; and onion powder, he said, was like gold dust.
By 1940 he had 30,000 acres (12,150 hectares) of land and was filling 10,000 freight wagons with potatoes a year. Once America was at war, every third portion of potatoes on the GIs' plates was supplied by Mr Simplot. He could take the credit when, in 1948, Idaho first put “World Famous Potatoes” on its car licence plates.
Eager to cut costs and to keep control, he became a great vertical integrator, owning much of the land on which he grew his produce and fertilising it with phosphate from his own mines. He even owned the forests that provided the wood for the boxes in which his veg was packed before he processed it. Any food he could not sell he fed to his cattle, and in time he would own the biggest cattle ranch in America.
With restless energy and a gambler's love of a new enterprise, he was always innovating. Not all his ventures succeeded. An attempt to take large-scale farming to Germany was a failure, and other investments in Latin America and Europe flopped. But he looked only for a 51% success rate, and that he far exceeded. A hugely profitable breakthrough came in 1953, when one of his chemists perfected a technique for freezing chipped potatoes. By the late 1960s Mr Simplot was the biggest supplier of french fries to McDonald's. In 1980 a $1m investment gave him 40% of a start-up that became Micron Technology, which makes semiconductors for storing data in microchips and memory cards.
The odd felony
Mr Simplot's success had the traditional ingredients: hard work, thrift, enterprise, readiness to take risks and a shrewd ability to assess an opportunity. It also involved an occasional brush with the tax man. The authorities first accused him of tax dodging after the war. Charged with trying to manipulate potato futures, he paid $50,000 in fines in 1976, and he and his privately owned company both paid more fines for tax fraud in 1977.
In other respects, too, Mr Simplot departed from the usual heroic script. The patriot who flew a gigantic Stars and Stripes above his house thought religion was “hocus-pocus”. The lifelong teetotaller and anti-smoker was addicted to sleeping pills. The munificent donor to many good causes was ready to foreclose on a loan to his son. Indeed, the man who said he put his family above all else was a distant father to both his eldest boys, whom he sent away to school. He made more time, though, for his adored grandchildren.
He had critics, too. Environmentalists in particular were horrified at his company's hostility to land-use and clean-air laws. Mr Simplot himself, an avowed lover of skiing, duck shooting and the great outdoors, was attacked in the 1970s for his support for new coal-fired electricity plants along the Snake river and for a scheme to generate hydro-power by diverting water from another river into a vast underground tube. Free-traders took him to task for his readiness to lobby President Ronald Reagan to put a $300m tariff on imported computer chips.
Other traits earned a certain admiration. Mr Simplot was unstuffy: he often answered the telephone himself and his number was never ex-directory. He was frugal to the point of stinginess, driving a scruffy Lincoln Town Car for six or seven years before buying a new one, and he did not like paying to have the brakes fixed. Even his hostility to “goddamn parking spaces for cripples” may not have done him any harm. In potato country, the American Dream does not have much room for political correctness.
作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 围观兄提到卖酱油的做高科技，我来ZT一篇从薯片到芯片的大佬。励志啊。 -- ceo/cfo - (5403 Byte) 2008-6-29 周日, 09:41 (1849 reads)
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