Cinematic stories of the world's greatest business empires.
How Empires Rise is a narrative business podcast that tells how the world's greatest companies were built, broken and rebuilt — from Samsung to Apple, from Toyota to Tesla. Every story is deeply researched, checked against named sources, and scored like a film.
How Empires Rise is the English-language edition of Hành Trình Đế Chế, Vietnam's business-storytelling podcast. It retells how the world's great companies — from Asia, America and Europe — were founded, nearly destroyed, and rebuilt into empires.
Every episode begins as a research dossier: newspaper archives, company filings, IPO prospectuses and founder memoirs, cross-checked fact by fact before a single line is recorded. The result is storytelling with the rigour of a documentary and the pull of a drama — the founding gamble, the near-death crisis, the decision that changed everything.
The show exists for one reason: to tell the stories of how the world's great business empires were built, so that every listener can draw lessons from them — and light the fire of building something of their own.
Season One adapts the show's 100-episode library, opening with twelve flagship stories — TikTok, Huawei, TSMC, Nintendo, Nike and LEGO among them — before rolling out the full slate of 45 new empires across nine regions.
How did Samsung become a global empire?
A small trading company becomes the empire behind the phone in your pocket and the chips inside almost everything else — through war, crisis and a chairman's decision to burn $50 million of faulty phones in front of his own workers.
How did Apple rise from a garage to the world's most valuable company?
Two Steves, one garage, a founder fired from his own company — and a comeback that turned a near-bankrupt computer maker into the defining empire of the consumer-tech age.
How did Toyota conquer the world's roads?
A loom maker's son bets the family fortune on automobiles, and a philosophy of relentless, humble improvement — kaizen — quietly out-builds Detroit and reshapes how the whole world manufactures.
How did Tesla survive 'production hell' to remake the car industry?
Weeks from bankruptcy more than once, sleeping on the factory floor, betting the company on a sedan the industry said was impossible — the electric empire that forced every carmaker on Earth to change course.
How did ByteDance build the algorithm that hooked the world?
In 2012, a 29-year-old engineer starts a news app in a small Beijing apartment. Its recommendation engine gives birth to TikTok — and lands its founder in the centre of the US–China tech war, stepping down as CEO at 38.
How did Huawei survive being cut off from the world's chips?
Founded in 1987 with 21,000 yuan in a shabby Shenzhen room, Huawei rose to lead global 5G — then came the US blacklist, the chip cutoff and the arrest of the founder's daughter in Canada. Huawei's answer: build everything itself.
How did one company come to make the world's most advanced chips?
In 1987, Morris Chang — past 55, fresh from Texas Instruments — proposes an idea the industry laughs at: a company that makes chips only for others, never under its own name. Today that 'pure-play foundry' fabricates the most advanced chips on Earth for Apple and NVIDIA.
How did a playing-card workshop become the house of Mario?
Kyoto, 1889: a craftsman opens a tiny workshop making hand-painted hanafuda cards. One hundred and thirty-five years later it is the creator of Mario — by way of taxi firms, love hotels, the Wii triumph and the Wii U collapse that nearly ended it.
How did Nike start with $50 and shoes sold from a car trunk?
In 1962 Phil Knight borrows $50 from his father and flies to Japan to represent a company that doesn't exist. A decade of selling shoes from a trunk, permanent cash-flow panic, a supplier's betrayal — then a $35 swoosh, and Michael Jordan.
How did LEGO rebuild itself from the edge of bankruptcy?
In 2003 the brick empire is losing roughly $300 million a year, over $800 million in debt, with 94% of its products unprofitable. A 35-year-old outsider CEO sells the theme parks, cuts thousands of parts — and returns to the brick.
How did SpaceX survive three exploding rockets?
Three Falcon 1 launches fail between 2006 and 2008. With the last of his money split between SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk has fuel for one more try: on 28 September 2008 the fourth rocket reaches orbit — and three months later NASA signs a $1.6 billion contract.
How did Grab defeat Uber in Southeast Asia?
Anthony Tan walks away from his family's manufacturing empire to build a taxi app his family opposes. Grab burns billions fighting Uber across Southeast Asia — until Uber sells its entire regional business to Grab in 2018, ahead of a record $40 billion SPAC listing in 2021.
This is the complete approved slate of 45 new companies for the show's 100-episode library — eight of them (Grab, ByteDance, Huawei, TSMC, Nintendo, Nike, LEGO and SpaceX) are the flagship stories featured above. From Vietnam's Trung Nguyên Legend to Brazil's Nubank.
Three things set the show apart: every fact is verified against named sources before recording; every episode is scored with original music composed for that empire's story; and the show begins where Western business media rarely looks — the boardrooms of Asia.
Each episode is built from a source dossier — reporting by Reuters, Bloomberg, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, SEC and stock-exchange filings, and founder memoirs such as Shoe Dog. If a number cannot be traced to a named source, it does not make the script.
One signature theme opens every story; beyond that, no two episodes sound alike. Each empire gets its own original score — Vietnamese strings for a Vietnamese saga, electronic pulses for a tech war — rising at the turning points, never wallpaper.
English-language business shows retell the same Silicon Valley canon. How Empires Rise covers nine regions — Samsung and Hyundai, Alibaba and Huawei, Reliance and Tata, alongside Apple, Nike and LVMH — because the next century of business is being written on every continent.
Join the launch list. We will email you the moment Season One premieres on Spotify and YouTube — one email at launch, then one per new empire story. No noise, no spam, unsubscribe anytime.
How Empires Rise — cinematic stories of the world's greatest business empires — is coming soon in this language. The English and Vietnamese editions are available now.
Use the language menu above to read the site in English or Vietnamese today.
