In this episode of Add To Cart, we checkout George Hartley. Co founder of Bluethumb, Australia’s online art marketplace. Representing over 20,000 emerging and established artists from Australia, Bluethumb’s mission is to make discovering artists and buying art easy. They have on boarded a third of Australia’s Indigenous Art Centres and have recently launched in the US.
Can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
I really like reading biographies. There’s one I’m reading right now, which is called The First Tycoon about Cornelius Vanderbilt. It’s mind blowing, this guy, you know companies were invented while he was starting. A limited liability company wasn’t a thing and then it was.
Is this better than a monopoly? Is democracy better? All these things were concepts that were being batted around.
You realise how much infrastructure and how much stuff we already have to build stuff now versus these guys back in the day. Also, it’s this story of US exceptionalism. The invention of the steam engine was like the internet now. It opened up the world. It’s just a great story of his grit and ability to turn a steam engine into the richest man in the world and lay the pipes for America to be the dominant thing it is now.
The Checkout is a short snippet of our conversations.
