Ancestry

Use newspapers.com to read about founders before anyone knew they'd win

Sam's research habit: subscribe to newspapers.com (owned by Ancestry, ~$10-20/mo) and set the date range to a founder's early years to read contemporaneous coverage of people like Ted Turner or Dan Gilbert before their outcomes were known.

“I started reading about Dan Gilbert, the guy who started Quicken Loans, and he owns all this stuff. Big deal. He's revitalizing Detroit. Everyone knows his name. I was like, what was his path like? What did he start? And so I went to Dan Gilbert, 1994, Quicken Loans, and it was like his company was 6 years old. And I looked at how they were describing him and they described him as very similar to what they described him as now.”

Steal thisRead primary-source newspaper coverage from a founder's early years to see how people judged them before the outcome was known, training your own pattern recognition.