Entrepreneurship
Founders
David Senra
Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work. This quote explains why: "There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, new ways to manage etc. They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book. For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize. You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before and you learn every time." —Marc Andreessen
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#223 Unstoppable: Siggi Wilzig's Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz Survivor and Penniless Immigrant to Wall Street Legend
Dec 29, 20211h 15mWhat I learned from reading Unstoppable: Siggi Wilzig's Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz Survivor and Penniless Immigrant to Wall Street Legend by Joshua M. Greene. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- Never give up. Only death is permanent. Everything else can be fixed.I couldn't take such talk about not coming out alive. I didn't want to hear it. Whenever my mind told me I was not going to survive, the Almighty told me to keep going. So I stayed away from the others.Because I could outwit the guards, I always felt superior to them. I hated them. I hated their brutality, their inhuman behavior. I felt stronger, more intelligent, and I had confidence in myself from childhood. So even though they had the guns and did all the killing, I felt superior. It was obviously a touch of arrogance, and some of it was justified and some not justified, but even in that totally hopeless condition I looked down on all of them.It was clear that Americans were alive in every sense, moving purposefully toward some vision of tomorrow. He liked that. He would do that, too: grasp opportunities and not allow the darkness of the past to rob him of a bright future.Even smart chickens shit on their own feathers!When Naomi found out her husband was purchasing shares of Wilshire on a regular basis, she chided him. "More stock? We can barely pay the bills and you're buying more stock?" Siggi made excuses, but he didn't stop buying. "I didn't see how this was going to change our life," Naomi said, remembering other stocks her husband had bought and other career moves he had made. "But that's how it turned out."You are looking at a man who had the foxlike instincts to survive history's darkest hour, a man who has no fear of adversity and who cannot be intimidated by overwhelming odds.Siggi had grown his bank from $180 million in assets to more than $4 billion.Siggi was the first person in history to sue the Federal Reserve.He's just happy to be alive. People thought he was nuts and laughed at him, but he didn't care.Less than a year after his death, his estate was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. “Not bad," as Siggi once said, "for a short, bowlegged Jew with flat feet who never graduated kindergarten and started with only $240 in his pocket." ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- “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 ---- 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
#222 Ed Thorp (My personal blueprint)
Dec 20, 20211h 38mWhat I learned from rereading A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market by Ed Thorp. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- 1. The book reveals a thorough, rigorous, methodical person in search of life, knowledge, financial security, and, not least of all, fun. 2. I learned at an early age to teach myself. This paid off later on because there weren’t any courses in how to beat blackjack, build a computer for roulette, or launch a market-neutral hedge fund.3. Even though the Goliath I was challenging had always won, I knew something no one else did: He was nearsighted, clumsy, slow, and stupid, and we were going to fight on my terms, not his.4. I admired the heroes who, through extraordinary abilities and resourcefulness, achieved great things. I may have been inspired to mirror this in the future by using my mind to overcome intellectual obstacles.5. Rather than subscribing to widely accepted views—such as you can’t beat the casinos—I checked for myself. 6. What matters in life is how you spend your time.7. Life is like reading a novel or running a marathon. It’s not so much about reaching a goal but rather about the journey itself and the experiences along the way. As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Time is the stuff life is made of,” and how you spend it makes all the difference.8. I also believed then, as I do now after more than fifty years as a money manager, that the surest way to get rich is to play only those gambling games or make those investments where I have an edge.9. Since much of what we were doing was being invented as we went along, and our investment approach was new, I had to teach a unique set of skills. I chose young smart people just out of university because they were not set in their ways from previous jobs. Better to teach a young athlete who comes fresh to his sport than to retrain one who has learned bad form.10. Whatever you do, enjoy your life and the people who share it with you, and leave something good of yourself for the generations to follow. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- “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 ---- 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
#221 Charlie Munger
Dec 13, 20211h 25mWhat I learned from reading Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger by Janet Lowe. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- [16:02] I had a considerable passion to get rich. Not because I wanted Ferraris—I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it. [26:49] I met the towering intellectuals in books, not in the classroom, which is natural. My family was into all that stuff, getting ahead through discipline, knowledge, and self-control. [37:44] He talked about business in a way that was animated and interesting though now I see he was almost broke. I knew he drove an awful car. But I never thought he was anything but a big success. Why did I think that? He just had this air-everything he did was going to be first class, going to be great. He had these enthusiasms for his projects and his future. [38:48] Charlie drummed in the notion that a person should always "Do the best that you can do. Never tell a lie. If you say you're going to do it, get it done. Nobody gives a shit about an excuse. Leave for the meeting early, Don't be late, but if you are late, don't bother giving people excuses. Just apologize. They're due the apology, but they're not interested in an excuse.” [42:22] The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.[49:15] He wouldn't accept anything on face value. His interest in almost everything can be so intense, he will have a perspective that others will not have. [49:29] Do things that other people aren't doing. [1:07:55] I am a biography nut myself and I think when you're trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think that you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, making friends among the eminent dead, but if you go through life making friends with the emìnent dead who had the right ideas, I thìnk it will work better in life and work better in education. It's way better than just giving the basic concepts.[1:15:15] It is Charlie's philosophy that a first-rate man should be willing to take at least some difficult jobs with a high chance of failure.[1:21:28] Though few companies last forever, all of them should be built to last a long time, says Munger. The approach to corporate control should be thought of as "financial engineering." Just as bridges and airplanes are constructed with a series of back-up systems and redundancies to meet extreme stresses, so too should corporations be built to withstand the pressures from competition, recessions, oil shocks, or other calamities. Excess leverage, or debt, makes the corporation especially vulnerable to such storms. It is a crime in to build a weak bridge. How much nobler is it to build a weak company? ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- “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 ---- 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
#220 Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine
Dec 9, 20211h 22mWhat I learned from reading Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine by Brock Yates. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- [0:01] Editorial writers around the world groped for words to express what Enzo Ferrari had meant. Many tried to describe him as an automotive pioneer, which he was not; others called him a great racing driver and engineer, which he was not. He was, however, exactly what he had repeatedly said he was: an agitator of men. And he remained true to his credo to the day he died. [0:43] If there was one essential quality about the man it was his ironbound tenacity, his fierce devotion to the single cause of winning automobile races with cars bearing his name. For nearly sixty years, hardly a day passed when this thought was not foremost in his mind. Win or lose, he unfailingly answered the bell. In that sense his devotion to his own self-described mission was without precedent. For that alone he towered over his peers.[44:26] Enzo Ferrari was a man with a diamond-hard will to win at all costs.[45:08] If they were to survive, it would be thanks to their wits and their ability to play the ancient game of life. Few men understood this game better than Ferrari. [48:49] Enzo Ferrari was born with simple tastes, and even after he became rich and prominent, he retained the ways of a simple, uncluttered man. During the 1930s, when every ounce of his energies and every lira in his pocket were being plowed back into the business, he lived a modest, frugal life. [1:05:50] It is often said that his greatest skill was his ability to recognize talent. [1:06:13] Ferrari appeared to be happier when he was losing, which jibes with mechanics' observations that the race shop on Monday was more serene following a defeat than a victory. But why? Was not winning the central object of the exercise? Ferrari explained: “There is always something to learn. One never stops learning. Particularly when one is losing. When one loses one knows what has to be done. When one wins one is never sure.”[1:08:08] The source of much of Ferrari's success over the years was not technological brilliance or tactical cleverness, but dogged, gritty, unfailing persistence in competing—a willingness to appear at the line no matter what the odds and run as hard as possible. [1:15:44] Those who knew him best understood that Enzo Ferrari would never retire. There was little else in his life besides automobile racing. It was that simple.[1:19:34] His view of racing remained constant; the event itself was essentially meaningless. For him the stimulation came in the planning and preparation, in the creation of the machines, in the organization of the human beings who would man the team.---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- “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 ---- 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
#219 Tony Bourdain: The Definitive Biography
Nov 30, 20211h 47mWhat I learned from reading Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- [28:32] All the energy he'd put into trying to destroy himself, he put that into building himself back up. All that negative energy became something else. He became so serious, and so driven and focused. He worked really hard. It takes a lot of determination to wake up early in the morning and write, and then go to a job in the kitchen, and come home at god knows what hour, and get up the next morning and do it again. He was a fiend. One time, he said about his disciplined writing regimen, "Such was my lust to see my name in print." He threw himself into his work in a manner that I found astonishing. [41:17] He gave me really good advice: "Stay public. You gotta promote, promote, promote, or it all dies. You just gotta be out there all the time." Tony embraced that.[56:17] He proceeded to tell everyone to ignore the network. He said, "Completely ignore everything they're saying about music, about story, about shots. Let me deal with it all. I'm gonna make the show I want to make, across all fronts.” I had already been editing for ten years, and this was the first time I'd heard anything like this. Everyone is always just trying to make the network happy. [1:01:51] The line between Tony and the show was very thin, if it existed at all. [1:07:07] This life isn't a greenroom for something else. He went for it. [1:20:50] He demanded excellence, and he never settled for shit. He just wanted the show to be the greatest thing ever, all the time.[1:22:48] It was his life's work, and he never slacked.[1:34:56] Tony gorged himself on being alive.[1:46:13] The world is not better off with him not here. It's just not.[1:45:46] I liked him better when he was just kind of living his best life and looking in the rearview mirror like he stole something. This beautiful life that he had, something people would dream of, and no one else could do it but him. A "slit my wrist" love story is just the shittiest ending to it all. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- “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 ---- 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
#218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football)
Nov 25, 202158 minWhat I learned from reading My Turn: A Life of Total Football by Johan Cruyff. ---- 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 always say you play football with your head; you just use your legs to run. [1:09] I'm not capable of doing something at a low level. [8:45] I'm definitely cunning. I'm always on the lookout for the best advantage. [13:16] To be able to touch the ball perfectly once, you need to have touched it a hundred thousand times in training.[14:00] My father died in 1959, when he was forty-five and I was twelve. His death has never let go of me. [21:07] Winning was the consequence of the process that we had concentrated on.[45:30] It doesn't work without full commitment. [55:17] The experiences I have been through have given me a vast store of knowledge that needs to be shared so that others can profit from my experiences. [56:09] I've led a full life and can look back on it the way you're supposed to. It's been so incredibly intense that I feel like I've lived for a hundred years.[56:21] A setback is probably a sign that you need to make some adjustments. If you learn to think that way, all experiences are translated into something positive. ---- 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
#217 Estée Lauder
Nov 18, 20211h 23mWhat I learned from rereading Estée Lauder: A Success Story by Estée Lauder. Watch Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love by Bill Gurley. ---- 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. ----[21:14] I sometimes wonder if I had set my heart on selling tassels, cars, furniture, or anything else but beauty, would I have risen to the top of a profession? Somehow I doubt it. I believed in my product. I loved my product. [32:07] Risk taking is the cornerstone of empires. No one ever became a success without taking chances.[39:24] I was single-minded in the pursuit of my dream.[44:38] Despite all the naysayers, there was never a single moment when I considered giving up. That was simply not a viable alternative.[55:59] We took the money we had planned to use on advertising and invested it instead in enough material to give away large quantities of our products. [1:02:20] Never underestimate the value of an ally. Today they call it networking—this sharing between colleagues. It is one of the most powerful tools in the business. [1:12:22] It's not enough to have the most wonderful product in the world. You must be able to sell it.[1:15:03] Love your career or else find another. [1:19:05] Visualize. If in your mind's eye you see a successful venture, a deal made, a profit accomplished, it has a superb chance of actually happening. Projecting your mind into a successful situation is the most powerful means to achieve goals. If you spend time with pictures of failure in your mind, you will orchestrate failure. Countless times, before the event, I have pictured a heroic sale to a large department store every step of the way and the picture in my mind became a reality. I've visualized success, then created the reality from the image. Great athletes, business people, inventors, and achievers from all walks of life seem to know this secret.[1:21:34] I've always believed that if you stick to a thought and carefully avoid distraction along the way, you can fulfill a dream. I kept my eye on the target. I've never allowed my eye to leave the particular target of the moment. ---- 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
#216 Paul Van Doren (Founder of Vans)
Nov 14, 20211h 29mWhat I learned from reading Authentic: A Memoir by the Founder of Vans by Paul Van Doren. ---- 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. ---- The way we deal with hardship is our legacy. You can accept defeat, or you can overcome it.Quitting Randy's had probably been the biggest stroke of luck in my life. Opportunity is a strange beast.Whenever a situation went sideways and things looked dire, I always called up my one superpower: focus.I believe honest self-evaluation and the ability to listen to others has been one of my greatest strengths, one that has served me well over the years. If someone had a better idea than mine, of course I would adopt that. I really didn’t care if I didn’t get credit. I didn’t need credit; I needed success.The very best thing that occurred during that first decade of Vans was that we truly became a family business. Without exception, family has always been the most important thing in my life.Most of the kids in the early skater crews came from single-parent households, from the wrong side of the tracks. They were idiosyncratic, creative, independent—they were seen as the “freaks” of the sport. In so many ways, they were our people.If you do something no one else can do, or do something better than most, the odds are in your favor for success.Shit happens—it really does. Letting yourself get stuck in it doesn’t do any good. Acknowledge it and then move on. Don’t let it weigh you down—just cope. Tackling things in a positive way will help you succeed more often than not. Shit happens: these two words fully acknowledge the difficulties in life, but you can put them firmly in the rearview mirror, without letting them mess with your head or your path in life.To me, the more critical the situation, the better I’ll perform. I don’t create clutch situations just to feel the rush—I’d prefer to eliminate risk than encourage it—but I for one have always found defeat intoxicating, especially when it's someone else's. And when it's mine, I can’t say it's ever done anything but make me think smarter and behave differently, even courageously. Hell, it's only after I lost something or when something didn’t go my way that I was afforded the opportunity to shine.I’ve learned that what makes a successful entrepreneur is the same thing that makes a good skateboarder or good surfer: you need grit and determination to get back up every time you’re knocked off the board. ---- 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
#215: J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves (The General and the Genius)
Nov 9, 202157 minWhat I learned from reading The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer—The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Bomb by James Kunetka. ---- 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. ---- It is clear that nothing short of a full-speed, all-out attempt would be worthwhile.Once Leslie Groves accepted his new assignment, he embraced it completely. From his appointment in September 1942 until the end of the war, he worked at full speed, often fourteen hours a day or more. His remarkable energy and stamina frequently exhausted those who worked and traveled with him.Groves's style was to delegate whatever he could and then put the screws to the delegees. He was a taskmaster.The instructions to the project were that any individual in the project who felt that the ultimate completion was going to be delayed by as much as a day by something that was happening, it was his duty to report it direct to me. Urgency was on us right from the start.When Marshall asked him if he ever praised anyone for a job well done, Groves said no. "I don't believe in it. No matter how well something is being done, it can always be done better and faster.”Oppenheimer insisted that Los Alamos should have one director. He had learned enough about management from studying Groves to believe that while consensus was important, an organization needed a single leader.The dual approaches reflected Groves's belief in pursuing multiple solutions to a problem until the problem is solved. In a frank assessment of his boss after the war, he called him, "the biggest S.O.B. I have ever worked for. He is the most demanding. He is the most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. He disregards all normal organizational channels. He is extremely intelligent. He has the guts to make timely, difficult decisions. He is the most egotistical man I know. He knows he is right and so sticks by his decision. He abounds with energy and expects everyone to work as hard or even harder than he does. If I had to do my part of the atomic bomb project over again and had the privilege of picking my boss I would pick General Groves."Groves had a reputation for competence. He was demanding, rough, and sometimes brutal with his staff, intolerant of delay and mental slowness. On the other hand, he never swore, rarely lost his temper, and never raised his voice. He was also prepared to let subordinates disagree if their arguments were sound. He disliked people who groveled.Groves remained unflappable, accepting the unanticipated as normal. ---- 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
#214 Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography
Nov 3, 20212h 12mWhat I learned from rereading Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography 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. ---- 1. He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you.2. He refused to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.3. Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.4. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.5. The way we're running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let's make it simple. Really simple.6. Jobs’s intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions.7. The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme.8. One of Jobs's talents was spotting markets that were filled with second-rate products.9. Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.10. His mind was never a captive of reality. He possessed an epic sense of possibility. He looked at things from the standpoint of perfection. ---- 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
#213 Michael Jordan: Driven From Within
Oct 27, 20211h 7mWhat I learned from reading Driven From Within by Michael Jordan and Mark Vancil. ---- 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. ---- [4:55] Players who practice hard when no one is paying attention play well when everyone is watching.[9:47] It's hard, but it's fair. I live by those words. [12:49] To this day, I don't enjoy working. I enjoy playing, and figuring out how to connect playing with business. To me, that's my niche. People talk about my work ethic as a player, but they don't understand. What appeared to be hard work to others was simply playing for me. [24:00] You have to be uncompromised in your level of commitment to whatever you are doing, or it can disappear as fast as it appeared. [24:26] Look around, just about any person or entity achieving at a high level has the same focus. The morning after Tiger Woods rallied to beat Phil Mickelson at the Ford Championship in 2005, he was in the gym by 6:30 to work out. No lights. No cameras. No glitz or glamour. Uncompromised. [37:01] I knew going against the grain was just part of the process. [53:20] The mind will play tricks on you. The mind was telling you that you couldn't go any further. The mind was telling you how much it hurt. The mind was telling you these things to keep you from reaching your goal. But you have to see past that, turn it all off if you are going to get where you want to be.[57:41] I would wake up in the morning thinking: How am I going to attack today?[1:06:04] I’m not so dominant that I can’t listen to creative ideas coming from other people. Successful people listen. Those who don’t listen, don’t survive long.[1:06:22] In all honesty, I don't know what's ahead. If you ask me what I'm going to do in five years, I can't tell you. This moment? Now that's a different story. I know what I'm doing moment to moment, but I have no idea what's ahead. I'm so connected to this moment that I don't make assumptions about what might come next, because I don't want to lose touch with the present. Once you make assumptions about something that might happen, or might not happen, you start limiting the potential outcomes. ---- 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
#212 Michael Jordan: The Life
Oct 23, 20211h 38mWhat I learned from reading Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby. ---- 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. ---- [5:07] His competence was exceeded only by his confidence.[5:58] He worked at the game, and if he wasn't good at something, he had the motivation to be the best at it. [6:33] It seemed that he discovered the secret quite early in his competitive life: the more pressure he heaped on himself, the greater his ability to rise to the occasion. [14:06] At each step along his path, others would express amazement at how hard he competed. At every level, he was driven as if he were pursuing something that others couldn't see.[16:10] Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I'd close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it, and that got me going again. [19:29] Jordan could sense immediately that he had something the others didn't. [59:53] The Jordan Rules succeeded against the Bulls so well that they became textbook for guarding athletic scorers. The scheme helped Detroit win two NBA championships, but it also helped in the long run, by forcing Jordan to find an answer. "I think that 'Jordan Rules' defense, as much as anything else, played a part in the making of Michael Jordan," Tex Winter said. [1:16:35] Jordan had been surprised to learn how lazy many of his Olympic teammates were about practice, how they were deceiving themselves about what the game required. [1:19:56] I have always liked practice and I hate to miss it. When you miss that one day, you feel like you missed a lot. You take extra work to make up for that one day. I've always been a practice player. I believe in it.[1:29:47] Jordan presented a singleness of purpose that was hard to dent. ---- 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
#211 Aristotle Onassis: An Extravagant Life
Oct 16, 20211h 15mWhat I learned from reading Onassis: An Extravagant Life by Frank Brady. ---- 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. ---- He became one of the richest men in U.S. history ever to be arrested.The epic life of Aristotle Onassis is as mysterious as a tale from ancient Greek mythology and is a study of paradoxes, altogether gripping because of their seeming inconsistencies.Onassis had long since begun to formulate a personal business philosophy. The key to success was boldness, boldness, and more boldness.He was constantly visiting and inspecting ships, talking to ship owners and other importers and quietly absorbing everything, making a very conscious attempt to learn as much as he could before going into ship-owning seriously.He was quite observant about what, to others, were trifles but, to him, were important details. He often quoted Napoleon: “The pursuit of detail is the religion of success.”Onassis was a man of the pier, but with the cocksureness of a king.She simply never knew anyone quite as free or exotic as Aristotle Onassis, a paradoxical blend of raconteur and ruffian.Onassis was a born orator. He could keep a dinner party of some of the world's most sophisticated conversationalists spellbound.Onassis spent almost all of his time working. He would pore over shipping journals from Antwerp, Vancouver, Hamburg, and New York, looking for intelligence, trends, and opportunities. He would scan, study and memorize tonnage, prices, insurance rates and schedules of the world's great and small steamship companies and then attempt to outbid his competitors. He read the maritime sections of at least six foreign language daily newspapers each day.And I, of course, will do exactly as I please. ---- 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
#210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Oct 10, 20211h 10mWhat I learned from reading Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. ---- 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. ---- My earliest memory is of imagining I was someone else.By the time I was fourteen the nail in wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all. I'm not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.There was also a work-ethic in the poem that I liked, something that suggested writing poems (or stories, or essays) had as much in common with sweeping the floor as with mythy moments of revelation.The realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit.If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. I'd have a cigarette cough from too many packs, thicker glasses, more dandruff, and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk. And of course. I'd lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn't too late.You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair – the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.“When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.” Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate - four to six hours a day, every day – will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them.You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself. These lessons almost always occur with the study door closed. ---- 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
#209 Steven Spielberg: A Biography
Oct 6, 20211h 11mWhat I learned from reading Steven Spielberg: A Biography by Joseph McBride. ---- 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. ----Whatever is there, he makes it work.Spielberg once defined his approach to filmmaking by declaring, "I am the audience.""He said, 'I want to be a director.' And I said, 'Well, if you want to be a director, you've gotta start at the bottom, you gotta be a gofer and work your way up.' He said, 'No, Dad. The first picture I do, I'm going to be a director.' And he was. That blew my mind. That takes guts."One of his boyhood friends recalls Spielberg saying "he could envision himself going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar and thanking the Academy.” He was twelve.He was disappointed in the world, so he built one of his own.Spielberg remained essentially an autodidact. Spielberg followed his own eccentric path to a professional directing career. Universal Studios, in effect, was Spielberg's film school. Giving him an education that, paradoxically, was both more personal and more conventional than he would have received in an academic environment. Spielberg devised what amounted to his own private tutorial program at Universal, immersing himself in the aspects of filmmaking he found most crucial to his development.At the time he came to Hollywood, generations of nepotism had made the studios terminally inbred and unwelcoming to newcomers. The studio system, long under siege from television, falling box-office receipts, and skyrocketing costs, was in a state of impending collapse.When Steven was very discouraged trying to sell a script and break in, he always had a positive, forward motion, whatever he may have been suffering inside.In the two decades since Star Wars and Close Encounters were released, science-fiction films have accounted for half of the top twenty box-office hits. But before George Lucas and Spielberg revived the genre there was no real appetite at the studios for science fiction. The conventional wisdom was science-fiction films never make money.Your children love you. They want to play with you. How long do you think that lasts? We have a few special years with our children, when they're the ones who want us around. So fast, it’s a few years, then it's over. You are not being careful. And you are missing 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
#208 Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Bill Hewlett
Sep 29, 20211h 22mWhat I learned from reading In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz. ---- 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. ---- A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. —Steve Jobs There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. —Steve Jobs Usually people never think that much about what they're doing or why they do it. They just do it because that's the way it has been done and it works. That type of thinking doesn't work if you're growing fast and if you're up against some larger companies. You really have to outthink them and you have to be able to make those paradigm shifts in your points of view. —Steve Jobs ————Steve Jobs answer to What advice would you give someone interested in starting their own company?A lot of people ask me, "I want to start a company. What should I do?" My first question is always, "What is your passion? What is it you want to do in your company?" Most of them say, "I don't know."My advice is go get a job as a busboy until you figure it out. You've got to be passionate about something. You shouldn't start a company because you want to start a company. Almost every company I know of got started because nobody else believed in the idea and the last resort was to start the company. That's how Apple got started. That's how Pixar got started. It's how Intel got started. You need to have passion about your idea and you need to feel so strongly about it that you're willing to risk a lot.Starting a company is so hard that if you're not passionate about it, you will give up. If you're simply doing it because you want to have a small company, forget it.It's so much work and at times is so mentally draining. The hardest thing I've ever done is to start a company. It's the funnest thing, but it's the hardest thing, and if you're not passionate about your goal or your reason for doing it, you will give up. You will not see it through. So, you must have a very strong sense of what you want.You have to need to run such a business and know you can do it better than anyone else. ————There are no safe harbors. The only safe harbor is competency. Competency at doing something. —T.J. Rodgers founder of Cypress SemiconductorThe first time someone says, “The product you've made has changed my life," is the biggest sense of satisfaction you get. It motivates me more than anything else, by far. —Charles Geschke, founder of AdobeBeing detached from the customer is the ultimate death. —Michael Dell The faster you experiment and get rid of things that don't work and keep doing things that do work, the faster you get to the winning business model. —Michael DellThe important things of tomorrow are probably going to be things that are overlooked today. —Andy Grove The best assumption to have is that any commonly held belief is wrong. —Ken Olsen ---- 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
#207 Claude Hopkins (Scientific Advertising)
Sep 26, 202151 minWhat I learned from reading Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. ---- 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. ----Individuals come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become a guide to all who follow.Genius is the art of taking pains. The best ads ask no one to buy. That is useless. The best ads are based entirely on service. They offer wanted information. They site advantages to users.Remember the people you address are selfish, as we all are. The care nothing about your interests or your profit. They seek service for themselves. Ignoring this fact is a common mistake and a costly mistake in advertising. Ads say in effect, “Buy my brand. Give me the trade you give to others. Let me have the money." That doesn't work.We learn that people judge largely by price. We often employ this factor. Perhaps we are advertising a valuable formula. To merely say that would not be impressive. So we state as a fact that we paid $100,000 for that formula. That statement when tried has won a wealth of respect.The weight of an argument may often be multiplied by making it specific. Makers of safety razors have long advertised quick shaves. One maker advertised a 78-second shave. The difference is vast. If a claim is worth making, make it in the most impressive way.The product itself should be its own best salesman. Not the product alone, but the product plus a mental impression, and atmosphere, which you place around it. Samples are of prime importance. However expensive, they usually form the cheapest selling method. Samples serve numerous valuable purposes. They enable one to use the word "Free" in ads. That often multiplies readers. Samples pay for themselves in multiplying the readers of your ads.Mail order advertising tells a complete story if the purpose is to make an immediate sale. You see no limitations there on the amount of copy. The motto is, "The more you tell the more you sell." And it has never failed to be proven wrong in any test we know.Show health, not sickness. Don't show the wrinkles you propose to remove, but the face as it will appear. Your customers know all about the wrinkles. Show pretty teeth, not bad teeth. Talk of coming good conditions, not conditions that exist. We are attracted by sunshine, beauty, happiness, health, and success. Point the way to them, not the way out of the opposite.I spend far more time on headlines than on writing. I often spend hours on a single headline. The identical ad run with various headlines differs tremendously in its returns. It is not uncommon for a change in headlines to multiply returns by five or ten times over. ---- 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
#206 Albert D. Lasker (the creation of the advertising industry)
Sep 23, 20211h 37mWhat I learned from reading The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz. ---- 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. ----Advertising is a very simple thing. I can give it to you in three words: Salesmanship in print.Before he arrived on the scene, advertising agencies were mostly brokers of space in newspapers and magazines. With Lasker's prodding, the industry became a creative force and began earning substantial commissions.His rare ability to put troubled geniuses to work on challenging problems grew in part from the fact that he himself had been driven by "a thousand devils.”Albert measured himself against the man who had braved the privations and horrors of the Civil War, epidemics, and hurricanes and made several fortunes in a foreign and sometimes hostile land.Thomas was often taken aback by his young colleague's unconventional views and methods.He decided that he could represent as well as anybody, because at least as far as he could tell, nobody in his office really knew anything much about the business they were in.He was beginning to suspect that advertising agencies were leaving an enormous amount of money on the table. Lasker felt sure that he could build the business, and boost commissions if he could improve the agency's copywriting.You are insufferably egotistical on the things you know nothing about, and you are painfully modest about those things about which you know everything.Hopkins began imparting his theory of copywriting. We should never brag about a client's product, he said, or plead with consumers to buy it. Instead, we must figure out how to appeal to the consumer's self-interest.Lasker argued that rather than maintaining many modestly successful small brands, the company needed to create one overwhelmingly powerful product. ---- 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
#205 James Dyson (Invention: A Life)
Sep 18, 20211h 52mWhat I learned from reading Invention: A Life by James Dyson. ---- 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. ---- This is a story told through a life of creating and developing things, as well as expressing a call to arms for young people to become engineers, creating solutions to our current and future problems.I have tried to seek out those young people who can make the world a better place. I have seen what miracles they can achieve. This book is aimed at encouraging them. Some may well become heirs to my heroes—inventors, engineers, and designers—who make their appearance in these pages. Like them, they will not find it easy and they will need oodles of determination and stamina along the way. That was the last time I saw him. His brave cheerfulness chokes me every time I recall the scene. It is impossible to imagine my father's emotions as he waved goodbye knowing that he might be on his way to London to die. Sixty years have not softened these memories, nor the sadness that he missed enjoying his three children growing up.I felt the devastating loss of my dad, his love, his humor, and the things he taught me. I feared for a future without him.Running also taught me to overcome the pain barrier: when everyone else feels exhausted, that is the opportunity to accelerate, whatever the pain, and win the race. Stamina and determination, with creativity, are needed to overcome seemingly impossible difficulties.I admire Soichiro Honda greatly for his addiction to the continuous improvement of products.Craziest of all, during the first thirty years of our marriage, she agreed unselfishly to keep putting her signature to endless bank guarantee forms in front of solicitors, signing away our possessions. If we had defaulted on the bank loans, we would have been evicted from our home.At Dyson, we don't particularly value experience. Experience tells you how things should be done when we are much more interested in how things shouldn't be done.Jeremy Fry encouraged me to think for myself and to "just do it."Jeremy Fry taught me, without saying a word, that each day is a form of education.I wanted to make new things—things that might seem strange—and not things you make because you know they will sell.I was left with a burning ambition to emulate designer-engineers like Issigonis and Citroën in my own small way.I happen to find factories and production lines romantic places. They are truly exciting.Selling goes with manufacturing as wheels do with a bicycle. Products do not walk off shelves and into people's homes. And when a product is entirely new, the art of selling is needed to explain it. What it is. How it works. Why you might need and want it.He believed, most of all, in the power of enthusiasm.I still find myself putting into practice at Dyson some of the same things Jeremy said and did when I worked for him half a century ago. He believed in taking on young people with no experience because this way he employed those with curious, unsullied, and open minds.Jeremy was always looking for a better way of doing things.He loathed arrogance and experts, by which he meant those who want you to believe that they know everything about a subject when the inventive mind knows instinctively that there are always further questions to be asked and new discoveries to be made.Alec's view was that market research is bunk and that one should never copy the opposition.I was also putting into practice ideas I'd learned directly from Jeremy Fry and indirectly from Alec Issigonis: Don't copy the opposition. Don't worry about market research. Both Jeremy and Alec Issigonis might just as well have said "Follow your own star." And this is indeed what successful entrepreneurs do.I was penniless again with no job and no income. I had three adorable children, a large mortgage to pay, and nothing to show for the past five years of toil. I had also lost my inventions. This was a very low moment and deeply worrying for Deirdre and me. It was deeply upsetting, too. My confidence took a big blow, and it would take some years to regain it.Here was a field-the vacuum cleaner industry-where there had been no innovation for years, so the market ought to be ripe for something new.For the following fifteen years I lived in debt. This might not sound encouraging to young inventors with an entrepreneurial spirit, yet if you believe you can achieve something then you have to give the project 100 percent of your creative energy. You have to believe that you'll get there in the end. You need determination, patience, and willpower.Experts tend to be confident that they have all the answers and, because of this trait, they can kill new ideas.I had various degrees of perseverance underpinned by a kind of naïve intelligence, by which I mean following your own star along a path where you stop to question both yourself and expert opinion allong the way.How best could I share my enthusiasm for what I knew was a great and innovative product?We knew this was the most exciting adventure of our lives.As Buckminster Fuller said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."En route, there are multiple failures, sleepless nights, a great deal of frustration.This was another of those products, used frequently by hundreds of millions of people, stuck in a technological time warp.The general idea was to show that Dyson was founded by Mr. Dyson and that he was responsible for Dyson products. Big, long-established multinationals, most of them public companies, would not be able to put forward an individual in the same way.Dyson has become as much an Asian as it is a British business.The fourth Industrial Revolution is not going to dissipate anytime soon.Learning by doing. Learning by trial and error. Learning by failing. These are all effective forms of education.Children love making things and yet, all too often, this innate curiosity and experimentation expressed through our hands is stamped out by educational systems that see no virtue in such natural creativity.Education should be about problem solving.Invention is a human imperative.If I wasn't getting anywhere with the education system in my quest to raise the number and quality of engineering graduates, why didn't I start a university of my own?There were to be no tuition fees. Our undergraduates would work three days a week with Dyson on real research projects alongside young Dyson engineers, earning a proper salary, and we would teach them for the remaining two days. When the first undergraduates complete their four-year course they will be debt-free.I also have an interest, verging on obsession, with the past.It is about understanding and celebrating the progress that has been achieved, learning from it, and building on it.Each artifact has its own story of against-the-odds progress and lessons on why having faith in your ideas and believing in progress is so important.It is hard for other people to understand or get excited by a new idea. This requires self-reliance and faith on the part of the inventor.Remember that there is nothing wrong with being persistently dissatisfied or even afraid. ---- 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
#204 Steve Jobs (Inside Steve's Brain)
Sep 14, 202159 minWhat I learned from reading Inside Steve's Brian by Leander Kahney. ---- 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. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that.2. He remade Apple in his own image. Apple is Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives.3. I'm looking for a fixer-upper with a solid foundation. Am willing to tear down walls, build bridges, and light fires. I have great experience, lots of energy, a bit of that 'vision thing' and I'm not afraid to start from the beginning.4. Good storytelling lasts for decades. I don't think you'll be able to boot up any computer today in 20 years. But Snow White has sold 28 million copies, and it's a 60-year-old production.5. Jobs has said the starting point is the user experience.6. In everything I've done it really pays to go after the best people in the world. 7. My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we've got to be a great marketing company.8. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.9. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea or a problem you're passionate about; otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there.10. The older I get, the more I'm convinced that motives make so much difference. Our primary goal here is to make the world's best PCs—not to be the biggest or the richest. ---- 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
#203 Georges Doriot (Birth of Venture Capital)
Sep 8, 20211h 27mWhat I learned from reading Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital by Spencer Ante. ---- 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. He was very important because he was the first one to believe there was a future in financing entrepreneurs in an organized way.2. He brought a unique style to everything he did. 3. He called his course Manufacturing, but it was really his philosophy of life and of business.4. At Harvard, Doriot became a Yoda-like figure, dispensing wisdom to an ever-growing group of disciples.5. He got me motivated to start a business.6. A real courageous man is a man who does something courageous when no one is watching him. 7. If any information is to be exchanged over whiskey, let us get it rather than give it. 8. You will get nowhere if you do not inspire people.9. Always remember that someone somewhere is making a product that will make your product obsolete.10. Decades before economists appreciated the value of technology, Doriot realized that innovation was the key to economic progress.11. He upset the conventional wisdom by proving that there was big money to be made from patient investing in and the nurturing of small, unproven companies.12. He believed in building companies for the long haul. 13. I don’t consider a speculator constructive. I am building men and companies.14. A creative man merely has ideas; a resourceful man makes them practical. I look for the resourceful man.15. When ARD liquidated its stake in Digital, the company was worth more than $400 million—yielding a return on their original investment of more than 70,000 percent. It was the young venture capital industry’s first home run.16. Doriot never figured out a way to appease government regulators, who repeatedly threatened to put ARD out of business.17. More than any other person, Doriot pioneered the transition to an economy built on entrepreneurship and innovation.18. Celebrating anything less than the best possible result smacked of contentment19. A commercial bank lends only on the strength of the past. I want money to do things that have never been done before.20. Every successful man can usually point to a mentor that helped guide his career.21. One of things that profoundly affected Georges was his father getting wiped out financially.22. Doriot would go on to mentor thousands of other students, giving them advice, finding them jobs, guiding them in their careers, and taking an extraordinarily personal interest in each and every one of their futures.23. Doriot believed strongly in forming a close bond between student and teacher.24. Doriot described with a palpable sense of glee the importance of imparting a strong work ethic.25. Doriot encouraged his students to ponder the purpose of life and business. It was a highly unusual technique but the students realized Doriot was giving them knowledge of much deeper value.26. Always challenge the statement that nothing can be done about a certain condition27. There was still a fire that burned in Doriot. A passion that kept him searching for his next mission impossible.28. Doriot was a workaholic with no family responsibilities to divert his energies29. A committee is an invitation to do nothing.30. Lack of competent personnel was his most vexing problem.31. One word is omitted from Doriot’s vocabulary. That word—“impossible.” If a thing must be done, it can be done.32. Doriot was putting in twelve-hour days, seven days a week. 33. We cannot depend safely for an indefinite time on the expansion of our old big industries alone. We need new strength, energy and ability from below.34. A team made up of the younger generation, with courage and inventiveness, together with older men of wisdom and experience, should bring success.35. On his desk, Doriot kept a stopwatch. “Sometimes I use it to see how long it takes someone in a meeting to tell me the same thing three times,” he said.36. An average idea in the hands of an able man is worth much more than an outstanding idea in the possession of a person with only average ability.37. The riskiest investments, they were learning, held the potential to generate the greatest financial returns and the highest personal satisfaction38. He knew that if entrepreneurs weren’t self-driven and a bit egotistical they’d be punching the clock for IBM or General Electric.39. Creative ability knows no boundaries.40. It’s very important to cultivate the memory of great people. ---- 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
#202 A Few Lessons From Warren Buffett
Sep 2, 20211h 7mWhat I learned from reading A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers From Warren Buffett by Warren Buffett and Peter Bevelin. ---- 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. ---- Big opportunities come infrequently. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it. —W. Somerset Maugham"Moats" —a metaphor for the superiorities they possess that make life difficult for their competitors. Business history is filled with "Roman Candles," companies whose moats proved illusory and were soon crossed.When a company is selling a product with commodity-like economic characteristics, being the low-cost producer is all-important.In a business selling a commodity-type product, it's impossible to be a lot smarter than your dumbest competitor.As a wise friend told me long ago, "If you want to get a reputation as a good businessman, be sure to get into a good business."The truly big investment idea can usually be explained in a short paragraph.Our managers have produced extraordinary results by doing rather ordinary things—but doing them exceptionally well.If we are delighting customers, eliminating unnecessary costs and improving our products and services, we gain strength.On a daily basis, the effects of our actions are imperceptible; cumulatively, though, their consequences are enormous. When our long-term competitive position improves as a result of these almost unnoticeable actions, we describe the phenomenon as "widening the moat."We always, of course, hope to earn more money in the short-term. But when short-term and long-term conflict, widening the moat must take precedence.Charlie and I are not big fans of resumes. Instead, we focus on brains, passion and integrity.It's difficult to teach a new dog old tricks.Investors should understand that for certain companies, and even for some industries, there simply is no good long-term strategy.Most of our directors have a major portion of their net worth invested in the company. We eat our own cooking.Our trust is in people rather than process. A “hire well, manage little" code suits both them and me.Just run your business as if: (1) You own 100% of it; (2) It is the only asset in the world that you and your family have or will ever have; and (3) You can't sell it for at least a century.We believe in Charlie's dictum-“Just tell me the bad news; the good news will take care of itself".We do have a few advantages, perhaps the greatest being that we don't have a strategic plan. Thus we feel no need to proceed in an ordained direction but can instead simply decide what makes sense for our owners.We always mentally compare any move we are contemplating with dozens of other opportunities open to us. Our practice of making this comparison- acquisitions against passive investments –-is a discipline that managers focused simply on expansion seldom use.We have no master strategy, no corporate planners delivering us insights about socioeconomic trends, and no staff to investigate a multitude of ideas presented by promoters and intermediaries. Instead, we simply hope that something sensible comes along-and, when it does, we act.Loss of focus is what most worries Charlie and me.Charlie and I know that the right players will make almost any team manager look good. We subscribe to the philosophy of Ogilvy & Mather's founding genius, David Ogilvy: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But, if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants."Our experience has been that the manager of an already high-cost operation frequently is uncommonly resourceful in finding new ways to add to overhead, while the manager of a tightly-run operation usually continues to find additional methods to curtail costs, even when his costs are already well below those of his competitors.A compact organization lets all of us spend our time managing the business rather than managing each other.Thirty years ago Tom Murphy, then CEO of Cap Cities, drove this point home to me with a hypothetical tale about an employee who asked his boss for permission to hire an assistant. The employee assumed that adding $20,000 to the annual payroll would be inconsequential. But his boss told him the proposal should be evaluated as a $3 million decision, given that an additional person would probably cost at least that amount over his lifetime, factoring in raises, benefits and other expenses (more people, more toilet paper). And unless the company fell on very hard times, the employee added would be unlikely to be dismissed, however marginal his contribution to the business.In both business and investments it is usually far more profitable to simply stick with the easy and obvious than it is to resolve the difficult.The most elusive of human goals- keeping things simple and remembering what you set out to do.Stay with simple propositions.Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.Tomorrow is always uncertain.The less the prudence with which others conduct their affairs, the greater the prudence with which we should conduct our own affairs.In allocating capital, activity does not correlate with achievement.The roads of business are riddled with potholes; a plan that requires dodging them all is a plan for disaster.Unquestionably, some people have become very rich through the use of borrowed money. However, that's also been a way to get very poor.The trick is to learn most lessons from the experiences of others.When a problem exists, whether in personnel or in business operations, the time to act is now. ---- 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
#201 Isambard Kingdom Brunel (James Dyson's Hero)
Aug 30, 20211h 14mWhat I learned from reading Isambard Kingdom Brunel: The Definitive Biography of The Engineer, Visionary, and Great Briton by L.T.C. Rolt. ---- 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. His career was to him a tremendous adventure.2. I have always made it a rule, which I have found by some years experience a safe and profitable one, to have nothing to do with newspaper articles.3. It is consoling to be thus reminded that the lunatic fringe is a hardy perennial and not a phenomenon peculiar to our day and age.4. The livelihood of anybody relying upon their penmanship is generally precarious.5. One whose high spirits seemed quite impervious to cold and discomfort.6. The ready wit and the gaiety concealed a fire and a power which would drive him, undeterred by repeated disappointments, to achieve fame and fortune.7. The name of Isambard Brunel would not mean what it does today if he had not displayed the same characteristics of dogged persistence and an unlimited capacity for hard work which distinguish the self-taught engineers.8. A great man achieves eminence by his capacity to live more fully and intensely than his fellows and in so doing his faults as well as his virtues become the more obvious.9. It is not in freedom from faults but in the ability to transcend and master them that greatness lies.10. Isambard Brunel threw into the work all that unsparing energy which was to distinguish his whole life. For as much as thirty-six hours at a time he would not leave the tunnel, pausing only for a brief cat-nap.11. The Brunels were not men to sit down with folded hands and bewail their misfortune.12. Spurred on by Brunel's unconquerable determination, the work went forward.13. Iť's a gloomy perspective and yet bad as it is I cannot with all my efforts work myself up to be down hearted.14. Never Despair has always been my motto – we may succeed yet. Persevere.15. This time he was going to win, but it would be a great struggle.16. He never lost faith in himself.17. He determined then to make perfection of his work the supreme goal and from that resolve he never subsequently wavered.18. He knew that it would be so because, as any artist or craftsman must, he had alrcady conccived the completed work in his imagination19. For it was an inviolable rule of Brunel's that he would never, under any circumstances, accept an appointment which involved divided responsibility. In any work upon which he engaged there could be only one engineer and he must have the full responsibility for the work and for the conduct of his staff.20. Plain, gentlemanly language seems to have no effect upon you. I must try stronger language and stronger measures. You are a cursed, lazy, inattentive, apathetic vagabond, and if you continue to neglect my instructions, and to show such infernal laziness, I shall send you about your business. I have frequently told you, amongst other absurd, untidy habits, that that of making drawings on the back of others was inconvenient; by your cursed neglect of that you have again wasted more of my time than your whole life is worth.21. Experiment was the breath of life to Brunel and for him precedents only existed to be questioned.22. Brunel rejected precedent and proceeded from first principles. ---- 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
#200 James Dyson (Against the Odds)
Aug 27, 20212h 14mWhat I learned from rereading Against The Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson and reading A History of Great Inventions by James Dyson. ---- 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. I am a creator of products, a builder of things, and my name appears love on them. That is how I make a living and they are what have made nom my name at least familiar in a million homes.2. This is also the exposition of a business philosophy, which is very different from anything you might have encountered before.3. It has all happened, I really believe, because of the intrinsic excellence of the machine; because it is a better vacuum cleaner than anything that has gone before; and because it looks better than anything like it has ever looked.4. Perhaps millions of people, in the last few thousand years, have had ideas for improving it. All I did was take things a little further than just having the idea.5. My own success has been in observing objects in daily use which, it was always assumed, could not be improved.6. Anyone can become an expert in anything in six months, whether it is hydrodynamics for boats or cyclonic systems for vacuum cleaners. After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology. My first cyclonic vacuum cleaner was built out of cereal packets and masking tape long before I understood how it worked.7. The best kind of business is one where you can sell a product at a high price with a good margin, and in enormous volumes. For that you have to develop a product that works better and looks better than existing ones. That type of investment is long term and high risk. Or at least, it looks like a high-risk policy. In the longer view, it is not half so likely to prove hazardous to one's financial health as simply following the herd.8. Difference for the sake of it. In everything. Because it must be better. From the moment the idea strikes, to the running of the business. Difference, and retention of total control.9. This is not even a business book. It is, if anything, a book against business, against the principles that have filled the world with ugly, useless objects, unhappy people, and brought the country to its economic knees. We all want to make our mark. We all want to make beautiful things and a little money. We all have our own ideas about how to do it. What follows just happens to be my way.10. I have been a misfit throughout my professional life, and that seems to have worked to my advantage. Misfits are not born or made; they make themselves. 11. I took on the big boys at their own game, made them look very silly, just by being true to myself.12. Herb Elliot was a big name at the time, so I read a few books about him and discovered that his coach had told him that the way to develop stamina and strengthen the leg muscles was to run up and down sand dunes. This suited me fine, because if I had nothing else I certainly had sand dunes. Out there alone on the dunes I got a terrific buzz from knowing that I was doing something that no on one else was - they were all tucked up in bed at school. I knew that I was training myself to do something better than anyone else would be able to do.13. The act of running itself was not something I enjoyed. The best you could say for it was that it was lonely and painful. But as I started to win by greater and greater margins I did it more and more, because I knew the reason for my success was that out on the sand dunes I was doing something that no one else was doing. Apart from me and Herb, no one knew. They were all running round and round the track like a herd of sheep and not getting any quicker. Difference itself was bon making me come first.14. In so many ways it taught me the most significant lessons in all my youth. I was learning about the physical and psychological strength that keeps you competitive. I was learning about obstinacy. I was learning how to overcome nerves, and as I grew more and more neurotic about being caught from behind, I trained harder to stay in front. 15. To this day it is the fear of failure, more than anything else, which makes me keep working at success.16. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was unable to think small, and nothing was a barrier to him. The mere fact that something had never been one before presented, to Brunel, no suggestion that the doing of it was impossible. He was fired by an inner strength and self-belief almost impossible to imagine in this feckless age. While I could never lay claim to the genius of a man like that —I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was. And at times in my life when I have encountered difficulty and self-doubt I have looked to his example to fire me on.17. I have tried, in my own way, to draw on Brunel's dream of applying emerging technology in ways as yet unimagined. He was never afraid to be different or shocking. He never shirked the battles with the money men, and he had to overcome the most incredible resistance to his ideas: when he applied the system of the screw propeller to a transatlantic steam ship he actually filled a boat with people and sent them across the sea. I have asked people only to push my inventions around, not to get inside them and try to float!18. I have told myself, when people tried to make me modify my ideas, that the Great Western Railway could not have worked as anything but the vision of a single man, pursued with dogged determination that was nothing less than obsession.19. Throughout my story I will try to return to Brunel, and to other designers and engineers, to show how identifying with them, and seeing parallels with every stage of my own life, enabled me to see my career as a whole and to know that it would all turn out the way it has.20. I am led to the belief that, for 'vision' one might equally well read 'stubbornness'. At any stage in my story where I talk of vision, and arrogance seems to have got the better of me, remember that I am celebrating only my stubbornness. I am claiming nothing but the virtues of a mule.21. And I suppose it was here that I learnt the crucial business principle that would guide my later attempts at making money from invention: the only way to make real money is to offer the public something entirely new, that has style value as well as substance, and which they cannot get anywhere else.22. He did not, when an idea came to him, sit down and process it through pages of calculations; he didn't argue it through with anyone; he just went out and built it.So it was that when I came to him, to say, 'I've had an idea,' he would offer no more advice than to say, 'You know where the workshop is, go and do it.' But we'll need to weld this thing,' I would protest. 'Well then, get a welder and weld it.' When I asked if we shouldn't talk to someone about, say, hydrodynamics, he would say, 'The lake is down there, the Land Rover is over there, take a plank of wood down to the lake, tow it behind a boat and look at what happens.'23. Now, this was not a modus operandi that I had encountered before. College had taught me to revere experts and expertise. Fry ridiculed all that; as far as he was concerned, with enthusiasm and intelligence anything was possible. It was mind-blowing. No research, no 'workings', no preliminary sketches. If it didn't work one way he would just try it another way, until it did. And as we proceeded I could see that we were getting on extremely quickly. The more I observed his method, the more it fascinated me.24. But I learnt then one of the most crucial business lessons of my life: to stint on investment in the early stages, to try to sell a half-finished product, is to doom from the start any project you embark on.25. People do not want all purpose; they want high-tech specificity.26. You simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. A consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two, or even several.27. I set off around the world to start selling it properly. It was time spent away from designing, but it was to teach me, above all else, that only by trying to sell the thing you have made yourself, by dealing with consumers' problems and the product's failings as they arise, can you really come to understand what you have done, to bond with your invention to improve it. 28. Only the man who has brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on others, and demand a heavy price, with all his heart.29. It was an interesting lesson in psychology, teaching me that the entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer.30. One decent editorial counts for a thousand advertisements.31. In following his advice to abandon direct selling and supply shops via wholesalers, we began to lose that contact with the consumer that was the basis of our success.32. One of the strains of this book is about control. If you have the intimate knowledge of a product that comes with dreaming it up and then designing it, I have been trying to say, then you will be the better able to sell it and then, reciprocally, to go back to it and improve it. From there you are in the best possible position to convince others of its greatness and to inspire others to give their very best efforts to developing it, and to remain true to it, and to see it through all the way to its optimum point. To total fruition, if you like.33. That is what development is all about. Empirical testing demands that you only ever make one change at a time. It is the Edisonian principle, and it is bloody slow. It is a thing that takes me ages to explain to my graduate employees at Dyson, but it is so important. They tend to leap in to tests, making dozens of radical changes and then stepping back to test their new masterpiece. How do they know which change has improved it, and which hasn't?34. While it is easy, of course, for me to celebrate my doggedness now and say that it is all you need to succeed, the truth is that it demoralized me terribly. I would crawl into the house every night covered in dust after a long day, exhausted and depressed because that day's cyclone had not worked. There were times when I thought it would never work, that I would keep on making cyclone after cyclone, never going forwards, never going backwards, until I died.35. Everyday products sell. Although it is harder to improve a mature product, if you succeed there is no need to create a market. 36. Try out current products in your own home, and make a list of things that you don't like about them – I found about twenty things wrong with my Hoover Junior at the first attempt.37. No one ever had an idea staring at a drawing board.38. Painful but true. Breaking the mould will upset people. Challenging sitting tenants will be tough. It will take longer than you ever imagined. Ten years of development? Do you fancy that? And then negotiations on a knife edge, a shoestring, and hanging by a thread? It will take balls.39. Total control. From the first sprouting of the idea, through research and development, testing and prototyping, model making and engineering drawings, tooling, production, sales and marketing, all the way into the homes of the nation, it is most likely to succeed if the original visionary (or mule) sees it right through. As I have often said, I aim not to be clever, but to be dogged.40. I need to sleep a hell of a lot, you see. Ten hours a night or the whole day is useless.41. We also scooted to number one so silently because our profile was raised more by editorial coverage than by paid-for advertising. Apart from being cheaper, this is much more effective, because it carries more of the weight of objective truth than a bought space. But in terms of visibility it is less popularising, while being more efficient in selling to those to whom it is exposed, because those prospectively in the market will be drawn to it. It is also out of your control—you cannot make journalists write about you, and I have never tried. And, when they have, I have never sought to influence what they write and have never asked to see their copy before publication. They take me, or the products, as we are, and I have to hope they like us.42. It is one of the virtues of having such a strange—looking product, however, that journalists are more likely to take an interest in it.43. If you make something, sell it yourself.44. Companies are built, not made.45. You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant. And if you can't of be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think. ---- 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
#199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life
Aug 20, 20211h 4mWhat I learned from reading Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life by Justine Picardie. ---- 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. ---- 'When my customers come to me, they like to cross the threshold of some magic place; they feel a satisfaction that is perhaps a trace vulgar but that delights them: they are privileged characters who are incorporated into our legend. For them this is a far greater pleasure than ordering another suit. Legend is the consecration of fame.” —Coco Chanel, 1935 Her father soon left them, discontented with marriage and fatherhood. The dead are not dead as long as we think of them. I like talking to myself and I don't listen to what I'm told. Gabrielle spent seven years in the orphanage, until she was 18. Her father never returned to see her or her siblings. I was thoroughly unhappy. I fed on sorrow and horror. I wanted to kill myself I don't know how many times. And having to hear people call me an orphan! They felt sorry for me. All this was humiliating. She was one of the charity pupils who were provided with a free place, and therefore treated differently to those whose family could afford to pay for their education. It was here, too, that she was given further instruction in how to sew. She sought to define herself by her idiosyncratic choice of clothes. She distanced herself from the past in storytelling. For telling stories is a way in which to imagine a happy-ever-after. What she did want was to earn her own living. They didn't understand how important this was to me. Coco made hats that were stripped of embellishments, of the frills that she dismissed as weighing a woman down. Coco began to edge her way to the centre of attention, elbowing past her rivals and competitors. Paul Poiret, whose fame at the time was such that he dubbed himself the 'King of Fashion', said of Chanel's early days as a milliner, 'We ought to have been on guard against that boyish head. It was going to give us every kind of shock, and produce, out of its little conjuror's hat, gowns and coiffures and jewels and boutiques.’ I often fainted. I had too much emotion, too much excitement, I lived too intensely. My nerves couldn't stand it. The House of Chanel seemed to give her stability. I am not here to have fun, or to spend money like water. I am here to make a fortune. She rejoiced in her independence. I was my own master and I depended on myself alone. Chanel was neither slave girl nor wife, but something of her own making. The little black dress wasn't formally identified as the shape of the future until 1926, when American Vogue published a drawing of a Chanel design, and announced: 'Here is a Ford signed Chanel.' It was simple yet elegant sheath, in black, with long narrow sleeves, worn with a string of white pearls; and Vogue proved to be correct in the prediction that it would become a uniform, as widely recognised as a Ford automobile; fast and sleek and discreet. I imposed black; it's still going strong today, for black wipes out everything else around. She did not see herself as an artist – she repeatedly described herself as an artisan who 'works with her hand' - and yet her precision and commitment to her craft was reminiscent of Reverdy. Coco was always contrary. Chanel N°5 was the solid foundation of her empire. N°5 was multiplied a million times over - and more, far more - in a dizzying proliferation that made Coco Chanel rich and recognised around the world, so that her name became a brand, and her face as famous as her logo. She surreptitiously sprayed the women who passed their table with the new perfume. “You've got to be able to lead them by the nose.” Each tormented the other at different points in their lives, with such antagonism that Pierre had to employ a full-time lawyer simply to deal with her. She was both a copyist, and much copied. Coco is really strong being fit to rule a man or an Empire. —Winston Churchill, 1927 Chanel's deft designs were not without precedents. Nor did she invent its associated fashions. But as was often the case in her career as a designer, she was quick to distil its essence, absorbing it into her own style, and selling it to customers eager for her clothes. It is immoral to play at earning one's living. I am only a little dress-maker, trying to make women young and pretty. These other designers that do the pretty little sketches, the boys, they don't understand women, they don't know how they live. Their idea is to make them weird, freaks. When I showed it in Paris, I had many critics. They said that I was old-fashioned, that I was no longer of the age. Always I was smiling inside my head, and I thought, I will show them. She devotes her energies to barely noticeable refinements of detail of her suits and dresses. ---- 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
#198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty)
Aug 18, 20211h 15mWhat I learned from reading The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets by Niall Ferguson. ---- 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. ---- A business can only be managed well if one pays as much attention to the smaller business transactions as one does to the larger ones.All banks have histories, only the Rothschilds have a mythology. Ever since the second decade of the nineteenth century, there has been speculation about the origins and extent of the family's wealth; about the social implications of their meteoric upward mobility; about their political influence, not only in the five countries where there were Rothschild houses but throughout the world.Unlike modern multinationals, however, this was always a family firm.Perhaps the most important point to grasp about this multinational partnership is that, for most of the century between 1815 and 1914, it was easily the biggest bank in the world. In terms of their combined capital, the Rothschilds were in a league of their own. The twentieth century no equivalent.What exactly was the business the Rothschilds did? To answer these questions properly it is necessary to understand something of nineteenth-century public finance; for it was by lending to governments or by speculating in existing government bonds-that the Rothschilds made a very large part of their colossal fortune.It was war and the preparation for war which generally precipitated the biggest increases in expenditure.It was in this highly volatile context that the Rothschilds made the decisive leap from running two modest firms—a small merchant bank in Frankfurt and a cloth exporters in Manchester—to running a multinational financial partnership.The system they developed enabled British investors (and other rich "capitalists” in Western Europe) to invest in the debts of those states by purchasing internationally tradeable, fixed-interest bearer bonds. The significance of this system for nineteenthcentury history cannot be over-emphasised. For this growing international bond market brought together Europe's true “capitalists": that elite of people wealthy enough to be able to tie up money in such assets, and shrewd enough to appreciate the advantages of such assets as compared with traditional forms of holding wealth (land, venal office and so on). Bonds were liquid.The Rothschilds spent so much time, energy and money maintaining the best possible relations with the leading political figures of the day.They constantly strove to accelerate the speed with which information could be relayed from their agents to them. They relied on their own system of couriers and relished their ability to obtain political news ahead of the European diplomatic services.The primary concern of this book is therefore to explain the origins and development of one of the biggest and most unusual businesses in the history of modern capitalism.The history of the firm is inseparable from the history of the family.Inevitably, there were conflicts between the collective ambitions of the family, so compellingly spelt out by Mayer Amschel before he died, and the wishes of the individuals who happened to be born Rothschilds, few of whom shared the founder's relentless appetite for work and profits.There are few major political figures in nineteenth-century history who do not feature in the index of this book."I see in Rothschild," he went on, "one of the greatest revolutionaries who have founded modern democracy": Rothschild destroyed the predominance of land, by raising the system of state bonds to supreme power, thereby mobilizing property and income and at the same time endowing money with the previous privileges of the land. He thereby created a new aristocracy.All the copies of the outgoing letters from the London partners were destroyed at the orders of senior partners.Nathan was a fiercely ambitious and competitive man.The merchants who are well organised are the ones who get very rich, and the ones who are disorganised are the ones who go broke.In a market crowded with numerous small businesses, subject to rapid fluctuations in prices and interest rates and almost completely unregulated, it took a combination of burning aggression and cool calculation to survive and thrive. Nathan Rothschild possessed both in abundance.Nathan felt himself almost at war with his business rivals.Nowadays everybody calls himself 'Excellency.' I remember, however, what our father used to say, With money you become an Excellency.Father used to say, If you can't make yourself loved, make yourself feared.We owe not only our wealth but also our honourable position in society primarily to the spirit of unity and cooperation that binds together all our partners, bank houses and establishments.Playing hide and seek with the authorities was becoming second nature to the brothers. Indeed, even their sons were already being taught to attach importance to secrecy.Nathan had only one concern: business.Nathan gloried in his ascetic: After dinner I usually have nothing to do. I do not read books, I do not play cards, I do not go to the theatre, my only pleasure is my business.Our old established practice of buying some gold whenever we can find any.Contemporaries found Nathan Rothschild an intimidating man: coarse to the point of downright rudeness in manner.Such bruising encounters in the office were later distilled into the famous "two chairs" joke, probably the most frequently reprinted Rothschild joke: An eminent visitor is shown into Rothschild's office; without looking up from his desk, Rothschild casually invites him to "take a chair." "Do you realise whom you are addressing?" exclaims the affronted dignitary. Rothschild still does not look up: "So take two chairs.”To give mind, and soul, and heart, and body, and everything to business; that is the way to be happy. I required a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune; and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it.Stick to one business, young man. Stick to your brewery and you may be the great brewer of London. Be a brewer, and a banker, and a merchant, and a manufacturer, and you will soon be bankrupt.When a guest at the same dinner expressed the hope "that your children are not too fond of money and business, to the exclusion of more important things. I am sure you would not wish that," Nathan retorted bluntly: "I am sure I should wish that."This man is really a complete original.He and his brothers recognised that there might be a conflict between higher education and a successful business apprenticeship.I advise you not to let him study more than another two years so that he should enter the business when 17 years old. Otherwise he would not be deeply attached to business.No one could conceive that the man who, since the death of his father in 1812, had been the unquestioned leader of the house of Rothschild, might die at the very height of his powers.All that mattered was that they should hold together in unity. ---- 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
#197 Founder of the Rothschild Family Dynasty
Aug 11, 20211h 17mWhat I learned from reading Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild by Amos Elon. ---- 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. ---- Riches cover a multitude of woes.Only a few crumbling bricks are left today of the dark, foul-smelling alley in Frankfurt where, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a disenfranchised Jew named Meyer Rothschild founded a European banking dynasty.Rothschild was a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy and ingenuity.He raised five famously gifted sons, veritable money-making machines, to carry on his work after him. Their names overshadowed his own and became synonymous with colossal wealth, extravagant living and hidden political power.A century after his death they would still ask, in all seriousness, if a great war was still possible in Europe if the House of Rothschild set their face against it.Rothschild's origins were certainly modest. There was little reason to foresee his destiny. The personal circumstances of his life were difficult throughout. They suggest a saga not only political and financial but also human and dramatic – more dramatic, perhaps, than that of his flamboyant sons. The sons were not persecuted human beings, legally confined to the squalor of a congested ghetto.The old ghetto where Rothschild lived his entire life was a narrow lane, more slum-like and overcrowded than any other tenements in Frankfurt. A closed compound, it was shut off from the rest of the city by high walls and three heavy gates. The gates were guarded by soldiers and were locked at night, and all day on Sundays. In it lived the largest Jewish community in Germany in conditions of almost total isolation, and apartheid.How they managed to survive under these circumstances and at times even to prosper was a mark of human enterprise and ingenuity.Every petty principality minted its own currency. The only coins from outside the city that were accepted as payment were those which had the same silver content as the Frankfurt gulden. All others had to be exchanged before a purchase could be made. Constant variations in the exchange rates offered knowledgeable moneychangers ample opportunity to profit.The spirit of the place was workaday and businesslike. A city ruled "by the God of this world – Money".At home, from an early age, he was apprenticed in the family business. Everybody in the family, boys and girs, were expected to help.As a thirteen-year-old orphan, with a few coins in his pocket, the future tycoon launched out alone into the world.Besides learning the rudiments of the financial business, Rothschild broadened his knowledge of rare and antique Jews were disencoins and historic medals. Coins had fascinated him since early childhood.He was acquiring a certain amount of historical knowledge without which he might not have been able to find his way. Coins and medals attracted collectors who often bought them as an investment. By the time he was eighteen, he had become something of an expert. He read every other book or paper he could find on the subject.Selling a few old coins could not possibly make him rich., But it was a means to establish contacts with persons of wealth, power and importance. Such a person was the young Crown-Prince Wilhelm, who would play a decisive role in Rothschild's future career. Wilhelm was the presumptive heir to his father's vast fortune. His pedigree was one of the finest in Europe.Rothschild threw himself into his business with determination and zest.He ran something like a mail-order business. In 1771 he published the first of several printed coin catalogues which he sent out during the next twenty years at regular intervals to potential customers all over Germany.He brought to his work a certain natural flair, a knowledge of human nature and a capacity to generate trust.As a rule, he preferred to minimize profits in the hope of increasing turnover and consequently his prices were often lower that those of other dealers. He was ready to lower them even more, at times even at a small loss, in the hope of more profitable business in the future.Thrifty Guttle Rothschild spent only a fraction of this annual income on her household; a large part was pumped back into the business.There was little, if any, visible wealth. The family's modest lifestyle did not reflect the true extent of Rothschild's accumulated riches, which he continued to channel back into the business. Rothschild had an inborn compulsion to hide his wealth.Long after his death one of his sons quoted him as saying: "Something three people know about is no more a secret".He shunned all conspicuous displays of wealth.He practised his old policy of maximizing volume by minimizing profits. His competitors, who for decades had handled the affairs of the landgraves of Hesse, were gradually squeezed out. By 1807 Rothschild enjoyed a near monopoly.No one in the family was idle.Yet as a critical and strict father, he also anguished over Nathan's casualness and disorganized work habits. A lack of order would make a beggar out of a millionaire.While other bankers mostly awaited orders to reach them, Rothschild went out to solicit them.It paid homage to their father's "proven industry, good business sense and experience, who through his tireless activity from youth to advanced age, was the sole cause for the present flourishing state of the business and the worldly happiness of his children".They reflected an overriding desire to perpetuate unity among the brothers, prevent the dispersion of capital and retain, as far as possible, the compact, disciplined, well co-ordinated character of the family firm.His astonishing concentration on business continued as before.His main concern in his last hours was to secure the continued happiness and prosperity of his sons. He knew that riches came and went. He had seen in his lifetime fortunes dissipate through waste, vanity or infighting among heirs. Fortunes, he warned Amschel: do not keep longer than two generations.For two reasons: one, because house-keeping and other expenses are not considered; two, because of stupidity.He urged his "dear children to relate to one another with mutual love and friendship". He knew his sons were strong-willed, difficult, impulsive men. He was afraid of their tempers. On his deathbed he urged them once more to remain united at all cost. It had become an obsession with him. He said on his deathbed: Amschel, keep your brothers together and you will become the richest men in Germany. ---- 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
#196 Winston Churchill (Leadership during WW2)
Aug 7, 20211h 19mWhat I learned from reading The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson. ---- 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 wondered how on earth anyone could have endured it: fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing, followed by an intensifying series of nighttime raids over the next six months. In particular I thought about Winston Churchill: How did he withstand it? It is one to say "Carry on," quite another to do it.History is a lively abode, full of surprises.The only effective defense lay in offense.The king harbored a general distrust of Churchill's independence.He had lived his entire life for this moment. That it had come at such a dark time did not matter. If anything, it made his appointment all the more exquisite.At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.Churchill brought a naked confidence that under his leadership Britain would win the war, even though any objective appraisal would have said he did not have a chance. Churchill knew that his challenge now was to make everyone else believe it too.He considered Churchill to be inclined toward dynamic action in every direction at once."If I had to spend my whole life with a man," she wrote, "I'd choose Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.”Churchill was flamboyant, electric, and wholly unpredictable.Churchill issued directives in brief memoranda.No detail was too small to draw his attention.Churchill was particularly insistent that ministers compose memoranda with brevity and limit their length to one page or less. "It is slothful not to compress your thoughts," he said.Anything that was not of immediate importance and a concern to him was of no value.Churchill wanted Germans to "bleed and burn."I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.In the Churchill household defeatist talk inspired only rage."It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour," Churchill said. "It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.”Churchill said, "We shall not hesitate to take every step-even the most drastic-to call forth from our people the last ounce and inch of effort of which they are capable.”Recognizing that confidence and fearlessness were attitudes that could be adopted and taught by example, Churchill issued a directive to all ministers to put on a strong, positive front. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.Churchill demonstrated a striking trait: his knack for making people feel loftier, stronger, and, above all, more courageous. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.He had been fond of quoting a French maxim: "One leads by calm."“Your idle & lazy life is very offensive to me," Churchill wrote. "You appear to be leading a perfectly useless existence." So confident was Hitler that England would negotiate, he demobilized 25 percent of his army. But Churchill was not behaving like a sane man.Churchill’s message was clear. “We shall not stop fighting until freedom, for ourselves and others, is secure.”Nothing must now be said which would disturb morale or lead people to think that we should not fight it out here."It typified the uniquely unpredictable magic that was Churchill—his ability to transform the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain stepping stone to ultimate victory.There was still no sign that Churchill was beginning to waver.When raids occurred, he dispatched his staff to the shelter below but did not himself follow, returning instead to his desk to continue working.Churchill did many things well, but waiting was not one of them.Churchill’s resilience continued to perplex German leaders. "When will that creature Churchill finally surrender?" Brush aside despondency and alarm and push on irresistibly towards the final goal.Goebbels confessed in his diary to feeling a new respect for Churchill. "This man is a strange mixture of heroism and cunning. If he had come to power in 1933, we would not be where we are today. And I believe that he will give us a few more problems yet. He is not to be taken as lightly as we usually take him.To be stupid about one's life is a crime.She told Churchill that the best thing he had done was to give people courage. He did not agree. "I never gave them courage," he said. "I was able to focus theirs.” ---- 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
#195 Sid Meier (Computer game designer)
Jul 31, 20211h 14mWhat I learned from reading Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games by Sid Meier. ---- 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. ---- Sometimes it takes a misstep to figure out where you should be headed.Each game taught me something, each game was both painful and gratifying in its own way, and each game contributed to what came after it.We are surrounded by decisions, and therefore games, in everything we do. If my gravestone reads "Sid Meier, creator of Civilization" and nothing else, I'll be fine with that. It's a good game to be known for, and I'm proud of the positive impact it's had on so many players' lives.There was no such thing as a retail computer game, only free bits of code passed between hobbyists, so it would have been difficult for me to harbor secret dreams of becoming a professional computer game designer."I could design a better game in two weeks." “Then do it," he insisted, "If you can do it, I can sell it."At the time it felt like a fun project, but not any sort of life-changing decision. The big moments rarely do, I think, and the danger of retroactive mythologizing is that it makes people want to hold out for something dramatic, rather than throwing themselves into every opportunity. —As soon as the articles were published, Bill began placing calls to hobby stores that were farther than driving distance away."Hello, I'm looking to buy a copy of Hellcat Ace."Hmm, I don't think we carry that one""What?" he would fume. "What kind of computer store are you? Didn't you see the review in Antic?" Then he would hang up in a huff, muttering about taking his business elsewhere.A week later he would call again, pretending to be somebody else. And a third time a week after that. Finally, on the fourth week, he'd use his professional voice. "Good afternoon, I'm a representative from MicroProse Software, and I'd like to show you our latest game, Hellcat Ace." Spurred by the imaginary demand, they would invite him in. —My appetite for making games was growing stronger. I never forgot that moment. My mother had become emotionally invested in this little game, so profoundly that she'd had to abandon it entirely.Games could make you feel. If great literature could wield its power through nothing but black squiggles on a page, how much more could be done with movement, sound, and color? The potential for emotional interaction through this medium struck me as both fascinating and enticing.Were there people who got paid for making games? Could I be one of those people? I knew by now that I was a person who would make games, probably for the rest of my life, but it had never occurred to me that it could be a source of income. If that were true, then being a game designer seemed like the ideal job.I was cautious about giving up my steady paycheck, and still not convinced that this dream was going to last.Quality content was the driving force behind it all.All that mattered to me was that I got to make games for a living.I don't think any of us could have imagined back then the kind of cultural domination that gaming would someday achieve.Robin Williams pointed out that all the other entertainment industries promoted their stars by name, so why should gaming be any different?A pirate's career would last about forty years between childhood and old age, and his goal was to accomplish as much as he could in that window-to have an adventurous life with no regrets.Life is not a steady progression of objectively increasing value, and when you fail, you don't just reload the mission again. You knock the wet sand off your breeches and return to the high seas for new adventures. And if you happen to get marooned on a deserted island a few times, well, that makes for a good tavern story, too.I'd always had a distaste for business deals in general, simply because it's not the kind of thing I want to spend my day doing, but I was starting to realize that there was potential danger in them as well.People play games to feel good about themselves.Age and experience may bring wisdom, but sometimes it's useful to be a young person who hasn't learned how to doubt himself yet.Sid Meier makes a pathetic Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he makes a magnificent Sid Meier.Deciding what doesn't go into the game is sometimes more important than deciding what does.Conventional wisdom said a strategy title would never make the big money. (Sid sold 51 million copies)They were interacting with the game as a tool, rather than an experience.Good games don't get made by committee.What I didn't see at the time is that imagination never diminishes reality; it only heightens it.The dichotomy between someone else's talent and your own is a cause for celebration, because the further apart you are, the more you can offer each other.This is not to say that my version of Civilization had no outside influences—far from it. Aside from the general "creating not destroying" concept I had first encountered in SimCity, there were two games that I very much respected, and blatantly took ideas from to use for my own purposes.The ideas didn't start with us, and they can't end with us either.Whatever it is you want to be good at, you have to make sure you continue to read, and learn, and seek joy elsewhere, because you never know where inspiration will strike.A full 70 percent of Candy Crush Saga users have never paid a dime for the game yet it still brings in several million dollars a day.So many of our wildest dreams have turned out to be laughably conservative that it's hard to write off anything as impossible. ---- 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
#194 Ernest Hemingway (Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy)
Jul 27, 20211h 18mWhat I learned from reading Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961 by Nicholas Reynolds. ---- 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
