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Quote of the Day
How important is an understanding of history? Here’s the CEO and founder of Amgen on one of his “lessons learned” from his early life:
“I mean, I took physics and I took solid geometry and trigonometry—those courses. But I did avoid a… history course that I regretted ever since…”
-George Rathmann, founder of Amgen, which had its IPO on this day in 1983.
June 18th – This Day in Stock Market History
June 18th, 1983 – Amgen (Ticker symbol: AMGN) has its initial public offering at 18 dollars per share.
The I.P.O valued the company at about $190 million dollars.
Amgen shares would fall more than 60 percent after the first 5 months being publicly traded:
In fact, it would take Amgen stock nearly 3 years just to get back to its IPO price!
Today, Amgen is worth more than $130 billion and is one of the largest bio-pharmaceutical companies. Since the company’s IPO, the price has risen more than 57,000%:
June 18th, 1998 – Disney buys a 43 percent stake in Infoseek.com, valuing the company at $900 million.
The purchase was made to compete with Yahoo, A.O.L, and Netscape as the internet bubble heats up. At the time, infoseek had 14 million monthly visitors, making it the 10th most visited website at the time.
Disney would combine the assets of infoseek and roll it into its “Go.com” platform, which it included its properties that would become ABCnews and ESPN.
Disney would give up on Infoseek in 2001, firing all employees. The few remaining assets of Infoseek today belong to HP.
Source: WIRED – Disney Buys Into InfoSeek
Best June 18th in Dow Jones Industrial Average History
1984 – Up 2.09%, 22.75 points.
Worst June 18th in Dow Jones Industrial Average History
1930 – Down 4.26%, 9.73 points.
Read of the Day
Here is a long interview with George Rathmann, founder of Amgen with the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
https://digital.sciencehistory.org/downloads/f7623d61j?disposition=inline
The early part of the interview talks about his early life and growing up. If you don’t find that interesting, don’t miss the middle and end, where he gives some great lessons learned for entrepreneurs, investors in biotech, and more.
