Happy Monday
One idea, one quote, one question. 90 seconds.
The Idea
The oldest company in recorded history was a Japanese temple builder called Kongo Gumi. Founded in 578 AD. Not 1578 — 578. A Korean carpenter was invited by a Japanese prince to build the country’s first Buddhist temple, and his family kept building temples for 1,428 years. Forty generations. One craft.
Think about what that company survived. The Meiji era, when the Japanese government actively tried to eradicate Buddhism — their entire customer base. Civil wars. Famines. Two atomic bombs. Every one of those should have killed them. None did, because through all of it they kept doing the one thing they were the best in the world at.
Then in the 1980s, Japan’s real estate bubble arrived, money got cheap, and for the first time in fourteen centuries the company did something new. They borrowed heavily and started speculating in property. The bubble burst, the debt ballooned to roughly 30 billion yen, and by 2006 the world’s oldest independent business was gone — liquidated to pay creditors and absorbed as a subsidiary of a larger construction group.
Here’s the detail that gets me: as late as 2004, temple building was still 80% of their revenue — over $60 million a year. The core business was fine. The craft never failed. The family had simply decided, after 1,400 years, that the craft wasn’t enough.
Forty generations of leaders each inherited the same temptation. Expand. Diversify. Chase the thing working for everyone else right now. Thirty-nine of them said no. It only took one yes to end it.
They survived war for fourteen centuries and got killed by a good economy in twenty years. The crash tests your business. The boom tests your judgment.
Quote
“There are only three ways a smart person can go broke: liquor, ladies, and leverage.” — Charlie Munger
Question
What’s the “temple building” in your life — the boring thing that actually works — and what shiny opportunity is currently whispering at you to abandon it?
Listen
Mark Pincus: What 10 Years of Failure Really Looks Like Before a $7B Exit. The other side of the same coin. Kongo Gumi abandoned a working craft and died; Pincus stayed in a craft that wasn’t working yet and won. Before Zynga hit a $7 billion valuation, he spent over a decade on ventures that never broke through — Freeloader, Tribe.net, a social network that predated Facebook and still couldn’t stick. He treated every misfire as tuition on product, virality, and monetization, then spent all of it at once on Zynga. Same lesson from the opposite direction: the years that look like nothing are usually the ones doing the work.
Read
The Living Company by Arie de Geus. A Shell executive studied why some companies live for centuries while the average corporation dies before 50, and found the long-lived ones shared the same traits: conservative with money, and absolutely clear on what business they were in. It’s the Kongo Gumi story as a repeatable pattern — and a quiet argument that most “growth strategy” is just impatience with a better name.
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— Scott