On the desk today · Iron Mountain
The boxes go in. They almost never come out. And the rent never stops.
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The Mushroom Farmer's
Bomb Shelter
In 1936, a mushroom farmer named Herman Knaust bought a depleted iron ore mine in Kingston, New York, for $9,000. He grew mushrooms underground for 15 years. His neighbors called him the "Mushroom King." Then the Cold War changed everything. The threat of nuclear attack made corporations desperate to protect their records. Knaust looked at his mine and saw a vault. In 1951, he founded the Iron Mountain Atomic Storage Corporation and began charging oil companies and banks to store documents inside a mountain, outside the blast zone of New York City. He bought a 28-ton vault door in Ohio for $1 and paid $20,000 to ship it to the entrance.
I was cleaning out a closet last month and found a box of old files — tax returns from 2014, a lease from a previous apartment, a folder of receipts I'll never look at again. I couldn't throw them away. I couldn't bring myself to shred them. So I put the box back. That instinct — the inability to destroy a record you'll probably never need — is the entire Iron Mountain business model.
Most people think of Iron Mountain as a storage company. It is — but that description misses the point. It's a company that charges rent on boxes that never leave. Once a corporation sends its records to Iron Mountain, the cost of retrieving, sorting, and re-filing them somewhere else is almost always higher than just paying the storage fee. So the boxes sit. And the meter runs.
Knaust's mine became a business. The business became a chain. The chain became a real estate investment trust in 2014. Today, Bill Meaney runs Iron Mountain from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The company operates roughly 1,350 facilities across 58 countries and serves more than 240,000 customers — hospitals, law firms, banks, government agencies, and every Fortune 1000 company you can name.
The numbers from 2025 are records — for the fifth straight year. Revenue hit $6.9 billion. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, and depreciation came in at $2.6 billion. The company generated $1.5 billion in adjusted funds from operations — $5.17 per share. And the growth businesses — data centers, digital services, and asset lifecycle management — grew more than 30% for the full year. If you think this is still just a box storage company, the numbers say otherwise.
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That customer count — 240,000 organizations — is the number I keep returning to. These aren't month-to-month renters. The average customer relationship at Iron Mountain stretches for years. Some have been storing boxes for decades. And the economics of retrieval are brutal: pulling your records, cataloging them, shipping them, finding a new vendor, re-shelving everything — it costs more than just paying the rent for another five years. So you pay. The boxes stay. The rent compounds.
The pricing power is quiet and annual. Iron Mountain raises storage rental rates on existing boxes by a few percent each year — typically tied to inflation or built into contract escalators. A law firm paying $40,000 a year to store 10,000 boxes doesn't call Iron Mountain when the invoice goes up 3%. That's $1,200. Less than a single associate's billing hour. The boxes are already there. The rate goes up. Customers pay anyway.
I find myself drawn back to the vault door. Knaust paid a dollar for it. Then he spent $20,000 to ship it from Ohio and bolt it to the mouth of his mine. That ratio — spending 20,000 times the price of the door just to move it — tells you everything about the business. The thing that protects the records is cheap. The location and the trust are priceless. Bill Meaney, who has run the company since 2013, described the latest results simply: "We are pleased to report another record performance, concluding our fifth consecutive year of all-time highs."
The flywheel now runs on two tracks. The legacy business — physical boxes, tapes, documents — generates roughly $4 billion a year in storage rental revenue. It barely grows, but it barely shrinks either. The boxes just sit. The new growth engine is data centers. Iron Mountain is building server capacity at a rapid clip, and data center revenue grew more than 33% in 2025. The same customer that stores its paper records with Iron Mountain now stores its digital backups there too. Same trust. Same relationship. New revenue stream.
WHY THIS WORKS
The boxes never leave. Retrieving and relocating stored records costs more than years of rent. Inertia is the moat. Once the box enters the facility, the revenue stream is effectively permanent.
Invisible price increases. Annual rent escalators of 2–4% on storage are rounding errors in a corporate budget. No procurement team launches a review to save $1,200 a year on file storage.
Two growth engines, one customer. Physical storage generates stable cash. Data centers generate 33%+ growth. The same 240,000 relationships feed both, and cross-selling is accelerating.
Regulated necessity. Banks, hospitals, law firms, and government agencies are required by law to retain records for years or decades. The demand isn't optional. It's mandated.
What most people miss: Iron Mountain started as a mushroom farm inside a mine. The founder paid $1 for a 28-ton vault door and $20,000 to move it. Today the company stores boxes and data for 240,000 organizations — and the boxes almost never come back out. Five straight years of record revenue. And it all began with a farmer who realized his cave was worth more than his mushrooms.
Disclaimer
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.
Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.
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