[Outliers] J.W. Marriott

In 1927, a man from a farming town in Utah opened a nine seat root beer stand in Washington, DC with $6,000 to his name. By the time he died, that stand had become one of the largest hotel companies in the world, with billions in annual sales, over a hundred thousand employees and a name you see all over the world.

His name was J. Willard Marriott, but everybody called him Bill. And here’s what’s strange about the Marriott story. You’d assume the man who built the world’s largest hotel company was a hotel guy, but he wasn’t, he didn’t open his first hotel until he was in his mid fifties, and he fought against it the whole way.