Laugh-O-Gram Studio

In the early 1920s, Walt began working in commercial art and animation.

In 1922, he founded Laugh-O-Gram Films in Kansas City, Missouri.

The company produced animated short films, including creative adaptations of fairy tales.

That sounds like a promising beginning.

It was, but then at last, Laugh-O-Gram Films experienced financial difficulties and eventually went bankrupt in 1923.

Instead of abandoning animation, Walt moved to California with his brother, Ray O. Disney.

Established the Disney Brothers Studio in October 1923.

Well, did he have a lot of money when he started?

Walt was fired from an early job at the Kansas City Star newspaper because he was not creative enough.

In 1922, he started his first company called Laugh-O-Gram.

The Kansas City-based business would produce cartoons and short advertising films.

In 1923, the business went bankrupt.

At 22, Walt worked as a newspaper artist, dreaming of bigger things, but his editor fired him saying he wasn't creative enough.

Determined to prove himself, he started Laugh-O-Gram Studios, his first animation company.

He hired a team, made cartoons, and poured everything into it.

But bad business deals left him broke, in debt, and sleeping in his office floor.

I think most people in Kansas City, yeah, have no idea, right? And of course, we don't have time to visit all of them, so we hit the highlights.

And I th- I would say, um, you know, obviously the most important place, I think, in Kansas City is the, the site of the Laugh-O-Gram film studio-

Absolutely

... because it represented Walt's first company, president at age 21, but also represented failure, right?

What a quitter.

But I did say Vera Wang, and you know her name, right? Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams had a company called Odeo, a podcasting platform.

As soon as they heard that Apple came out with iTunes, they quit Odeo.

Wow, really? Just in the face of a, a little fight with a Goliath, you're just gonna quit? What weenies, you might be thinking.

Quitter, you shout.

Well, today, Wrigley chewing gum is one of the most recognizable brands in American history, and still, to this day, generates billions of dollars in revenue annually.

Now, yesterday, y'all asked about how all those famous stories that you've been pumped up with all your life, what about the never die persistence of Thomas Edison and his light bulb thingy, or Walt Disney, who actually quit his company Laugh-O-Gram, by the way, or Colonel Sanders, who was rejected 1,009 times before he succeeded.

If they had quit, they'd never have gotten anywhere.