Founders

#205 James Dyson (Invention: A Life)

What 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)

What 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)

What 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

What 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)

What 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)

What 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

What 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)

What 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

What 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)

What 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)

What 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)

What 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

#193 Arnold Schwarzenegger (Arnold's first autobiography)

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

#192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS)

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

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

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

#190 Henry Ford and Thomas Edison

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

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

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

#188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes)

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

#187 Albert Einstein

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

#186 Phil Knight (Nike)

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

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

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

#184 Isadore Sharp (Four Seasons)

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

#183 Johnny Carson

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

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

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

#181 Paul Orfalea (Kinkos)

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

#180 Jeff Bezos (Invention of a Global Empire)

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

Jeff Bezos (Insights, Stories, and Secrets)

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

#179 Jeff Bezos

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

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

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

#177 Robert Campeau (Junk Bonds and Retail Bankruptcy)

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