The Agora Companies didn’t spring from a vision. It is not something that was ever designed… sketched out on a napkin… or carefully presented in a business plan.
Agora has been an evolutionary thing… the result of a “spontaneous order” to use a phrase from Austrian economics. It is what you get when an invisible hand shoves you around. You adapt to circumstances. You adjust your plan. You try things. Most fail. Those who don’t fail become your business.
Our name comes from ancient Greece, where an agora was a marketplace. We are a kind of marketplace. But we are not a marketplace for cabbages and silver jewelry. We are a marketplace of ideas. In fact, Agora is the largest publisher in the world of ideas.
We don’t publish information. You can get information from almost anywhere and often for free. A friend who passes on information with no judgment or advice isn’t much of a friend. A good friend gives you good advice. We want to be a good friend to our customers.
Imagine a bell curve. In case you’re not familiar with a bell curve, it’s a shape that shows the way things are distributed in nature. Most things tend to fall right in the middle. They are average. Ideas follow that same distribution. The ideas that everyone knows and everyone believes are in the center. All new ideas, fashions, businesses, and trends begin on the edges of the bell curve. That is where innovations take place. That’s where we want to be.
Of course, not every idea out there on the edge is worth exploring. Some “crazy” ideas are simply that. Others, however, merit further attention. A few examples: the report put out by one of our groups in the mid-2000s warning that the housing bubble was going to collapse… or the many times our health newsletters warned that sugar, not fat, was the biggest danger to the American diet… or one of our editor’s recommendations that all his subscribers buy stock in Nvidia back in 2004…
Not every innovative idea makes it to prime time. Our customers know that. They don’t expect us to be right all the time. They pay us to explore the edges of the bell curve and to report to them on the ideas and recommendations we find most compelling. They forgive us for being wrong… but they never forgive dishonesty, laziness, or incompetence. This is why quality is so important… even with the least expensive of our products. We try to continually improve our core products year after year, even when there is no discernible payoff. This is a radical principle. It focuses our attention on the quality of what we produce and the quality of our relationship with the customer rather than on bottom-line profits.
Ultimately, we can never forget that we have a special relationship with our customers. And we can never get complacent about it.
Our headquarters in Baltimore are very different from the humble place in the slums where we started out. And we now have offices across the world. But as a business, we are fundamentally the same. We are still in the business of ideas.
— Bill Bonner, Founder, The Agora Companies
The Visionaries Behind Agora
Bill Bonner
Bill Bonner is a best-selling author and the founder of The Agora Companies. With his adage “right, wrong, always in doubt,” Bill created Agora’s unique culture of entrepreneurialism, integrity, and above all, a fascination with bold ideas at the edges of the bell curve.
Mark Ford
Mark Ford is a best-selling author, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. He has been instrumental in the success of dozens of multimillion-dollar businesses, including The Agora Companies, which he joined in 1993. As a partner, Mark’s “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach to business building fueled Agora’s growth into the worldwide group it is today.
