Hacker Cinema
The Founder
2016 · Film · 115 min
Directed by John Lee Hancock
The true story of how Ray Kroc, a salesman from Illinois, met Mac and Dick McDonald, who were running a burger operation in 1950s Southern California. Kroc was impressed by the brothers’ speedy system of making the food and saw franchise potential. He maneuvered himself into a position to be able to pull the company from the brothers and create a billion-dollar empire.
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39 comments on Hacker News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_Room_(film)
I still love the concept of the USA. However, please make this make sense to me. How did we get here?
This is the man involved with:
1. Copy-pasting Putin's request to end NATO and the post-war rules based order that made us all rich as a society.
2. Pardoning major criminals who even I, as a news junkie, didn't know existed.
3. Pushing the Fed to make bad calls.
4. Renaming the DoD to the Department of War!
5. Starting a war with Venezuela.
6. n+1 ??
I just want my nephews to be safer than they were yesterday. Is that what is happening now?
Disclaimer: please note that I avoided all the internal USA "politics" stuff.
Double Disclaimer: Cannot make this up. At this very moment, I am watching the movie "The Founder", and loving it. Still, wtf 2025 USA?
> McDonalds is a real estate business.
In the same way that American Airlines is a credit card company. How much rent will they receive if they stopped selling burgers?
> The Founder"
Good movie but McDonalds is a long long way away from scrappy, morally-bankrupt Ray Kroc's time. I imagine using pink slime to make the nuggets he sold to kids would be right in his wheelhouse though.
McDonalds is a real estate business. I recommend you check out the 2016 movie "The Founder" which is the story of Ray Kroc. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founder
> My thinking around that is it's pretty much the same effort to build something small or something big
Your thinking have huge mistake, because you thinking about money, without considering market.
What I mean, market is not a single flat place where all 6 Billions walking and you will look at them from crystal tower.
But real market space is multi-dimensional, for simplicity I will tell analogy.
Imagine, Newton method of finding roots of equations. For simple case it could been considered rough 2D surface, like Moon surface projection, with indefinite number of holes, and some holes are huge, and others are tiny.
And height of edges of hole, which you research are important, because they are practically proportional to energy need to overcome edge of your hole, so it defines some tension, or budget to come to other hole, or it named enter barrier.
And hole width define, how many money could be here.
What important for business, as I said before, you are not only person on Earth, there are at least hundreds millions smart people (about 10%), who also want to make some money and making research of their environment, so your concurrents are aware about surface line of market, and where it have holes.
And typical human avoid small holes, prefer to enter large holes or even huge holes.
So, when you enter tiny hole, huge probability, you will not see any market concurrence there.
What also important, start small doesn't mean, you will not become big any time, as you could make some fat in small niche, and than you could make try to enter bigger niche, or few neighbor small niches, etc.
In reality, McDonalds and Walmart began in regional small niches, and enter mega-cities after make fat in niches (for mcdo way you could watch "the founder" cinema, for Walmart, read "made in America").
Sure, if you have few spare Billions, you could start already big, but I bet, you would not ask this question having Billions.
PS any way, you are not alone, ask if you consider cooperation.
Sideways
Back To The Future
Cinema Paradiso
Spaceballs
Up In Smoke (Cheech & Chong)
The Incredibles
Indiana Jones 1-3
Indiana Jones: Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (Rifftrax only)
Falling Down
Office Space
Man Bites Dog
Nothing To Lose
Idiocracy
Space Mutiny (MST3k)
Goodfellas
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Groundhog Day
Barbie
Full Metal Jacket
Mallrats
Flight Of The Navigator
The Founder
One Hour Photo
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I'm pretty certain I've rewatched Sideways more than any other film.
Ha. I was only saying that in jest, hope I didn't come off too strongly.
I have a IRL best friend who is very against all forms of TV and media while I watch quite a bit of it. We argue strongly about this, so I've trodden this path ha.
Sometimes I'm not in the mood or mindset to read. 99% of my YouTube is makers / documentaries / war footage / local history and maps / etc. For mainstream stuff, just biopics or stories loosely based on real life or old war content (recently: Gotti, Edge of the World, Bruno Manser, Founder, Hacksaw Ridge, the Lebron/Lakers TV show, Detroit war production, some others) and I'm a huge sci-fi fan so I'll watch most scifi fiction as well.
To him, its all just mindless consumption. I 100% agree though about being social and desiging around people rather than a screen, but I don't judge others too much. To each their own.
This was the plot of the film "The Founder" on the founding of McDonalds.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4276820/
The founder and Air are must watch. Also, Guru (Bollywood) is a nice one - story of Dhirubhai Ambani, the man who founded Reliance industries
The Founder. Not a movie but Halt and Catch Fire was really great.
That's my feeling, too. It reminds me of a scene in "The Founder", the movie about McDonalds: "You're not in the burger business. You're in the real estate business."
"The Aviator" [1] about Howard Hughes? Love to also talk about real startups movies without failure as a main theme. For example, "The Social Network" (includes Winklevoss and Eduardo Saverin "failures"). We have other non-fictional ones such as "The Founder" [2] about McDonalds. Classic: "Pirates of Silicon Valley". Ford v Ferrari (amazing if you have not seen it) [3].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338751/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founder
[3] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_v_Ferrari
> It's like being trapped in a hamster wheel
No!
You just opening world. Approx to 1950, people satisfy only most important physiological needs (in east Europe/USSR/Asia this was longer), but from 1950s, got resources to have more.
If you look on primitive model of Maslou Pyramid, even there are more levels than just physiological.
Century ago, people engaged with religions, but now most (classic religions) considered valueless, and are in deep crisis, so appear huge void, and entrepreneurs see it and try to use it.
And Apple is just play dolls, comparable to others.
For me very mind-shaking was movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founder
Watch it, it's really joy.
I think, md system will appear, even more paradoxical for you, because there are religion for investors, but customers see just pure performance, and central administration of franchise takes care of things.
The beginning part of the Founder (i.e. the story about how Ray Kroc turned McDonalds into a huge empire) is sort of inspirational in that the man has gumption and he recognizes the potential for Micky D's to become huge even though the original McDonald brothers never wanted to take it as big.
In fact, there's a portion of the movie where's psyching himself up to go and hustle by listening to a recording of Calvin Coolidge's speech on Persistence.
Like all that was really cool. My fave moment, though was when the McDonald brothers describe how they optimized the layout of their McDonald's location in San Bernardino.
In the last 3rd of the movie you see the bad part of Ray Kroc and how he ripped off the brothers but aside from that the first half is pretty inspirational to me.
Overall, a great movie.
If you haven’t, watch the movie “The Founder” which tells the back story about McDonald’s and its efficiency.
The Founder was a nice movie about McDonald's founding. They have automation and labor-saving devices and processes cooked right into their early DNA. Recent efforts around automated ordering are just the last straw in a long line of efficiency optimizations.
> How can you call McDonald's predatory pricing? They have been cheap and profitable for decades.
Their pricing and food is a gimmick, didn't that movie The Founder and the subsequent articles from various outlets pretty much lineout how Mcdonald's actual business model relies on Property Management and franchising? [1]
The food, competitively priced (questionable food costs and sources are the bigger story not told) or not is only the hook/marketing costs to get you to show up in Corporate's business model, the real money is in leasing the property and the brand name to the Local owner.
Personally speaking, I had the misfortune of eating at Mcdonalds during this COVID shutdown on more than one occasion as grocery stores were closed by the time I got off work.
And other than nostalgia for what was once a haven of my childhood, I cannot bring myself to put that stuff into my body without feeling nausea afterward. Everything is overly sweet, or salty; I remember the pickles and the fries from the happy meal being pretty decent as a kid in the 90s that went down with the Hi-C orange soda, having had one of those value-meals ($15 is hardly a value mind you) as an adult with the same items was atrocious.
1: https://medium.com/@alexcjensen/forget-burgers-mcdonalds-is-a-real-estate-company-49658d4d9061
That quip was actually documented quite lucidly in The Founder (where Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc). I really enjoyed that film.
I saw the movie "The Founder" (Michael Keaton is Ray Croc of McDonalds fame).
They had trouble with francisees offering their own menus, having dirty restaurants and more...
Their trick was to become a real estate company who owned the land, and then lease to the franchisee. If there was any problem, they had complete control over the franchise.
That said, as a customer the whole POINT of 7-11 is to be always open. (although I wonder what stores are still open 7am-11pm instead of 24 x 7)
I designed/built my own house too[1], giving sketches to an architect and working with him. Some major takeaways for others who have yet to build:
* No one will care about your project as much as you and this includes the architect :(
* Few(???) architects and zero builders seem to understand light/wind/circulation like people apparently intuitively did 200 years ago. You might be better off with the average curious engineer designing the house than the average architect. Everyone is astonishingly lazy, even mansions around here have terrible light/circulation problems.
* VR is no match for IRL! It's best to actually get a measuring tape and stake out the dimensions of the house on the land. An even better, get chalk and go to a big flat parking lot and draw out the entire floor plan (compass-correct) and walk inside, looking at the sun (keeping in mind what season). This worked well for me, I should have done more of it. I didn't build a porch though, which is where getting more exacting summer/winter sun angles would matter.
I actually got the chalk idea from the excellent movie The Founder, where the creators of McDonalds try out different kitchen workflow models this way.
* Draw and sketch a huge amount. Sketch facades freeform, with the ruler, etc. The fidgeting will help you discover things.
* Read a bunch of books about old houses. Maybe most approachably: Get Your House Right and A Pattern Language
* Get a pinterest board for you + spouse. We used ours heavily and it was great for keeping track of interior detail decisions.
[1] It's a fundamentally simple house, basically a box that maximizes light and airflow and wood burning heat, so I probably had a much easier task than you. Some of the original drawings: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1183150002002112512
> The movie "The Founder" might clear things up.
The movie The Founder is mostly fake. It's unlikely to clear much up.
http://rayandjoan.com/the-founder/
> "WeWork is a weird company because it is a real estate company that thinks it’s a tech startup; [...]"
This quote reminds me of something that was said in the movie The Founder (2016).
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4276820/
(Spoiler alert, possibly.)
“You’re not in the hamburger business. You’re in the real estate business.”
Ray Kroc is analogous to Adam Neumann.
They both expanded a marginally profitable (and hard to grow) business by expanding a few locations than leveraging the capital to buy real-estate, which allowed them to stop caring about the original and individual franchised business success. Using the massive income of being commercial property landlords, even if the franchises failed, they had revenue growth. Now that Kroc is gone, the reference to McDonald's as a corporation is convenient, since the history is understood and available.
The movie "The Founder" might clear things up.
The Movie "the Founder" sort of explains things.
Also McDonald's https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4276820/
I think that you are correct. I also think that journalists look for attention-grabbing headlines. I haven’t read the article, but the headline makes me think that the author saw the movie The Founder, where a McDonald’s co-founder leverages the real estate market as the primary profit generator, and thought, “I can apply that to Apple.”
Ray Kroc's story is fascinatingly told in recent film "The Founder" with Michael Keaton as the fascinating food franchise businessman and "founder". The film isn't entirely accurate, though closer than many films get, and a fun watch.
Hi everyone, I'm sharing this following my viewing of "The Founder" (the movies).
I was surprised to see so many famous people being ambulance drivers during the WW1.
Including, but not limited, you can find Walt Disney, Ernest Hemingway and of course, Ray Kroc (McDonalds).
Which is what the movie "The Founder" drives home near the end (besides that Ray Kroc screwed over the McDonald brothers). It's a real estate company that owns buildings that are occupied by fast food burger restaurants. How well those restaurants do doesn't really matter all that much because the value of the real estate is most likely going to increase over time. If the restaurant does well, it's just a bonus.
As an aside. McDonald did exactly this by doing everything efficiently. They increased their margins by improving costs and having a niche product. Still wasn't easy.
See the movie The Founder. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4276820/
The interesting question is whether Musk himself portrays himself as the founder. I don't think he does? There are lots of stories though of how people take a business and make it huge, and take credit for being the founder when they weren't. The most popular story these days may be Ray Kroc due to his work at McDonald's and the corresponding movie The Founder.
Your topic is kind of wide-ranging and it's difficult to know if something will be off-topic or not. Let's try:
In terms of someone hacking the system, not for himself, but for the benefit of the people, there's this guy Edward, with a documentary made about him called 'CitizenFour' (2014). It's pretty good! It doesn't end like 'The Founder' though.
In terms of continuously hacking an invention to find new ways of exploiting it, I'd say the hard sci-fi indie movie 'Primer' (2004) pretty much revolves around that (although it might not be completely obvious during the first viewing).
I have to mention 'Spin' (1995), about the 1992 US election candidates. The hack here is not really the subject, but the documentary itself: it is entirely made of unauthorized satellite feeds of pre- and post-interview scenes not meant to be broadcast, i.e. you see all politicians talking unfiltered and off-the-record, as they were all unaware that, even though they were not being broadcast at those very moments, the cameras were still on and transmitting over satellite -- and their feed could be easily intercepted.
Rant on actual/software hacking movies: it might be different for some other medium, but I don't know of any movie that depicts hacking in a realistic way and is a decent movie. In my opinion, this is because there is nothing cinematic in hacking. As far as I know, the only one that marketed itself as 'realistic' on this topic was 'Blackhat', but that aspect of the movie was boring, and almost everything else was lazy and/or dumb. Maybe something on TV?
Agreed. Watch "The Founder". The amount of workplace efficiency brought by the McDonald brothers would have been, and almost certainly was considered inconceivable by other restaurateurs of the era.
"The system" was so good that it revolutionized the fast food market to the point that almost every attempt to buck the trend is now considered some sort of synonym to 'craft' or 'artisanal'.
(Note: I'm taking the movie as canon, which is basically stupid, but I have a grandfather who would gladly tell you the story of his first McDonald's visit, and how revolutionary it was relative to everywhere else he'd been, but for his passage a few years back.)
Do you know the 3 most important things in Real Estate? Location, Location and Location.
Also, besides the location, a cheap rent is crucial to your success. I have seen dentists (in Europe) going out of business because of the rent. In many businesses you are in fact in the real estate business. Have you seen the recent movie about McDonnalds? "Founder"?
Quote: " You build an empire by owning the land. You're not in the burger business. You're in the real estate business."
The Founder is a movie that tells the story of the birth and growth of McDonald's (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_founder/), and it covers much of the ground covered in this article.
In addition to being a very well-done movie, it does a superb job of describing the relationship between the visionary founders of a startup, and the sales guys and bean counters who turn it into a successful business. It doesn't matter that the McDonald brothers were revolutionizing burgers, the telling of this part of the story captures perfectly the same sort of activity that goes on at any startup with a new idea, (emphasis on new). It also captures very well how the suits recognize a good thing when they see it, buy into the vision (but for very different reasons from the founders), and finally take over and render the founders obsolete.
Really great movie for anyone involved with startups.
I Second that. The Founder was a very intriguing movie.
One of the things I really liked about the movie is that Kroc didn't actually come up with many of the ideas at all. He was just very successful at recognizing good ideas, good talent, and synthesizing them together.
Traits of a good founder.
Plus one on it being a good startup movie.
Watch The Founder,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4276820/
for an entertaining and educational dramatization of the McDonald's story, including the franchising and real estate leasing aspects.
According to the Wikipedia article on Kroc, soon enough you won't have to read his story because Michael Keaton will be playing him in the movie The Founder coming out in December. Really interesting guy though. I had no idea about all the positive things he did while he was in control of McDonald's