Sam Parr tells how a 1920s mushroom farmer whose business failed rented a cave, installed a vault door, and accidentally started Iron Mountain. Now the $30 billion company stores 80 million square feet of records, including Princess Diana's will and U.S. government secrets, generating over $1 billion in annual free cash flow.
In the 1920s, there was this guy. He was the Mushroom King of America. He had to rent a cave and grow mushrooms. And for some reason, those damn Europeans started undercutting him and started selling cheaper mushrooms. And he was like, my mushroom business is going to go under. I got to figure out what to do. He bought a bank vault door and he installed it in his cave, went to a local bank and was like, hey, you guys have a lot of paperwork. I have the safest place on earth to store this paperwork. And he started this thing called Iron Mountain. Google Iron Mountain market cap. $30 billion. Company. Since the year 2000, they have created a billion dollars at least per year in free cash flow, and they now own 80 million square feet of storage. They have everything. Princess Diana's will is in there. The record label Sony has all of their masters recordings stored in Iron Mountain. This is the thing that stores the government stuff? Yes, federal government is a customer of Iron Mountain.
