
Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of - RudySF
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/billionaire-revealed-biggest-company-ve-never-heard-135439645.html
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lifeisstillgood
More tantalising than revealing - he is focused on quanta tive metrics -
that's good, he pays extra not to make mistakes, hell that's almost unique (I
assume some bonus based on errors in stock reconciliation) - but what are his
sales channels look like? Who are his suppliers and how does he handle them?
Does operating under the radar give benefits better than just being modest?

And yes the big question - why now?

And the second big question - how many other quiet billion dollar or even just
8figure companies are out there?

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rocky1138
Assuming this is why he is a former president:

“I tried to put our name on the trucks and he didn’t want any part of it,”
said Edward Albertian, a former C&S president, to Bloomberg. “He wanted to
continue to be stealth and operate in this little, dinky Keene, New Hampshire,
marketplace.”

Little, dinky marketplace that brings in over a 1 billion dollars in sales...

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pmorici
Seems like the no names on the trucks thing could also be about efficiency.
How much does it cost to get a truck painted with the company logo?

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wavefunction
It costs a meaningless amount for a company of this size. Perhaps the
anonymity is more valuable though.

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Houshalter
It's not really valuable, most companies want to get their names out there.

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ErikHuisman
They are wholesalers. They don't want to compete with the brands of their
customers. The unmarked trucks drive business.

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epc
Also makes it more difficult for the competition and market analysts to gauge
the company's activities.

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danilocampos
So why are we hearing about the company now? Is this how you sell a successful
but previously-unknown company?

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chiph
Sounds like what happened is the original reporter in Boston came across him,
did some investigating, and found out how wealthy he is. Also sounds like he
didn't really want the publicity, preferring to live a quiet life. If he ever
intends to sell, his competitors certainly know about him, and I expect equity
firms know about him as well.

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bch
> "[Cohen] has lots and lots of customers. And he delivers all of his goods in
> unmarked trucks, so that's how he stays secretive. C&S... does not have its
> branded trucks as other companies, like Sysco (SYY), its competitor, would
> so he's able to stay under the radar."

This makes no sense. "Under the radar" from who? Joe and Jane Average on the
street maybe, but stores that are making orders are going to have reps
dropping by, and the suppliers are going to _KNOW_ that if Store A is carrying
product XYZ, and it's not getting it from (e.g.) Sysco, it's coming from
somewhere else. I can't imagine unmarked trucks keep C&S off the radar from
anybody who actually cares.

Edit: On re-read, maybe it -is- supposed to be stealth from Joe and Jane
Average. Initially I thought they might be attributing "stealth" to the
success of C&S. I guess they really just wanted to be quietly (to the public)
doing their work. In that case: great job invading privacy Daily Ticker.
"Nobody's Business" indeed.

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pmorici
Perhaps under the radar from politicians who would otherwise demand political
donations as protection against onerous government actions? It says the local
town council was even unaware of how major an employer the company was.

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andyakb
That's not exacty how polticians treat billionaires, or anybody really. I'm
not saying its free of corruption by any means, but almost nothing that
transparently corrupt occurs

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pmorici
Sure it is. They wouldn't describe it as I have in plain language but that is
basically what goes on albeit with the veneer of propriety provided by
campaign fundraising events and congressional horse trading.

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Hectic1015
C&S is a fascinating company. As a former employee, the insight for me is that
you can make a lot by disrupting a large, old industry.

What they don't highlight is that they grew from about $500m in revenue to
$20bn in about 20 years from 88 to 2006:
[http://bit.ly/1a12pkU](http://bit.ly/1a12pkU). C&S did this by innovating on
management models at the warehouse, having a capital model which grew its cash
position as it expanded, and helping to support the business case for private
equity acquisitions of major US Grocery Chains.

This article also misses one major point. Rick is innovating again. ES3
([http://www.es3.com/](http://www.es3.com/)) is the largest automated
warehouse in the world. As this warehouse scales, it could take a full step
out of the grocery supply chain for the east coast.

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noonespecial
I've resigned myself to the fact that most really rich people became so doing
things I'd have never in a million years imagined you could get rich doing.

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w3pm
Many of these "I'd never have imagined you could get rich doing...
(groceries|steel|lumber|shoes|silverware|bandaids|etc) examples take
generations to build the business large enough to actually "get rich." They're
definitely not "get-rich-quick" schemes but slow, methodical progress made on
capturing a portion of industries with billions worth of turnover per year.
Obviously counter-examples exist (Cotsco, etc.) but by and large these stories
involve generational contributions to the business.

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systemizer
Self-maintained groups and incentives based on performance. It would be
interesting to adopt this in the tech area: the amount and quality of your
unit tests means you get paid more.

You can also do code analysis: look at branching factors; code duplication;
runtime performance; etc

This might be hard to implement in a company setting; but it may be easier to
apply with contracting work.

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tbrownaw
How do you quantify whether someone is solving a problem the wrong way, just
because that way will score better on the metrics?

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systemizer
I don't have a good answer for you, but let me shoot a question back at you:
"How do you determine whether the code you're looking at is good or bad?"
Surely, there's an algorithm you run in your head that looks at specific
features of the code and analyses them. All I'm saying is that there may be a
way to automate that algorithm and use it to drive incentives. Even if the
algorithm is as simple as "make sure X and Y unit tests pass."

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DougWebb
Assert.IsNull(null);

It's easy to make unit tests pass. To defeat this kind of gaming, you'd need
extensive code review of the unit tests. But that circles around to your
point: when you look at code there's something that tells you whether it's
good or bad. That algorithm can't be based on passing tests, because tests are
code too and also need review.

If you had a team of completely selfless developers, you could probably have
code-reviews and peer-reviews drive incentives. But as soon as the team
suspects it's a zero-sum game and they're competing for a limited prize,
they're going to stab each other in the backs, and your best developer will be
the prime target. That'll make your best developer leave, and the next-best
becomes the target, until all you're left with are lousy developers who are
only good at office politics.

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ig1
Anyone at all interested could have found out about the company, it's been
near the top of Forbes list of largest private companies for years (which is
even mentioned in the companies Wikipedia article):

[http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/21/private-
companies-10_lan...](http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/21/private-
companies-10_land.html)

I'm guessing most people haven't heard of half the companies in the top ten,
unless you're a consumer business you can be huge and almost no-one will
recognize your name.

Here's a little test, how many of these companies do you recognize:

Bazaarvoice, Conduit, Klarna, nicira, Homeaway, Workday, Changyou, ServiceNow,
Giant, Guidewire, DealerTrack, SuccessFactors, SourceFire, ArcSight, Popcap,
ExactTarget.

They're all tech startups with valuations estimated in the billion+ dollar
range. Unless you've used them you'll probably have never come across them.

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rocky1138
I thought once companies got to a certain size they were forced to go public?
Or is that in Canada only?

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bpodgursky
In the US once a certain number of people hold stock you have additional
financial disclosure laws. But if it's owned by a single owner / family,
you're never forced to go public regardless of revenue. That wouldn't make any
sense, since you'd basically be forcing the owners to sell their shares
whether they wanted to or not.

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qwerta
I think in California you have to go public over certain number of employees.
Facebook had problems with that.

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CyrusL
That was also based on the number of shareholders, not the number of
employees. Facebook began issuing RSUs, which don't count towards the limit,
to employees when they started approaching the 500 shareholder limit, but I
believe trading on SecondMarket pushed them over 500.

Also I think Facebook was originally a partnership and then converted into a
DE c-corp. I don't think they were ever a CA company.

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mdisraeli
“We’re the biggest company no one has ever heard of”, aka "My huge
company/daddy is bigger and more obscure than yours!".

Although in this case, they might actually hold a better claim on that title
than others it is often given to

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JonCox
Anyone else notice the similarities with Madrigal from Breaking Bad?

Low key, large profits, extensive distribution network. I may be paranoid
but...

(Okay, probably just a coincidence/I've been watching too much tv recently.)

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Radle
I find this post is awful, i mean don't people in Britain do have rights on
Privacy? Their Photos etc?^^

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Houshalter
What are you referring to?

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adaml_623
Bloomberg acting like a mini little NSA. Finding rich people and violating
their privacy.

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mjn
Unless Bloomberg is coercing internet providers into handing over his emails
and getting secret court orders to record his web traffic, it doesn't seem
like a very good comparison.

Investigating people, especially those with any kind of political, economic,
cultural, academic, or other influence, based on publicly available
information and whatever people are willing to tell you if you ask, is a
pretty traditional part of American public life. There's no right to force
people to be disinterested in what you do and refrain from writing articles
about it, as long as they collect the information by legal means.

