They Had a $31 Billion Empire , Then Ignored One Small Thing That Destroyed It #business #wealth

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]In 1975, a 24-year-old engineer walked into a meeting at Kodak headquarters.

[00:00:07]He had just built something that had never existed before.

[00:00:11]A camera with no film.

[00:00:13]A camera that captured images [music] digitally. He called it the world's first digital camera.

[00:00:19]His bosses looked at it, studied it, then locked it in a drawer.

[00:00:24]Because Kodak made $2 billion a year selling film. And a camera that needed no film was a camera that needed [music] no Kodak. So, they buried it for nearly two decades. And while they [music] buried it, they told themselves the same thing every year. Nobody will ever give up physical photos. [music] People want something they can hold.

[00:00:46]Digital will never replace film.

[00:00:49]By 1996, [music] Kodak was worth $31 billion. 140,000 employees worldwide. They owned the photography industry completely. [music] Then something changed. Sony, Canon, Nikon, companies with nothing to protect [music] started selling digital cameras aggressively. And consumers didn't hesitate.

[00:01:12]By 2000, digital camera sales were exploding.

[00:01:16]By 2004, film sales had collapsed by 75%.

[00:01:20]Kodak scrambled. [music] They tried to launch their own digital cameras, but it was too late. Because the market didn't just move on from film, it moved on from cameras entirely.

[00:01:31][music] The iPhone launched in 2007.

[00:01:35]By 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy. [music] A company worth $31 billion gone. And the most [music] painful part?

[00:01:45]They invented the very technology that destroyed them.

[00:01:49]The engineer who built that first [music] digital camera in 1975, his name was Steve Sasson. Kodak held the patent.

[00:01:58]They owned the future and they chose the [music] present instead.

[00:02:02]So, here's the real lesson. It's not that Kodak was stupid. It's that they were too comfortable.

[00:02:08]Because the most dangerous moment in any business [music] isn't when things are going badly.

[00:02:14]It's when things are going so well that you stop paying attention to what's coming next.

[00:02:19]Like if you want to start building your first million, like in comment billionaire if you want to start building your first billion.

[00:02:26]If you want to think like this consistently, subscribe to or this might be the last time you ever see us.