David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Also I didn't realize that the fact that the coffee company got rolled up into Coke, and I presume the 1970s, they weren't conglomerating earlier than I thought. I mean, obviously Coca-Cola is a multi-hundred-year-old brand, but they were single product for the majority of their life. I assumed it was the 90s and 2000s when they started becoming this big portfolio of beverage brands, but it sounds like it was much earlier. It was and they were buying other stuff. I don't know how big it was versus the cola business. Anyway, with Cherry Coke, Don convinces Warren to switch. That of course causes Warren to start thinking like, oh, well, maybe I should take a look at investing in Coke. He becomes intrigued. As he digs in, I think this was 1985 or so, maybe it was in 1983, I think. A couple years earlier, they had launched Diet Coke, and Diet Coke was like a monster. Coca-Cola, now Classic, as we will get into in a second, was great, but Diet Coke is huge, maybe the most successful beverage product launch of all time. It's a blockbuster. So Warren’s intrigued, but he thinks, hey, stock price is kind of high. I'll just keep an eye on it. And then New Coke happens. I knew about and I've read about, but do you remember this Ben? How do you mess this up? If you're a company like Coca-Cola, and you got all these big brains around the table, and you basically have a thing that's a trade secret—you don't have any IP protection around it but you have the magic formula—and you have the brand—not yet world-renowned but sort of a nation renowned brand that is synonymous with, like your sense of patriotism and its associated with one particular, very odd, very well-balanced flavor—how on Earth do you replace that? What are you thinking?…

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