Keep pulling the thread on David Gardner.
The Motley Fool's initial business model on AOL involved receiving a 10% share of the platform's per-hour user fees, which were approximately $4 per hour.
AOL's strategic shift from a per-hour to a flat-rate subscription model negatively impacted The Motley Fool's revenue and turned their high-engagement site into a cost center for AOL.
Since The Motley Fool's 1998 recommendation on "The View," Starbucks' stock has increased in value by 33 times.
David Gardner's investment criterion of seeking strong past price appreciation is based on his analysis that seven of his best stock picks, including Netflix and NVIDIA, had risen 30% to 90% in the 3-9 months before he first recommended them.
A key tenet of David Gardner's "Rule Breaker" strategy is to invest in stocks that are widely considered overvalued by mainstream financial media.
When David Gardner first recommended Intuitive Surgical, its stock was trading at 73 times earnings, and it has since increased over 100 times in value.
Every one of David Gardner's most successful, generationally great stock picks has lost 50% or more of its value on more than one occasion.
Due to long-term holding and stock splits, David Gardner's cost basis for both Amazon and NVIDIA is 16 cents per share.
In 1996 and 1997, a group of global economists voted AOL the "most overvalued stock" for two consecutive years, after which the stock increased 150 times in value from The Motley Fool's initial recommendation.
In the 2000s, Netflix offered to sell itself to Blockbuster for $50 million, an offer which Blockbuster's management declined.
The CEO of Blockbuster once dismissed Netflix as a "niche thing" on The Motley Fool's radio show, at a time when Blockbuster had 25 million customers to Netflix's 1 million.
Netflix's key disruption was changing the video rental industry's business model from transactional and late-fee-driven to a subscription-based relationship.