Founders

#193 Arnold Schwarzenegger (Arnold's first autobiography)

What I learned from reading Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder by Arnold Schwarzenegger. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- I knew I was going to be a bodybuilder. It wasn't simply that either. I would be the best bodybuilder in the world, the greatest.I'm not exactly sure why I chose bodybuilding, except that I loved it. I loved it from the first moment my fingers closed around a barbell and I felt the challenge and exhilaration of hoisting the heavy steel plates above my head. The only time I really felt rewarded was when I was singled out as being best.I had it tougher than a lot of my companions because I wanted more, I demanded more of myself.I was literally addicted.I learned that this pain meant progress. Each time my muscles were sore from a workout, I knew they were growing.I could not have chosen a less popular sport. My school friends thought I was crazy. But I didn't care. My only thoughts were of  going ahead, building muscles and more muscles.I remember certain people trying to put negative thoughts into my mind, trying to persuade me to slow down. But I had found the thing to which I wanted to devote my total energies and there was no stopping me.My drive was unusual, I talked differently than my friends; I was hungrier for success than anyone I knew.Reg Park looked so magnificent in the role of Hercules I was transfixed. And, sitting there in the theater, I knew that was going to be me. I would look like Reg Park. I studied every move he made. From that point on, my life was utterly dominated by Reg Park. His image was my ideal. It was fixed indelibly in my mind.I had this insatiable drive to get there sooner. Whereas most people were satisfied to train two or three times a week, I quickly escalated my program to six workouts a week.With my desire and my drive, I definitely wasn't normal. Normal people can be happy with a regular life. I was different. I felt there was more to life than just plodding through an average existence. I'd always been impressed by stories of greatness and power. Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon were names I knew and remembered. I wanted to do something special, to be recognized as the best.My dreams went beyond a spectacular body. Once I had that, I knew what it would do for me. I'd get into the movies and build gymnasiums all over the world. I'd create an empire.This inspired me to work even harder. When I felt my lungs burning as though they would burst and my veins bulging with blood, I loved it. I knew then that I was growing, making one more step toward becoming like Reg Park. I wanted that body and I didn't care what I had to go through to get it.My weight room was not heated, so naturally in cold weather it was freezing. I didn't care. I trained without heat, even on days when the temperature went below zero.From the beginning, I was a believer in the basic movements.Most of the people I knew didn't really understand what I was doing at all.My mind was totally locked into working out, and I was annoyed if anything took me away from it.I started this practice early in my career and continued it for as long as it served to help me maintain a clear focus and drive myself toward a fixed point.In two or three years I had actually been able to change my body entirely. That told me something. If I had been able to change my body that much, I could also, through the same discipline and determination, change anything else I wanted.I know that if you can change your diet and exercise program to give yourself a different body, you can apply the same principles to anything else.Every day I hear someone say, "I'm too fat. I need to lose twenty-five pounds, but I can't. I never seem to improve." I'd hate myself if I had that kind of attitude, if I were that weak.By observing the principles of strict discipline that bodybuilding taught me, I can prepare myself for anything.My desire to build my body and be Mr. Universe was totally beyond their comprehension.  I listened only to my inner voice, my instincts.Even people's ideas were small. There was too much contentment, too much acceptance of things as they'd always been.I felt I was already one of the best in the world. Obviously, I wasn't even in the top 5,000; but in my mind I was the best.At that point my own thinking was tuned in to only one thing: becoming Mr. Universe. In my own mind, I was Mr. Universe; I had this absolutely clear vision of myself up on the dais with the trophy. It was only a matter of time before the whole world would be able to see it too. And it made no difference to me how much I had to struggle to get there.They paid and came to the gym. But it was a disgusting, superficial effort on their part. They merely went through the motions, doing sissy workouts, pampering themselves.I went right down the line, trying to figure out who I might beat. I got to eighth or ninth place and figured I might have a chance if I tried hard enough. It was a loser's way of looking at it. I defeated myself before I even entered, before I'd even completed the year's training. But I was young. I hadn't yet pulled together my ideas about positive thinking and the powers of the mind over the muscles.Once I was over the initial disappointment of losing, I began trying to understand exactly why I had lost. I tried to be honest, to analyze it fairly. I still had some serious weaknesses. For me, that was a real turning point.I was relying on one thing. What I had more than anyone else was drive. I was hungrier than anybody. I wanted it so badly it hurt. I knew there could be no one else in the world who wanted this title as much as I did.I had thought perhaps he had some special exercises, but that wasn’t true. He concentrated on the standard exercises. That was his "secret" —concentration.Being around Yorton [the winner] backstage for a few minutes made me painfully aware of my own shortcomings.They asked when I was going to get a real job, when I was going to become stable. "Is this what we raised," they asked, "a bum?"I continued doing precisely what I knew I needed to do. In my mind, there was only one possibility for me and that was to go to the top, to be the best. Everything else was just a means to that end.If I expected to make it big in the field, I had to become a showman.I had a photographer take pictures at least once a month. I studied each shot with a magnifying glass.I started training in an area where there were no distractions. That gave me enough time to concentrate and find out what bodybuilding was really all about.I was determined and constant. I never wanted to pause or stop training.I sacrificed a lot of things most bodybuilders didn’t want to give up. I just didn't care, I wanted to win more than anything. And whatever it took to do it, I did.You are a winner, Arnold. I wrote this down and put it where I would see it. I repeated it a dozen times a day.I had lists and charts of the things I needed to concentrate on pasted all over. I looked at them every day before I began working out. It became a twenty-four-hour-a-day job; I had to think about it all the time.We made it a regular thing. We brought girls out there to cook. We made a fire outdoors and turned the whole thing into a little contest. We worked hard but we had a good time. After the muscle-shocking sessions we drank wine and beer and got drunk and carried on like the old-time weight lifters back in the 1800s or early 1900s. Sometimes it became pure insanity.It was a great time. We cooked shish kebab, sat around the fire, and made love. We got into this trip that we were gladiators, male animals. We swam naked out in nature, had all this food, wine and women; we ate like animals and acted like animals. We got off on it so much it became a weekly routine-eating fresh meat and drinking wine and exercising.It's important that you like what you do, and we loved it.They weren't mentally prepared for intensive championship training; they weren't thinking about it. I knew the secret: Concentrate while you're training. Do not allow other thoughts to enter your mind.When I went to the gym I got rid of every alien thought in my mind.I knew that if I went in there concerned about bills or girls and let myself think about those things I'd make only marginal progress.It was then I started seriously analyzing what happens to the body when the mind is tuned in, how important a positive attitude is.53. I began looking at the difference between me and other bodybuilders. The biggest difference was that most bodybuilders did not think I'm going to be a winner. They never allowed themselves to think in those terms. I would hear them complaining while they were training, “Oh, no, not another set!" Most of the people I observed couldn't make astonishing advances because they never had faith in themselves.They had a hazy picture of what they wanted to look like someday, but they doubted they could realize it. That destroyed them. It's always been my belief that if you're training for nothing, you're wasting your effort. Ultimately, they didn't put out the kind of effort I did because they didn't feel they had a chance to make it, And of course, starting with that premise, they didn't.You talk yourself into it. You tell yourself you are going to be the hero.I came in second. That did a little number on my mind. I went away from the auditorium overwhelmed, crushed. I remember the words that kept going through my head: "I'm away from home, in this strange city, in America, and I'm a loser." I cried all night because of it. I had disappointed all my friends, everybody, especially myself. It was awful. I felt it was the end of the world.Business fascinates me. I get caught up in the whole idea that it's a game to make money and to make money make more money.Now I had to reach out to the general public, to people who knew nothing about bodybuilding, and educate them to the benefits of weight training.Working in the same way I had to build my body, I wanted to create an empire. I felt I was equipped to go ahead with my own enterprises.I've come to realize that almost anything difficult, any challenge, takes time, patience and hard work, like building up for a 300-pound bench press. Learning that gave me plenty of positive energy to use later on. I taught myself discipline. I could apply that discipline to everyday life.Gradually a conflict grew up in our relationship. She was a well-balanced woman who wanted an ordinary, solid life, and I was not a well-balanced man and hated the very idea of ordinary life. She had thought I would settle down, that I would reach the top in my field and level off. But that's a concept that has no place in my thinking. For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.The same with business. I'm so determined to make millions of dollars that I cannot fail. In my mind I've already made the millions; now it's just a matter of going through the motions. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS)

What I learned from reading Big Brown: The Untold Story of UPS by Greg Niemann.  ---- Casey pursued a Spartan business philosophy that emphasized military discipline, drab uniforms, and reliability over flash.I had heard stories about the company's tireless founder. He was a living legend. Jim Casey started working from the age of eleven to support a family of five.Casey began at the bottom. He speedily delivered messages and packages on foot. Casey learned about efficiency by doing.Seconds saved become minutes over the day and a few minutes each day mean big dollars.To outsiders the UPS regime has always seemed excessive.People have always bought more than they could carry, and a hundred years ago they had no cars to help them out. When Jim Casey and his partners began their delivery service, it served only department stores, and the UPS role was to complete the stores' retail transactions.Humility was one of Jim Casey's most strongly held values.Our real, primary objective is to serve. To render perfect service to our stores and their customers. If we keep that objective constantly in mind, our reward in money can be beyond our fondest dreams.Service is the sum of many little things done well.Good management is taking a sincere interest in the welfare of the people you work with. It is the ability to make individuals feel that you and they are the company–not merely employees of it.Jim Casey watched the streets carefully. He watched movement. He watched what people sold and what people bought. He was an eternal puzzle solver, his mind constantly preoccupied by every sensory detail involving his core business, packages. He gravitated to them, mesmerized by how they were wrapped and how they were delivered.When traveling between meetings Casey would frequently tell his driver to stop when he saw a UPS delivery in progress. Without identifying himself, Casey would ask UPS drivers what they thought of their job. He'd listen carefully and consider their answers seriously. These informal "man on the street" interviews became an invaluable way for him to assess the efficiency of UPS delivery operations in a way that a UPS manager's filtered version could not.Jim Casey's office was a small stark room, occupied only by a desk, several chairs, and a coat tree. His door was never closed.His answer for sluggish layers of management was decentralization, and his attitude toward employees was an unwavering belief in and respect for the individual.Money and prestige did not push him. Excellence did.Casey's personal code was discipline.Hardly a shining star, Jim Casey was more a steadily burning flame.Distill Jim Casey's lifelong message to its essence and you get: Neatness, humility, frugality, dependability, safety, strong work ethic, integrity.This unassuming ascetic with an iron will based his company and his every move on ethics that he learned as a child. Jim Casey's parents greeted hardship with grit and ingenuity.Jim was by then old enough to apprehend his parents' mounting anxiety, to understand that his father was not healthy by comparison with other men. The worried atmosphere undoubtedly had effect.At the end of the nineteenth century, the number of American children in the workforce reached staggering proportions. Over two million children worked in mines, factories, and sweatshops, many in appalling conditions.For the Caseys, there was no alternative. It was critical. With two younger brothers to protect and a mother and an ailing father to support, eleven-year-old Jim Casey had developed a maturity that belied his age. His family was in precarious straits, and it was up to him to solve the problem.He worked more than ten and a half hours a day, and longer on Saturdays, starting at $3 a week. [He is 11]He picked up and delivered telegrams, mail, and packages —working from 7 P.M. until 7 A.M.It wasn't all telegrams. Many of the night calls were drug addicts summoning a messenger to help replenish their stash.During winters, it rained and rained. Jim was often cold and wet. Wealthy people could afford fancy hotels. Jim often looked with envy at them through the windows, as they sat in the big hotel chairs looking out onto the rain from warm lobbies.Thompson shot and killed Moritz. [Jim’s partner]The cold-blooded murder left the other two boys stricken.The company, founded in that six-by-seven-foot basement office, would eventually become United Parcel Service.Jim wrote to the Chambers of Commerce of every American city with a population over 100,000, asking for names of local delivery firms. He accumulated the names and then initiated a communications link that he called the "Parcel Delivery Service Bureau." The bureau was a means of sharing new methods, ideas, or systems that worked in different cities. Every once in a while, the correspondence disclosed a gem of an idea, which Jim would hurry to implement. [Founders allows you to do the same]Mr. Carstens told them that he would not fund their venture, but that they should not interpret his resistance as a disincentive. He finished with the words "determined men can gave do anything." That comment became an invocation; Jim Casey would use it as a rallying cry time and again.We have nothing to sell except service.Rather than paying up front with cash, they funded these acquisitions by pledging what they had, which meant shares of UPS stock. UPS was to use this strategy numerous times in coming years.The vision beyond retail store delivery made sense to Casey and he later related “Think of the scores of millions of additional packages we would handle if we delivered all those going into each territory, rather than what goes out of the stores we happen to serve."UPS would take on the ICC one city, state, or multistate area at a time.Like Aesop's tortoise, UPS was sure and steady, plodding toward its objective of providing delivery service all over America, moving forward with perseverance and a humility that bordered on stealth. Big Brown was slowly but inevitably taking over the country.As Jim Casey commented “Employee-ownership is credited by the people inside and outside the company with having done more than any other thing toward making our company and our people so notably successful financially and otherwise."Fred Smith and his FedEx was sheer genius. That FedEx was established in 1973 as an airline, not a ground delivery company, is an important legal distinction, because the company was exempt from onerous common carrier regulations. Airlines fall under a different regulatory body (the FAA), not the ICC that regulated trucking companies.And FedEx didn't intend to start up city by city as UPS always had. The concept was hatched nationwide, with its one hub, from the very beginning.Most UPSers took the ostrich approach, ignoring the new company. Some denigrated it, saying, for instance: How are they going to deliver them on the ground? Their network's too small. People don't need that much delivered overnight. Costs are too high. They'll probably go under.Business building, to Casey, depended on the hard work and loyalty that the stock ownership inspired. "The basic principle which I believe has contributed more than other to the building of our business as it is today, is the ownership of our company by the people employed in it."---Transition seldom comes easily. Of course, we cannot clearly see all of the steps ahead. It is always easier to see difficulties than to develop methods of solving them. But first, let us take sight of a goal. The difficulties will be solved in ways we cannot now see.First is the dream, then development, followed by improvement until the dream becomes a reality. Later a new dream makes the products of an earlier one obsolete. This has been the course of industrial history, and in its path have been the victims and the victors of progress. —Jim Casey ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#191 Naval Ravikant (A Guide to Wealth and Happiness)

What I learned from reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Naval Ravikant and Eric Jorgenson. Read the book online for free here.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- Naval has changed my life for the better, and if you approach the following pages like a friendly but highly competent sparring partner, he might just change yours.Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.If you don't know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out.Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.Ignore people playing status games, They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers, Most people haven't figured this out yet.Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.Fortunes require leverage.Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.An army of robots is freely available-it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.When you're finally wealthy, you'll realize it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place. But that is for another day.Your summary says "Productize yourself"-what does that mean? “Productize" has leverage. “Yourself" has accountability.Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.When I talk about specific knowledge, I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn't even consider a skill, but people around you noticed. Your mother or your best friend growing up would know.No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.If you're not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you. And they won't just outperform you by a little bit-they'll outperform you by a lot because now we’re operating the domain of ideas, compound interest really applies and leverage really applies.Escape competition through authenticity.If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that.The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.If you don't own a piece of a business, you don't have a path towards financial freedom.Find a position of leverage. We live in an age of infinite leverage.Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It's now leveraged versus un-leveraged.The most interesting and the most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication.This newest form of leverage is where all the new fortunes are made. The new generation's fortunes are all made through code or media.Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay.What you want in life is to be in control of your time.Demonstrated judgment-credibility around the judgmentis so critical. Warren Buffett wins here because he has massive credibility. He's been highly accountable. He's been right over and over in the public domain. He's built a reputation for very high integrity, so you can trust him. People will throw infinite behind him because of his judgment. Nobody asks leverage him how hard he works. Nobody asks him when he wakes up your or when he goes to sleep. They're like, "Warren, just do thing."Being at the extreme in your art is very important in the age of leverage.Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you're with, and what you do.Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering. If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you've done, it's all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions.The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.The more you know, the less you diversify.Inversion. I don't believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what's not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It's not about having correct judgment. It's about avoiding incorrect judgments.  In the intellectual domain, compound interest rules.Simple heuristic: If you're evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.What are the most efficient ways to build new mental models? Read a lot—just read.The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant-it's the desire to learn that is scarce.I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success I've had in my life and any intelligence I might have.There is ancient wisdom in books. If you're talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better. Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct. I wanted to get back into reading these sorts of books.A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.All the real scorecards are internal.You decide it's important to you. You prioritize it above everything else. You read everything on the topic.No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness.Self-discipline is a bridge to a new self-image.Enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#190 Henry Ford and Thomas Edison

What I learned from reading The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip by Jeff Guinn.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- Ford generally accepted the responsibilities of his celebrity-he'd worked diligently to cultivate it, realizing early on that his personal fame heightened demand for Model Ts.Ford's Model T changed everything. Thanks in great part to Ford's innovative assembly line, Model Ts were mass-produced on a previously unimaginable scale. In competitors factories, it took workers several hours to assemble an individual car. At the Ford plant, a completed Model T rolled off the line every two and a half minutes.Ford continued tinkering with the manufacturing process, aggressively seeking ways to cut production expenses and Model T prices even more. The best example fostered a popular joke that you could buy any color Model T that you liked, so long as the color was black. Few realized that Ford insisted the cars come in that color because black paint dried quickest, meaning Model Ts could be whipped through the assembly line and off to dealerships at an even faster pace, saving additional time and labor related dollars.The Model T alone would have established Henry Ford as a household name, but he'd further cemented his reputation as a friend of the working man with a stunning announcement. In an era when factory line workers were lucky to earn $2 a day for their labor and toiled through ten-hour shifts six days a week, Ford pledged to pay $5 a day, and to reduce workdays to eight hours. Everyone in America was talking about it.Over the years, as Ford founded and failed with two auto manufacturing companies before succeeding with his third, he endlessly reminisced about the meeting and Edison's words of encouragement: “Young man, that's the thing. You have it. Keep at it.”Ford was a cannier businessman than his hero, much wealthier.They found themselves in complete agreement about the evils of Wall Street and the crass men there who cared only for profit and not for the public. Both were poor boys who made good. Neither had a college degree, and both were disdainful of those who believed classroom education was superior to hands-on work experience and common sense.Like Edison, Ford didn't have many friends. Ford was a prickly man and also a complicated one, burning to make the world better for humanity as a whole while not enjoying personal contact with most individuals.Ford never doubted his own beliefs and decisions, forbidding disagreement from employees and ignoring any from outsiders. Ford's hobby was work. He devoted almost every waking minute to it.When he and the inventor quickly became the closest of friends, Ford felt energized again, thanks in great part to Edison's inspiration.For all of Ford's professional life he'd had to overcome skepticism from other successful men. He had always been the outsider, the one with the crazy ideas and clumsy social graces. Edison sympathized, because in his earliest years of prominence he was criticized for some of the same traits. The inventor not only accepted Ford for the rough-edged man that he was, he recognized in him the fine qualities that offset the carmaker's obvious flaws.Henry Ford was always a man of strong opinions, and one who absolutely trusted his own instincts. He especially disdained anyone identified as an expert: "If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means, I would endow the opposition with experts. No one ever considers himself an expert if he really knows his job."When prominent, better educated men and their hired experts insisted that the future of the automobile market was limited to manufacturing expensive cars for the wealthy, Ford believed that the real potential lay in sales of a modest but dependable vehicle to the growing American middle class; there would be less profit in individual transactions, but the sheer number of sales would yield greater cumulative returns. With the Model T, Ford was proved right, and he reveled in it.Their main goal was to have a good time. But few business magnates in America had a shrewder understanding of marketing than Edison, Ford, and Firestone. If rank-and-file consumers liked what they saw and read about, as they surely would, then sales of cars and light bulbs and phonographs and tires would directly benefit, too.Ford shocked America by resigning as company president. He was going to start an entirely new automobile manufacturing enterprise. Ford Motor Company stockholders assumed the threat was real, and within weeks agreed to sell Ford their shares at a whopping $12,500 a share. (James Couzens, who knew Ford best, held out and received $13,000 for each of his.) Though Ford had to borrow $60 million of the near $106 million total cost, he was still glad to do it. It had been an elaborate bluff, but he was now in complete control of Ford Motor Company.Ford received thousands of letters with the general message that if he were an anarchist, then America needed more of them. Ford was the son of a Michigan farmer, and like  most rural Americans of the time his formal education was limited to a few years in local schools and teachers who themselves had often not graduated high school. Then he had to leave school to make a living. Like Ford, many of his countrymen read only with difficulty, if at all. Their understanding of American history was limited. They, too, might not remember the exact date of the American Revolution, but they knew that Henry Ford introduced the $5 workday and a car that ordinary people could afford. They identified with Ford so strongly that newspaper attacks on him were taken as insults directed at them.They were shocked to receive shipments of Model Ts that they hadn't ordered. The edict on these cars was the same-Ford Motor Company must be paid for them. Refusal would terminate the dealer-company relationship. If they refused to accept these additional Model Ts and were fired by Ford, they could be ruined. Or, as the parent company suggested, they could accept the cars, if necessary get loans from their own banks to pay Ford for them, and then aggressively keep trying to sell Model Ts and hang on until the national economic crisis was over. The dealers had little choice but to accept. That provided Ford with enough money to meet his immediate corporate debts-the dealers had to risk wrath from their banks instead.She never complained when Ford spent most of his off-the-job hours trying to build a combustion engine in their kitchen. Clara encouraged Ford to pursue his dream of creating "a car for the great multitudes," remaining supportive when his first two companies failed, encouraging  him during the difficult first years of Ford Motor Company, his third.Ford fixated on even the smallest details.Patience was never Ford's strength.Ford had no interest in laurel-resting.Ford’s cars were built to last. Never flashy, in every way efficient, always dependable, much like the man whose company assembled them. And, just as Ford never saw any reason to change himself, he felt no pressure to change the Model T.Ford's stubbornness gave competitors the opening they needed. When Alfred Sloan took over General Motors in 1923, the new boss emphasized a marketing plan based on Americans wanting not just transportation, but selection. Enough people now owned cars so that ownership itself was no longer special. What was going to matter soon was driving a car that reflected the personality, the specialness, of the individual owner.As individuals, Edison, Ford, and Firestone created the means for the "great multitudes" to enjoy leisure entertainment far beyond what was previously imagined. As the Vagabonds, their summer car and camping trips exemplified what they had helped make possible: See what we're doing? You çan do it, too. By their example, the Vagabonds encouraged countless ordinary Americans to pursue their own dreams. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#189 David Ogilvy (The book I've given as a gift the most)

What I learned from reading The Unpublished David Ogilvy by David Ogilvy.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- [0:01] Will Any Agency Hire This Man? He is 38, and unemployed. He dropped out of college.He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer. He knows nothing about marketing, and has never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year.I doubt if any American agency will hire him.However, a London agency did hire him. Three years later he became the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world.The moral: it sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring. [2:39] Words were what made him. Reading this collection, one is struck, piece after piece by how David's words surprise and seduce, tease and provoke.[2:58] His writing is opinionated, forceful, and urgent.[4:24] David was building his first-class business in a first-class way.[5:37] Every advertisement must tell the whole sales story.[5:41] The copy must be human and very simple.Every word in the copy must count. Concrete figures must be substituted for atmospheric claims; clichés must give way to facts, and empty exhortations to alluring offers.[6:08] Permanent success has rarely been built on frivolity. People do not buy from clowns.[7:38] The worst fault a salesman can commit is to be a bore.[11:49] I have a new metaphor. Great hospitals do two things: They look after patients, and they teach young doctors. Ogilvy & Mather does two things: We look after clients, and we teach young advertising people. Ogilvy & Mather is the teaching hospital of the advertising world. And, as such, to be respected above all other agencies.[12:44] I plead for charm, flair, showmanship, taste, distinction.[16:42] Dear Ray: Nineteen years ago you wrote me the best job application letter I have ever received. I can still recite the first paragraph. The first paragraph read: "My father was in charge of the men's lavatory at the Ritz Hotel. My mother was a chambermaid at the same hotel. I was educated at the London School of Economics.[18:04] I find extravagance esthetically repulsive. I find the New England Puritan tradition more attractive. And more profitable.[21:14] So the time had come to give the pendulum a push in the other direction. If that push has puzzled you, caught you on the wrong foot and confused you, I can only quote Ralph Waldo Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds... Speak what you think today in words  as hard as cannonballs, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today."[22:01] I prefer a posture of confident authority.[22:19] You have a first-class mind. Stretch it.[22:38] David on how he lasted so long:  1. I have outlived all my competitors.  2. My obsessive interest in advertising has not dimmed.  3. My younger partners have tolerated my presence in their midst.  4. I had the wisdom to give them a free run. As a result, Ogilvy & Mather has outgrown its founder.[27:02] An account manager wrote to David wondering what he considered his worst shortcomings. The reply:I am intolerant of mediocrity – and laziness.I fritter away too much time on things which aren't important.Like everyone of my age, I talk too much about the past.I have always funked firing people who needed to be fired.I am afraid of flying and go to ridiculous lengths to avoid it.When I was Creative Head in New York, I wrote too much of the advertising myself.I know nothing about finance.I change my mind – about advertising and about people.I am candid to the point of indiscretion.I see too many sides to every argument.I am over-impressed by physical beauty.I have a low threshold of boredom.[28:09] Somebody recently asked me for a list of the most useful books on advertising – the books that all our people should read. Here is what I sent her: Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples. Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy.How to Advertise by Kenneth Roman and Jane Maas. Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves.The Art of Writing Advertising : Conversations with Masters of the Craft: David Ogilvy, William Bernbach, Leo Burnett, Rosser Reeves by Denis Higgins.The 100 Best Advertisements by Julian Watkins.[29:26] Don't be dull bores. We can't save souls in an empty church.[31:28] What guts it takes, what obstinate determination, to stick to one coherent creative policy, year after year, in the face of all the pressures to "come up with something new" every six months.[31:57] The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most favourable image, the most sharply defined personality, is the one who will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit – in the long run.[32:05] We try to create sharply defined personalities for our brands. And we stick to those personalities, year after year.[32:58] Set exorbitant standards, and give your people hell when they don't live up tọ them. There is nothing so demoralizing as a boss who tolerates second-rate work.[33:57] For Pete's sake write shorter memos. Cut your wordage in half.[34:12] How does the OBM of 1962 compare with the agency I dreamed of in 1948? To tell you the truth, it looks a million times better than I ever dreamed it could look. I just cannot believe what a good agency this has grown to be. I am terribly proud, and terribly grateful.[35:07] David is often astonished by working habits that differ from his own. Once, discussing a copywriter at another agency whom he admired in some respects, he said: "Listen to this - every day at precisely five o'clock that man gets up from his desk, puts on his hat and his coat, and goes home." Long pause to let it sink in. Then, leaning forward for emphasis: "Think of the extraordinary self-discipline that requires!"[36:49] My old friend advised you to avoid excess in all things. Mr. Ashcroft used to say the same thing – avoid excess in all things. That is a recipe for dullness and mediocrity.[38:09] I will begin with an old-fashioned affirmation in the supreme value of hard work. I believe in the Scottish proverb: “Hard work never killed a man." Men die of boredom, psychological conflict and disease. They never die of hard work.[38:36] On the other hand, I believe in lots of vacations. Sabbaticals recharge batteries.[39:18] Are we freewheeling entrepreneurs, ready to take risks in new ventures? Or are we too frightened of making mistakes? When the toy-buyer at Sears made a mistake which cost his company 10 million bucks, I asked the head of Sears, “Are you going to fire him?" “Hell no," he replied, “I fire people who don't make mistakes."[41:06] It is the duty of our top people to sustain unremitting pressure on the professional standards of their staffs. They must not tolerate sloppy plans or mediocre creative work. [41:30] If you ever find a man who is better than you are– hire him. If necessary, pay him more than you pay yourself.[41:56] Five characteristics for rapid promotionHe is ambitious.He works harder than his peers – and enjoys it. He has a brilliant brain – inventive and unorthodox.He has an engaging personality.He demonstrates respect for the creative function.  [42:56] The line between pride in our work and neurotic obstinacy is a narrow one.[43:07] We have a habit of divine discontent with our performance. It is an antidote to smugness.[43:50] Raise your sights! Blaze new trails! Compete with the immortals![48:13] Great leaders almost seem to exude self-confidence.[49:13] Great industrial leaders are always fanatically committed to their jobs. They are not lazy, or amateurs.[52:00] What would you have done differently if you could do it all over? I wouldn't have made so damn many mistakes, and most notably, I would not have sold so many of my Ogilvy & Mather shares.I was scared. We were being fantastically successful. I kept saying to myself: easy come, easy go. This thing could go up in smoke at any moment. I was frightened and I wanted to get the money out and put it into something safe.[53:22] Did you ever think the agency was going to fail? Yes. Every day for years I thought it was going to fail. I was always scared sick-always a terrible worrywart when I was in my heyday at the agency. I remember saying one day: If this is success, God deliver me from failure.[53:47] Personal dislike made me resign many accounts. I didn't like having to deal with the sonofabitch. Why should I? We pass this way only once.[54:02] Anything you've always wanted that eluded you? A big family. Ten children.[54:10] Retiring can be fatal. [56:04] I was talking at my old school not long ago in Scotland and I gave them a little sermon on the subject of success. They should stop thinking about success entirely in terms of material achievements and careers and all that stuff and think of success in terms of their own happiness and the happiness of their family.[56:45] I had to make my own bed. I was a very, very good salesman. And that's an important thing to be.[58:22] I had a short period in my life, I think maybe ten years, when I was pretty close to being a genius and I can look back on that with interested curiosity and affection and some nostalgia. Then it ran out. But I was. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes)

What I learned from Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys by Joe Coulombe. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- [0:01] I wrote this book to help entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. That's why there's a lack of miracles and a surplus of marketing details including buying, advertising, distributing, and running stores; and lots of discussion of how we built a successful business on high wages. [18:09] Chapter 11 was a possibility. But I was reading The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman, with its implicit concept of multiple solutions to non-convex problems. [19:07] This is my favorite of all managerial quotes: If all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions. —Tex Thornton, cofounder of Litton Industries, quoted in the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1960s. [22:33] The most basic conclusion I drew from her book was that, if you adopt a reasonable strategy, as opposed to waiting for an optimum  strategy, and stick with it, you'll probably succeed. Tenacity is as important as brilliance. [24:31] The one core value that I chose was our high compensation policies. This is the most important single business decision I ever made: to pay people well. [30:30] The basic problem is that convenience store retailing is a commodity business that is hard to differentiate. What I needed was a good but small opportunity for my good but small company: a non-commodity, differentiated kind of retailing. [33:38] As we evolved Trader Joe's, its greatest departure from the norm wasn't its size or its decor. It was our commitment to product knowledge, something which was totally foreign to the mass-merchant culture, and our turning our backs to branded merchandise. [38:25] Most of my ideas about how to act as an entrepreneur are derived from The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset, the greatest Spanish philosopher of the twentieth century. I believe this book still offers the clearest explanation of the times in which we live. And I believe it offers a master “plan of action" for the would-be entrepreneur, who usually has no reputation and few resources. [40:22] From the beginning, thanks to Ortega, I've been aware of the need to sell everybody. . . I took a cue from General Patton, who thought that the greatest danger was not that the enemy would learn his plans, but that his own troops would not.[47:32] We assumed that our readers had a thirst for knowledge, 180 degrees opposite from supermarket ads. We emphasized "informative advertising," a term borrowed from the famous entrepreneur Paul Hawken, who started publishing in the Whole Earth Review in the early 1980s. These informative texts were intended to stress how our products were  differentiated from ordinary stuff. [52:09] All businesses have problems. It's the problems that create the opportunities. If a business is easy, every simple bastard would enter it. My point is that a businessperson who complains about problems doesn't understand where his bread is coming from. [57:00] We violated every received-wisdom of retailing except one: we delivered great value, which is where most retailers fail. [1:14:05] But do I regret having sold? Yes. I admit it. To mine own self I was not true when I sold. I regret not having had the guts to ride out the loss of the surtax exemptions, the employee ownership problem, the threat of death taxes, Carter's threat to eliminate capital gains preference, and all the other fears, real or phantom, of late 1978. I have to admit the truth, that I regret having sold Trader Joe's. And I have had to pay something for this, beyond the loss of my shadow. ----- Other episodes mentioned in this episode: #18 Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman #20 Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business#89 Confessions of an Advertising Man#107 Sol Price: Retail Revolutionary & Social Innovator#110 Distant Force: A Memoir of the Teledyne Corporation (Henry Singleton)#170 My Life in Advertising#179 Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon#181 Copy This!: How I turned Dyslexia, ADHD, and 100 square feet into a company called Kinkos ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#187 Albert Einstein

What I learned from reading Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- [0:01] In a drama that would seem fake were it not so horrifying, Einstein’s brain ended up being, for more than four decades, a wandering relic. [4:22] Einstein remained consistent in his willingness to be a serenely amused loner who was comfortable not conforming. [6:49] “In teaching history,” Einstein replied, “there should be extensive discussion of personalities who benefited mankind through independence of character and judgment.”  [8:33] It is important to foster individuality, for only the individual can produce the new ideas. [11:39] He had an allergic reaction against all forms of dogma and authority. [14:37] It made me clearly realize how much superior an education based on free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority. [20:24] It would be an astonishing nine years after his graduation and four years after the miracle year in which he upended physics before he would be offered a job as a junior professor. [26:24] How To Win With People You Don't Like [35:22] Had he given up theoretical physics at that point, the scientific community would not have noticed. There was no sign that he was about to unleash a remarkable year the like of which science had not seen since 1666, when Isaac Newton, holed up at his mother’s home to escape the plague developed calculus, an analysis of the light spectrum, and the laws of gravity.  [41:41] To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone. [44:30] He responded by saying that he planned to “smoke like a chimney, work like a horse, eat without thinking, go for a walk only in really pleasant company.” [54:25] The whole affair is a matter of indifference to me, as is all the commotion, and the opinion of each and every human being.  [55:56] I am truly a lone traveler and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude. [1:10:47] When shown his office, he was asked what equipment he might need. "A large wastebasket so I can throw away all my mistakes.” [1:18:57] I do not know how the Third World War will be fought but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth — rocks. [1:22:26] Brief is this existence, as a fleeting visit in a strange house. The path to be pursued is poorly lit by a flickering consciousness.----- Other episodes mentioned in this episode: #18 Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman  #25 Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson  #94 The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success (Henry Singleton)  #95 A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age #110 Distant Force: A Memoir of the Teledyne Corporation (Henry Singleton) Bonus episode between #168 and #169 Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II Bonus episode between #179 and #180 Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#186 Phil Knight (Nike)

What I learned from rereading Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- [2:02] I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all...different. [6:18] So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy... just keep going. Don't stop. Don't even think about stopping until you get there, and don't give much thought to where "there" is. Whatever comes, just don't stop. That's the precocious, prescient, urgent advice I managed to give myself, out of the blue, and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it's the best advice-maybe the only advice-any of us should ever give. [10:32] They greeted my passion and intensity with labored sighs and vacant stares. [16:48] Carter never did mess around. See an open shot, take it. I told myself there was much to learn from a guy like that. [20:25] If I didn't, if I muffed this, I'd be doomed to spend the rest of my days selling encyclopedias, or mutual funds, or some other junk I didn't really care about. [27:45] Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men, and there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development. Shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod. [32:30] Bowerman didn’t give a damn about respectability. He possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness. Today it’s all but extinct. He was a war hero, too. Of course he was. [32:49] The most famous track coach in America, Bowerman never considered himself a track coach. He detested being called coach. He called himself a “Professor of Competitive Responses,” and his job, as he saw it, and often described it, was to get you ready for the struggles and competitions that lay ahead. [35:40] In my mind he was Patton with a stopwatch. That is, when he wasn't a god. [38:17] "Buck," he said, "how long do you think you're going to keep jackassing around with these shoes?" I shrugged. "I don't know, Dad." [40:00] So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn't selling. I believed in running. [1:00:57] My life was out of balance, sure, but I didn't care. In fact, I wanted even more imbalance. Or a different kind of imbalance. I wanted to dedicate every minute of every day to Blue Ribbon. I'd never been a multitasker, and I didn't see any reason to start now. I wanted to be present, always. I wanted to focus constantly on the one task that really mattered. [1:05:40] I spent a fair portion of each day lost in my own thoughts, tumbling down mental wormholes, to solve some problem or construct some plan. [1:10:40] More than once, over my first cup of coffee in the morning, or while trying to fall asleep at night, I'd tell myself: Maybe I'm a fool? Maybe this whole damn shoe thing is a fool's errand? Maybe, I thought. Maybe. [1:23:10] I told myself, Don’t forget this. Do not forget. I told myself there was much to be learned from such a display of passion, whether you were running a mile or a company. [1:36:50] When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is-you're participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you're helping others to live more fully, and if that's business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me. [1:38:10] I asked myself: What are you feeling? It wasn't joy. It wasn't relief. If I felt anything, it was... regret? Good God, I thought. Yes. Regret. Because I honestly wished I could do it all over again. [1:40:32] Of course, above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. And yet I know that this regret clashes with my secret regret that I can't do it all over again. God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. [1:40:50] I'd like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so that some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist, might press on. It's all the same drive. The same dream. It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I'd tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I'd tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don't know what that means, seek it. If you're following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you've ever felt. [1:42:22] Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn't mean stopping. Don't ever stop. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#185 César Ritz and Auguste Escoffier (The Hotelier and The Chef)

What I learned from reading Ritz and Escoffier: The Hotelier, The Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class by Luke Barr.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ----[1:00] The words echoed in his head, even now. The idea that they should be seen as servants was the cruelest of insults. César Ritz, Auguste Escoffier, servants? [11:28] He hasn't the least idea how much work and care, how much imagination and effort, go into the proper running of a hotel. [20:44] This was the very heart of a world that had shaped him, a world of privilege and luxury in which he had forged a place for himself, against all odds. Ritz had not been born to this life. Raised in a tiny village (population 123) in the foothills of the Swiss Alps, he was the last of eleven children, and had left home at the age of twelve.[21:04]  He was a self-made man. And beneath his placid, imperturbable Swiss poise lay enormous ambition. [22:26] Ritz knew better than anyone the importance of the kitchen in creating a truly luxurious hotel experience. He had built his success in the hotel business in tandem with the brilliant chef Auguste Escoffier. [26:48] Ritz had spent years working for others and was now, finally, a hotel owner himself. Yes, his hotels were small, but they were his. [27:48] Ritz was proud, but also full of insecurities: about his Swiss peasant family background, his lack of education. [30:20] "You'll never make anything of yourself in the hotel business," his boss at one of his very first jobs had told him. "It takes a special knack, a special flair, and it's only right that I should tell you the truth: you haven't got it." Well, he'd got it now. [40:18] Escoffier was not an educated man, but he had quickly discovered that he had a real talent for cooking, which he saw as both a science and an art. [40:37] He had begun to establish a new ethos for the professional kitchen, one that depended on respect: respect for the chefs, respect for the ingredients, respect for the artistry of cooking.[44:41] The food itself was less complicated than it had been, shorn of unnecessary ornamentation, inedible decoration, and too many sauces. "Above all, make it simple." was his motto. [49:40] He was the elegant and cultivated César Ritz, mastermind of luxury, but he couldn't escape the feeling that he might be revealed, at any moment, to be an impostor, nothing more than a servant. The truth, he feared, was detectable in the size of his hands and feet. They were large, peasant-size hands and feet, he was convinced, and he did everything possible to keep them hidden. He wore his shoes a half size too small.[53:39] The Provence was his and his alone. It was almost impossible to explain to Marie what that meant to him, how deep that feeling went. For Ritz, owning his own hotel was the signal achievement of his life, marking his escape from his past. [1:02:07] The most damning charge in the entire letter was that Escoffier was taking kickbacks on all the food orders coming into the Savoy. [1:05:11] Escoffier and Ritz had been fired. [1:06:57] "The best is not too good," Ritz would say. This was his philosophy about everything. [1:08:01] It should instead be "a work tool more than a book, a constant companion that chefs would always keep at their side." A book for working professionals. [1:12:17]Again, a tiny detail, a solution to a problem no one had ever even put into words, but one that Ritz, in his obsessive way, had noted and now acted upon.  [1:14:35] Ritz was filled with overwhelming pride and, at the same time, a creeping sense of inadequacy. [1:16:25] To think that his parents had lived and died in Niederwald, had never even left Switzerland, not once, and here he was, the proprietor of the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, the most famous hotelier in the world, and now he was opening a new property in London. [1:18:29] They both looked back with amazement at what they had achieved together in the 1890s, how different the world was then, how they themselves had changed it. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#184 Isadore Sharp (Four Seasons)

What I learned from reading Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy by Isadore Sharp. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ----[0:01] When I built my first hotel I knew nothing about the hotel business.  [4:28] He refused to settle for the pragmatic dictum of maturity. Issy also skipped skepticism and "Let's be sensible." People said he was naïve, with a kind of glandular optimism. Perhaps. But as it turned out naïveté served him well. [6:32] Early on he made some audacious statements that sounded like pipe dreams. He told me once that his aim was to make the name Four Seasons a worldwide brand, synonymous with luxury, like Rolls-Royce.[8:39]Once, when Dad was excavating a basement with horse and plough, he broke his shoulder. But he shrugged it off and uncomplainingly kept on working, something I never forgot. [26:52] I decided to go ahead. I foresaw only one difficulty, but it loomed large: How do you build a two-hundred-room resort without any money? This was literal fact. My earnings barely covered my rising family costs. [35:23] I asked Sir Gerald Glover, "How do you keep your lawn so perfect?"  “No problem”, he replied. “You just cut it every week for three hundred years.”  [43:48] I owe my success to my freedom. I think for me independence has an incalculable value.  [44:44] All business proceeds on belief: Trying to run a company without a set of beliefs is like trying to steer a ship without a rudder.  [56:03] The experience made me realize what I would really like to do: create a group of the best hotels in the world. And what we really want to do is usually what we do best.[56:51] We will not be all things to all people. We will specialize.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#183 Johnny Carson

What I learned from reading Johnny Carson by Henry Bushkin.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- [13:50] He often told me that all it took to turn the most electrifying film stars into dullards was to be around them for a while. But he felt that way around everybody. There were very few social scenes in which he was ever really comfortable. [14:07] Johnny was comfortable in front of twenty million but just as uncomfortable in a gathering of twenty.[15:44] Carson grasped that he owned the camera the way Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra had grasped that they owned the microphone. That understanding made him more natural, more relaxed, cooler.[21:29] Johnny continued. “If a doctor opened up my chest right now, he couldn’t find a heart, or any goddamn thing. Just a lot of misery. My mother made sure of that. She deprived us all of any real goddamn warmth."[23:20] Facts revealed themselves. Curious facts. Disturbing facts. Like the fact that Johnny Carson wasn’t wealthy. Indeed, he had very little money. He had little money because the people around him, whom he trusted, were serving him poorly.[28:43] I was shocked to realize that he owned no equity interest in the new company. Instead, half was owned by the manufacturer and half by Sonny Werblin. Carson, in effect, was paid a salary to wear clothes from the company that bore his name, while the man he had entrusted with his affairs lined his own pockets.[29:39] “Look what’s going on,” I said. “His wife is cheating on him. His manager is screwing him, his agents are exploiting him, and his producer’s wife has been conspiring with Joanne to cuckold him. What a goddamn mess.” [32:46] Johnny Carson lived comfortably in his own skin. He may have been troubled in certain areas, but he was never tormented by insecurity. [42:57] Carson’s show was earning NBC between $50 and $60 million a year. [45:45] Being a star in Hollywood was a fabulous thing, but the real money and power went to those who owned the companies that produced the programs. It was Aaron Spelling who called the shots and raked in the dough and lived like the sultan of Brunei. Or to put it another way, Merv Griffin, who was a rival of Carson’s but never his peer, was so much richer than Johnny because he owned the game shows Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. [49:14] He had too keen an appreciation for how much work and talent and discipline went into success to be flattered by praise and adulation. [50:27] Like most oracles, Wasserman gave an opinion that was simple and sensible (but unambiguously presented, thank goodness). “It is not prudent,” replied Wasserman, “to ask people to change their nightly viewing habits. Once they are used to tuning in a given channel, they find it hard to make the move, no matter how good an alternative is being provided elsewhere.” Was that it? All of our thinking and talking and arguing and agonizing came down to the belief that Americans won’t change the dial? Wasserman’s advice sealed our decision. [54:39] He liked performing. He liked being onstage, being the center of attention, and doing something he did with supreme excellence.[57:27] To my surprise, the three girls were skinny-dipping in the rooftop swimming pool, while Johnny, wearing nothing but an apron, served them wine from a silver platter. [1:00:31] Johnny Carson performed on television, but he didn’t watch it.[1:09:37] Johnny Carson enjoyed the adulation of millions, but his mother could not love him. He carried that pain, and spread it, all his life. [1:09:56] He has probably been funnier longer and more consistently than any other comedian who ever lived. Johnny just kept rolling on and on, never deviating, seldom surprising, seldom surpassing, but nearly always delivering.[1:10:35] Once he got control of The Tonight Show he was earning so much that it was like Monopoly money. He was free to do literally whatever he wanted. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#182 Warren Buffett (The Making of an American Capitalist)

What I learned from reading Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- His talent sprang from his unrivaled independence of mind and ability to focus on his work and shut out the world, yet those same qualities exacted a toll. He emerged from those first hard years with an absolute drive to become very, very rich. He thought about it before he was five years old. And from that time on, he scarcely stopped thinking of it. Most of us were trying to be like everyone else. I think he liked being different. He was what he was and he never tried to be anything else. Warren disgustedly reported that he knew more than the professors. His dissatisfaction-a forerunner of his general disaffection for business schools-was rooted in their mushy, overbroad approach. His professors had fancy theories but were ignorant of the practical details of making a profit that Warren craved. It seemed too good to be true; if the stocks were so cheap, Buffett figured, somebody ought to be buying them. But slowly, it dawned on him. The somebody was him. Nobody was going to tell you that an investment was a steal; you had to get there on your own. Buffett knew more about stocks than anyone. He was working virtually all the time, and loving every minute. His talent lay not in his range—which was narrowly focused on investing—but in his intensity. His entire soul was focused on that one outlet. He did not draw the usual line between "work" and other activities. Wall Street's chorus, all reading the same lyrics, was chanting, "Sell." Buffett decided to buy. He put close to one-quarter of his assets on that single stock. Buffett visited Walt Disney himself on the Disney lot. The animator was as enthusiastic as ever. Buffett was struck by his childlike enchantment with his work-so similar to Buffett's own. It was virtually impossible to poke through the fog of his concentration. Jack asked, "How do you do it?" Buffett said he read "a couple of thousand" financial statements a year. He would go home and read a stack of annual reports. For anyone else it would have been work. For Buffett it was a night on the town. He did not merely do this nine-to-five. If he was awake, the wheels were turning. As Buffett explained, Berkshire was something he intended never to sell. “I just like it. Berkshire is something that I would be in the rest of my life. It is public, but it is almost like the family business now.” Not long-term, but the rest of his life. His career-in a sense, his life-was subsumed in that one company. Everything he did, each investment, would add a stroke to that never-to-be-finished canvas. And no one could seize the brush from him. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#181 Paul Orfalea (Kinkos)

What I learned from reading Copy This!: How I turned Dyslexia, ADHD, and 100 square feet into a company called Kinkos by Paul Orfalea. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- [4:23] I've never met a more circular, out-of-the-box thinker. It's often exhausting trying to keep up with him. [5:21] I graduated from high school eighth from the bottom of my class of 1,200. Frankly, I still have no idea how those seven kids managed to do worse than I did. [8:29] I also have no mechanical ability to speak of. There isn't a machine at Kinko's I can operate. I could barely run the first copier we leased back in 1970. It didn't matter. All I knew was that was I could sell what came out of it. [10:24] Building an entirely new sort of business from a single Xerox copy machine gave me the life the world seemed determined to deny me when I was younger. [13:04] The A students work for the B students, the C students run the companies, and the D students dedicate the buildings. [23:02] I learned to turn a lot of busywork over to other people. That's an important skill. If you don't develop it, you'll be so busy, busy, busy that you can't get a free hour, not to mention a free week or month, to sit back and think creatively about where you want to be heading and how you are going to get there. [24:07] There's no better way to stay "on" your business than to think creatively and constantly about your marketing: how you are marketing, who you are marketing to, and, always, how you could be doing a better job at it. You'd be amazed what kind of business you can generate by a seemingly simple thing like handing out flyers. [26:18] The phone rang. It was one of our store managers calling to ask me how to handle a bounced check. I held the receiver away from my face and looked at it, flabbergasted. If every store manager needed my help to deal with a bounced check, then we really had problems.[39:55] I never walked in the back door used by coworkers. I walked in the front door so I could see things from the customer's perspective. [48:06] You had to remember he'd been picking up the best ideas from all around the country. (Founders is doing the same thing from the history of entrepreneurship)  [54:14] I believe in getting out of as much work as I possibly can. [54:45] By now, you’d have to be as bad a reader as I am not to figure out that I have a dark side. You rarely hear people talk about their dark sides, especially business leaders, which is a shame because successful businesses aren't usually started by laid-back personalities. I don't hide the fact that I have a problem with anger. [1:03:37] I'll give you an example of a corporate view of money. We used to sell passport photos at Kinko's and we advertised the service in the local Yellow Pages. It would cost us 75 cents to make a passport photo. I calculated that price jumped by $1 to $1.75 when you added in the cost of the Yellow Pages ads. We'd sell those photos for $13 a piece. You think this is a nice business? Shortly after we sold a controlling stake in Kinko's, the new budget people came in and, to make their numbers, they got rid of the Yellow Pages ads. They saw it as an advertising expense and didn't take into account how it affected the rest of our business. I used to go to the office and think, "Are they deliberately trying to be idiots?" These straight-A types drove me nuts. Then, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, we abandoned our passport business. That is corporate dyslexia. There is a lot of corporate dyslexia going on out there. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#180 Jeff Bezos (Invention of a Global Empire)

What I learned from reading Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders by investing in a subscription to Founders Notes ---- [1:47] Every interesting thing I've ever done, every important thing I've ever done, every beneficial thing I've ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures. I'm covered in scar tissues as a result of this. [6:19] I absolutely know it's hard, but we'll learn how to do it. [8:30] Thinking small is a self fulfilling prophecy. [12:13] Begin any conversation about a new product in terms of the benefit it creates for customers. [19:08] Bezos deployed his playbook for experiments that produced promising sparks: he poured gasoline on them. [22:41] You can regulate yourself quite easily or think about what you're going to do with your existing resources. Sometimes, you don't know what the boundaries are. Jeff just wanted us to be unbounded. [25:48] If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time. It always yields a better result. [27:19] Don't come to me with a plan that assumes I will only make a certain level of investment. Tell me how to win. [35:50] He preached the wholesale embrace of technology, rapid experimentation, and optimism about the opportunities of the internet instead of despair. [45:17] Bezos’ one constant edict: Go faster. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Jeff Bezos (Insights, Stories, and Secrets)

What I learned from Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by  Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. ---- [3:58] What is best for the customer? Do that: "Amazon believes that long-term growth is best produced by putting the customer first. If you held this conviction, what kind of company would you build?" [7:05] Jeff skips the conferences and dinners: "95 percent of the time I spent with Jeff was focused on internal work issues rather than external events like conferences, public speeches, and sports matches." [25:08] Don't encourage communication—eliminate it: "Jeff said many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it. When you view effective communication across groups as a "defect," the solutions to your problems start to look quite different from traditional ones." (There is nothing conventional about Jeff)  [27:29] Why companies must run experiments: "Time and time again, we learned that  consumers would behave in ways we hadn't imagined especially for brand-new features or products." [30:16] Jeff on the importance of making decisions quickly: "Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure." [30:48] Great anything is rare: "Great Two-Pizza team leaders proved to be rarities. Although we did identify a few such brilliant managers, they turned out to be notoriously difficult to find in sufficient numbers, even at Amazon."  [34:30] A simple tip from Jeff on how to produce unique insights: "Jeff has an uncanny ability to read a narrative and consistently arrive at insights that no one else did, even though we were all reading the same narrative. After one meeting, I asked him how he was able to do that. He responded with a simple and useful tip that I have not forgotten: he assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove otherwise. He's challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer.” [35:12] Why Amazon works backwards: "Working Backwards is a systematic way to vet ideas and create new products. Its key tenet is to start by defining the customer experience, then iteratively work backwards from that point until the team achieves clarity of thought around what to build." [40:00] Working backwards on Kindle: "We were working forward, trying to invent a product that would be good for Amazon, the company, not the customer. When we wrote a Kindle press release and started working backwards, everything changed. We focused instead on what would be great for customers. An excellent screen for a great reading experience. An ordering process that would make buying and downloading books easy. A huge selection of titles. Low prices. We would never have had the breakthroughs necessary to achieve that customer experience were it not for the press release process, which forced the team to invent multiple solutions to customer problems." [43:58] Patience. Then bet big: Our approach permits us to work patiently for multiple years to deliver a solution. Once we had a clear vision for how these products could become businesses that would delight customers, we invested big. Patience and carefully managed investment over many years can pay off greatly.  [46:03] Have Steve Jobs level of belief in your products: "Jobs calmly and confidently told us that even though it was Apple's first attempt to build for Windows, he thought it was the best Windows application anyone had ever built." [54:48] Amazon's Kindle strategy was influenced by Apple: "In digital, that meant focusing on applications and devices consumers used to read, watch, or listen to content, as Apple had already done with iTunes and the iPod. We all took note of what Apple had achieved in digital music in a short period of time and sought to apply those learnings to our long-term product vision." [56:48] Good ideas are rare. When you find one bet heavily: "At some point in the debate, someone asked Jeff point blank: "How much more money are you willing to invest in Kindle?" Jeff calmly turned to our CFO, Tom Szkutak, smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and asked the rhetorical question, "How much money do we have?" ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#179 Jeff Bezos

What I learned from The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone. This is part one of a three part series on Jeff Bezos. The next two books are Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon and Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. ---- (0:54) It may very well be that the absolute intensity of drive and focus is essential and incompatible with all of the nice management thought about consensus and gentle demeanor.(2:07) Jeff’s clarity, intensity of focus, and ability to prioritize is unusual.(4:05) As I read the Steve Jobs biography I even had an insight and question about myself, that maybe I haven’t begun to really find my own limits.(10:49) You have to be able to think what you're doing for yourself. (11:42) There is probably no limit to what he can do. (12:34) People forget that most people believed Amazon was doomed because it would not scale at a cost structure that would work. It kept piling up losses. It lost hundreds of millions of dollars. But Jeff was very smart. He’s a classic technical founder of a business, who understands every detail and cares about it more than anyone.(13:45) Bezos has proved quite indifferent to the opinions of others. (13:58) Bezos is extremely difficult to work for. (15:58) Amazon's internal customs are deeply idiosyncratic. (16:15) He is highly circumspect about deviating from well established, very abstract talking points. (18:08) The financial community knew very little about D. E. Shaw, and its polymath founder wanted to keep it that way. (20:15) Jeff was not concerned about what other people were thinking. (20:26) Bezos had closely studied several wealthy  businessmen. (21:13) Bezos was disciplined and precise. (22:14) Bezos seemed to love the idea of the nonstop workday. (22:23) The rest of Wall Street saw D. E. Shaw as a highly secretive hedged fund. David Shaw didn't view the company as a hedge fund but as a versatile technology laboratory who could apply computer science to different problems. (25:51) Web activity had grown that year by 230,000%. Things just don't grow that fast Bezos said. It's highly unusual and that started me thinking what kind of business might make sense in the context of that growth? (31:59) He swept me off my feet. He was so convinced that what he was doing was basically the work of God and that somehow the money would materialize. The real wild card was, could he really run a business? That wasn’t a gimme. Of course, about two years later I was going, Holy shit, did we back the right horse!(34:05) Bezos plowed through them at a rapid clip, looking for someone with the same low regard for the usual way of doing things that Bezos himself had.(34:46) Bezos looked right at Schultz and told him We are going to take this thing to the moon!(35:16) Jeff was always a big believer that disruptive small companies could triumph. (35:55) I think you are underestimating the degree to which established companies will find it hard to be nimble or to focus attention on a new channel. (36:45) I brought him very bad news about our business and he got excited. (37:28) I think our company is undervalued. The world just doesn't understand what Amazon is going to be. (39:30) Bezos had imbibed Walton's book thoroughly and wove Walmart's founder's credo about frugality and a bias for action into the cultural fabric of Amazon. (44:54) We were all running around the halls with our hair on fire thinking What are we going to do? But not Jeff. I have never seen anyone so calm in the eye of a storm. Ice water runs through his veins. (53:20) Bezos met Jim Sinegal, the founder of Costco. Sinegal explained the Costco model to Bezos. It was all about customer loyalty. I think Jeff looked at it and thought that was something that would apply to his business as well. Sinegal doesn’t regret educating an entrepreneur who would evolve into a ferocious competitor. I’ve always had the opinion that we have shamelessly stolen any good ideas. (57:45) Perhaps Amazon’s founder realized he owed Sinegal a debt of gratitude, because he took the lessons he learned during that coffee in 2001 and applied them with a vengeance.(59:37) He just never stopped believing. He never blinked once. (1:00:09) Slow steady progress can erode any challenge over time.(1:01:40) Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.(1:04:43) Like a warlord leaving the decapitated heads of his enemies on stakes outside his village walls, he was using the mounts as a symbol, and as an admonition to employees about how not to behave.(1:06:29) I want you to understand that from this day forward, you are not bound by the old rules.(1:12:46) I think the thing that blindsided Jeff and helped with the Kindle was the iPod, which overturned the music business faster than he thought.(1:14:27) Bezos is not tethered by conventional thinking. What is amazing to me is that he is bound only by the laws of physics. He can’t change those. Everything else he views as open to discussion.(1:15:01) Bezos learned that Zappos was advertising on the bottoms of the plastic bins at airport-security checkpoints. They are outthinking us! he snapped at a meeting.(1:16:15) Companies that make things and companies that sell them have waged versions of this battle for centuries.(1:19:04) Every anecdote from a customer matters. We research each of them because they tell us something about our metrics and processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of information. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#178 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

What I learned from reading Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney. ---- [4:43] Mike Ive influence on his son’s talent was purely nurturing. They were constantly keeping up a conversation about made-objects and hw they could be made better. [6:39] I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product. [9:24] Take big chances. Pursue a passion. Respect the work. [11:47] His designs were incredibly simple and elegant. They were usually rather surprising but made complete sense once you saw them. You wondered why we had never seen such a product like that before. [15:52] Grind it out. You can make something look like magic by going further than most reasonable people would go. [17:34] The more I learned about this cheeky, almost rebellious company (Apple) the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money. [24:06] He was completely interested in humanizing technology. What something should be was always the starting point for his designs. [33:29] Jony was very serious about his work. He had a ferocious intensity about it. [41:52] It is very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better. [51:38] Jobs didn't want to compete in the broader market for personal computers. These companies competed on price, not features or ease of use. Jobs figured theirs was a race to the bottom. Instead, he argued, there was no reason that well-designed, well-made computers couldn’t command the same market share ad margins as a luxury automobile. A BMW might get you to where you are going in the same way a Chevy that costs half the price, but there will always be those who will pay for the better ride in the sexier car. Why not make only first class-products with high margins so that Apple could continue to develop even better first-class products? [1:19:25] A great prompt for your thinking: What is your product better than? Are you just making a cheap laptop? Or are you making an iPad? Netbooks accounted for 20% of the laptop market. But Apple never seriously considered making one. “Netbooks aren’t better than anything,” Steve Jobs said at the time. “They’re just cheap laptops.” Jony proposed that the tablets in his lab could be Apple’s answer to the netbook. [1:20:32] It’s great if you can find what you love to do. Finding it is one thing but then to be able to practice that and be preoccupied with it is another. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#177 Robert Campeau (Junk Bonds and Retail Bankruptcy)

What I learned from reading Going for Broke: How Robert Campeau Bankrupted the Retail Industry, Jolted the Junk Bond Market, and Brought the Booming Eighties to a Crashing Halt by John Rothchild. ---- [0:01] A stranger comes to Wall Street, borrows nearly $4 billion to acquire a company that six months earlier he'd never even heard of. This transaction is scarcely settled before he's allowed to borrow $7 billion more to acquire a bigger company, making him a major force in retailing, an industry he knows nothing about.  [11:16] Just a few weeks back, Randall had figured that Bob might be interested in attracting a single Brooks Brothers store into one of his malls. Now in a great imaginary leap, Bob had vaulted himself into the ownership of all forty-five Brooks Brothers stores.  [15:01 Neither Bob nor his advisers really knew one investment bank from another. "It was basically a matter of looking up names in the Yellow Pages."  [19:42] Lehman Brothers was impressed by two things: the man's obvious, if naive, enthusiasm; and the absurdity of his proposition. Those who doubted Bob could acquire Allied had grown into a large crowd that included Bob's brain trust, his advisers in Toronto, his Toronto bankers, his advisers from Paine Webber and his lawyer.  [21:45] This was Citicorp's first clue they were dealing with a volatile character, who soon acquired the in-house nickname Mad Bomber.  [29:26] The M&A department they established at First Boston helped the firm to a record $125 million in earnings in 1985, a long way from the $1 million it had earned in 1978.  [33:45] He think's he's destined to take over Allied. His fortune-teller says so.  [41:28] Bob understood that Citicorp and First Boston, who together had invested in $1.8 billion in the Street Sweep and who were going to make hundreds of millions in fees if this deal closed, were not about to let the deal fall apart because he didn't pony up his equity. They had more of a vested interest in this deal than he did.  [42:53] His $4.1 billion acquisition included a whopping $612 million in fees, expenses, and financing charges.  [50:00] The purpose of business is profit, not a platform for your ego.  [53:24] Bob said, "Don't worry. If somebody lends a dollar, you take it. The ramifications can be handled later. There's always some way out." He goes bankrupt shortly thereafter.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux)

What I learned from reading Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond. ---- [0:01] From a party of one it now counted millions of users on every continent, including Antartica, and even outer space, if you count NASA outposts. Not only was it the most common operating system, but its very development model—an intricate web of its own, encompassing hundreds of thousands of volunteer computer programmers—had grown to become the largest collaborative project in the history of the world.  [1:08] Revolutionaries aren’t born. Revolutions can’t be planned. Revolutions can’t be managed. Revolutions happen. And sometimes, revolutionaries just get stuck with it.  [9:05] The Swedish language has no equivalent to the term “dysfunctional family.” As a result of the divorce, we didn’t have a lot of money. Mom would have to pawn her only investment—the single share of stock in the Helsinki telephone company. I remember going with her once and feeling embarrassed about it. Now I’m on the board of directors of the same company. [10:13] Linus has no handlers, doesn’t listen to voice mail, and rarely responds to email.  [10:40] I found Linus to be unexpectedly knowledgable about American business history.  [13:19] Some of the smartest programmers out there are fifteen-year-old kids playing around in their rooms. It’s what I thought sixteen years ago, and I still suspect it’s true.  [13:46] Everybody has a book that has changed his or her life. As I read the book I started to understand. I got a big enthusiastic jolt. Frankly, it never subsided. I hope you can say the same about something.  [16:01] An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That’s what having a clean design is all about. It’s the same with languages. The English language has twenty-six letters and you can build up everything from those letters. Unix comes with a small-is-beautiful philosophy. It has a small set of simple basic building blocks that can be combined into something that allows for infinite complexity of expression.  [17:39] You should absolutely not dismiss simplicity for something easy. It takes design and good taste to be simple.  [27:42] You can do something the brute force way, the stupid, grind-the-problem-down-until-it’s-not-a-problem-anymore way, or you can find the right approach and suddenly the problem just goes away. You look at the problem another way, and you have this epiphany: It was only a problem because you were looking at it the wrong way.  [29:00] That was the point where I almost gave up, thinking it would be too much work and not worth it.  [50:52] It’s been well established that folks do their best work when they are driven by a passion. When they are having fun. This is as true for playwrights and sculptors and entrepreneurs as it is for software engineers.  [51:48] Survive. Socialize. Have fun. That’s the progression. And that’s also why we chose “Just For Fun” as the title of this book. Because everything we ever do seems to eventually end up being for our own entertainment.  [52:02] My theory of the meaning of life doesn’t actually guide you in what you should be doing. At most, it says “Yes, you can fight it, but in the end the ultimate goal of life is to have fun.”  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

What I learned from reading The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#174 Bill Gates (Overdrive)

What I learned from reading Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace. ---- There would be an industry breakthrough unimagined at the time, and it would be made by a company that didn’t yet exist. [7:55] Another corollary to Joys Law of Innovation was that the number of bright people in any company went down as the size went up. [10:47] As Apple founder Steve Jobs liked to say: When you are at simplicity, there ain’t no complexity. [12:49] Gates looks at everything as something that should be his. He acts in any way he can to make it his. It can be an idea, market share, or a contract. There is not an ounce of conscientiousness or compassion in him. The notion of fairness means nothing to him. The only thing he understands is leverage. [17:21] I became convinced that Microsoft was building the last minicomputer. That the Microsoft Network was based on the notion that your competitors were the model — proprietary online services like America Online — and that the reality was that the Internet was going to be such a fundamental paradigm shift, that you needed to think about your strategies fundamentally differently. [28:08] The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. — Zero to One [29:25] Most college kids knew much more than we did because they were exposed to it. If I had wanted to connect to the Internet, it would have been easier for me to get into my car and drive over to the University of Washington than to try and get on the Internet at Microsoft. [31:12] For years , Gates had Kahn in his sights. Kahn recalled that he once had found Gates at an industry conference in the late 1980s sitting alone in a corner, looking at a photograph in his hands. “It was a picture of me,” said Kahn. [41:16] It’s not in Microsoft’s bones to cooperate with other companies. [42:47] ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#173 Louis B. Mayer (MGM Studios)

What I learned from reading Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer by Bosley Crowther.  ---- The reason so many people showed up at his funeral was because they wanted to make sure he was dead. [0:50] He is in that phalanx of men of aggressive bent who seized on the opportunities that an expanding civilization exposed. With them, he ascended to high places along an upwardly spiraling route that was there to be ascended by those who had the necessary stamina and drive. And, with some of them , he was unsettled and rendered dizzy by the heights, so that he could not control his footing when the road itself began to narrow and fall. [2:07]  His own recollections of his early childhood were mercifully meager and dim. They were mainly recollections of being hungry. That was the only memory Mayer had of himself as a little boy. [7:01]  How powerful and violent were the urges in the depths of the growing boy to break out of his immigrant encasement. [10:27]  One of his favorite maxims had to do with behavior in adversity. “When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on." [11:55]  He wanted to be a film producer. He wanted to get into that realm of fabrication and creation where glamour and excitement were. [27:00]  My unchanging policy will be great star, great director, great play, great cast. You are authorized to get these without stint or limit. Spare nothing, neither expense, time, nor effort. Results only are what I am after. [33:00] It was not all sunshine and profits with Mayer’s company during these embryonic days. Mayer was far from being one of the top producers of Hollywood. He was a small, enterprising operator. There were many others like him, clawing to get minor stars and unattached directors to make their pictures and help them to get ahead. On some films they picked up profits, on others they definitely did not. The business was always a gamble for them, as it was for Mayer. [39:13]  The radical and profound transition (sound in movies) was spread over two or three years. Compulsion more than planning impelled it, against resistance within the industry. [49:57]  The system (sound) was not regarded as anything more than a novelty by the remainder of the industry. [54:45]  Mayer was no doubt a brilliant man, with vision and understanding in the business of manufacturing films as well as a fervor for investing in talent in every phase of production, to the point of extravagance, he was also a careless manager, a favorer with stubborn likes and dislikes, and a braggart who wasted his time and the time of others telling them what a great man he was. [1:01:33]   Mayer had a psychopathic need for power. [1:07:40]  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#172 Elon Musk (Early Days of SpaceX)

What I learned from reading Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger.  ---- [12:38] Numerous other entrepreneurs had tried playing at rocket science before, Musk well knew. He wanted to learn from their mistakes so as not to repeat them.  [20:55]  He could be difficult to work for, certainly. But his early hires could immediately see the benefits of working for someone who wanted to get things done and often made decisions on the spot. When Musk decided that Spincraft could make good tanks for a fair price, that was it. No committees. No reports. Just, done.  [22:05] Most of all he channeled a preternatural force to move things forward. Elon Musk just wants to get shit done.  [27:42] The iterative approach begins with a goal and almost immediately leaps into concept designs , bench tests, and prototypes. The mantra with this approach is build and test early, find failures, and adapt. This is what SpaceX did.  [41:24] It is perhaps worth noting that those launch companies that succeeded also took their lumps along the way, Musk wrote in a postmortem. SpaceX is in this for the long haul and, come hell or high water, we are going to make this work.  [42:24] Musk’s management style: Don’t talk about doing things, just do things.  [43:15]  If you’re trying to do something no other commercial company has ever done, you had better have some confidence.  [44:00] I make the spending decisions and the engineering decisions in one head. Normally those are at least two people. There’s some engineering guy who’s trying to convince a finance guy that this money should be spent. But the finance guy doesn’t understand engineering, so he can’t tell if this is a good way to spend money or not. Whereas I’m making the engineering decisions and spending decisions. So I know, already, that my brain trusts itself.  [45:37] He didn’t want to fail, but he wasn’t afraid of it.  [50:50] It’s not like other rocket scientists were huge idiots who wanted to throw their rockets away all the time. It’s fucking hard to make something like this. One of the hardest engineering problems known to man is making a reusable orbital rocket. Nobody has succeeded. For a good reason. Our gravity is a bit heavy. On Mars this would be no problem. Moon, piece of cake. On Earth, fucking hard. Just barely possible. It’s stupidly difficult to have a fully reusable orbital system. It would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of humanity. That’s why it’s hard. Why does this hurt my brain? It’s because of that. Really, we’re just a bunch of monkeys. How did we even get this far? It beats me. We were swinging through the trees, eating bananas not long ago.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#171: Chuck Feeney (The Billionaire who gave all of his money away)

What I learned from reading The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune by Conor O'Clery. ---- He celebrated having divested himself personally of the vast wealth with which fate and his genius for making money had burdened him. [0:01]  Feeney was already showing a trait that would assert itself throughout his life: thinking big and aiming to achieve the best result, even if it seemed unattainable. [3:27] I all of a sudden realized, shit, you can sell this to anybody, anywhere. [12:45]  Feeney believed that there could be more lucrative opportunities in the less  crowded Pacific. [21:53]  Chuck lived out of his briefcase. Everything was connected with business. We did a lot of screwy things. I became part of what he called his ‘teen  age frontier’ approach to business, because he surrounded himself with smart college youngsters, mostly single and aggressive ‘conquerors of the world.’ I was the oldest, always the damper, saying to him, "Are you out of your mind?" [25:44] We hadn’t spent any time on corporate structuring or anything like that, we were just simply busy selling cars, duty — free liquor, making the cash, putting the cash in the bank, cash in, and cash out. [28:06] They were on the verge of going bankrupt, perhaps already were. Feeney and Miller were almost back where they started. They could perhaps boost the cash flow from the duty   free shops in Hong Kong and Hawaii to clear off the debts. Feeney had moments of despair. “Of course. It goes with the territory. But there wasn’t much we could do. It was something we had started, and we thought we were going to make a million dollars out of it. We had no choice but to salvage the company or go over the cliff.” [31:21]  The duty   free shops began to make substantial profits, the owners agreed to take 90 percent of the dividends in cash, a practice that would continue for a quarter of a century. [44:54]  Paradoxically, while Feeney became more frugal, he was pushing himself ever harder to build up the business that was making him even richer. [48:26]  He brings a focus on business that I hadn’t experienced before. If something doesn’t work, he has four or so different thoughts. He has a multifaceted way of looking at business. He is detail oriented in his approach. [48:51]  His definition of success was not having all the money one desired, but being able to raise a happy, healthy family. “There has to be a balance in life. A balance of business, family, and the opportunity to learn and teach." [49:41]  They were offering to pay the State of Hawaii some $2 million every three days, for the next five years, just for the right to run a couple of stores. [58:38]  What only the four owners knew was that during that period (1978–1988), they had received cash dividends of $867 million, of which Chuck Feeney had got $334 million. [1:00:53]  A new divorce settlement was reached that gave Danielle an additional $60 million. Feeney insisted that Danielle get all the family homes, in Paris, London, the south of France, Connecticut, Hawaii, and New York. He took nothing himself from the family property. [1:03:33]  Nobody ever put a penny in the business. We took out $ 8 billion or whatever it was. Nobody is that smart. You have just got to have a lot of things going your way. [1:07:56]  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#170 Claude Hopkins (A Life in Advertising)

What I learned from reading My Life in Advertising by Claude Hopkins.  ---- Any man who by a lifetime of excessive application learns more about anything than others owes a statement to successors. The results of research should be recorded. Every pioneer should blaze his trail. That is all I have tried to do. [0:19] There are few pages in “My Life in Advertising” which do not repay careful study—and which do not merit rereading. Before your eyes, a successful advertising life is lived—with all that went to make it successful. The lessons taught are taught exactly as they were learned. They are dished up dripping with life. It is not a book, it is an experience—and experience has always been the great teacher. [2:49]  The man who does two or three times the work of another learns two or three times as much. He makes more mistakes and more successes, and he learns from both. If I have gone higher than others in advertising, or done more, the fact is not due to exceptional ability, but to exceptional hours. [11:00] To poverty I owe the fact that I never went to college. I spent those four years in the school of experience. [15:16]  If a thing is useful they call it work, if useless they call it play. One is as hard as the other. One can be just as much a game as the other. [20:27]  A young man can come to regard his life work as the most fascinating game that he knows. And it should be. The applause of athletics dies in a moment. The applause of success gives one cheer to the grave. [23:16]  A good product is its own best salesman. It is uphill work to sell goods, in print or in person, without samples. [27:02]  I consider business as a game and I play it as a game. That is why I have been, and still am, so devoted to it. [33:44]  I sold more carpet sweepers by my one-cent letters than fourteen salesmen on the road combined. [45:31] No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration. [50:10] We must treat people in advertising as we treat them in person. Center on their desires. [53:46]  Again and again I have told simple facts, common to all makers in the line—too common to be told. The maker is too close to his product. He sees in his methods only the ordinary. He does not realize that the world at large might marvel at those methods, and that facts which seem commonplace to him might give him vast distinction. [56:57]  Serve better than others, offer more than others, and you are pretty sure to win. [57:45]  There are other ways, I know, to win in selling and in advertising. But they are slow and uncertain. Ask a person to take a chance on you, and you have a fight. Offer to take a chance on him, and the way is easy. [57:52]  So far as I know, no ordinary human being has ever resisted Albert Lasker. He has commanded what he would in this world. Nothing he desired has ever been forbidden him. So I yielded, as all do, to his persuasiveness. [1:00:07]  The greatest two faults in advertising lie in boasts and in selfishness. [1:01:01]  It is curious how we all desire to excel in something outside of our province. That leads many men astray. Men make money in one business and lose it in many others. They seem to feel that one success makes them superbusiness men. [1:04:04]  I earned in commissions as high as $185,000 in a year. ($4,000,000 in today's dollars) All earned at a typewriter which I operated myself, without a clerk or secretary. [1:06:33]  Most success comes through efficiency. Most failures are due to waste. [1:10:22]  Human nature does not change. The principles set down in this book are as enduring as the Alps. [1:17:01]  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#169 David Ogilvy (The King of Madison Avenue)

What I learned from reading The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising by Kenneth Roman.  ---- One characteristic of geniuses, said Einstein, is they are passionately curious. Ogilvy’s great secret was an inquiring mind.In conversation, he never pontificated; he interrogated. There were piles of books all over his house, most about successful leaders in business and government. He was interested in how they used their leadership. How they made their money. He was interested in people — people who had accomplished remarkable things. Reading Ogilvy’s short autobiography is like having dinner with a charming raconteur. His Scottish grandfather is portrayed as cold — hearted, formidable, and successful — and his hero.  When you write a book about advertising, you’re competing with midgets. When you write an autobiography, you’re competing with giants. He took the occasion to remind everyone that he was not a big shot at school. I wasn’t a scholar. I detested the philistines who ruled the roost. I was an irreconcilable rebel — a misfit. In short, I was a dud. Fellow duds, take heart! There is no correlation between success at school and success in life. If you can’t advertise yourself, what hope do you have of being able to advertise anything else? Although he entered advertising to make money, Ogilvy had become interested — obsessively interested — in the business itself. He said he had read every book that had been written on the subject, and, as a young man, had reason to believe he would be good at it and would enjoy it. Since American advertising was years ahead of advertising anywhere else, he decided to study the trade where it was done best. Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times (Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins). Every time I see a bad advertisement, I say to myself, “The man who wrote this copy has never read Claude Hopkins.” In print, it should lead with a headline that offers a consumer benefit. Often it should rely on long text packed with facts. “The more you tell, the more you sell,” as he would later preach. David also learned something about writing from his time in the intelligence service. Stephenson was a master of the terse note. Memos to him were returned swiftly to the sender with one of three words written at the top of the page: YES, NO, or SPEAK, meaning to come see him. Here Ogilvy describes himself as of the day he started the agency: “He is 38 and unemployed. He dropped out of college. He has been a cook, a salesman and a diplomat. He knows nothing about marketing and has never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising as a career and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year. I doubt if any American agency will hire him. Like De Gaulle, he felt that praise should be a rare commodity lest you devalue the currency. He had a near psychopathic hatred of laziness in all its forms. He was the least lazy person I have ever encountered. His advertising philosophy was shot through with intolerance of sloth. Lazy people accept mediocrity, which he hated. You cannot bore people into buying. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they cannot create them. Compromise has no place in advertising. Whatever you do, go the whole hog. You can’t save souls in an empty church. American Express built its business in part with an effective direct mail letter that started: “Quite frankly, the American Express Card is not for everyone.” I am a lousy copywriter. But a good editor. My crusade is in favor of advertising which sells. My war cry is: “We Sell. Or Else.” This has been my philosophy for 50 years, and I have never wavered from it, no matter what the temptations have been. Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography)

What I learned from reading Driven: An Autobiography by Larry Miller.  ---- [1:01] I decided I had to be extremely good at something.  [2:47] I’m sorry to say, neglecting my family to do all of the above. I worked and worked and worked, day after day, night after night, dawn to bedtime.  [5:23] He owned movie theaters, auto dealerships, a motorsports park with a world-class racetrack, a movie production company, an advertising agency, ranches, restaurants, TV and radio stations, a real-estate development company, an NBA franchise, a professional baseball team, an NBA arena, sports apparel stores—nearly 90 companies in all, in six states, with 7,000 employees, all under the umbrella of The Larry H. Miller Group, which produces $3.2 billion in sales annually, ranking it among the 200 largest privately owned companies in the United States.  [7:23] The chain of events that began my entrepreneurial career was sparked by three failures: I dropped out of college, got laid off, and got demoted.  [35:22] It’s excellence for the sake of excellence. It just feels good being excellent, doing your best, learning everything you can about anything to which you apply yourself and then doing that thing well.  [38:40] The insanely long hours that I worked were driven by fear, but then the success became intoxicating. Clearly, my motivation to work like that shifted from fear-driven to success-driven.  [40:36]  A bunch of people say, “I wanna have . . .” and “I wanna be . . .” but they’re not willing to pay the price. The price is time and effort and being a student of what you’re doing. [48:15] https://patrickcollison.com/fast.  [56:15] Working all the time made me successful. It made me a failure, too. I missed most of my children’s youth. I missed ball games and science fairs and back-to-school nights. I missed the first day of kindergarten and playing catch in the yard. I missed dinner at home with my wife and kids.  [1:00:53] I try to pass these painful lessons to others who might be tempted by the allure of professional success. Mine is a cautionary tale.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#167 Jackie Cochran (Aviation)

What I learned from reading Jackie Cochran: An Autobiography by Jackie Cochran.  ---- [4:37] At the time of her death on August 9, 1980, Jacqueline Cochran held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history. Her career spanned 40 years, from the Golden Age of the 1930s as a racing pilot, through the turbulent years of World War Il as founder and head of the Women's Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) program, into the jet age, when she became the first female pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound. She was a 14-time winner of the Harmon trophy for the outstanding female pilot of the year and was accorded numerous other awards and honors in addition to the trophies she won with her flying skills.  [6:15] Jackie was an irresistible force. Time and time again in the many, many interviews I was so kindly granted, the repeated theme was "Jackie just could not be stopped." And indeed, this driving, cussed determination is signally evident in Jackie's own writings. Her unremitting persistence is clear in everything she did, from regaining the doll of which she was robbed at the age of six to her need to be the world's top aviatrix. Generous, egotistical, penny-pinching, compassionate, sensitive, aggressive -indeed, an explosive study in contradictions—Jackie was consistent only in the overflowing energy with which she attacked the challenge of being alive. Always passionately convinced of any viewpoint she happened to hold (nothing Jackie ever did was by halves), she raced through life, making lifelong friends and unforgetting enemies, surely breaking all records in the sheer volume of her living on this earth—as she did in the air.  [8:07] To live without risk for me would have been tantamount to death.  [14:16] Whenever I turned on a light, I'd think of how my foster family had been able to sit back and sit around that goddamn mojo lamp. Not me.  [16:39] I always knew I was different from the others.  [24:02] "What are you going to be when you grow up, Jackie?" they'd ask me. I never wavered in my response. "I'm going to be rich," I'd say, knowing even then that they thought I was silly or crazed. "I'll wear fine clothes, own my own automobile, and have adventures all over the world." They'd laugh. I was certain that's where I was going, I felt no embarrassment about my big dreams. No dreams, no future. They could laugh, but most of my mill friends wanted as little from life as they were destined to get.  [26:51] To get the best performance, to do better than anyone has ever done before, you've got to take chances.  [30:21] You almost had to have been there to know what such a range of existences did for me. Because of where I came from and then where I went, I ended up understanding intimately one very sustaining line of life: I could never have so little that I hadn't had less. It took away my fear. It pushed me harder than I might ever have pushed myself otherwise. The poverty provided me with a kind of cocky confidence and made me relatively happy with what I had at any given moment.  [42:05] Jackie always felt that there was nobody better than she was. She was equal to anybody and had as much confidence as anybody. That's why she was able to accomplish so much. If somebody else can do it, so can I. That was her theory, her motto.  [45:16] She could be ruthless when she wanted to pursue something, and she'd go at her goal with an intensity that wouldn't stop. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#166 Robert Noyce (Intel)

What I learned from reading The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin. ---- [0:01] Bob Noyce took me under his wing,” Steve Jobs explains. “I was young, in my twenties. He was in his early fifties. He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand.” Jobs continues, “You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before.”  [2:00] He inspired in nearly everyone whom he encountered a sense that the future had no limits , and that together they could , as he liked to say, “Go off and do something wonderful.”  [3:15] Warren Buffett , who served on a college board with Noyce for several years said: “Everybody liked Bob. He was an extraordinarily smart guy who didn’t need to let you know he was that smart. He could be your neighbor, but with lots of machinery in his head.”  [12:01] Noyce was slowly gathering experiences that would anchor his adult approach to life, which was not so much an approach as a headlong rush into any challenge with the unshakable assumption that he would emerge not only successful, but triumphant.  [14:18] Every night before he fell asleep, Noyce would mentally rehearse each of his dives in slow motion until he could see himself executing them perfectly. He called this habit “envisioning myself at the next level,” and he carried it with him throughout his life. In his mind’s eye, he could always see himself achieving something more.  [21:16] Bob was not the type to slow down for much of anything.  [33:02] His approach was to know the science cold and then “forget about it.” He did not slog or grind his way to ideas; he felt they just came to him. When he heard Picasso’s famous line about artistic creativity — “I do not seek; I find” — Noyce said that he invented in the same way.  [35:31] “I don’t have any recollection of a ‘ Boom! There it is!’ light bulb going off, ”Noyce later said of his ideas. Instead, he conceived of the integrated circuit in an iterative method he described thus: “[ I thought,] let’s see, if we could do this, we can do that. If we can do that, then we can do this. [It was] a logical sequence. If I hit a wall, I’d back up and then find a path, conceptually, all the way through to the end. [Once you have that path], you can come back and start refining, thinking in little steps that will take you there. Once you get to the point that you can see the top of the mountain, then you know you can get there.”  [45:48] We were a hard, young, hungry group. Our attitude was ‘We don’t give a damn what money you have to offer, buddy. We’re going to do this ourselves.’ [1:08:55] Noyce was invited to dinner at the home of an entrepreneur whose company the his fund had supported. After the dishes had been cleared and the children sent to bed, Noyce listened as the company founder explained that some day, if the business did well, he would like to move his family into a bigger, nicer house. Noyce looked up at him and said very quietly, “You’ve got a nice family. I screwed up mine. Just stay where you are.” Twenty - five years and a successful company later, the entrepreneur has not moved.  [1:09:45] His financial success directly benefited the entrepreneurs whose companies he funded, but the stories about Noyce’s success indirectly inspired many more. One entrepreneur put it this way: “Why do we love this dynamic environment? I’ll tell you why. Because we have seen what Steve Jobs, Bob Noyce, Nolan Bushnell [founder of Atari], and many others have done, and we know it can and will happen many times again. ”In other words, if they could do it, why couldn’t he? Such rationale functioned as a self - fulfilling prophecy in Silicon Valley, propelling the region forward on a self - perpetuating cycle of entrepreneurship and wealth. (This is what I hope Founders does.)  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#165 William Shockley (Creator of the Electronic Age)

What I learned from reading Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age by Joel Shurkin.  ----  [1:19] Why would a man as unquestionably brilliant as he knowingly and deliberately destroy himself? [5:04] Dear Jean: I am sorry that I feel I can no longer go on. Most of my life I have felt. that the world was not a pleasant place and that people were not a very admirable form of life. I find that I am particularly dissatisfied with myself and that most of my actions are the consequence of motives of which I am ashamed. Consequently, I must regard myself as less well suited than most to carry on with life and to develop the proper attitudes in our children. I hope you have better luck in the future. —Bill. He took out his revolver, put a bullet in one of the six chambers, put the gun to his head and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened. He put the gun away and wrote a second note.  [13:36] “My elation with the group’s success was balanced by the frustration of not being one of the inventors. I experienced frustration that my personal efforts had not resulted in a significant inventive contribution of my own.” Apparently his involvement was too passive to provide Shockley with the credit he craved.  [16:29] I am overwhelmed by an irresistible temptation to do my climbing by moonlight and unroped. This is contrary to all my rock climbing teaching and does not mean poor training but only a strong headedness. [24:21] The rise and fall of Bill Shockley’s company took less than a year and a half. It profoundly affected Shockley, but had even more impact on the world around him and on our lives today. In all of the history of business, the failure of Shockley Semiconductor is in a class by itself. [35:26] Shockley was often insulting, treating his employees the way he treated his sons, with no glimmer of sensitivity. His favorite crack, when he thought someone was wrong, was: ‘Are you sure you have a PhD?’ Worse of all, he could not keep himself from believing he was in competition with his employees. The very people he hired because they were so bright. He just didn’t want them to be as bright as he was. That his employees could come up with their own ideas did not register with him. [46:07] Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore decided it was time to go and set up their own company. They raised the capital, based entirely on Noyce’s reputation, with one telephone call to Arthur Rock. They called the new company Intel. They lived Bill Shockley’s fantasy. They directed the flow of the technology and made billions.  [52:12] A genealogy of Silicon Valley showed that virtually every company in the valley could show a line leading directly to someone who worked at and eventually left Fairchild Semiconductor. Everyone from Fairchild originally came from Shockley Semiconductor. Shockley’s company was the seed of Silicon Valley.  [1:00:48] They called his personality “reverse charisma.” [1:01:07] Alison read about her father’s death in the Washington Post. Emmy, obeying her husband’s last order, did not call her or Shockley’s sons. Emmy had her husband’s body cremated. She did not have a memorial service. It is not clear who would have come.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast