Welcome back to the Collective. Last week, our interview featuring Series Co-Founders Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow (two current Yale undergraduate students who raised $3.1M in 14 days) gave us context on what it is like to build a game-changing startup in its earliest days.

But today, we’re going to remind you that there are lessons to learn from the companies who have been building in tech for way, way, WAY longer than any of us have even been alive.

We’d like to call this the first entry in the Coeus Collective Icons series, where we will seek to examine the stories behind the iconic companies, founders, and VCs who have shaped our current collective reality.

Today, we’ll be examining a company that has been one of the most meaningful global brands in tech for over a century: IBM.

From the founding of International Business Machines to improve the US federal government’s operational efficiency in the 1890 census to WatsonX AI today, IBM has maintained an unmatched flexibility in their capability to impact the landscape of business and technology.

As we learned from our NGEN Trailblazers interview featuring IBM VP of Transformation David Cuenca (which we released on our YouTube channel today), this capability to create meaningful impact over time stems not only from technological advancement, but rather from distinct philosophies that drive the company forward.

"You find opportunity when you experience pain."

"We literally eat what we cook."

"Keep your entrepreneurial mindset, don't change it."

Alright, we are ready now. Let’s get to it.

— By Antonio DiMeglio and Leon Li

The First International Business Machines

IBM's origin story begins not with computers, but with the messy collision of three seemingly unrelated businesses in 1911.

Charles Ranlett Flint, a merger specialist operating near Wall Street, saw potential in combining companies focused on distinctly different products: computing scales (for weighing and calculating costs), time recording devices (for tracking factory workers), and most critically, data tabulation machines. This unlikely trio formed the unwieldy named Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).