Over the last 20 years, thousands of these bottom line companies have been founded. You may not familiar with all of them, because much like AT&T or GE, they take decades to get big enough to show up on the radar of a distant viewer.
Take this guy for example, the pillow king (as bottom line as Oreos):
Or Under Armour, founded in 1996, on its way to being a giant potentially.
Or Lululemon, founded in 1998.
Netflix and Tesla are also both bottom line companies.
Tory Burch is an example, as is Sara Blakely & Spanx. Fashion has a lot of significant bottom line stories from the last 20 years. Hard to tell which might grow into the next big fashion conglomerate, or just be acquired (as with Burch apparently).
There are a lot of these types of stories roaming about, and far more of them that have yet to break the media surface but will in the next five or ten years. You often don't hear about them until they get big enough to be picked up by the likes of Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, et al. It's also next to impossible to tell which one of them will go on to become a big conglomerate like Mondelez; we'll find out in 30 or 40 years.
I think another good example would be the craft beer industry. The brewers association directory[1] lists around 200 regional and large breweries in the US, and somewhere around 5000 microbreweries and brewpubs.
Granted, some of these are more than 20 years old, but the movement grew the most through the early 90's[2].
Book suggestion: "beyond the pale" by Ken Grossman, founder of Sierra Nevada. Probably my favorite book about a startup ever. Great example of both bootstrapping and also a founder knowing his craft completely.
Take this guy for example, the pillow king (as bottom line as Oreos):
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-11/the-prepo...
Or Chobani, which most know about now:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-31/at-choban...
Or Manoj Bhargava of 5 hour energy fame:
http://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/5-hour-energy-billions-in-ch...
Or Monster Beverage (reinvented in the early 1990s), which has become, well, a monster ($25 billion market cap):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Beverage
Or Under Armour, founded in 1996, on its way to being a giant potentially.
Or Lululemon, founded in 1998.
Netflix and Tesla are also both bottom line companies.
Tory Burch is an example, as is Sara Blakely & Spanx. Fashion has a lot of significant bottom line stories from the last 20 years. Hard to tell which might grow into the next big fashion conglomerate, or just be acquired (as with Burch apparently).
There are a lot of these types of stories roaming about, and far more of them that have yet to break the media surface but will in the next five or ten years. You often don't hear about them until they get big enough to be picked up by the likes of Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, et al. It's also next to impossible to tell which one of them will go on to become a big conglomerate like Mondelez; we'll find out in 30 or 40 years.