Looking to investigate a competitor, including their history, strengths, weaknesses, or other? Or, conducting a research project on a small business or entrepreneur? The resources and tips listed below will be helpful.
Private and public U.S and international business data, industry news, facts and figures, executive contact information, and industry data.
Data and analysis on international and domestic stocks, mutual funds, and exchange traded funds.
Search to find manufacturers, distributors, and service providers.
Visiting a company website is a great way to learn more about the company's mission and values, products and services, and their activities. Public companies will have information like quarterly and annual reports and earnings call presentations available on their websites, usually on a page called Investor Relations.
Example:
The layout and organization of a company's Investor website will each be different. But all with have useful content to use in your research. Three things to start with:
A document that public corporations must provide annually to shareholders that describes their operations and financial conditions.
The earnings conference call is a way for companies to relay information to all interested parties, including institutional and individual investors, as well as buy- and sell-side analysts.
A press release is a piece of news or information that companies send out to inform the public about something noteworthy or of material significance. Press releases are often handled by a company's public relations (PR) department.
Example:
From the bestselling author of The Everything Store comes an unvarnished picture of Amazon's unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, revealing the most important business story of our time.
The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos - the Enron of Silicon Valley - by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers.
Build an iconic shopping experience that your customers love - and a work environment that your employees love being a part of - using this blueprint from Trader Joe's visionary founder, Joe Coulombe. Coulombe founded what would become Trader Joe's in the late 1960s and helped shape it into the quirky food chain it is today.
The inside story of the rise and fall of WeWork, showing how the excesses of its founder shaped a corporate culture unlike any other.
Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, shares lessons he learned in business and life which show how improving the happiness of those around you can increase your own and create success in your business.
From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era - a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.
A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing.
A fast-paced look at the corporate dysfunction - the ruthless cost-cutting, toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management - that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation.
In The Founders, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal's turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today - fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer - were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal's success.
Simple but powerful advice on how and why to rethink your business structure in a time when traditional capitalism is no longer working for people or the planet. Vincent Stanley, Patagonia's director of philosophy, along with Yvon Chouinard, founder and former owner of Patagonia, draw on 50 years of experience at Patagonia to challenge all business owners and leaders to rethink their businesses in a time of cultural and climate chaos.
The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and U.S. Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that's because the billionaire Koch brothers want it that way.
The New York Times bestselling author Fawn Weaver unveils the hidden narrative behind one of America's most iconic whiskey brands. This book is a vibrant exploration set in the present day, delving into the life and legacy of Nearest Green, the African American distilling genius who played a pivotal role in the creation of the whiskey that bears Jack Daniel's name.
Award-winning reporter Sarah Frier reveals an inside, never-before-told, behind-the-scenes look at how Instagram defied the odds to become one of the most culturally defining apps of the decade.
Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.
In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company's early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world's most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years - as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues - Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang take readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within Facebook to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth.