Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast)

Speaker 1 I found this guy tweeted something a couple days ago whenever it was hilarious. He goes, Most people's alarm clock is David Goggins telling them to wake up and get after it.

Speaker 1 My alarm clock is David Sundra yelling at me, telling me to be like Edwin Lamb.

Speaker 1 I was like, all right, repetition works. Who got the truth?

Speaker 1 Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now?

Speaker 1 Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight. Another story on the way.

Speaker 2 We got the truth. Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
I'm Ben Gilbert.

Speaker 1 I'm David Rosenthal.

Speaker 2 And we are your hosts. Today's episode is our next installment of Acquired Sessions, a video format on YouTube that we started playing with last year.

Speaker 2 Our guest today is David Senra of the Founders podcast. David is quite possibly the only person we know who is more obsessed than us with business history and the lessons that great founders teach us.

Speaker 2 David, David Senra, that is, has read hundreds of founder biographies and done deep episodes on them all.

Speaker 1 I don't know that I'm at hundreds yet is me, David, but I'm definitely in dozens.

Speaker 1 I aspire to be at hundreds, but David Senra is just one of our closest podcaster friends and friends, period, out there. His show is awesome.

Speaker 1 Here on this episode, we had him out to my living room here in San Francisco, and we had just an awesome, really fun, multi-multi-hour conversation, just like the ones that he and I have scheduled every month on Zoom when the mics are off.

Speaker 1 And it was super organic, super unstructured.

Speaker 1 We covered a ton of ground, including that I think two nights before we recorded, David was just coming up from LA where he had dinner with Charlie Munger.

Speaker 1 And so we spent a lot of time talking about that, Charlie's influence on David, his and Warren's influence on all three of us, a bunch of thoughts on advice generally.

Speaker 1 And as you can imagine, David just sprinkled dozens and dozens of historical examples and founder stories throughout the episode.

Speaker 2 It is crazy. Every time someone's making a point, he'll dive in.
This is just like that thing Edwin Land said that one time.

Speaker 1 Or David Ogilvy or Coco Chanel or who have you.

Speaker 2 David is definitely close with the eminent dead. I will say, after editing this episode, I had one enormous takeaway.
David Senra is really, really into podcasting.

Speaker 2 So get fired up to meet him on his level. All right, quick things.
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Speaker 2 There is voting going on right now for our next episode, which LPs all have input on. And for every new LP that joins, we will shoot you an email to your inbox.

Speaker 2 Voting closes about a week after this comes out, and we are straight up picking whatever you tell us the next episode should be with really no editorial from us so help us direct the next episode join the slack it is one of the only places on the internet with this super high level of incredibly thoughtful discussion by well-connected kind folks with a deep appreciation for history people meet co-founders they find jobs and they get nuanced takes on the news of the day in there so join at acquired.fm slash slack lastly this show is not investment advice david and i may have investments in the companies we discuss and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.

Speaker 2 Now, on to acquired sessions.

Speaker 2 So, David, do you want to tell us who you had dinner with the other night?

Speaker 1 I had a three-hour dinner with Charlie Munger.

Speaker 2 That is awesome.

Speaker 1 Where I could ask him any questions that you want. Well, first of all, I guess we should back up.
It's like, there's a reason that he's so admired, right, by so many people. But for

Speaker 1 me particularly, You get to meet a lot of really interesting people because of the work that we do, right?

Speaker 1 And so that's like a blessing and something that I know we've had conversations in the past that we deeply appreciate. But Charlie's a different level for me.

Speaker 1 Like I literally think of him like the wise grandfather I never had.

Speaker 1 You know, I've met all kinds of people. I don't really get like nervous or starstruck.
I was legitimately like shaking the day before. I was like, I cannot believe.

Speaker 1 I didn't want to tell that many people because like, this is just, there's no way this is going to happen. Like, I just, I won't believe it till it actually happens.

Speaker 1 We do very similar work, right?

Speaker 1 Where it's like, how many people have spent six, seven years, tens of thousands of hours reading hundreds of books about the history of entrepreneurship and investing and then not only reading it, taking notes on it, making a podcast.

Speaker 1 Charlie and Martin. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so what the reason I bring that up is because you think about all the different companies and founders you guys have studied, all the different companies and founders that I've studied, right?

Speaker 1 And like even amongst the rarest group of people, Charlie still stands out. And the crazy thing is, he's 99, right?

Speaker 1 And so I get there and we start off in his library, which is like the best place for me that you could possibly see. And set the stage more.
How big is the library?

Speaker 1 Like how many books are we talking about?

Speaker 1 So his, his, one of his family members was there too. And she's like, oh, this is like nothing.

Speaker 1 This is like the front room. Wait till you see the back.
Yeah, so it's like, it's similar to like the room we're in, like, you know, very similar size and, you know, floor to ceiling shelves.

Speaker 1 And so I'm with a small group of friends. In fact, mutual friends for ours.

Speaker 1 So the people that set this up for us, or for me, was Andrew Wilkinson and Chris from the founders of Tiny, who are mutual friends. And

Speaker 1 so we're sitting there. And there's actually a funny thing where it starts out and they know both Warren and Charlie.
They've talked to me before. So they go right into it.

Speaker 1 And then like, I'm sitting there and I had this whole list of probably like 25 questions. I was going to ask if you like prepared in advance.
I know you did.

Speaker 1 I never got the chance to open my phone because I was just sitting there. I was like, I'm looking at him.
And he's, you know, very close, like, you know, maybe a little bit further from me to reflect.

Speaker 2 It's more disrespectful to like take up my phone.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that too. And I had, you know, read every single book on Charlie.
I watched all of his videos. Like I have studied this guy forever.

Speaker 1 And so every time he had said, hey, read this book, I go and read the book. And then I see a bunch of the books that he has recommended behind him.
So people are like, oh, was he as like you expected?

Speaker 1 Like they say, hey, be careful, don't meet your heroes, right? It's like he was unbelievably gracious. You know, unbelievably, like.

Speaker 1 I was like, hey, Charlie, you mind if I take a look at your bookshelf? Right. He's just like, do whatever you want.
Just unbelievably polite. Still like biting intellect, ferocious intelligence.

Speaker 1 At 99. At 99.
So we were talking earlier

Speaker 1 downstairs where the scary thing about Charlie is

Speaker 1 I remember asking him a question about Henry Kaiser, this guy that was super famous when Charlie was younger. He built like 100 companies, built the Hoover Dam.

Speaker 1 Like he was as famous in his time as like Elon Musk is today, right? But no one knows who he is.

Speaker 1 And I was asking questions about Charlie in the book and his recall is just insane. So the point where I ask him, I go, how do you know all this, Charlotte? He goes, I knew his partner.

Speaker 1 And then he starts telling stories about being knowing, like, having a relationship with Henry Kaiser's business partner. And then all these three hours of just unbelievable stories.

Speaker 1 And then I go, Charlie, like, how do you remember all this stuff? Like, do you write words? Like, do you take notes? Do you reread the books over and over again? He's like, nope.

Speaker 1 And all I can think of, I was like, imagine. Wow.
That guy's mind at 99 is still so sharp. I had brought a gift for him because he talks about like Rockefeller all the time.

Speaker 1 I bought him this special edition

Speaker 1 Centennial Edition version of Henry Flagler's biography. Oh, Flagler.

Speaker 1 So I live in Miami. The guy, Les Santaford, I think is the author of that book.

Speaker 1 He is good friends with, there's only like one local bookshop in Miami called Books of Books. And so Les is a local author who's good friends with the owner of that bookstore.

Speaker 1 So they did a, you can't get this book anywhere else. It's a special edition book.
Because Flagler moved to Florida later after the Standard Oil thing.

Speaker 1 He's got a fascinating story. We talked about that where he made unbelievably wealthy because of Standard Oil.
He's 50, 60, 70 years old when he's doing this.

Speaker 1 And he's just like, oh, what am I going to do now? I'll build an entire state. When he gets to Miami, Miami is little less than 500 people living in a swamp.
Because you can't live there.

Speaker 1 There was no AC at the time. And so then he builds the world's first railroad over

Speaker 1 connecting the Florida Keys. He just essentially, you read that book and you're like, oh, humans have no limits other than the ones we put on ourselves.
And so that's what Flaggler does.

Speaker 1 He stretches it. And he does some terrible things too, where it's like, yeah, wanted to find a way to divorce his wife.

Speaker 1 So he literally moves to another state because he couldn't be a divorce in New York, bribes

Speaker 1 the government of Florida. They create the Flaggler law, which allows him to get a divorce.
Then he does that like a few, like a few times. I think he's like in the 70s.
He marries like a 30-year-old.

Speaker 1 So it's not all good. But that guy's like, oh, your rules don't apply to me.
Like, I will build whatever I want. He built infrastructure, hotels, everything else.

Speaker 2 This is like one of my, the things that I keep learning from Founders Podcasts. And I'm curious if you do it intentionally or if you like try not to do it.

Speaker 2 But like every single time, I'm like, oh, people aren't perfect. Like, none of your heroes are perfect.
And do you find yourself like...

Speaker 2 Because we run into Unacquired a lot. We're like, it's not as fun to tell stories about terrible people.

Speaker 2 And so you don't want to show someone's negative side as much because it doesn't, like, it's just, it's.

Speaker 1 Well, we, we, like, we fall in love with them too, right? When we're doing that.

Speaker 2 that right and you're like wow they're the most extraordinary person on this one axis to ever live and we we should talk about how they're a flawed person in many ways but it's not fun to dwell on like you kind of want to like move through that and be like yep yep they were flawed here's the next amazing thing that they did like how do you handle that like you know how a normal biography is written right it's like way too much family history like i want to know some family history i don't want five generations back stop like i don't want to know the origination of their last name i don't need that i want to know like you're like the most qualified person in the world to critique a biography writing style at this point.

Speaker 1 So why we're reading it is like, everyone wants to know the climb, right?

Speaker 1 It's like, how did you, you guys, I just went through your entire to get part of the prep for Charlie is listening to all of your Berkshire episodes, right?

Speaker 1 Where you guys do a fantastic job on this because like the first two is like the young Charlie, the young Warren. So I would literally, and I've done this forever.

Speaker 1 It's like, I don't, when you think of Warren Buffett or Ben Franklin or George Washington or anybody that's super famous, when we see them, it's like, oh, who's the Ben Franklin on the $100 bill, right?

Speaker 1 Or who's the Washington on the dollar bill? Or who's Buffett at the meeting in Omaha? It's like, no, no, that's the guy that is enjoying the fruits of the person that actually built the empire.

Speaker 1 That's the answer. I go and stare at pictures like a freak at like of young Charlie Munger when he was like 38 or young Warren Buffett, right?

Speaker 1 They were like us.

Speaker 1 They were young people once.

Speaker 1 In our Berkshire series,

Speaker 1 did we end the first episode without even getting to Berkshire yet? I think we might have to do it. Yeah, it was the Buffett partnership.
It was just a partnership, yeah.

Speaker 1 You mentioned it on the Walmart episode where it's like, everybody says, oh, Sam Walton didn't start at Walmart Walmart until he's 44. Yeah, but he was doing 25 years of practice and learning.

Speaker 1 And he wasn't just sitting on his ass. Starting a bunch of stuff that looked an awful lot like Walmart.
Yes, learning from that.

Speaker 1 And so the which is totally like, I mean, aside, but we have no agenda here.

Speaker 1 That is like,

Speaker 1 I think both an advantage that like we have, all three of us, and like kind of a secret that we have, which is that like.

Speaker 1 We wanted, we did Walmart because we wanted to do Amazon. And so we were like, how do we do Amazon, right?

Speaker 2 We got to do Walmart first.

Speaker 1 People want this. Like, this is the right way to study things.
I think, I'm glad you brought that up because I think this is why people get a lot of value.

Speaker 1 And I don't want it to make us about, like, hey, this is an acquired founder show.

Speaker 1 The reason that some of the people in our audiences are the most successful people in the world, they're all reading biographies. They're all studying the history of business.

Speaker 1 I told you guys a few weeks ago, I was very lucky to have a two-hour one-on-one lunch with Sam Zell that I didn't think was possible.

Speaker 1 What I realized in that conversation is like, you don't make, you know, Sam Zell sold his company for almost $40 billion, right? $38 billion, whatever it was.

Speaker 1 It's like, you don't build a company, sell for $40 billion, and then learn all this. It's like he was doing this since he was up, since he was young.
We were talking in his autobiography.

Speaker 1 He talks about...

Speaker 1 I think my favorite episode of your podcast is the Kobe Bryant episode. Because like, this is what these guys are doing.
They're like Kobe Bryant. They're watching game tape.

Speaker 1 They're watching game tape. They're working on the fundamentals from the time they're 12.

Speaker 1 Through the time they die. They don't stop.
I think that's what listening to Acquired and Founders is, is you're watching game tape of of history's greatest entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1 Sam did this when he was younger.

Speaker 1 But this ties together where Bill Gurley had a fantastic quote about this, a tweet about this, when all that crypto was going crazy and like the run-up and people were getting rich.

Speaker 1 And he's like, one thing I don't like, and I'm paraphrasing because I wasn't expecting to talk about this. He's like, I don't like

Speaker 1 these

Speaker 1 younger people. denigrating the people that came before them.
And he's like, he made the point that

Speaker 1 none of history's greatest entrepreneurs and investors did that. They had the opposite perspective.
All of them had idols. You just made the point.

Speaker 1 You can't understand Jeff Bezos until you study Sam Walton. You can't understand Sam Walton until you understand JC Penny and Seoul Price.

Speaker 2 And even all the contemporaries, like the point that Walton always made was, I don't think my competitors are stupid.

Speaker 2 I want to go shop my competitors and get all of their very best insights and then bring them into my store. Yeah.
100%.

Speaker 1 They're learning machines. Yeah.
And so you get to Charlie's going, tying this well back to this, you get to Charlie's bookshelf and it's just biographies I've never even heard of.

Speaker 1 And I do this for a living.

Speaker 1 I do it for a living. I was like, what is this book? And then I started looking.
I was like, oh, I'm just taking picture after picture after picture. I was like, I'm ordering every single one.

Speaker 2 So we're talking about this idea that like the

Speaker 2 way to get truth is to weave together the tapestry of all of history's stories of things that are adjacent to understand like how this opportunity to start some business came to be.

Speaker 2 And you always have to like all history is revisionist and all history is biased.

Speaker 2 And so I think one of the hardest things about making an acquired episode is figuring out like when we're looking at a source, like someone giving an industry talk who works at a company, or like a biographer who chose to dedicate, you know, two years of their life to writing this book after working at Newsweek and covering the sector forever, is like trying to mentally account for and discount from whatever bias and perspective they're coming in with to create whatever the source material is that we're using to then incorporate into our version of here's how this thing happened, which is, that's like, I think it's the hardest part about what we do.

Speaker 2 And I'm curious if you ever think about that. that.

Speaker 1 I think about it all the time because people are like, oh, like survivorship bias or vision is history and everything else. It's like, here's the problem.
Like we humans don't see things as they are.

Speaker 1 We see them as we are. So like we could have this super long conversation between the three of us right now, then go in the other room and write down, you know, what just occurred.

Speaker 1 And every single version is going to be different because it's viewed through all of our experience, the way we think, the words we use.

Speaker 1 And so what I'm looking at is like when I'm reading about Sam Walton, right? It's just like,

Speaker 1 the story we both hit on in all the podcasts, because I've done a bunch of podcasts on Sam too, where it's like, the guy's pissed off.

Speaker 1 He's just like driving from store to store in these like mountain roads taking forever.

Speaker 1 So he buys the plane and he realizes like, oh, this is a massive advantage because I'm doing something my competitors aren't, right?

Speaker 1 I'm flying over and you guys mentioned it too, which I thought was hilarious.

Speaker 1 And then he just lands and he's like, who owns that? Let me land. And then he, you know, buys for action.
So he's like, we're going to negotiate right now. I want to buy it from you.

Speaker 1 And so my point is, it's like, okay, yes, that most likely occurred. But what is the idea behind that? It's due, you can have an advantage by doing something your competitors are not doing, right?

Speaker 1 And this ties together with what you just said, it's like they all learn from somebody else.

Speaker 1 When we're reading these books and listening to these podcasts, it's like, what's the idea I can use in my life? We're not building the next Walmart.

Speaker 1 There's no way if we read Titan that we can tell, did this actually happen? Right. I don't know, but I'm looking for the ideas behind it.

Speaker 1 Not, oh, I'm going to verify for every single word in this book. That's ridiculous.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the truth is always, it is always the case that

Speaker 2 a clean narrative is grafted onto a fact pattern.

Speaker 2 And it's like, okay, well, what I care about is the lessons I can can learn from the clean narrative, not does the fact pattern, if you had all the facts in totality, did it necessarily mean that it, you know, this was premeditated?

Speaker 2 It's like, eh, whether it was premeditated or not, you know, the facts are the facts and like maybe I can duplicate it in a different realm.

Speaker 1 For what we do, I mean,

Speaker 1 I think on Acquired more than you, but especially because you will do multiple episodes of different books on the same people. And multiple episodes on the same book.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and multiple episodes on the same book. Your format is a very important thing.
We're doing a narrative weave. So like, you know.

Speaker 2 We're shooting the moon a little bit more in this respect. Like

Speaker 2 your format lends itself to, so for anyone who's listening, like founders is more about, hey, I just read this book and I want to tell you what I learned from this book. And it's always a biography.

Speaker 2 And like sometimes you'll do five different biographies on Edwin Land. And like if Acquired was going to do Polaroid, we would do Polaroid.
The episode would be Polaroid one.

Speaker 2 Maybe it would be like Polaroid part one and part two, or like maybe at some point

Speaker 2 we'd have like someone on to like talk about the story, you know, in addition to our one canonical episode. But like

Speaker 2 we would be shooting the moon on like, let's make sure that we get the Polaroid story as right.

Speaker 2 It's almost like, how do we find the correct average of all of the other stories to create the canonical version?

Speaker 1 I wasn't expecting to quote Bill Gurley two times early so far, but

Speaker 1 he does. How does that even know this is going to be a good episode? That fantastic talk he gave, which to me is the best talk for entrepreneurs and investors on YouTube.

Speaker 1 It's called Running Down a Dream, How to Survive and Thrive in a Career You Love, right?

Speaker 1 And he says, this: Listen, in the age of the internet, he's like, You don't have to be the smartest person, right?

Speaker 1 Charlie Munger, after talking to him, I, whatever mind that dude has, I don't have that, and I'm cool with that.

Speaker 1 Like, I could not imagine trying to compete against that guy 40 years ago, like, he would destroy me, right? He's got a super mind that I don't have.

Speaker 1 But what Bill says is like, you made like, you don't have to be the smartest person, but you can collect more, the most information, and he's, and he holds you to a high standard in that talk.

Speaker 1 Bill's like, listen, in the age of the internet,

Speaker 1 all the information you possibly need, right, is right at your fingertips. You have no excuse not to do this.
And so he gives the example of if

Speaker 1 you want to be a domain expert in whatever you're doing, like within two years of intense study, if you're doing that and you're focused on it, it's like you're going to get to the point where like, you know more than maybe anybody else.

Speaker 1 And so that's my whole thing, which is when you talk to, you've never met a founder or an entrepreneur that's like kind of into entrepreneurship. It's like, no, it's our lives.

Speaker 1 So of course, the reason why so many of them listen to both of our shows, right? It's because they're building machines where they literally can can turn knowledge into profit, right?

Speaker 1 I've become close friends with the guy through the podcast. He's a young kid.

Speaker 1 I don't mean to call him a kid. He's not a kid, but he's a lot younger than I am.
And he's like 28 years old.

Speaker 1 And we were on the phone the other day because he had a very serious offer for a company he owns like 95% of. And

Speaker 1 they were going to give him $100 million, right? Winds up saying no to it. But the point of it is like, when you talk to him,

Speaker 1 you know, he's listened to all the episodes. He's read like 60 of the books.
He'll text me a picture of like, he won't even tell me what the book. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure I read that.

Speaker 1 Like, he's like, oh, yeah, it's from this episode. It's like, oh, why? What if he finds one idea in a book, one idea in a podcast, and it gives a 10% improvement on his company?

Speaker 1 That's a $10 million idea. Yeah.
Well, we were talking about this earlier. Like,

Speaker 1 this dinner that you have sounds like Charlie is just like a very curiosity-driven machine, but we know there's lots of folks that have regular dinners and have groups of people, often geographically dispersed.

Speaker 1 Why do they do it? Why is it worth their time, their money, their effort? It's that if they get one idea. The leverage that they can get on that is

Speaker 1 Charlie tells a story. He's like, Yeah, I made $400 million from reading Barons for 50 years.
And you're like, What the? What are you talking about, Charlie?

Speaker 2 How do you quantify that? Because he does.

Speaker 1 He goes, I read, this isn't something he said at dinner. I've heard him say publicly.
He's like, I read Barons

Speaker 1 all the time for 50 years. I found one idea that I can act on.
I made $50 million on that deal. And then I took that 50 million and I gave it to Lee Liu.
Is that the idea? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I gave that 50 million to Li Liu and Li Liu turned it into $400 million. That's how I made $400 million from reading Barons.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And listen, I'm not, and this is another thing where I feel like everybody's like, oh, this time is different. This is new.
It's like human nature has never changed. It will never change.

Speaker 1 This time is not different.

Speaker 1 You're just experiencing the difference is if you don't study the history of the people that came before you, you're just ignorant and making mistakes that people already saw in the past.

Speaker 1 Learning from history is a form of leverage.

Speaker 1 He has billions and billions, or not, yeah, billions and billions of years of collectives like human history. You know, this guy spent 70 years and there's thousands of them.

Speaker 1 And like Sam Walton's book, how many, how many people spent 50 years in one industry, in the retail industry? And he distilled it down. And then

Speaker 1 you could read it in a week, and then you could listen to Acquire's episodes. You can listen to David's episodes on Sam.
Okay, that's good.

Speaker 2 In addition to that. So the question is, then, do you have 90% of Sam's wisdom or do you have 0.1% of Sam's wisdom after there's no way you have 90%?

Speaker 1 right because like the time like the instincts I was just re-watching uh Peter Thiel's talk at uh why comment area where he says competitions for losers oh yeah and he goes one thing that we do in Silicon Valley

Speaker 1 one thing we do in Silicon Valley is we overrate overvalue growth rates and undervalue durability and he's like that doesn't make sense for a technology company because all your profits the vast majority of your profits are 20 years in the future and so if you're trying to optimize for growth And that over optimization can cause your company to go out of business, you're never going to collect that.

Speaker 1 You optimize for durability first, dummy. Like, that's to me my interpretation of what he's saying, right? Yeah, so you're going to get, you know, 1%, probably, maybe 5%.

Speaker 2 But that's still enormous leverage because you read it in five hours and he took 50 years to accumulate everything.

Speaker 1 And it's Sam Walton's wisdom. And it's what you do with the idea.
I know you've talked about this before, but what was the moment where you're like...

Speaker 1 I'm going to start this podcast. Like, it's crazy, right? What you do.
You talk to a microphone yourself every week. Yeah.

Speaker 1 My friend. Not that I think you're crazy.

Speaker 1 You are, but no, I definitely am nuts, for sure.

Speaker 1 And that's going to be like, we could talk about,

Speaker 1 did you guys read Jeff Bezos' last shareholder letter before he,

Speaker 1 the best lines he has is at the end. He's like, differentiation is survival.
And so they think about that, like how hard.

Speaker 1 Like they say, let's say somebody says, damn, I love what Ben and Dave are doing. I'm going to do the exact same thing.
They can jump in and try to do that, right?

Speaker 1 But you have six years of experience. You have 600 hours out there.

Speaker 2 You have to counter position against us or address a different audience. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Which, by the way, they definitely should every time i talk to somebody who wants to i i without i'm always like you absolutely should do this yeah and you will even if you never succeed in terms of any like numerical success or like you will succeed because you are learning like so being a nut job and completely crazy is I think makes you harder to compete with.

Speaker 1 And it's also, we're going to go all over the map here, but it's impossible not to be that.

Speaker 1 Like, think about how seeped you guys are in the same information that I am, where it always says, oh, you're the sum of the first of your five friends or whatever, right?

Speaker 1 Well, it's like, it's also like what you, you're the sum of your podcasts you listen to and the books you read.

Speaker 2 You have five friends, including your parasocial relationships.

Speaker 1 And so now what happens is like, you mentioned, dude, like you only read like one book about him, you'll go crazy.

Speaker 1 And so what happens is when I'm really interested in somebody, I will, I listen to Bill Gurley. Again, I just take advice when people are smarter than me.
Bill said, go collect everything you can.

Speaker 1 Okay. Good.
I'll do that. This is very, these are simple ideas.

Speaker 1 And so I'll find somebody that's interesting. I'll read everything about them.
And so with Charlie, I have like a little Charlie Munger on my shoulder.

Speaker 1 I have a little Steve Jobs, a little Edwin Land, a little David Olgovy, Estee Lauder, Coco Chanel, all these people that have been heroes of mine, James Dyson.

Speaker 1 And so now I'm presented with a situation. It's like, what would they do?

Speaker 1 And you'll have, if you read and spend, absorb everything that's out there about these people, like you'll have an idea of how they would respond.

Speaker 1 Did you guys ever read Ken Cosienda's book, Creative Selection? Uh-uh.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's shocking. Did you guys read that?

Speaker 2 He worked on the original human interface for the iPhone.

Speaker 1 So he made the keyboard for when it was still

Speaker 1 Purple or something. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Keyboard. He made Safari before the iPhone.
He has this excellent book that I've read like three times called Creative Selection. I think

Speaker 1 how Apple Design Products and the Golden Age of Steve Jobs might be the subtitle. But he talked about that where he demoed to Steve, right? And you're not going to describe it to him.

Speaker 1 You're going to demo and you're going to hand it to him. And so they iterate, you guys already know this, they iterate through a series of demos.
And it's based on Steve's taste.

Speaker 1 Like he is not, oh, let's talk about this. Like, nope, do this, do this, that.

Speaker 1 And so Ken has a great line in the book where he's like, demoing for Steve is like asking questions to the Oracle of Delphi, except the Oracle of Delphi would like respond with a riddle.

Speaker 1 And he's like, no, no, Steve was unbelievably like crystal clear. You understood him.
Out of every single person I've ever studied, Steve Jobs is by far the clearest thinker I have ever come across.

Speaker 1 Like he's just gifted at that. Charlie is like the Oracle and it's crystal clear.
You are not like, you are going to understand what he's, the idea he's trying to get into your brain for sure.

Speaker 1 But my point being is like all of the people that we study, they don't denigrate the past.

Speaker 1 Steve Jobs, the reason I'm so obsessed with Edwin Land,

Speaker 1 I read in a biography when Steve was like 20 in his 20s, Edwin Land is in like 70s, he goes and meets Edwin Land and he goes, visiting Edwin Land was like visiting a shrine. He's like, he is my hero.

Speaker 1 More people should try to be like that. And then you guys made the point in

Speaker 1 that, you know, Jeff Bezos took a lot of ideas from Sam.

Speaker 1 Who took a bunch of ideas from Sony too? Steve and Jeff. So you always find these people where you're like, oh, I thought this was a Steve Jobs idea.

Speaker 1 No. It's an Acchio Marita idea.
Yeah. Or an Edwin Land idea.
Or an Edwin Land idea.

Speaker 1 Like when you used to watch the presentations that Steve would give where he's like, oh, we're building at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. He put it up on the screen.
He really

Speaker 1 Edwin Land.

Speaker 1 Said that exact word. But that's the point.

Speaker 1 It's like you're never going to find anybody gets to the top of their profession without doing the work, like studying the people that came before them and learning from them and admiring them.

Speaker 2 This is a good like sort of personal pivot. And something I've never asked you in all the hours we've spent.
This is crazy. This is the first time we've met in person.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like we spent hours and hours and hours on Zoom.

Speaker 2 How did you like decide that this is what you were going to do with your time on this planet? And

Speaker 2 what led to this?

Speaker 1 Okay. So

Speaker 1 I,

Speaker 1 you know, our mutual friend Jeremy from Formula Live of Tiny, I just spent like a bunch of hours with him. He was in town.

Speaker 1 In one sentence, he like, he psychoanalyzed me better than anybody else ever has. He goes, you didn't have any mentors growing up.
So you like, you have, then you took it to like this extreme.

Speaker 1 And he said it more, much more eloquently than I am. But he's like, you didn't have any mentors.
So I view your career as like this psychopathic search for like mentors that can help you, you know?

Speaker 1 And so like to answer your question, it's like, I don't want to go into too much detail here, but

Speaker 1 like I've only had one habit my whole life and that was reading. I was reading for for as long as I can remember.
My mom passed away from breast cancer a couple years ago and

Speaker 1 she we didn't have like a lot of money like long story, but like I was the first person not only to graduate college, but like high school in my family.

Speaker 1 Like I came from a family that like unfortunately both sides of the family like no education, a lot of like just bad habits.

Speaker 1 So I identify with a lot of what Charlie Munger says because he essentially observes bad behavior and then tries to do the opposite, right? So I was just, let me give you an example.

Speaker 1 I was just up in Canada

Speaker 1 actually at an event Andrew Wilkinson was hosting for a bunch of entrepreneurs. Me, Shane Parrish from the Knowledge Project and

Speaker 1 Farnum Street was up there, Ben Wilson from How to Take Over the World, and we were doing this panel together. And Shane's the moderator, and we don't know what we're going to talk about beforehand.

Speaker 1 And so Shane asked the question, it's like, oh,

Speaker 1 what did you learn most from your upbringing or something like that, right? And I go, I learned not to do cocaine and to graduate high school. Like, so that kind of thing, right?

Speaker 1 And so there's just a bunch of anti-models. I thought about this as I was walking through the tenderloin this morning in San Francisco.

Speaker 1 And I I was like, I should do this walk with my daughter as the best. Like, hey, this is why you don't do drugs.

Speaker 1 Like, this is the perfect example. Like,

Speaker 1 you observe bad behavior and then you do the opposite. So long story short, I've always been obsessed with reading.

Speaker 1 Like, one of the best things my wife, my mom ever did was even if we didn't have money for books, she would take me to the bookstore and just sit there.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, bookstores are so cool because they just let you read.

Speaker 1 No one comes here and it's like, hey, you've been reading for an hour. Like, you got to get out of here, you know, and just read and read and read.

Speaker 1 So was there anybody who like introduced you to reading and books or you just like there was just something about it sounds like his mom yeah but no she's she wasn't a big reader the only thing she read was the bible um

Speaker 1 there was no books in the house when i was younger ever so my parents could you be like i can't answer take me to the bookstore i can't answer that all i can say is like my wife knows has known me for 15 years and her thing what she says is she like likes my family and gets along with them but she goes how did that come from that

Speaker 2 it sounds like you have a classic, like, you're the one who made it out story.

Speaker 1 Sam Hinkey, our mutual friend, actually gave me the way to think about this. And it's called The Founder of Your Family, right?

Speaker 1 And it's the person that, like, and I used to call them, and it was a terrible name, but generational inflection points, because you'd read this in the biography where you have like generation after generation of just not good things happening.

Speaker 1 And then one person just says, it stops now. That's what Rockefeller did.
Rockefeller.

Speaker 1 I always think of Sam Brompin, the guy that did Seagram's. Oh, yeah.
And he's in Canada growing up.

Speaker 1 Their parents had lost so much money. They think they were Jewish and they had to escape from persecution in Russia.
I can't remember where they came from, but they go and they have to start all over.

Speaker 1 And they're in Canada and

Speaker 1 there's no heating and they're freezing. And

Speaker 1 so he has this psychopathic drive to change, but that stays with you forever. So like once, you know, he builds this massive company and literally changes the trajectory of all of his descendants.

Speaker 1 And as his daughter's an adult, and she tells a story in the book where Sam is sitting there in like a mansion

Speaker 1 next to a fire, like shivering, thinking about how embarrassing it was to have to go to school with tired clothing. And so I was like, that guy's never going to go back to that.
And he never loses it.

Speaker 1 So I've just always been a reader. That's the only thing I've ever, like the only one unbroken habit I've always had.
And so I just had this idea where like I would obsess with podcasts forever.

Speaker 1 I was obsessed with audio before there was such a thing as a podcast.

Speaker 1 Like I would listen to talk radio when I was a kid. And at that time, you know, it's, it's not like, there's no on-demand anything.
You would listen, sports talk radio, politics talk radio.

Speaker 1 It's embarrassing. There was like this woman that used to be on at night and people would write in like advice for love, their love life.
And I'd listen to that.

Speaker 1 Just the idea of like, there's all this information.

Speaker 2 Oh man, I used to listen to Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. Do you ever listen to this?

Speaker 2 Like, it's when all the other radio programming sort of expires and then you enter the like one in the morning AM radio stuff.

Speaker 2 And it was like, you know aliens and like tons of paranormal stuff but it was like if you if you listen like you know the the Cavs game ends I'm from Cleveland and so like then you listen to like the sports post game and then it goes into like the politics hour and if you still can't fall asleep then you're into like aliens and it's like four hours of that stuff

Speaker 1 do you have a radio in your bedroom oh yeah

Speaker 2 I'd be able to I don't I imagine my parents probably came and turned it off but like would leave it on while I fell asleep every night and then remember like I remember so you have the jumpo from that and then the a.m.

Speaker 1 radio stations would then start streaming to

Speaker 1 your browser, internet. It still wasn't on demand.
So if you're not listening at three o'clock or 12, like you miss it. And then once I saw it.
Wasn't this what Mark Cuban's company was?

Speaker 1 His was like broadcasting audio for sports games, though, I think.

Speaker 2 I don't actually know. It's kind of funny.

Speaker 1 It's like an era. It's broadcast.com, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it was competitive with Real Player, which also wasn't on demand. That was just streamed radio.

Speaker 1 No, the first on-demand was the first time I saw this, I was like, this is insane.

Speaker 1 Like, especially for people that are like, you know, learning machines using Charlie's, where it's like, I can go to, even today, like the idea, you can go to any podcast player, type in whatever you want to learn about, and then you can hear somebody.

Speaker 1 It's usually spent hundreds of hours teaching you about this stuff.

Speaker 2 You can also find intellectual, high-quality content more easily now, because all content, because there were a limited number of channels and a limited number of time slots, everything had to be produced for the lowest common denominator.

Speaker 2 And now you can opt into your niche and find the highest quality content in that niche. Yep.
And like the only way to do that before was books. Like there wasn't an audio way to, there wasn't content.

Speaker 2 There wasn't niche audio content broadly available.

Speaker 1 And they weren't, because there aren't like several million authors out there, right? But there's several million podcasters. Right.

Speaker 1 But you made a good, you're, I think you were getting to a good point. It's like, because the business model didn't support that.
And so now there was no distribution.

Speaker 1 And now with podcasting, it's like you guys, you know, I'm sure I think like 50, I don't ever look at analytics, but I think last time I looked, it was like 50% of my audience was in the United States, but then everywhere.

Speaker 1 And so I was doing the early days of founders, I was just, I remember it all changed because I couldn't figure out the business model.

Speaker 1 So you would do like affiliate, you know, at that time, I remember when I first started. You went through a bunch of business models.
Yeah. So when I first started, they're like, hey,

Speaker 1 you contact like the few podcast advertising networks there were back then, you know, because you guys started your show in 2016, right? 15, 15. Okay, so I started in 2016.

Speaker 1 And you contact me like, yeah, we can do ads for your show.

Speaker 1 You know, you need like 25,000 downloads an episode. And at the time, I'm like, I'll never get there.
Like, obviously, we've skyrocketed past that, but like, that's impossible.

Speaker 1 That's like as many people as in a basketball arena.

Speaker 2 Oh, when you start visualizing the audience, it's like, oh, two and a half NFL stadiums show up for every acquired episode. Like, that's an insane.
Yes.

Speaker 1 But do you guys think? So do you guys think that's a good idea? I don't think about that.

Speaker 1 Only in

Speaker 1 adding to the pressure in a good way. Like, it's a good motivator.

Speaker 1 I never think about it. Really? You know what I think about it? How my show's set up is why I say you and I.
And I

Speaker 1 was like, I've never seen it.

Speaker 2 I like how you treat the audience as like the person you're.

Speaker 1 It's one person. So like once, and I've done this forever.
It's like I, it's funny.

Speaker 1 I remember it's one of my friends that we were met up one day and I was like, man, I think I'm going to try to make like a business around the fact that I read so much. And he's like,

Speaker 1 and he called me like a year, like six months ago, a year ago. He's like, I can't believe you did that.

Speaker 1 He's like, I thought you were, this is the dumbest thing I ever heard. But I just picture him when I started.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, the whole idea behind the show was like, what if you got to meet up once a week with your friend that reads a lot and he just tells you the stuff that he read that week?

Speaker 1 Like interesting ideas.

Speaker 1 And so I'm not sure if you're not going to even trust your friend to like try and convince him to do the podcast with you or somebody else or you're always like, no, I'm going to.

Speaker 1 So one thing, one thing, we don't have like a bunch of prepared stuff, but one thing us three talked about is like, hey, why don't we talk about like who was your influence on why you do what you do?

Speaker 1 And so I feel the greatest

Speaker 1 podcaster of all time is Dan Carlin from Harker History. That's like my, I think he's like, I can't believe what that guy does, right?

Speaker 2 You and him are like the only successful

Speaker 2 monologue podcasters. Like, I think it's the hardest thing to do in this medium.
And I can't, I mean, there's, everyone else either has a guest on or a co-host.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Um, well, there's another guy that was

Speaker 1 that, so I took Dan Carlin. I was like, I was obsessed with this.
I've listened to all his episodes. For like years, you talked about falling asleep.
I did that too, but I fell asleep to Dan Carlin.

Speaker 1 So over and over and over again. To now where I listen to him, I'm like, it's like, it's a Kavlovian.
Yeah, it's like, no, don't wake me up. This is not nighttime, bro.
Wake up.

Speaker 1 But there was another one that a friend of mine put me on. There's this comedian named Bill Burr.

Speaker 1 He does the Monday morning podcast. He used to do it every Monday.
Now he does, I think, Monday and Thursdays, right? He is one of the first podcasters.

Speaker 1 When he was podcasting, his first episodes, at the time, he would do it. He would call into a number and record, right?

Speaker 1 And then there was a service that would transform that recording from your phone into

Speaker 1 an MP3 that you could

Speaker 1 download and put on your iPod.

Speaker 1 Way before like anything.

Speaker 1 It's so wild how things have. I mean, you know, we're here now in this recording setup that we have here, you know, with thousands of dollars a gear.

Speaker 1 And like, we started, I remember when we first started, I don't think you'd let me do this, but I was like, well, why don't we just talk at the computer and like set up QuickTime?

Speaker 2 Dude, when I listen back to our first few episodes, like Pixar, and I'm like, it sounds like we were just talking at the computer.

Speaker 1 We basically were.

Speaker 1 That's when people are like, I have a lot of psychos that they're like, I start on number one, I go all I throw up. I was like, oh, like, please don't.
Please don't.

Speaker 1 If you're going to do, like, go in the opposite order. These are the things I wanted to talk about.

Speaker 1 I used to.

Speaker 2 Because that way, at least by the time you get to one, you like, you, you, you're a fan. But if you, if you start at one, you're like, oh, these guys just suck.

Speaker 1 But like,

Speaker 2 it's almost like

Speaker 2 there's great pleasure in hearing something that you think is excellent and fully baked. And like,

Speaker 2 especially when it's been long running, you're like, oh, this this has always been immaculate and perfect. And then you get to go see some of the early work and you're like, oh, it's

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 you want the early Charlie.

Speaker 2 I get the, I can see where the magic was, even though they didn't know yet. Like that's the same thing in the books that you're reading, though.

Speaker 1 Like Sam Walton, when you tell a story where his, his landlord screws him over and he goes, he goes, I'm not whipped.

Speaker 1 I found this store. I'll do it again.
Right.

Speaker 1 And it's like,

Speaker 1 yes, Walmart is a huge success.

Speaker 1 You guys made the point that there was a great point where it's like, you're never going to think 25 years in the future when there's watermelons and donkey crap on the ground, that this is going to be the richest family in the world, right?

Speaker 2 And the most standardized form of retail. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so you see like, oh, that same guy that became the richest person in the world, that his now family has a rich family or whatever. It's like, he's imperfect too, just like I am.

Speaker 1 And so that is the only benefit of listening to an early acquired or an early founder. It's like, oh, you see the improvement.
Just like in the books, you see the improvement. Well, it's fun too.

Speaker 1 Like, I like going back and listen to some of your old experiences. I get to see your journey, you know like

Speaker 1 I'm proud of you like right the uh but I've been thinking about that and I was thinking about ahead of our conversation here like

Speaker 1 I used to say all the time people like oh I go back I listen to their early episodes like no don't it's so embarrassing I actually think like we always want to be embarrassed by our last episode We've just constantly kept like raising the every episode like we try and just notch it up because we keep picturing the stadium and we're like that's that's the like that's why I think about the stadium because I think about the like the pressure of like we got to do better next time than we did this time.

Speaker 2 And it's not just filled with like, you know, Seattle's NFL fans.

Speaker 2 It's filled with like hundreds of thousands of the smartest people that, and this gets to like the psyche, like the deep insecurities that at least I have of like, I want to impress those people.

Speaker 2 I want those people to think I'm smart. And so I have to produce something.
unbelievably worthwhile of their time.

Speaker 2 And the minute that I don't, I'm like literally walking out in front of an NFL stadium full of people that I want to impress.

Speaker 2 And like, I didn't used to have that pressure, but like once we found content market fit for acquired with like people that I've always thought highly of,

Speaker 2 that is the time for now.

Speaker 1 There were a couple of years where we kind of drifted. There wasn't that pressure to keep amping the bar.
And then

Speaker 2 the 2017 era.

Speaker 1 I think you're never going to be embarrassed about your, your latest episode at the time we're making this is LVMH. You're never going to be embarrassed about that.
That was excellent. And like,

Speaker 1 it doesn't mean you can't keep improving 10 years from now. But no, like, I look back at that and I think like,

Speaker 1 yes, that's certainly an episode, I don't know how you feel, but that like I'm proud of, but I look back, like, I, at the time, like, so we didn't know that was going to be a super popular episode.

Speaker 2 Totally unpredictable. It's our, it's our, it's our, uh, because we haven't shared this publicly yet.
It's our, our number one episode by a huge margin.

Speaker 2 40,000 more people have listened to that episode than the next highest, which was amazon.com.

Speaker 2 I probably could have told you, actually, I was like, David, no one's going to listen to Amazon because everyone already knows this story, which was super wrong.

Speaker 2 But But I either thought like no one will listen to this one or like this will be in our most successful episode.

Speaker 2 With LVMH, even after we recorded it, I was like, or after we edited it, because we had to like edit a lot of stuff. But I was like,

Speaker 1 this is how much we didn't know. But it's not

Speaker 2 our best ever, but apparently.

Speaker 1 I think it might be my favorite episode of yours. And I heard from a ton of other people how much they liked it.
Like, it's thank you. It's funny.
But to the point of the conversation, like,

Speaker 1 there's a bunch of stuff that we could have done better in that episode, like a whole bunch.

Speaker 1 So I do this all the time where like I'll go back and listen to old episodes because people are like, this weird you listen to a podcast. It's like, no, this is a tool.
That's how you're better.

Speaker 1 This is a tool.

Speaker 1 No, we could even try to get better. It's like, I was like, oh, I haven't read that book in like two years.
I'll just listen to my episode on it. And it like services, it's a tool for me.

Speaker 1 That's how I know it's good for other people, right?

Speaker 1 And so it's like, and then I'll listen to it. I'm like, oh, wow, I forgot that.
I need to keep that idea in my mind.

Speaker 1 But I'll hear myself like, oh, you said that in two paragraphs. That could have been one paragraph, cut that part.
That doesn't make sense. And so, yeah, I understand the improvement.

Speaker 1 But what I'm saying is your quality is already super high. Like, it can increase and get better, don't get me wrong, but like, you're never going to be embarrassed.

Speaker 1 You're just like, oh, I could probably do it 20%, 30% better, which is still excellent from

Speaker 1 the level you're at.

Speaker 2 So, the way that we edit is our editor takes the first pass, and he's unbelievably good, and we're so lucky to have him. And then he sends us a rough cut.

Speaker 2 I upload it to Descript, and then we listen and read while we're listening, word for word, sentence for sentence, and try to cut every unnecessary sentence. And

Speaker 2 we end up pulling out 20-ish minutes of just fluff. It's just like, okay, we could have been tighter in that point.
Is there a way to get tighter in it without re-recording it?

Speaker 2 And I think that has dramatically contributed to episode quality because by the time we ship it, neither of us feel that there are extraneous sentences.

Speaker 2 Okay, listeners, now is a great time to introduce a new friend of the show who many of you will be familiar with, Claude.

Speaker 2 Claude is an AI assistant built by Anthropic, and it's quickly become an essential tool for us in creating, creating Acquired and the go-to AI for millions of people and businesses around the world.

Speaker 1 Yep. We're excited to be partnering with them because Claude represents exactly the kind of step change technology that we love covering here on Acquired.

Speaker 1 It's a powerful tool that fundamentally changes how people work. I know, Ben, you have used Claude for some Acquired work recently.

Speaker 2 Yes. So listeners, I used to take four plus hours the day before recording to take all the dates from my raw notes and put them in a table at the top of my script for recording day.

Speaker 2 On the Rolex episode, I actually fed my raw notes into Claude and asked it if it could do that for me, which was amazing.

Speaker 2 I just got my most important hundred dates for the episode done in like 20 seconds.

Speaker 1 You texted me this table. It was awesome.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that freed up an extra half day that I used instead to focus on explaining how a mechanical watch works, which I'm so glad I got to spend the time doing that instead of making the table.

Speaker 1 Totally. So cool.
I was actually just chatting with Claude to brainstorm ideas for something big that you and I are working on for later this summer, and it was insanely helpful.

Speaker 1 Listeners, stay tuned to hear all about that.

Speaker 2 Yes, so listeners, by using Claude as your personal or business AI assistant, you'll be in great company.

Speaker 2 Organizations like Salesforce, Figma, GitLab, Intercom, and Coinbase all use Claude and their products.

Speaker 2 So, whether you are brainstorming alone or you're building with a team of thousands, Claude is here to help.

Speaker 1 And if you, your company, or your portfolio companies want to use Claude, head on over to claude.com. That's C-L-A-U-D-E dot com or click the link in the show notes.

Speaker 1 So I don't know if I'm like that,

Speaker 1 like you're still a one-man show, right? Like I do everything, no one touches anything. So like everything.
Soup to nuts.

Speaker 1 I'm going to answer your question, but I also think like we should, this is a perfect point to like how we became friends and why.

Speaker 1 like I'm putting this out on my feed and no one, no one, you're going to be the first non-David Center of voices that I ever heard on founders and only would agree to do it.

Speaker 1 And I only agree to do it with you guys is because this goes back to why I want to be surrounded with, first of all, people that have like interest, super smart people, but also people that have positive sum thinking, right?

Speaker 1 Patrick O'Shaughnessy has this gigantic successful show, Invest Like the Best. He's got the Colossus Podcast Network.
His fund is called Positive Sum, and that's how he acts. I joined his network.

Speaker 1 This is like months later.

Speaker 1 And they're like, hey, like, like, you know, we have editors, whatever. Like, he has like this empire over there.

Speaker 1 And resources. he's like, what do you want? And I was like, I just want you to amplify my audience and then connect me with first rate advertisers.
Cause like, I think acquired is a luxury podcast.

Speaker 1 Maybe not luxury, premium. We got to go over the distinction there for LVMH.
But like, we're saying, no, no, this is like, we're trying to set the bar here.

Speaker 1 But anyways, he's like, hey, do you want editors? Do you want any of this stuff? I was like, no, I don't want, no one gets to touch my stuff. Like, people think, oh, like,

Speaker 1 do they tell you what books to read? And they're like, no, Patrick liked my show. And he's just like, why would I tell you? Like, just whatever you're doing, just do it to more people now.

Speaker 1 And so the answer to your question is, no, like, I pick the books, I record them, I edit. I'm still a one-person show.

Speaker 1 I don't know if that'll happen forever, but I do think the fact that it just spends so much time with the material gets it into my brain. But the reason that

Speaker 1 I want to talk about the role you guys played in that, where we were getting on Zoom, and for like the background here is like, you know, we had known of each other.

Speaker 1 I talked to Ben a long time ago because he was running this private podcast. This is like years ago.

Speaker 1 And so, anyways, we're like,

Speaker 1 it's also funny to think back, like, all the dead ends that we went to. Like, we went down a ton of them.
You went down a ton of them. You're about to talk about some of them.

Speaker 1 Like, there's so many dead ends. But they're in the books, too.
Yeah, but they're in the books.

Speaker 2 Normal change the name of the show to adapting.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. That was

Speaker 1 ugly. No one was ugly.
Tell the story.

Speaker 2 COVID happened, and we were like, no one wants to hear these stories of like extreme capitalism. Like, we're like the ex-games of capitalism.

Speaker 1 And, like, this is a moment where like

Speaker 2 everyone is hurting, zero business. And like, this is in that the stock market trough too, where you're just like, wow, like, you know, all businesses are going to go under.

Speaker 2 No one's ever going to have jobs again. This is, you know, this is scary.
And so we were like, well, like, what stories should we tell?

Speaker 2 How about businesses that are adapting to make it through this tough time? And to like. show how serious we were about it, we changed the name of the show.

Speaker 2 It was like our three least listened to episodes covering pretty amazing stories, but we just branded it wrong. Like Canlis is like the most interesting restaurant story you could ever hear about.

Speaker 1 We did Intel.

Speaker 2 That's the only time we've ever done Intel.

Speaker 1 That's the only time we've done it. But because it was adapting,

Speaker 2 it was stupid. It's so stupid.
But there's no way to do, like, learn

Speaker 1 rather than

Speaker 1 do you want to know the first name of founders? Ooh. You know, like in your RSS feed, you can change the name, right? But you can't change the link.
Like, it'll still say. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 So you look at it from mine and it's AutoTelec. The worst name.
Autotelek comes from this book called Flow.

Speaker 1 A-U-T-O-T-E-L-I-C, maybe I don't know I can't spell for I can't spell pronounce I have no grammar so people like you read so much how it was like I don't pay attention any of that stuff is that the mihai yes the guide

Speaker 1 yes it's it is an activity that you do for the sake of itself going back to your questions like why like I just love to read I'm gonna do this if no one listens like that's how I know I'm gonna win because it's like people like oh would you do it for free it's like I no no I paid to do this like a long time for a long time like I literally said I'm gonna quit and I'm gonna I have the savings I have a wife and a baby or a daughter to support now i have a son a wife a daughter and a son and i was like i bet you i i just put trust in myself it's just like i'm going to if i focus on this seven days a week i'll figure out the business model i know i like i don't think i'll ever get rich from it but i will at least pay my bills right and so like every month i'm like oh less money there and like so i paid to do it so the idea where like uh you know again people get i think steve jobs talks about this like the older he get he says something like the older he gets the more he realizes why people do things matters and so he's always asking those questions like i always say it's like how do you know uh that you found what you love to do and uh people are like oh because like i wouldn't sell my company it's like okay there's another level it's like how much would you have had to pay steve jobs to stop working at apple the answer is he wouldn't take all the money in the world how how would how much would you have to pay charlie money a lot of people tried to stop steve jobs from working at apple yeah but like think about that like the idea is like he's not doing it for money he's in a different game he's doing it for the sake of itself and so i went through a bunch of different names uh history's greatest men history's greatest like history all this these terrible names and i just started narrowing it more and more and more to like founders and i was like oh that's perfect there is a because you weren't even like you didn't you weren't coming from the tech world you weren't like there's a this wasn't content marketing

Speaker 1 no it was just like interesting uh the i the idea i had known about like Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and all these other people. And I remember you had Kevin Rose on your show a long time ago.

Speaker 1 So you guys remember his, he had, if he was.

Speaker 2 Yes, not that long ago, maybe a year, year and a half. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It just, time flies.

Speaker 2 Because it was post, it was, he was, he was during COVID. He, he was pretty much already fully Web3 by the time we.

Speaker 1 So do you guys remember Foundation? Yeah, of course. Oh, it's like one of the first high-quality

Speaker 1 inter, like, imagine if he would have stuck with that show. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it would have been a moral.

Speaker 2 And it's like the only episodes that ever came out was like, here's me interviewing Elon Musk. Here's me interviewing Sam Altman.
Here's me.

Speaker 2 And like these people, and also before they became like I was

Speaker 1 that's it Elon had the model that was the only thing he was just about to release the model s the roadster no no they were in the factory because I watched it I watch it all the time they were in the factory building the model s that's right so it was I don't know if you could buy it yet but it was like coming or whatever and Elon looks way younger and like you know and then in 2015 Tim Ferriss I was a big fan of his podcast.

Speaker 1 I'd read like, you know, four-hour work week. I remember the way it did.

Speaker 2 Dude, a four-hour body changed my life. Did it?

Speaker 1 Yeah. With the slow carb? Yep, slow carb diet.
I did that too.

Speaker 2 Slow carb diet, cold showers. Like, I did.
And the funniest thing is, like, this is like this whole cold plunge thing that's like becoming a thing now.

Speaker 2 I'm like, was nobody like reading Tim Ferriss in 2011?

Speaker 1 Like, that was a huge part of.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, it goes back only our demographic was.
Yeah. Actually, that made me think of something.
Let me interrupt this story because I think it's really important.

Speaker 1 You're like, oh, is anyone going to listen to our, like, no one's going to listen to our Amazon episode? They already know it.

Speaker 1 And so this is something that, like, and then it becomes the most successful.

Speaker 2 Are you going to quote Ogilvy?

Speaker 1 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 2 100%. to enough founders to know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because it's like, this is so key that people don't understand. It's like you're not advertising to standing army, you're advertising to moving parade.

Speaker 1 And so like, I will literally get on calls with like media company founders that are like selling ads or like building companies. I'm like, oh yeah, you must have read Ogilvy.
They're like, what?

Speaker 1 And I was like, these are not new lessons.

Speaker 1 And again, this comes from the humility to realize, hey, Warren Buffett's smarter than me.

Speaker 1 So if that dude in his shareholder letters is saying, David Ogilvy is a genius, I'm like, wait a minute, this dude, how many businesses has Warren Buffett looked at at that point?

Speaker 1 How many founders and managers has he looked to? And he's like, this dude's a genius. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is not rocket science, guys. Just go and like,

Speaker 1 search David Ogrevy and Amazon. Five books? Good.
Order them all. These days to search David Ogilvy and your podcast player of choice.

Speaker 2 Wait, but explain the standing army versus.

Speaker 1 So you're not advertising to standing army, you're advertising to moving parade. But what happens is like, even when you put on the Sequoia episode, right?

Speaker 1 We went, me and David went on a hike in Stanford and I was like, dude, you have this crazy back catalog. Every single day, you have more people following your podcast feed than you had the day before.

Speaker 1 I was like, and I, cause I knew this because I was a subscription podcast, right? Recount briefly your business model journey. So

Speaker 1 I'll give you a shorter breakdown because like I went through so many of them. I just put a hard paywall.
Listen to the first 30 minutes. You want to listen to all of them.

Speaker 1 Then you pay, right? And it converted to that. And this is when we had that chat that you were talking about.
We got to go back to that. We're like, dude, you're doing it right.

Speaker 1 You're doing it right now.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because there's been times like this one where we're like, what the hell are you doing?

Speaker 2 But there's been other times where you come to us and you're like, do you know how good your Sequoia episodes were?

Speaker 2 And like the fact that you have four times the audience that you have now and none of the 75% of those people have ever heard the Sequoia episode, what are you doing?

Speaker 1 And so you guys, we have this hike.

Speaker 1 This is an Olga idea. Remember, not my idea.
I don't get like.

Speaker 1 Everything has already been done, guys. Just pay.
And I'm speaking to the people listening, not you. You obviously know it's like, they've already been done.
Just go see, hey, that person's smart.

Speaker 1 He learned from a 40-year career. Like, you're not going to, the idea is not going to pick up on an idea you can use as silly.
So I told, I do think. David, though, I was thinking about this.

Speaker 1 There's some cases where it's not true, but I think most

Speaker 1 truly like iconic world-changing businesses and founders, they build, they stand on the shoulders of giants, but they have one or multiple things that is novel that they come up with.

Speaker 1 It's the combination of these ideas. Like Sam Walton taking Soul Price's ideas and his competitors' ideas and like, hey, what about you guys are kind of ignoring these like 4,000 person

Speaker 1 communities. I'm pretty sure like the thesis beyond Walmart is like, will they just drive far distances just to save money? Right.
The answer is yes. Right.
Five hours. Right.

Speaker 1 But that, that, like, that isn't a novel idea. Yeah, exactly.
It's a very, it's, that's the whole thing.

Speaker 2 So it's combining like one big novel idea with a bunch of other things that

Speaker 1 you guys combined David Ogre's idea by republishing your Seqora podcast. And then you text me, you're like, oh my God, like the downloads are crazy.

Speaker 1 And because the vast majority, because you're not podcasting to a standing army, you're podcasting to a moving parade.

Speaker 1 And so I had known this because through my experimentation, I would take an old episode that I had done,

Speaker 1 do a preview, throw it up, and you'd get conversions every time because it was new to them. And that was like, so Olga V, I credit Olgarvieve with that idea.

Speaker 1 That's an idea he got from Claude Hopkins and Albert Lasker, who were building advertising businesses 50 years before him.

Speaker 2 Is this scientific advertising?

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Also, a good founders episode. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's excellent.

Speaker 1 That book, Scientific Advertising, sold like eight or 10 million copies. They kept it in Albert Lasker.
So Claude Hopkins worked for Albert Lasker.

Speaker 1 Albert Lasker thought the book was so good, he stored it in a vault. He wouldn't let any.
He's like, he built.

Speaker 2 Because it was like the secrets of the industry, right? Like, don't publish this because we don't want this getting out.

Speaker 1 I learned that because in Ogavian Advertising at the very end of the book, David's like, here, these are the six giants that I wanted from. So I was like, okay, well, then I'm going to Google search.

Speaker 1 Who's it? Like, I'm going to read the book. This is not rocket science again.

Speaker 1 So then he's like, oh, Albert Lasker made more money than anybody in than anybody else in the history of the advertising business. I was like, hold up.
What?

Speaker 2 How? Also, none of us know this guy's name.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And so then you realize it's like, he says in the book, he's like, his estate outside of Chicago was so big, he had 40 full-time employees.
I'm like, what? Like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 Like, make these words make sense in my mind. That doesn't make any sense to me.
So you read Albert Lasker, and then he tells you about Claude Hopkins.

Speaker 1 He's like, yeah, the information was so good that like I stored that in my vault for 20 years.

Speaker 1 And then once he sold his advertising, I think he gave it away like a token, like $100,000, you know, to the people working there.

Speaker 1 And then they released it and Claude went off on his own and everything else. So these are not like...
Yeah. Okay.
So you were doing the 30-minute hard cutoff when we

Speaker 2 were so unsatisfying. It's like, I'm going to listen to 30 minutes of this episode and then like I just have to get, someone's asking me to pay for the reaction.

Speaker 1 I'm going to have to do conversion, right? The conversion rates were higher, but you guys said this is where...

Speaker 1 you're at a local maximum this is where like you were really helpful like david first of all you guys are nice this is not the language you use you're like you idiot like that's it's like but you guys are so nice so it's like dude you're doing it wrong listen for every one person i think it was ben that said this like for every one person that would buy a podcast there's a thousand or a hundred that would listen to him for free like just it's about a hundred yeah probably even more than that you know and so then you guys would show me like you open the kimono you're like this is these are our downloads this is who we advertise with this is what we charge for advertising you just like well the other really key insight is, so after spending a bunch of time with originally Kimberlight, then Glow, which got sold to Libsyn and still what powers the acquired LP program,

Speaker 2 an interesting learning is most podcasts should generate about 50% of their revenue from direct monetization, some kind of membership program or paywalling their feed,

Speaker 2 and about half from advertising. And it should, the math should sort of work out where that's going to be the case.

Speaker 2 For the type of podcast that we are, where you have lots of founders and CEOs and hedge fund managers and these sorts of people listening,

Speaker 2 you could never ask someone to pay you in membership what they are worth to the most valuable advertiser for that slot.

Speaker 2 And so the way it sort of works out is like you're massively hamstringing your monetization potential if you make it membership only because you'd have to be like,

Speaker 2 yes, please pay two to five thousand dollars a year in order to get access to this private thing versus if you were to take that same piece of content and open it up to advertisers.

Speaker 1 You made the good point earlier and we can elaborate on that, right? Why you're so psychotic about this sentence needs to get out of here, like these two sentences, let's remove it.

Speaker 1 Because if you could factor in the average hourly rate of the people in your audience, it is unbelievable.

Speaker 1 So even I think if you make what, a million dollars a year, and we know people obviously in our audiences make a lot more than that, but I think a million dollars a year is what, 500 bucks an hour or something like that.

Speaker 1 I don't know the math. I'm not a good math person.
But like, so you're asking if they listen to an hour-long podcast of founders.

Speaker 1 It's like, that's $500 like you cannot waste these people's time So I never answer your question when you're like hey, how do you guys think about this? Do you do re-edit or do you cut them out?

Speaker 1 I use the script as well I actually think the way I listen to founders is obviously listening to it and listening and reading like the superpower of podcasts is you can listen to it when you're doing something else, but when you're editing, but I think I'm gonna put all my ad all my podcasts up on YouTube.

Speaker 1 I don't have any video, but I think I'm gonna use the script.

Speaker 1 So like if you there is like some people have success just putting up the audio and editing like a static picture and you can listen to it on YouTube.

Speaker 1 But I also think it's like, well, if I'm going to do that, I might as well just have this and that's kind of cool if you want to use it, but don't have to.

Speaker 2 We did not find success doing that.

Speaker 2 Like this episode will be the first episode this year that's on YouTube because we basically said if there's not interesting video, then it's not a video podcast and you can go find it in a podcast player.

Speaker 1 I'm using it just for search and I would use Smart.

Speaker 1 I don't think I'm ever going to do video anything because it's just like, it's so much simpler to do. Literally, what I'm saying is like, I'm going to upload the MP3 to YouTube.

Speaker 1 Like I'm not making a video just because because it is, they're eventually gonna have, they're not stupid, they're eventually gonna have like the podcast player inside of YouTube.

Speaker 1 Like, I, did you, they released this like 40-page document I read on their podcast goals or YouTube. Did I send it to you guys? No, I'll send it to you guys.

Speaker 1 So, right now I have YouTube Premium, so you can listen to them in the background like a podcast player,

Speaker 1 but they need to have podcast functionality. It's still like a video.

Speaker 1 So, anyways,

Speaker 1 the way I do it is like, yes, I'm very aware that

Speaker 1 who's listening. I'm not ever going to waste a lot of their time.
And what I've found with the more practice I have for the podcast is I'm able to edit on the fly. Like I don't have a script, right?

Speaker 1 So like I'll go through the book, I highlight, then write down whatever pops to my mind. I don't like just,

Speaker 1 first of all, the highlights, like, am I excited about that? Oh, that's interesting. Highlight.
Just go off instinct, right?

Speaker 1 And then write down like something that, oh, that's like this, or that made me think of this. And I just write it down, right? Then I'll reread all these highlights the night before I record.

Speaker 1 So it's like the second time. You're doing this in physical books.
Physical books, yeah. But you're putting your notes into Read-Wise? That happens after.
Okay. That happens after.

Speaker 1 So the fifth time, every single book I do, I think I read the highlights five times. And the fifth time is me actually taking pictures of the physical book and putting in Read-Wise.

Speaker 1 So Jeff Bezos, I was thinking about this yesterday because I'm also slightly obsessed with Jeff Bezos.

Speaker 1 You're slightly obsessed with a lot of founders. That's why we were like, you're like, we're sitting in chairs.
Like, dude, I'm going to be forward. Yeah, we were setting up the camera angles before.

Speaker 1 Because you know what what I love?

Speaker 1 We got to move David's chair back here a little bit.

Speaker 1 Have you ever watched the old Jeff Bezos interviews when he's first starting Amazon? He's like skinny and bald. It's all

Speaker 2 the one that's like in that field outside the conference.

Speaker 1 Yes, I think this is the one he's like sitting. You see grasping on him.
I don't know if he's in a field.

Speaker 1 But he like leans forward. And he's like, we're going to be the most customer-obsessed company ever.
And he's got that look on his face. That's how I am about founders.
I'm like,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 you're like, that dude's a psycho. But Jeff says something that he is.

Speaker 1 But Jeff says something in Invent and Wander, which is an excellent book, because it's all of his shareholder letters and transcripts of his speeches. Walter Haskick said the dude did that, right?

Speaker 1 Yep. And all of his transcripts of his speeches.
And he goes, do you really want to

Speaker 1 live in a world or to compete against somebody that's as good as you? Like, I certainly wouldn't. That's what he states.

Speaker 1 And he's like, if you read his shareholder letters and listen to him talk, he's like, he's constantly looking for unfair advantages.

Speaker 1 And I think part of the fact that I have now over 20,000 highlights from hundreds of books, and I still have like 50 50 or 60 or maybe 80 books I haven't put in there yet that are in my library.

Speaker 1 So it's like, that's my ReadWise account is an unfair advantage because anytime somebody's talking, it's like, I can immediately go, oh, you said something. I search for that term and it pulls up.

Speaker 1 And it's like, oh, and then I see my highlight and I see my note. It takes so long.
Yeah. Like so long to do that, but it's worth the extra five or ten.

Speaker 1 And that's integrated into your process of making that. Yes, because I'm reading something, I remember, no, I know I've seen this before.
I can't remember it.

Speaker 1 Type in that term and it pulls up every single instant. Wow.
Instant subject. It breaks out unfair advantage that I have with me all the time.
And

Speaker 1 what I'll do is, like, whenever I'm waiting for an Uber today, right?

Speaker 1 Just pull up ReadWise. And ReadWise has the highlights feed.
And I'll show you guys what it looks like. It looks a lot like a Twitter feed, right? Completely random.
So I'm not choosing this.

Speaker 1 And instead of me reading Twitter all day, which is not a good use of your time, it's this highlight from the Dodge brothers. I haven't read that book.

Speaker 1 You know, that was like episode, you know, probably in like the 115th. Billy Durant, who's the founder of GM, Sam Colt.

Speaker 2 And so are these ones that other people have liked a lot?

Speaker 1 No, they're for

Speaker 1 your own. Yes.
So it's my form of practice. So you've got

Speaker 1 an example.

Speaker 2 A healthy Twitter

Speaker 1 there on your phone. So is that what, like, how many times a day, like, how often are you just pulling up ReadWise and almost every day?

Speaker 1 And if I'm not doing it on ReadWise, I'll go to like my bookshelves. So what will happen is

Speaker 1 you can pull a book off my shelf. And I'm thinking about this for like my kids.
Long after I'm gone, my kids can like, what was my dad into?

Speaker 1 You know, and they can go back and see, oh, and when he was 35 or 38, this is the podcast he made. Let me go find that book.

Speaker 1 And then they can pull off the shelf, like, oh, this is the line he thought was interesting. Oh, wow, you see dad's handwriting here.

Speaker 1 And like, so I use this for myself where I can pick up a book and quote unquote read it, reread it in 30 minutes by rereading my highlights and notes.

Speaker 1 And now I'm like, it's back in, back, like in front of mine.

Speaker 1 And then what happens is like you can do this anytime like people are like oh i'm running late for lunch like i'll just do this or i'll answer dms or i'll i always have stuff to do with me but i use it as a form of practice the reason i said this is like sounds stupid people think it's maybe maybe they think it's silly i don't know but i read this book uh it's episode 212 of founders it's called michael jordan the life it's a 600 page biography and in that book you just have like this encyclopedia knowledge too of the numbers of your episodes, which I'm so impressed by.

Speaker 1 I don't. It's only because I reference that all the time.
So when if you look up something over and over again,

Speaker 1 it's repetition. Everything in life is repetition.
Sam Walton's career is repetition. You know, like it's like, I just think you're trying to, this is what I asked Charlie.
Like

Speaker 1 one of the most interesting things he said, he's like, one of the best things that ever happened to me is I got rich later in life.

Speaker 1 You know, like he saw the time and how difficult it was. Like he was talking about like, imagine you being like

Speaker 1 super famous or rich when you're like 21 or 25 and how disorienting. He's like, I was a full-grown man, like with life experiences with a wife and kids.
Yeah, a a child who died.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I didn't not mention that. Yeah.
Yeah. But like he had all, like, you know, full life experience.
And therefore, also

Speaker 1 the main problem that happens is people don't know. They're like, I was the son of a poor man.
Now I'm rich and my kids live in unbelievable amount of wealth and privilege. How do I deal with that?

Speaker 1 That comes up in the books for hundreds of years. The answer is no one knows.
Right.

Speaker 1 And so with Charlie, though, the benefit is he didn't have a famous last name or a lot of wealth. His kids were like grown.
Right.

Speaker 1 They wouldn't have to deal with that when you're five or seven or ten. He also gave me some advice that was fascinating.
You do that. Like you got to pay that bill eventually though.

Speaker 1 Like his grandkids have to. Well, so how do you deal with this though, right? Like he's multi-billionaire.
Like that's an insane thing. Right.
This is, this is a five-generation book.

Speaker 1 Not only is he a multi-billionaire, he's like, people like us talk for hours about him. He's like a celebrity.
So I just read this fantastic book.

Speaker 1 I like reading obscure books because go back to what Jeff Bezos said, differentiation is survival. So like I'll find like weird books.
Like me and Sam were in this weird.

Speaker 1 I I was searching for books for you guys yesterday. I couldn't find any.
I will order them and bring some to you because I always bring books. And I was really, we went to three different bookstores.

Speaker 1 I'm not kidding. Like, I brought energy drinks.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But no, we literally, like,

Speaker 1 bless Sam and his patience with me. And like drove me all around Menlo Park and Palo Alto yesterday going to bookstores.
Like, I was literally looking for you guys.

Speaker 1 What are you doing? Like, you had specific books in my game. No, no, no.
I like going to use bookstores.

Speaker 1 And then I think of how I, my, my interpretation of you guys in my mind, and I just know if this book is good for that person. Like

Speaker 1 the Henry Flagler book, I knew that was good for Charlie Munger because of what he said. So I don't know what's going to happen.

Speaker 1 Now I do have two books picked out for you guys, which I'll send you, but they're like newer books. But anyways,

Speaker 1 that sounds like a great day driving around with Sam Pinky and going to bookstores. Like what

Speaker 1 better day could you spend?

Speaker 2 Also, the peninsula is like beautiful. So like.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And like, you know, Sam's unbelievably intelligent and like, she's got a weird alien brain.

Speaker 1 And so I always tell him, our friend, our mutual friend Mitchell Baldrich, that all three of us know, says Sam has a giga brain. I think he's, I think, I think his design.
I've heard him say that.

Speaker 1 I think it's what he said, his description of it.

Speaker 1 But I like obscure books. I read this book that's very hard to find.
It's like 300 bucks. It's called The Invisible Billionaire.

Speaker 1 Daniel Ludwig was the richest person in the world in the 80s, and no one knew who he was. He paid

Speaker 1 a public relations firm to keep his name out of the papers.

Speaker 1 Do what your competitors don't. Yeah, so he's just like, I don't want to be known.
And a lot of his was like, it's like shipping and oil and refining and mining and all that other stuff.

Speaker 1 but the author makes the point in the book like how different a million and a billion is going back to Charlie Munger right yeah and he goes a stack of a million dollars in a stack of hundred dollar bills is like 40 inches you know

Speaker 1 a billion dollars in a stack of hundred dollar bills would be tall would be three times taller than the Empire State Building yeah and so like for us like oh that guy's kind of rich like no the billionaire millionaires are not in the same category it's so disorienting I this is also a thing where like the English language has done us a disservice by naming two things that are a thousand times different,

Speaker 2 very similar words.

Speaker 1 It sounds similar. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So they're not similar at all.

Speaker 1 A lot of people are asking, like, think about all the wealthy people that Charlie talks to.

Speaker 1 And they asked, like, okay, what do I do with like this wealth with my kids? And it's like, you know, is it, if you give your kids a bunch of money, is it going to demotivate them?

Speaker 1 And Charlie goes, of course it's going to. So he's like, but he's like, you know, it's like, again, like, this should be obvious to you.

Speaker 1 So he says, hey, don't try to steer his kids or his grandkids into what they they should do for a living which is charlie munger's one of his best pieces of advice that i took to heart is like follow your natural drift yeah like how i pick books there's been like 15 or 20 that i've read completely or half and it's like i don't like this book i'm not making an episode about it i i go to my bookshelf and i have like probably 80 or 100 books i haven't read yet most come from the audience and i was like what am i most excited to learn about now and that's how i pick it right so follow your natural drift which is also more or less how we pick episodes too we have a little bit more planning because now like there's such long lead times but it's kind of like what's interesting to us right now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 100%. So he's like, you know, don't try to steer them too much.
And he's like, he definitely feels that some of them are going to be less motivated because they're born rich.

Speaker 1 But he said this was the most surprising thing. But he goes, you have to give them the money anyways or they're going to hate you for it.

Speaker 1 And I was like, that's like, because my answer before this, I've read so many like family dynasty stories. And I'm not saying I'm trying to be aware of it.

Speaker 1 Where they decide we're not going to give the money. Or no, they did and it ruined them.
Like, did you guys, you guys haven't done an episode on

Speaker 1 TCI, John, John Malone, Cable Catboy? That's like,

Speaker 2 that will happen this year.

Speaker 1 For sure. So, you know why?

Speaker 1 That was one of the books that was recommended the most. They're like, you got to do a cable cat boy, you got to do a cable cat boy, you got to do it.
We both have read the book. It's awesome.

Speaker 1 It's excellent.

Speaker 1 And there's, so you know, the story I'm about to tell you, where the crazy thing is, like, I'm always thinking about, I didn't understand this before studying, dedicating my life to studying history, right?

Speaker 1 Where it's like, oh, wow, the decisions I'm making now can reverberate through the generations. That's a crazy thing where Bob Magnus, which is the founder of TCI,

Speaker 1 he doesn't have any monies and rural Texas wants to do this, jump into this new industry, cable, right? Full of cowboys, like literal cowboys.

Speaker 1 And he doesn't have money. So his dad gives him a $2,500 loan.
So Bob takes that $2,500 loan. And then

Speaker 1 let's say 40 years later, Bob dies. and he's got to pass on his money, right? That was created from the company he created to his two kids.

Speaker 1 And he winds up giving them, I think, I don't know the numbers. I want to say like 200 million each, two sons.
So think about that one decision. I think I talked about in the episode.

Speaker 1 And if I didn't, it's a big mess up on my part. And I stopped in that part of the day.
I'm pretty sure you did. I was like, hold on.

Speaker 1 Think about that. Like, what if his dad didn't give him the $2,500? Yeah, he's talking about that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so his $2,500 turns into $400 million, let's say $200 million each for his grandsons, changed his grandsons' lives. Right.

Speaker 2 So that means, rule of thumb, you take like, I don't know, you probably three more generations after that of wealth guaranteed.

Speaker 1 Right, before wealth is gone, because I think it went up their nose.

Speaker 1 Like, that was a so.

Speaker 2 It's pretty hard in one generation.

Speaker 1 But I don't know, like, the point was, it's like, they, that wasn't good for them because they were not motivated. They did a bunch of drugs.
I think they went to jail, like that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 And you see that so much. So my thought was like, oh, like, get them a little bit, but not enough that they don't have to work or whatever.
And Charlie's like,

Speaker 1 they're going to hate you. Yeah.
And like, what's such a good instant? It's just like human nature. This is my biggest takeaway from Charlie.

Speaker 1 And I think the biggest benefit that people that listen to founders and acquired and then hopefully read a bunch of the books and do studying on their own are gonna realize.

Speaker 1 This is like Charlie, I said it at the top of my notes, and this is the first thing. This is like,

Speaker 1 it's comforting. The conversation I had with Charlie was comforting the same way that people tell me listening to founders is comforting.

Speaker 1 It's like, Charlie has an almost complete indifference to problems. Troubles from time to time should be expected.
This is inescapable. So why would you let it bother you?

Speaker 1 And the difference, and if you think about, that's the main takeaway from this three-hour dinner I had with him, right?

Speaker 1 And if you think about how does he avoid this, he avoids it by great things have less problems.

Speaker 1 You're never going to escape problems, but if you're around great people, like they're not going to throw up, just like a great business doesn't throw up big problem after big problem after big problem,

Speaker 1 your wife, your kids, your friends, your coworkers, his whole thing is aim for the highest quality you can get. And then that's going to solve 99% of your problems.

Speaker 1 And then when you have the problem, the inevitable problems are still going to come. Okay, you just deal with it.

Speaker 1 He talked about like when he lost the money on Alibaba. He brought that up, you know, that people try to make fun of him for whatever.
It's like,

Speaker 1 you guys are missing the point. Like, you're not going to escape, get through life without making mistakes.
The founder of IKEA has this great quote where he says,

Speaker 1 making mistakes is the privilege of the active. Only those asleep make no mistakes.
It's a version of the

Speaker 1 man in the arena. Yeah.
Yeah. The 10-year-old.

Speaker 2 So, okay, so what do you think is the ideal way to handle it if at 35 someone becomes very wealthy and so when their kid's memory starts around age three?

Speaker 2 So for their entire kid's memorable lifetime, they've grown up in wealth and privilege. Like how does one handle that?

Speaker 1 I have no idea. I have no idea.
Like I don't,

Speaker 1 me even giving you an answer to that is like, there's this guy named Charles Ketering or Kettering. I don't know how to pronounce his name.

Speaker 1 I read his biography. I think it's episode 127 or something like that.
So he invented the electric starter. He founded AC Delco.
That gets acquired by GM.

Speaker 1 He is the head of research and development at GM when GM is the most valuable company and most like the cutting edge of technology company in the world at the time.

Speaker 1 There's a story from his wife and his daughter in that book saying, hey, when he dies, there's only one, there's only going to be three words on

Speaker 1 his tombstone. I don't know.
Because that's what he would say over and over and over again. And

Speaker 1 he's having this conversation. Same thing.
He was the son of a poor man. He is now a rich man.

Speaker 1 his kids are rich he's talking to other people that have the same experience his peers they're like what do you do and the answer what they came up with

Speaker 1 i don't know yeah

Speaker 1 because it's so dependent on who the person is like maybe you give them money that going to bob magnus's grandsons maybe they're you know they're like warren buffett's kids where like they they run foundations and they want to give the money away and i don't think they're coke addicts i don't know but like you don't it's just dependent on the person so i if there was a simple if there was a correct answer i think some of these guys

Speaker 1 would have figured it out well that's the thing about humans right? Like every person is different. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So it's, I have no idea.

Speaker 1 Really, and that's the biggest thing where I think this is one of the lessons I learned from the podcast where, you know, you mentioned this at the beginning, Ben, where most of these people are just so, they're like best in class in this one dimension in the world.

Speaker 1 And of course, to get that, they had to

Speaker 1 be poor, they had to, they couldn't optimize all the other areas of the life at what they did for like their work, right? You know, Sam Walton is one of the rare guys where he gets to the end.

Speaker 1 He knows he's dying because he's got cancer all over his body when he's writing that book. And he's like, Listen, if I could do everything again, he's like, Yeah, I missed some of my kids' childhood.

Speaker 1 They worked in the stores and he took them with him, but he's like, I'd do it again.

Speaker 1 I had to do this, I had to get after it. I had to improve.
A lot of them, you know, get to the end of their life and like, oh, I regret. The founder of IKEA has the best words on this.

Speaker 1 He said, you know, I had three sons growing up. He started IKEA when he was like 17, worked on it until he was like 80-something.
And he's like, I sacrificed my three sons' childhoods. I regret it.

Speaker 1 He goes, it's anybody that has kids knows that childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered.

Speaker 1 And so like we were hanging out today. We were going to do a recording, go to dinner.
And I was, my plan was, I was like, I want to see my son. He's like, and my daughter.

Speaker 1 It's like, I'm going to take the red eye. And then I realized like, yeah, but I want to spend time with David in bed, so I'm leaving early tomorrow morning.

Speaker 1 But it's like, I'm doing this as fast as possible. And if I had to, I'd like fly back and forth because like your kids are, think about like the relationship you guys have with your parents.

Speaker 1 Are they still alive? Yep. Yep.
Okay. So you get to talk to them see them, but you have your whole life, right? Right.

Speaker 1 When your kids are small, there's like this tiny window when they're like two to five to six where you're everything to them. Oh, yeah.
Even my you know I've talked to it. I absolutely feel this way.

Speaker 1 Even my 10-year-old daughter, like right now, she wants to spend time with me. Like it was the cutest thing ever.

Speaker 1 I was leaving, going to LA to see Charlie, then coming up to San Francisco to see you guys.

Speaker 1 And she texts me, she goes, I'm wearing your sweater because like it makes me feel close to you like while you're gone. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 But if you ask her, do you want to spend movie night with dad and mom or do you want to go play Roblox with your friends? Every

Speaker 1 friends. And she loves me, don't get me wrong, but like

Speaker 1 their friends are way, they're really important to them. Yeah.
Where like every day I miss my son's about to turn three, it's like, I'm not going to get back that day.

Speaker 1 And there's only like a thousand of those days. Yeah.
And my wife won't have any more kids, even though I was like, I don't want a bunch of kids. Like, what's that going to be? I'm feeling exactly.

Speaker 1 And I was like, I want a bunch. And it's like, no way.
I say, hey, I don't have to get pregnant. So that's fine.
Something that Buffon and Munger did with the Graham Group that

Speaker 1 was way ahead of its time that now anybody can do is they formed their social networks outside of geographic barriers.

Speaker 1 And they found their most compatible, most like-minded, highest level of talent, you know, peers.

Speaker 1 And then they just got on planes and got to go see them. You know, and like, that was really hard to do back in the day.
And now anybody can do it.

Speaker 1 It's kind of like Bill Gurley, you know, you have no excuse not to do that. You also, but here's the thing, what people get wrong is they're like, oh, I want to meet this guy.

Speaker 1 You have to do the work necessary to make them worth your time, right? Which is like the unfair advantage that the three people sitting in this room have is that it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 That's why I've like in the last six weeks, I've gone to lunch or dinner with multiple billionaires. It's like, and the people that like you get to talk to and all sort of stuff.

Speaker 1 It's just like, this dude is crazy. He's read 300 biographies of entrepreneurs.
There's no way I'm going to have dinner with him and not pick up one idea.

Speaker 1 Like, and then now I've built this machine where like, oh, that's an interesting idea. I'll just plug it into this business.

Speaker 1 And like, it's not a financial transaction by any means, but there's no, I, the reason it's not that like Charlie was the first person I met that I was actually nervous about and it's the reason I'm not nervous is because I know I've done the work.

Speaker 1 Like you can't put me in a room with anybody on the planet and I'm not gonna be able to tell them at least one interesting thing.

Speaker 1 It doesn't mean I'll be the most, the best dinner they've ever had in their life. That's not what I'm saying.
It's just like they're gonna hear something that's like, oh, that's interesting.

Speaker 1 And that goes through their own brain. And it's only because I've spent six years and same with you guys.
It's like, oh, you should feel comfortable. like you guys mentioned earlier it's like

Speaker 1 your audience feels like you know two football fields and like oh it's a little bit of like

Speaker 1 not you didn't use the word insecurity but like you know a little like nervousness I want these people to like like me it's just like oh yeah

Speaker 1 it's like you partly pushing you from behind but you know like you've most likely read you're you're you know more about the subject than they do. Sure.

Speaker 2 I do, but I need to make something worthy of their time.

Speaker 1 Yes, that is an admirable it's like, who cares?

Speaker 2 I could spend all the time in the world and fail to synthesize the narrative and the takeaways, and all of a sudden, then I've just, you know, then I've failed them.

Speaker 2 Regardless of how much work I did, the product wasn't good. And so that's the thing.

Speaker 1 It's hard to not have the product be good because you did the work. I guess is my point.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, I think we now have a process that

Speaker 2 means that when you and I put in the work, the product is good. But it took a long time to

Speaker 2 arrive at that. It's almost like,

Speaker 2 you know, this is another Sam Hankey thing. Trust the process.
Yep.

Speaker 1 I guess the point I was making there, though, is

Speaker 1 like because you guys do so much preparation and it's now your life's work,

Speaker 1 it's just so much, it's going to be so hard not to add value to the people in your lives, whether it's like friends that never show up on a podcast or friends that like you don't have a business relationship with.

Speaker 1 And like you're just going to add value because what you do is so rare. Like I, Naval Rabakan has this, he's influenced my thinking a lot too.
And he has this thing in

Speaker 1 the Naval, the Omanak Naval by our friend Eric Juergenson. And he's just like, if you read an hour a day, that puts you in the 0.0001% of humans.
And I'm like, that can't be true.

Speaker 2 No, that's the dirty secret of acquired and founders is that people don't read books. So if you just read them and then tell people what's in the books, you're going to 100x the market for books.

Speaker 1 And I couldn't believe that. I was having dinner with the same friend that was telling me, like, I told him, I was like, oh, I'll try to build a business around like my reading.

Speaker 1 This is like a couple months ago. And he's like, you vastly overestimate how much people read.
He goes, how much do you, how many books a year do you think the average person reads?

Speaker 1 I was like, I don't know, 12.

Speaker 1 It's like 0.5. Zero.

Speaker 2 I remember asking a book publisher. He said, America reads a book a year.

Speaker 1 Well, he quoted some other study. I said 12.
He's like, no, not 12. He's like, it's zero.
The average is zero. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's crazy.

Speaker 1 And yeah, to your point, I've become friends with a bunch of writers, some of of them I met through the podcast, and they've been telling me, like, teaching me about the publishing industry and just breaking down.

Speaker 1 Like, 98% of books ever published sell less than 5,000 copies. It's power law.

Speaker 2 The book business is the venture business, which is so interesting to me how the advance model works. It's like quite similar to a seed financing.

Speaker 2 I mean, they put out $50,000 for an advance on your book, which covers your cost of living while you're writing it. And

Speaker 2 they kind of don't care about recouping it because

Speaker 1 it's even worse.

Speaker 2 The whole business is about,

Speaker 2 did I sign up, you know,

Speaker 2 James Clear this year? Yeah. And like, you know, when you have Michelle Obama on your hands and you have to pay for it, but you don't know when you have a James Clear on your hands.

Speaker 2 And when that becomes the book that America reads this year, you better make sure it's in your publishing house and not one of the other three big or four big, whatever it is, publishing houses.

Speaker 1 Seed funding is better. because their advances are recoupable.
Right. So it's like this, I was having this long conversation.

Speaker 2 It's the most preferred stock.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we were, we were talking before.

Speaker 2 It's participating preferred.

Speaker 1 We were talking before we started recording.

Speaker 1 I was like, man, Jimmy Sony would be great to do a sessions with just because he's got this historical knowledge of PayPal, PayPal being so important to like Silicon Valley history.

Speaker 1 And we were talking about this, and he's like, no, like, I have to pay that back through sales.

Speaker 1 I'm like, oh, because the thing is, going back to like, did you guys listen to Gamecraft, Blake Robinson? Oh, yeah. Every episode.
Yep. So excellent.
So good. Unbelievably good.

Speaker 1 And what I loved about it is how they focused on the business model innovations and how one decision by some random group of programmers in the 1980s affected a business model decision 10 years later or whatever.

Speaker 1 And I was talking to Jimmy about this. They go,

Speaker 1 the books are fantastic. They're the best products in the world.

Speaker 1 There's a great quote in poor Charlie's Almanac, which says that there's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. For Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, that is literally true, right?

Speaker 1 And what I don't understand is like, you guys have such a high-value product and you haven't innovated on the business model at all. And so I was telling

Speaker 1 Jimmy, I was like, do you know the deal? Like, like, you just, you think about this like an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1 Like, you're not a writer, you're an entrepreneur, and your product just happens to be a book, but you can make money off that any kind of way you want. Like, you can just get creative.

Speaker 1 I go, people think it's crazy where I'm like, I'm trying to be the Jay-Z of podcasts. And people are like, what the hell is wrong with you? And I did, like, that episode.

Speaker 1 Have you done episodes on Jay-Z? That episode I did on Jay-Z's autobiography is one of my most popular people listening to.

Speaker 1 I love Jay-Z, and I love you. So, like, I can't believe I haven't listened to that.
Jay-Z has the founder mentality, and he had it since he was a kid.

Speaker 1 And you just see everything his whole career. And people look at him him like, Oh, like,

Speaker 1 this is another thing about intelligence manifests itself in vastly different ways. It's not always like credentialed, in many cases, it's not right.
But, like, Jay-Z is a straight-up genius.

Speaker 1 If you listen to him and what he did, and he looked at it, he's like, Yeah, he says it from the get-go. He's like, I thought I told you, characters, I'm not a rapper.

Speaker 1 He's like, I'm a businessman, and rap just happens to be my product. And so I'm going to think about it like that.
I go, Jimmy, you should do that.

Speaker 1 I go, Why don't you just find a deal like Jimmy, like Jay-Z did with Samsung? He's like, What are you talking about?

Speaker 1 Well, that's like true founders, entrepreneurs, whatever, you know, founders in the case of the title you want to put them,

Speaker 1 they care about ownership. Like they own their work.

Speaker 1 And you realize that the business model matters, which is why I brought up GameCraft. So what Jay-Z did, this is years ago, this is his Magna Carta Holy Grail, probably came out in 2013.

Speaker 1 So he goes, he goes,

Speaker 1 you know, I could record

Speaker 1 this album and then I could sell like normal, you know, stream it and then sell it for $10. You want the physical copy, et cetera, et cetera.
He goes, he goes, what if I just want my money guaranteed?

Speaker 1 So he goes to Samsung and says, Samsung, you're launching this new app, this new phone, and you have your own app on it.

Speaker 1 I'm going to sell you, I will sell you a million copies, $5 each. You give me $5 million guaranteed for my album.
I'm still going to own it. So he gets the streaming lights.

Speaker 1 He goes, and so what I'll do is like, you pay me $5 million. The first million people that get access to my album are going to be Samsung, whatever phone was coming out.

Speaker 1 You download it for free if you have this device. And so it's advertising to Samsung and it's guaranteed money to him.
I go, dude, you're writing about technology founders.

Speaker 1 It was like, there's these venture capital funds that have $80 billion billion of assets under management. It's like, hey, will you pay me a million dollars to write this book?

Speaker 1 And then you say, hey, this book is now presented by whatever firm. This is why me and you have, usually, have talked about this privately.

Speaker 1 You guys already know this was like, there's been like something like 15 acquisition or investment offers for founders. I said no to every single one.

Speaker 1 A lot of them are like this, where it's like, oh, well, you have the attention of people that are valuable.

Speaker 1 You just said the worst thing that could happen to a venture firm is they miss the hit of that. So they have to expand.
Like they have to make sure they catch that, right?

Speaker 1 So it's like, hey, we'll we'll pay for founders or whatever give you x amount of money pay you to do it you do exactly what you do the only difference is essentially they're trying to buy up added inventory forever it's like hey founders is presented by x company if you're going to raise money email here you know and the the response i have when these i get these pitches is like if i did that that means i'm not actually learning the lessons in the books right right which is like you never give up control it's like no that's what i was doing let's dive into like a deal structure on that so like

Speaker 2 what if they weren't

Speaker 2 what if you weren't giving up control? And what if you weren't giving up economics forever? You're just doing a period of time buyout of your, all your ad inventory.

Speaker 1 This is the intelligent thing. This is what Tegas is doing with Invest Like the Best.
And this is why, like, it's crazy to me when I talk to people and they don't understand this.

Speaker 1 I had a conversation with a founder and he's like, it's really weird. I'm not going to say who it was.

Speaker 1 He's like, it's really weird that this company is running ads on that podcast every single episode forever. And I'm like, not at all.
And I go,

Speaker 1 moving for aid, not standing up.

Speaker 1 I go, David Ogrevy ran the same exact ad in the same magazine for 30 years, and it was still effective. And so I went down.

Speaker 1 I was like, this is, I go, what do you think Coca-Cola's been doing for 100 years? These are not new ideas. So either Coca-Cola is really dumb or

Speaker 1 exactly.

Speaker 2 And I don't think so, and I talked to Apple has the prime billboard in every major city in America to advertise whatever the latest iPhone is in a state of

Speaker 1 forever. So I talked to Michael Elnick, who's the co-founder of Tees,

Speaker 1 And he's an act. Oh, yeah, we all knew each other.
Great team. And we talked about this.

Speaker 1 And this is another example because this somewhat affects our business because when there's like a decline in overall economics, like ad markets usually shrink a little bit and ad rates come down.

Speaker 1 And it's like, oh, you're doing exactly what investors do. Like what do Charlie and Buffett do when there's a crash? They don't deploy.
Deploy.

Speaker 1 You read Izzy Sharp's fantastic autobiography, The Founder of Four Seasons, right? And he says this.

Speaker 1 He goes, he's building what didn't exist at the time, the only chain of five-star hotels at the time. And he says, I grow.
And this is every founder does this. Andrew Carnegie, John D.

Speaker 1 Rockefeller, Henry Kelly Frick. When they have recessions, that's when they grow.
So, what he would do is his competitors would pull back on advertising. He would spend more.

Speaker 1 And he says, he claims, I think in the book, he increases market share by like 25 or 28% using this over and over again, because human nature is, oh, crap,

Speaker 1 things are small. And they cut.
This is what Ogavie said. Ogavi's like, if you need advertising to sell your product, it's not a marketing expense.
it's a production cost.

Speaker 1 It's actual cost of manufacturing your product. And so what Tegas, what Michael Elnick did, that was such a genius move, was, first of all, he knew something was working, right?

Speaker 1 And he scaled up through podcast ads.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he knew it was effective. And then he's like, oh, okay, well, like, now you have

Speaker 1 all these people in the tech industry.

Speaker 1 Their stock's creating. Everybody's like running in retreat.
What does he do? He goes like, oh,

Speaker 2 there's probably available inventory.

Speaker 1 And so he goes,

Speaker 1 hey, Colossus Network, I'd like to buy up every single ad inventory for 2023 on every single one of your shows. That's how you know that likelihood that guy is going to win.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't know the details of his business. It's private and everything else.
It's like, that's the right decision. The same decision.
That's what Oga V would have done.

Speaker 1 That's what Buffett and Munger do when they put money in. Like, that is, that's what Coca-Cola does.
It doesn't matter the economic climate. You're ever going to see less Apple

Speaker 1 billboards. You're going to see less Coca-Cola.
No. It's interesting to think about this in the

Speaker 1 venture business, right? Like,

Speaker 1 which obviously, as we record this here in mid-March, you know, 2023, there's a lot going on in the venture business.

Speaker 2 It's so dynamic right now that I feel like we don't know the last two iterations of what have happened because we've been recording and I haven't checked my phone.

Speaker 1 Like that's how fast the world is moving, right? Things are happening very quickly as we speak.

Speaker 1 But I think a consequence of that, to your point about like you should advertise heavier during recessions, I think differentiate customer differentiation among venture firms is just declining rapidly, right?

Speaker 2 Like, like, what is well, no, it was until

Speaker 2 interest rates went up, but now

Speaker 1 I think both the up and the down cycle is both, I think, are commoditizing. I totally disagree with this.

Speaker 2 I think when commodity, when capital was a commodity and money was free, it was extremely hard to differentiate yourself as a venture firm or any financial firm.

Speaker 1 But, like,

Speaker 2 it it should be easier than ever to differentiate yourself because the thing

Speaker 1 okay so how do you differentiate yourself right now

Speaker 2 you you guys are doing you you can i mean well one of them like let's let's abstract away like speaking to the acquired audience as as one of them uh or as a gigantic means of differentiation your xyz average venture firm out there having money and writing the checks right but but

Speaker 2 yes having money right but like a year from now it's like six to 12 months from now, that's going to be differentiating.

Speaker 2 Now is a great time to thank good friend of the show, ServiceNow.

Speaker 2 We have talked, listeners, about ServiceNow's amazing origin story and how they've been one of the best performing companies the last decade.

Speaker 2 But we've gotten some questions from listeners about what ServiceNow actually does.

Speaker 2 So today, we are going to answer that question.

Speaker 1 Well, to start, a phrase that has been used often here recently in the press is that ServiceNow is the quote-unquote AI operating system for the enterprise.

Speaker 1 But to make that more concrete, ServiceNow started 22 years ago focused simply on automation.

Speaker 1 They turned physical paperwork into software workflows, initially for the IT department within enterprises. That was it.

Speaker 1 And over time, they built on this platform, going to more powerful and complex tasks.

Speaker 1 They were expanding from serving just IT to other departments like HR, finance, customer service, field operations, and more.

Speaker 1 And in the process, over the last two decades, ServiceNow has laid all the tedious groundwork necessary to connect every corner of the enterprise and enable automation to happen.

Speaker 2 So when AI arrived, well, AI kind of just by definition is massively sophisticated task automation.

Speaker 2 And who had already built the platform and the connective tissue within enterprises to enable that automation? ServiceNow. So to answer the question, what does ServiceNow do today?

Speaker 2 We mean it when they say they connect and power every department. IT and HR use it to manage people, devices, software licenses across the company.

Speaker 2 Customer service uses ServiceNow for things like detecting payment failures and routing to the right team or process internally to solve it.

Speaker 2 Or the supply chain org uses it for capacity planning, integrating with data and plans from other departments to ensure that everybody's on the same page.

Speaker 2 No more swivel chairing between apps to enter the same data multiple times in different places.

Speaker 2 And just recently, ServiceNow launched AI Agents so that anyone working in any job can spin up an AI agent to handle the tedious stuff, freeing up humans for bigger picture work.

Speaker 1 ServiceNow was named to Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies list last year and Fast Company's best workplace for innovators last year. And it's because of this vision.

Speaker 1 If you want to take advantage of the scale and speed of ServiceNow in every corner of your business, go to serviceenow.com/slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

Speaker 2 Thanks, ServiceNow.

Speaker 1 So I have a thought on this. One, I don't know anything about venture investing.
Two, I don't know anything about investing, period.

Speaker 1 Like I get to talk to super smart investors, and I'm sure the questions are like, hold on, you had to find that for me. And I'm sure they're like, this kid's an idiot.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 when you guys were talking a little bit about like your business and like your the venture game in general is I just think of like what one of my favorite things that I heard Jeff Bezos say is you know for years people were like hey when are you gonna do physical retail when you're gonna do physical retail when you're gonna do physical retail and he said something that was crazy he's like physical retailing is an ancient business.

Speaker 1 And I love that term. He's like, it's an ancient business.
So I'm not going to do it until I know like I can, it's so hard to improve on an ancient industry. It has to be completely differentiated.

Speaker 1 You mentioned, I heard you on one of your podcasts where you're like, you went to the Amazon ghost store just as like, like pure curiosity. It's like not like you needed something.

Speaker 1 And so you guys have probably read that story too, where it's like, at one time they were going to do like, but like meat and like all this other stuff that you'd have to like talk to somebody.

Speaker 1 He's like, no, you have to redo this. This doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1 The key, the differentiation here is that you walk in you walk out not walk in talk to some guy like he's like cutting salami for you like you got to get that out of there and so i've had this thought because i've read a bunch of biographies on investors too and like investing is an ancient business like

Speaker 1 and and we're just doing it in different ways now and so uh i was like well if you if you wanted to invest right uh let's say you wanted to invest in private companies which people have been doing forever um i always think of like

Speaker 1 like, where did J.P. Morgan get his deal flow? And you know, like, you've read through the history.
It's like, people are like, oh, that was J.P. Morgan Bank.
Like, no, no, there's no retail bank.

Speaker 1 Like, you're not going in there. There's no ad, like a sign on the door.
It's like, here's J.P. Morgan companies.
Like, it was a relationship-based. It's like you got in if you knew somebody, right?

Speaker 1 I read this biography that's incredible. I highly recommend people read it.

Speaker 1 It's episode 103 of Founders. It is The Richest Woman in America, Hedi Green.
I can't remember the song.

Speaker 2 I love how he denies that he knows every number of every episode and then busts out three more.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's only because I like reference this all the time. So Hetty Green, right? It's only because you reference every episode all the time.

Speaker 1 One day it's just going to be a recording of just all the episode numbers. But Hetty Green.
You are an algorithm. You are your ReadWise app.

Speaker 1 Well, that's how I get it. So

Speaker 1 Hedi Green, though, was so wealthy that she bailed out the city of New York. Like that book has unbelievable stories.

Speaker 2 I've never heard this person's name and they bailed out the city of New York.

Speaker 1 Her family, so the richest, when she was alive, the richest city in the world per capita was like New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Speaker 1 So her family made so much whaling. And the way they looked at the family fortune is, I am a steward of this money.
My job is to make it grow so that the next generation has more. And then

Speaker 1 she's like the third generation of these whaling. And then whaling,

Speaker 1 it died out, I think, the generation before her. So they had to figure out how to make money.
The technology stocks of her day, railroads. Like she made a ton of money roads.

Speaker 1 And then she'd buy land, like real estate in New York and everything else. But anyways, my point being, and I had this conversation with Patrick one day.

Speaker 1 I was like, think about it. Like, that was an ancient, investing is an ancient business.
So like, you wouldn't do what Hedy Green did. Like, where did she get her deal from? People knew her.

Speaker 1 They knew she was wealthy. They knew that she was the first person to go to in financial panics.
They called financial panics, what we call recessions and depressions now.

Speaker 1 And it was like, you know, every three years back then.

Speaker 1 And so what she would do is she had a desk in Chemical Bank in Manhattan.

Speaker 1 So the advantage there is geography, physical location, you're at the center of finance in America, you need to be here, you build a reputation.

Speaker 1 So literally, there's stories in the book where there'd be a line of people in financial crashes waiting for at her desk. She's like, okay, I'll sell you my Rose Sox pennies on the dollar.

Speaker 1 Cornelius Vanderbilt did the same thing. She invested with him and a bunch of other people, right? And I was like, but what would you do today? Like you're an ain't you're you want an edge.

Speaker 1 Everything we're talking about is like you need an edge, right? You can't play. Ed Thorpe has a great, the great quote in his book.
He's like, I've been a money manager for 50 years.

Speaker 1 One thing I know is the surest way to get rich is only play games and make investments where you have an edge. Right.

Speaker 1 Which is another way of saying, do something your competitors don't, aren't, or can't. Or Edwin Land.

Speaker 1 So Edwin Land plays a huge role in my life, founder of Polar Rights, Steve Josh Hero, because he said, I have a personal model. It may not fit anybody else.
Don't do anything somebody else can do.

Speaker 1 And so I was like, okay, I don't think anybody else could do founders the way I do it. So I'm just going to do this, right? So my point being is like, how would you do it today? Well,

Speaker 1 you would look, it would look very much like what I think you guys are building, and I'm not an investor, so I don't know anything about your world, but it's just like I'd spend my time reading and learning about business history.

Speaker 1 Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett did that. Every single investor you guys have probably read about does that all the time, they read constantly, right?

Speaker 1 I would share what I know, that's going to build my network of other people. Those people are eventually gonna sell me deals.

Speaker 1 Then I have this huge advantage that you couldn't even do 10 years ago or 15 years ago because there's no such thing as a podcast, right?

Speaker 1 It's like now I could record all the stuff I'm learning, right?

Speaker 2 Which we should say, like, there have been iterations of this. Like, this is how

Speaker 2 Unisquare Ventures became Unisquare ventures or foundry group became foundry group because blogging yeah blogging and then brad and jason writing the book on venture deals i mean it's like angels uh venture hacks with naval and rivi i have two other examples this is like it's not even venture like what is the most successful content marketing of all time uh

Speaker 1 michelin no berkshire shareholder letters totally of course berkshire shareholders because this is how you know genius is a genius it is the greatest act of salesmanship because you never even see the sale happening it's like hey and they spend, you know, you guys have probably done this research, how much time they spend on those letters.

Speaker 1 It's like half a year, seven, eight months for every letter. This is not like, oh, I just jotted down what I learned this year.
And the crazy thing is like, he's like a Warren.

Speaker 1 How many people have, this is something Charlie taught. Oh, so this is a great, great thing that this came up here.
Did you talk about the letters with him? No, I asked him about like...

Speaker 1 So I was explaining to him, I was like, Charlie, I'm literally in the middle of like reading about you when you were like around my age.

Speaker 1 So every time I read a book, I'm like, okay, first of all, I know what year they're born. So every time as I go through the books, I'm like, how old are they? And I write down, okay, he's 24 here.

Speaker 1 He started, I want to know what they were doing in and around my age. And so I was like, Charlie, I'm thinking about you guys.

Speaker 1 Like you just started, like your fun starts when he's like 41 or something like that. I don't remember what it was, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I was like, then like 50, like you start out, you're trying to figure things out. You could see them kind of figuring it out, making the mistakes.

Speaker 1 You guys did an excellent job on your episode, like talking about what they learned from, getting to like get away from the Ben Graham, like get to wonder excellence. Great businesses are rare.

Speaker 1 We should be in there. And then they just let time do all the work.
And I was like, and now, like, you guys put up the greatest investment record the world's ever seen. It's like, are you surprised?

Speaker 1 He goes, of course.

Speaker 1 He's like, of course, I'm surprised. Like, how could you not be?

Speaker 1 Like, we want to be successful and we were like, had we were ambitious and driven, but there's no way you could say, hey, I'm going to make worth

Speaker 1 what's Berkshire's market cap right now. I don't know.
Like

Speaker 1 $500 billion. $500 billion.
Yeah, whatever it is. But he said,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 the reason that popped to my mind

Speaker 1 when when I was asking him

Speaker 1 these questions, let me actually get the exact note because I don't want to mess up the way he said it because his lines were just excellent.

Speaker 1 And so he goes, he's surprised how successful him and Warren turned out. How could you not be surprised? And then he said something that was fascinating.
He goes, I think we get too much credit.

Speaker 1 And I was like, whoa, that's an interesting. Like, why do you think that, Charlie? And he's like, it's very, he goes, it's, he, I find it odd to be so wealthy and loved.

Speaker 1 That's not, these are not exact words. These are my interpretation of his words.
Let me just be clear here. I find it so odd to be wealthy and loved.
That's not a usual human reaction.

Speaker 1 And then my note, tied to why I think the Berkshire letters are the greatest content marketing of all time, he goes, and I go, I wonder if this is because they spent so much time teaching others.

Speaker 1 So what is when you listen to choir, you guys are teaching, right? Berkshire, I'm going to go to Paul Graham too.

Speaker 1 Berkshire, they're teaching, like you could just not read a book and just read Berkshire's letters and you're going to get a fantastic education, right?

Speaker 1 And then in there is like, oh, by the way, we'd like to be the buyers of choice. So

Speaker 1 if you happen to know of this business, like this business that you want to get your hands on, like, you know, and you care about it and he does this excellent product differentiation, call me.

Speaker 1 The greatest content market.

Speaker 1 What is like, how much money do they make off of that? And obviously.

Speaker 1 And I think this is probably, I don't even know if it's on the list of things that they care about, but like it's also marketing for their businesses.

Speaker 2 Totally.

Speaker 1 I have Geico Car Insurance because it's a Berkshire Hathaway company. This is how we talked.
I'm drinking.

Speaker 2 I feel an extra kinship for Brooks running shoes for sure.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. I'm wearing Brooks right now.
Okay, so I'm wearing our arena shoes.

Speaker 1 There you go. I had changed out.
I was in a polo hoodie right before I came over. I watched a documentary on Ralph Lauren.
I just did a podcast.

Speaker 2 I just listened to your episode.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it's episode 288. I wonder if I'm right.
There it is. It is good.
Let's see if I'm right, though. Let's see if I'm right.
I could be wrong. I could be full of crap.
It's 288. Okay.

Speaker 1 So, but before that, I had watched a documentary on him like years ago, and I found out that he did the, I always go to Ben for the proper pronunciation.

Speaker 1 like we'll do the same podcast I will I say like Akeo Merida and then he's like akio marita I'm like all right I go with Ben I go with Ben you get the I will give you the correct American pronunciation

Speaker 1 but it's unclear if it's actually right or not so he did the same thing that Akeo did you know like they they were struggling in the early days of Sony they get this huge order like we're gonna take a hundred thousand units or whatever it is but take off Sony and put on our name and Akeo's like We have no money.

Speaker 1 But he refused to do that because he's like, I'm not building your company, I'm building mine. I love that, like, that entrepreneurial, like, bullheaded tendency.
Same thing with Ralph.

Speaker 1 Ralph was broke. Him and his wife are living in a house, our apartment with a train running over on top of them.
They're sleeping on a mattress, and he's making ties.

Speaker 1 And Bloomingdale's like, well, take them. We love them.
Take that name off. You're going to be our house brand.
And he packs up his ties. He's like, I'm not here to build your brand.

Speaker 1 I'm here to build mine. Like that.
So the

Speaker 2 because later in life, like he would make so much money on just licensing out his brand.

Speaker 2 He's like, I don't even make any of the products. I'd literally just license the brand.

Speaker 1 Hearing that made me buy more polo clothes. Hearing your affinity for Geico makes you buy Geico.
The advertisers you haven't acquired because they love you.

Speaker 1 Your audience, if you, I know you guys vet them and like, like, you have a ton of people that want to advertise that you don't let.

Speaker 1 It's like your relation, that goodwill that you're building up, the goodwill that Buffett built up. Another, the second made me most interested in the business.

Speaker 2 And by the way, there's a litmus test for that.

Speaker 2 It's, does the acquired brand, like I want to only work with sponsors that I want to so full-throatedly endorse that I feel the acquired brand gets stronger by working with them? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And like, if you can actually just keep doing that durably, I think that is like an amazing way to build a brand. And, you know, we try, it doesn't always work.

Speaker 2 And sometimes we just don't sell ad slots because we're like, well,

Speaker 2 the bar's here.

Speaker 1 Long term. They're like, okay, I missed a week on advertising.
It doesn't matter. I'm doing this for you.
When we get on the phone, the first time we ever talked, do you guys love podcasting?

Speaker 1 I love podcasting. You're going to do it forever.
We're going to do it forever. We say say the same thing.

Speaker 1 It's like one week,

Speaker 1 we could do this another 40 years. So

Speaker 1 the same thing. It's like the same goodwill that you talk about.
It's why I'm drinking. I don't even drink energy drinks, right?

Speaker 1 But like the format for founder. You showed up with five Jocko ghosts.

Speaker 1 This is the only energy drink I found. And I only found it because

Speaker 1 I was driving home on Thanksgiving and all the coffee shops are closed. And I heard Jocko's podcast.
And I know he has this. And he says he's in Wabwas.

Speaker 1 And I was like, wait, there's a Waba on the turnpike. I was like, I can just go there.
Like they're there. And I bought them and then I was wired for the whole drive home.

Speaker 1 I was like, oh, they work, man. This is fantastic.
But

Speaker 1 the point there is like, it's not like when I went to the energy drink aisle, I was like, oh, maybe I'll do Rockstar or Monsters. Like, no, they didn't make a podcast I love.

Speaker 1 Jocko made a podcast I love.

Speaker 2 You were not evaluating energy drinks at that point.

Speaker 1 The format for our founders, I got from Jocko.

Speaker 1 I found his podcast because he was on Tim Ferris's podcast at the very beginning was just him reading books for an hour, hour and a half saying, oh, I like this section.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and he does it for autobiographies for military people. I was like, Oh, I should do this for autobiography, for biographies of founders and everything else.

Speaker 1 So it's like a combination of ideas. The second best version, and you guys know this more than me because it's your world and I don't know anything.

Speaker 1 I had spent three weeks reading Paul Graham's essays. Paul Graham's essays changed my life.
The reason why content marketing totally changed my life. So we're going to get there.
The full,

Speaker 1 the reason to finally jump and dedicate my life to founders came,

Speaker 1 my wife was sleeping in bed next to me. I'm up late at night.
I read Paul Graham's essay, How to Do What You Love. I talk about this on

Speaker 1 episode 275, 76, and 77. Those are right.
I know that for sure. Are the three Paul Graham episodes I did? I talk about this snap, how he changed my, that episode changed my life, or that

Speaker 1 essay changed my life in 275. So then I'm reading, so I spent three weeks going through every single one of his essays.

Speaker 1 So something his new essays lack that they had before, you used to have this bright orange box at the top. It says, do you want to start a startup? Apply to Y Combinator.
Apply to Y Combinator. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so I was like, think about, so again,

Speaker 1 it's not like you went, I thought about this, like, what is the founder's version of Y Combinator? What is the acquired version of Y Combinators, right?

Speaker 1 You have to be very careful, like, who you partner with and what you're doing. So I was like, what is the orange box, right? It's not like you go to Paul Graham's and he's got like 10 banner ads.

Speaker 1 He's just like, no.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he worked for Yahoo. He knows that doesn't work.

Speaker 1 Your attention is here.

Speaker 1 And it's like, he didn't know that starting Y Combinator. You can go back and read his essays about it, watch his interviews.
They had no clue, just like Charlie told me. He's like,

Speaker 1 no, I did not expect to build one of those.

Speaker 2 It was called the Summer Founders Program.

Speaker 1 You know, it wasn't even. That's the best thing about learning about the company and founder history.

Speaker 1 It's like they didn't, there's no way when you could interview Sam Walton when he's his shoes, the bottom of his shoes has watermelon and donkey crap.

Speaker 1 He's not going to be like, hey, guys, I'm going to be the richest man in the world.

Speaker 1 And so I love this idea of, hey, all of these discussions about

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 business benefit all comes from, it's the byproduct of educating people, sharing people. That's why people love Charlie and Warren, why all three of us love him.

Speaker 1 How much have us three learned from him, them?

Speaker 1 So much. It's like, yeah, to the point where

Speaker 1 I wanted to

Speaker 1 because of their content marketing.

Speaker 1 I mean, it sounds straight, but like... These lessons changed my life.
They're going to change the trajectory of my kids' lives. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like that is, and, you know, he probably hears that a million times a day, but it doesn't matter. It's like, I got a chance to tell him that.

Speaker 2 That's it. It is is crazy.
Yeah, he educated America on investing while still managing to do it better than anyone else.

Speaker 1 There was some funny things about that, too, where he says, like, you know, they get, he says something like, well, you know, they're completely, he says, you both

Speaker 1 in your episode, you talk about Snowball. Snowball has that quote from Buffett in there.
He talks about it's really important to have an inner scorecard or an outer scorecard.

Speaker 1 Inner scorecard is his dad. It's like, I'm doing this because I know it's good.
Outer scorecard is like, I'm doing this. What are other people going to think about me?

Speaker 1 News flash, no one's thinking about you. They think about themselves.
So out of scorecard people cannot have, like, it's almost really hard to have

Speaker 1 a happy life having an outer scorecard. I like Charlie's description of that better.
He says, like,

Speaker 1 I think it was Andrew that asked him the question. Maybe Chris asked him the question.
It's like, were you like, were you driven to succeed, like to impress your dad or your mom?

Speaker 1 It's a great question. And he goes, no.
He goes, I had an inner clock. And I've always had, he goes, I have an inner clock and I always had an inner clock.
I did this because I wanted to do it.

Speaker 1 And like, that's, and he goes, and they're like, but you think Buffett's like that? He goes, Buffett has an inner clock too.

Speaker 1 And it's just like this idea where they did it their way,

Speaker 1 regardless. They don't care what other people think.

Speaker 1 He said this about the fact that they keep some of their wholly owned businesses and like, oh, the profits are less or they kind of just let them run out. And like, they'll just keep the cash.

Speaker 1 And then people are like, oh, you should invest the cash. And he's just like, no, because we're opportunists.
We're individual opportunity driven is the line that he has about that. Right.

Speaker 2 You were going somewhere, David, earlier with the discussion of being a professional investor and how it's less differentiated than it's ever been before.

Speaker 1 Well, where I was going with it was

Speaker 1 look at the reaction on Twitter and elsewhere and I think in

Speaker 1 much of the country to what's happened with the Silicon Valley Bank situation. Not that this is a current events podcast, but like

Speaker 2 it's also by the time this comes out, going to be two news.

Speaker 1 It's gonna be old news, right?

Speaker 2 Hopefully, things will just be calm and settle down, and there'll be no more impending crises.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right. But another one's coming eventually.
Like, just like Charlie says, you're gonna have another unintended problem a year from now. Yep.

Speaker 1 I think you are right, Ben, that just having capital to invest will be differentiating going forward.

Speaker 1 However, I think the aggregate brand and reputation of the venture industry has taken a massive hit. Totally.
A massive hit over the last

Speaker 1 several years. And you're not holding up.

Speaker 1 It just keeps going going down.

Speaker 2 SVB is revealing to how other people think of Silicon Order.

Speaker 1 What I'm specifically referring to is VC's behavior and reactions on Twitter over the past week. But that's just emblematic of the direction things have been going for years now.

Speaker 1 And part of it's related to tech in general, but I think there's a specific, like

Speaker 1 maybe hatred is strong, but brand decline of the venture capital industry. Yeah, I agree with that.

Speaker 2 Tie it to differentiation among venture firms.

Speaker 1 So, yes, while as the market goes down, having capital will be differentiating and like the number of participants will go down in the industry and whatnot.

Speaker 1 But how do you stand out in this market as like, if in aggregate, your industry is thought less of and people don't want to work with you? Right.

Speaker 1 How do you turn that tide? Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 If the next Sam Walton has the opportunity to raise venture capital dollars and and he's like, you know what? I think I would rather just figure it out another way and not build in that ecosystem.

Speaker 1 I think there are a lot of

Speaker 1 people out there right now who want to start businesses and are like, I'm not going to raise venture capital because F that. And I don't need to.
And it was a lie that I needed to. Right.

Speaker 1 Can I tell you from the founder's perspective? Cause I talked to a ton of founders. Yeah.
I'm going to go down, I think, hopefully, we'll see, talking to more founders than any non-VC, right?

Speaker 1 I get offers all the time, like, hey, you want to invest in my my company? I've said no to all of them.

Speaker 1 Like, just because I'm just, I was like, dude, I'm focused on founders. Like, I don't care about anything about my podcast.
And so we have these conversations.

Speaker 1 And it's just like, what VCs don't understand

Speaker 1 is like how much founders hate them. Yeah.
Yeah. They like,

Speaker 1 they hate them. And it's not they hate the good ones.
They love the good ones, right? Like, I'm not going to say some of the brands that I've heard about, they're like, oh, no.

Speaker 1 Like, we raise money from a bunch of people. They're good.
They don't mess with us. But if we ask a question or we need something, they jump on it, you know? And the problem is, this is not like,

Speaker 1 it's a natural like distribution of any industry. Like there's going to be crappy founders and great founders.
There's going to be crappy investors and great investors.

Speaker 1 And so I really think it ties back to the

Speaker 1 principle that Buffett and Munger built their business on is it's like only associating themselves with the best people on the best companies. And that solves so much other problems.

Speaker 1 So yeah, my issue is like there's a lot of VCs in my audience too, and they're nice people. Don't get me wrong, right?

Speaker 1 Some of them I've talked to is just like,

Speaker 1 who gave you money to invest? Like, what is going on here? Well, what I don't like is like,

Speaker 1 the best ones, like, this is what I like about Patrick, right? If you talk to the people that Patrick has invested in, he doesn't like, here's a list of 10 things I took two minutes to think about.

Speaker 1 He's asking questions. He does exactly what he does on his show.
He asks questions. And if you need something, like, I'll do whatever I can because he's got to go to network and help him out.

Speaker 1 But he's certainly not. He's like, if I have to tell the founder what to do, then I, why not invest in the, like, that doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 1 So what happens is like, I'll get these emails like, I love your show, et cetera, et cetera. Here's like

Speaker 1 10 ideas for you. And it's just like you read, read it.
It's like you hired like an assistant or a researcher, maybe you wrote this yourself. You thought about this for 30 minutes.

Speaker 1 I think about this all day. I've thought about this every day for years, man.
Like that's not helpful. Like what are you doing?

Speaker 1 Like you're just making, I have a lower opinion of you because like this is a dumb idea.

Speaker 1 And the only way about that is like,

Speaker 1 do you know who Bryce Roberts is? Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 So he has, this is, again, I've never raised venture capital, I've never made a venture capital investment, but I talked to a ton of founders and he has the greatest description.

Speaker 1 He's like, what is the product that founders are buying from VCs? It's not money because everybody's got money.

Speaker 2 Like, that's a, like, well, it used to have money.

Speaker 1 Or, yeah, I guess you, but still, like, there's the VCs.

Speaker 1 Like, there's still a lot of people. There's still going to be investments made in compared to venture in the 70s, yes.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 He said two words, improved odds. That is the best from a founder's perspective.
That is the best description.

Speaker 1 It's like, if I take investment from you as opposed to this other guy over here this other girl over there like who is going to be founders all they care about is can you call my company succeed is it more likely that my company succeeds I'm dedicating my life to this man this is not a game like can you make my company succeed and sometimes you can do that with money sometimes you can network there's other people sitting right across from me that could probably help with distribution that is actually a value add like that is the difference like if I was going to be a venture capitalist and God knows I would not not be right

Speaker 1 I would just start a podcast and then I would do it for and then I would do it for six six years and I would get really valuable and then my inbox is full of people. I don't have deal flows.

Speaker 1 It comes strictly in, yeah, it comes inbound. I have a friend, Chris, Chris Powers.

Speaker 1 He syndicates real estate investment. You know, rich people like to invest in real estate.
There's all these tax benefits.

Speaker 1 And he's got, he says, David, even with like, and this guy's done like, I think he's got either a billion or $2 billion of industrial class real estate under management right now.

Speaker 1 And he's like, even, he's like, David, I just was interviewing and doing my podcast. Again, same thing, educational, interviewing people operating in the real estate industry and

Speaker 1 interviewing founders and just doing because he'd like to do it. He wanted to talk to the support for people, happened to press record, put it out there, never really promoted it.

Speaker 1 You know, got, he's like, even with my small audience, he goes, I've raised, he goes, it changes the dynamic from, hey, I'm Chris. I'm setting an outbound.
Hey, I'm Chris. This is what I do.

Speaker 1 This is like, can we talk? Can we set up a meeting to, oh, Chris, love your podcast. How can I get 5 million in your fund?

Speaker 1 It reverses it.

Speaker 1 Oh, totally. They get to know you as a person.
This is what I don't like also. It shortcuts the relationship.
But you just said, it's a relationship, right?

Speaker 1 Which I think there's too much of this like calendar, like Tetrish that no effects, that venture capital display, because they try to do it with me, where our founders do this too, where they're like, hey, love your show, love to get to talk to you.

Speaker 1 Can we talk? And I reply back, yeah, let's set something up. Then I get like, then they're like, I'm like routed to an assistant.
And then it's like, oh, you know,

Speaker 1 how about six weeks from now? Mr. Mr.
Thursday, you know, Joe Smo Smo has 30 minutes three weeks from now. And I've done this like once or twice.

Speaker 1 And now my response is, that's no way to build a relationship. Here's my phone number.
Just text or call me when, when you're free. I'm not a 30-minute block in your calendar.

Speaker 1 And dude, we have the inbound that all three get, it's like I'm already almost hitting a limit to how many deep relationships I can build.

Speaker 1 So I'd rather instead of talking to a million people, I'm not a fester, instead of talking to a million people for 15 minutes, I'd rather talk to five or 10 people over and over and over and over again.

Speaker 1 That's what Charlie just, Charlie. You and I talked a lot about this.

Speaker 1 And like, you've revved off on me a lot on this like i have changed my my mind set and my daily behavior hugely because of our conversations charlie and warren it's just like they built relationships they found people they like admired and trust they repeat like admire and trust over and over again in the letters and their talks and then they just did business with them forever yep it's not this wide but shallow and that's where you get the bad behavior and anybody that's high quality can see through it and it's not going to work with you and you're only going to succeed like you guys your business is power law you're only going to succeed if you get the very best ones.

Speaker 1 It's interesting, though, like the

Speaker 1 man, just like so much in life, like Warren and Charlie really, like they're just so often right. And if you think about like,

Speaker 1 if you buy the premise that the aggregate opinion of the venture capital industry has declined,

Speaker 1 may continue to decline, whether it does or doesn't. It's meaningfully worse than it used to be.

Speaker 1 What have Warren and Charlie done? And to your point about the best content marketing ever,

Speaker 1 what is what they do? It's a combination combination of a hedge fund and a private equity firm.

Speaker 1 What is the aggregate opinion, public opinion of hedge funds, advancers, and private equity firms over the last 50 years? Nothing but down. What is the aggregate opinion of Berkshire? Nothing but up.

Speaker 1 It's amazing. There's just one advantage that I have, the fact that I'm not an investor.
So I don't have to keep up on like, to some degree, venture capitalists have to like know what's going on.

Speaker 1 Right. And I close myself off.
Like I was having dinner with Sam and his wife and they were asking me, like his wife was asking me like, hey, do you know about this person? Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Do you know about this? like and sam's like he's got a very limited like

Speaker 1 he's like he's a nice way he's like you can ask about like books but this dude's not watching tv he's not doing any other stuff right we keep him in a you know hot out back

Speaker 1 um and the and the good thing about that though is somebody actually um so essentially the way i use like twitter any social media is like i put out little uh snippets from my podcast and you put out a lot on twitter in text though for him right yeah yep um which has been really working for you i was i'm gonna read something that has a million over a million views in 24 hours because everything's going on and because I just had dinner with Charlie.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to read this and then I'll go back to what I'm doing.

Speaker 2 This is an amazing tweet, by the way.

Speaker 1 So I go, Charlie Munger tells a story about human nature. Now, I didn't put this because of the bank run.
Like, I was just thinking, I was like, oh, this is, I was reading my highlights.

Speaker 2 I didn't post this

Speaker 2 with regards to the bank run. No, no.

Speaker 1 Remember, I reread my highlights every day? Yeah. And so when I reread my highlights, what my Twitter is, is when I reread highlights, I'm like, oh, that's a good one.
I just put it on Twitter.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God. That did like just the greatest timing in history.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Well, like, it wasn't intentionally, I knew it was going on, but it never said, oh, let me, I need an SVB tweet.
Like, I don't have any money in SVB, like, whatever.

Speaker 1 So it goes, Charlie Munger tells a story about human nature. And then this is all Charlie speaking.
One of my favorite stories is about the little boy in Texas.

Speaker 1 The teacher asked the class, if there are nine sheep in a pen and one jumps out, how many are left? And everybody got the answer right, meaning eight, right?

Speaker 1 Except this little boy who said, none of them are left. And the teacher said, you don't understand arithmetic.
And the little boy said, no, teacher, you don't understand sheep. And so

Speaker 1 so effing good. How, okay, when you were in the room with Charlie for several hours, how did, like,

Speaker 1 in natural conversation, are they just pulling out these like parables and these fables? Like, you know, let me, I'm going to answer that question.

Speaker 1 The best response to this tweet, I didn't even, I missed it myself. He goes, was the child Charlie himself? And I'm like, oh my God, that's exactly what he would have done.

Speaker 1 He would have been the kid. Yeah.
Totally. He would have been the kid.

Speaker 1 So the reason I think it's so powerful, like the storytelling ability you guys have, how I try to break down things to aphorisms, you ask, like, why is this guy on my phone? Right.

Speaker 1 I only think in stories, I think people only learn through stories and then one-liners, right? That's why, why is Charlie, David Ogavy, that idea, it's like he says it in a creative way.

Speaker 1 And then you remember Fur. Charlie Munger says, hey, if you don't learn probability, you're going to go through life with a, as a one-mega, one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.
So good.

Speaker 1 So you laugh and then you think about it. It's like, oh, what is that? Oh, like, I'm going to get my ass kicked.
Like, so that's the way

Speaker 1 this is here because it's Ernest Shackleton.

Speaker 1 His family motto is by endurance we conquer so we're in the podcast business uh you know people are like you can't do podcasts there's like two million of them it's like dude there's like 70 or 80 percent of them that have quit right in eight percent in the business podcast right now

Speaker 1 me and patrick were just talking about this i just saw him in person in miami and we were talking and i showed him this i was like dude uh for podcasts like me and patrick's and yours uh

Speaker 1 Yeah, business categorize in business,

Speaker 1 have at least 10 episodes and I think release at least once a week. You guys, I think, are really schedules less than that, right? Two weeks.
Every two weeks.

Speaker 1 So, those three categories is like. But in terms of minutes of content per week, where we're the same as everybody else.
But, like, that was one thing, like, they release once a week, right?

Speaker 1 18,000. And the business category is the second most popular podcast, like the second most populated podcast category.

Speaker 2 Behind.

Speaker 1 And I go to the first? Spirituality. Faith.
Yeah. Oh, true crime has fallen off then.

Speaker 2 Yeah. No,

Speaker 1 so this is, I'm going to start. So there's a thing about that where i heard somebody said they're like

Speaker 1 founders is like church for entrepreneurs and i might start dropping podcasts on sunday and

Speaker 1 no no i'm not kidding and i if i do video i i swear to god i went and looked i looked at pulpits i was like i'm not gonna go

Speaker 1 i swear to god i swear to god

Speaker 1 i'm not gonna get a desk like think about i my mom was like fundamentals christian stuff and like i had to go to church my whole life and it's just like this is pretty crazy like like not in a bad way.

Speaker 1 I don't mean that the majority. I was like, they're learning from the same book every week over and over again.
And the stories you can tell are limitless. It's one book.
I can do the same thing.

Speaker 1 I have access to all the books in the world. Like, I can do that.
So I do think there's an element of totally.

Speaker 2 Five years from now, people are going to be like, this is the moment where David started the cult.

Speaker 2 It's right here on video.

Speaker 1 We're documenting it. Cults are the best businesses, though.

Speaker 2 100%.

Speaker 1 If you listen to my episode, In N Out, episode 244. Oh, yeah.
There's no way I got that right, by the way.

Speaker 1 Oh, now we got to know. I did that.

Speaker 2 You keep talking. I'll look up if you got this right.

Speaker 1 I did that episode because

Speaker 1 it's 244.

Speaker 1 Of course, is it? Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I read that book because the best businesses in the world are cults.

Speaker 1 That's what the founder of Trader Joe's, you know, his autobiography, he said that Trader Joe's was a cult for the overeducated and underpaid. Right.

Speaker 2 And that's not to say that like, like,

Speaker 2 cults are amazing businesses. That's not what you're saying.
You're saying the very best businesses.

Speaker 1 develop a culture.

Speaker 1 In and out calls them, they use this terminology in their business, cheerful cult.

Speaker 1 It's a positive cult. I'm not talking about Jonestown, let's get together and freaking drink mass suicide.

Speaker 1 No, no, I'm talking things that hopefully you're building a product that's good for the world.

Speaker 2 We had Gary Tan on back in the day, and he was talking about Palantir at the very beginning, and he was like, oh, Palantir was a cult. That's why it worked.

Speaker 1 Well, this idea also influenced me. It's zero to one, Peter Thiel's book, is like, you know, he says that.
He's like, the best businesses, like, startups look like cults. Like,

Speaker 2 you have to, you have to inspire emotion in people. Otherwise,

Speaker 2 you can't stand out in the world. And you certainly can't have repeat behavior and in a sea of choices for someone to keep choosing you over and over and over again.

Speaker 2 Just like, it's like how founders have to be weird. This is one of the things interesting was created by ordinary people.

Speaker 1 But I have to be intentional about this. I'm glad you said, oh, this is where we get it on camera and on recording that David is starting as cults.
It's like, podcast. No, I go crazy.

Speaker 1 Like, people start talking about me.

Speaker 1 A bunch of them say, David's too obsessed with podcasts.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, I'm glad they say that because like even now there's like, thank you. That's a couple.
No, it's like, I see an opportunity that other people don't, which is the same thing in the book.

Speaker 1 So I think podcasts in general are just fun to make and I'm obsessed with it, but they're also going to be wonderful businesses because they're prone to be cheerful cults.

Speaker 1 And how do you know that you have a cult? You just Google and see if the people have tattooed themselves with the brand.

Speaker 1 How many people are walking around with a Joe Rogan's face on his tattoo or a Joe Rogan face tattoo on on their skin? A ton of them. Really? Yes.
How many people have tattoos of the Apple Apple logo?

Speaker 2 A ton of them. There's an insane number with Mario.
We learned this in the Nintendo.

Speaker 1 Mario, Tesla, In-N-Out. There's a ton of, dude, I like, cheeseburgers are my favorite meal.
I'm not tattooing an In-N-Out logo on my arm, dude. You take another level.

Speaker 1 And you see this over and over and over again. And so when I analyze businesses, I'm not just doing this.
Like, it's not a game to me. I was like, oh, can I use these ideas in building my business?

Speaker 1 And like, Warren Buffett says the greatest thing. And this is, I think, speaks to why you guys are so like, hey, we know how big our audience is and we're going to take this seriously.
Seriously?

Speaker 1 Warren goes,

Speaker 1 a brand is a promise. That's the best description of a brand.
It's just like,

Speaker 1 I talked about the fact that I stayed in this hotel brand. I'm not going to say who it is.
In Austin, I loved it. I stayed in Santa Monica.
I loved it. I found out they had one in San Francisco.

Speaker 1 I didn't check the reviews.

Speaker 2 You came here and they broke their promise.

Speaker 1 I told you to stay with us. Yes.
And that's the biggest thing. A brand was a promise.

Speaker 1 I know this is going to be excellent. The hotel is fine.
It is in like,

Speaker 1 it's in a tenderloin. It's like a

Speaker 1 not a place you want to stay. No, I like if I wasn't traveling alone, there's no way I'd let my wife.
This is the major misconception about San Francisco.

Speaker 1 Many people who don't live here think that it's

Speaker 1 an absolute hellhole and wasteland.

Speaker 1 A specific part of it is. Yeah.
But like. There are other parts.
And unfortunately, that part is mostly where the hotels are. Yeah, which is not good for the city.
Because

Speaker 1 I'm not ever staying. I'm staying with you or I'd stay in, like I'd stay out in Silicon Valley.
I've stayed at the Rosewood, which is really nice.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that is

Speaker 1 not the tendency.

Speaker 2 It's the most expensive hotel, which is good.

Speaker 1 I didn't pay for it.

Speaker 1 Whatever does.

Speaker 1 That is the whole business model.

Speaker 1 I didn't know how much it was. It was really nice, though.
Thank you. I got to take that person.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so like, again, I don't mean it in like a, but I am very intentional. Like, hey, I'm not going to break my promise.

Speaker 1 I want you to know, and you guys do the same thing. It's like, if I press play on an acquired episode, this is why I like Dan Carlin is,

Speaker 1 you know, I read one book an episode. He reads like 30.
Yeah. He only does two a year or one and like one.
Maybe one a year. But like, I know there's no way I'm going to press a button.

Speaker 1 And he's, he didn't do the work necessary. Yeah.
That's that's what we feel. We all feel.
I mean, you, yeah,

Speaker 1 in our own ways, we all definitely feel that about what we're doing.

Speaker 2 Can I get some feedback? Like, how, how can we make Acquired better?

Speaker 2 Or have you ever had moments where you like paused an episode and were like, oh, I want to like talk to Ben and David about this right now because like I have some feedback?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 You'd probably just text us if you did. No, but like I text, I would, first of all, um.

Speaker 2 Or the model, not just, not necessarily just the content, but like.

Speaker 1 No, what you guys said on your benchmark dinner episode, I think was like, you know,

Speaker 1 there's a few podcasters. I was having this conversation with Sam yesterday.
It's like, there's a few podcasters that like, they know what they're doing.

Speaker 1 And you, they know by, like, what their position in the market is, like how they're thinking about it. And I'm not going to say who, but like, you guys hit it.
Like, what makes you special?

Speaker 1 It's the Edwin Land thing. Don't do anything somebody else can do, right? Where you says, like, your marquee thing is these super independent, like Blake made the funny,

Speaker 1 Blake Robinson said the funny thing on Twitter I saw. I loved it.
He's like, only a choir could say, all right, let's bring this home. It's still an hour and a half left.

Speaker 1 That's your brand. People know.
Totally. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think what you're doing here with like the sessions is like a way to also, it's like, There's no, you can't increase your, the amount of episodes that you can do because they take so much work to do, but you also have a way to surface all this information that you guys have that's valuable to other people in different formats.

Speaker 1 We were talking about this a little bit before, which I hate saying we were talking about this before we were recording because why didn't we just record? But

Speaker 1 you were also thinking about potentially doing something similar. Yeah.
And there's like

Speaker 1 years from now. Yeah.
But for the core episodes, we spend so much time preparing. But then for stuff like this, we don't prepare at all because our whole career is for sure.

Speaker 1 Does this make sense?

Speaker 2 Like, what is the right number and format of sessions? Because this is the second session. Like, we're still figuring sessions out.

Speaker 2 Like, in your dream world as an acquired listener, what do sessions look like?

Speaker 1 I mean, your sessions should replace your interviews. Anything that's a non-acquired, like, long deep dive, just make them a session.
There's enough people interviewing founders and investors.

Speaker 1 Right, right. But we need more conversations.
So if I ever did, people are like, if you ever do an interview show, I was like, first of all, I wouldn't do an interview show.

Speaker 1 Because like you, interview is a skill. It looks easy.
Like, I always tell

Speaker 1 Patrick, Patrick, you're world class at this, dude. Like, you have, you wield because

Speaker 1 I've interviewed every week and now twice a week for eight, nine years. And he's just, it's for, I like to read.
He likes to ask questions. So therefore, our formats match the personality, right?

Speaker 1 And so what I tell him is, like, I've been on the other side of it.

Speaker 1 It's like, you can tell it's not, he doesn't have a list of questions in front of him because you can tell his good question just came off a response of what, like, a lot of people like, um, and it's fine, but like the Tyler Cowan thing where he just like, he has his questions and you just said something interesting.

Speaker 1 He's not going to follow up and he's going to go on the next question.

Speaker 2 It feels very odd because you're like, are you guys not having a conversation? No, they're not.

Speaker 2 That guy like left you an opening and how did you not take that opening? They're not.

Speaker 1 But Tyler, you have to do, let's tie this to Jay-Z and J. Cole and answer your question also about like, I'm glad you guys are so much nicer.
We're like, do you have any feedback? Because like,

Speaker 1 I can't stand feedback. We're like, not in the sense of, like, like, I told you, I texted you guys this one time.

Speaker 1 We're like, one guy was like, hey, I don't like that you reference the, like, the superpower of the show is that I tie, it's not like the episode on Ralph Lauren is gonna tell you how Ralph thinks like Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller and Bezos and it's like you literally know all your episode numbers by heart like so I it's to me it's just one large conversation the history of on history's greatest entrepreneurs that's that's how it is to me it just happens to be separated and so this I text you this and this guy's like um could you save that for at the end and just do it like a carve out like acquired and I was like don't listen acquired I'm not going to I have a singular vision for how this is going to go and that's why I own and control and operate the entire thing It's even further than that.

Speaker 1 It's like, I'm not putting on a show. Like, there's a lot.
I loved Anthony Bourdain when he was alive. I read his books.
He had a huge influence on me.

Speaker 1 Like, anytime I traveled to a place that he went to, I'd go and do it. Are we doing an episode of 219?

Speaker 1 There's no way that's right. There's no way.

Speaker 2 Keep going. There's no way that's right.

Speaker 1 Fact checkers.

Speaker 1 It's called the oral biography.

Speaker 1 That format should be done more where his assistant

Speaker 1 had interviewed, an assistant, a friend had interviewed a bunch of people who actually knew Tony and were there in his last days.

Speaker 1 And then she used that organized that interview into uh this biography called uh bourdain the definitive oral biography i think um

Speaker 1 and is it 219?

Speaker 2 it's 219.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 1 and so, like, where was I going with that? I went on a digression, but, oh, so there's a line in the books I love. It says the line between Tony and his show is non-existent.
Yeah. Right?

Speaker 1 That's why people like,

Speaker 1 I hear a lot of people talk about podcasting. It's like, oh, you don't actually know what the superpower of podcasting is, right?

Speaker 1 Where it's like, to me, podcast, one of the superpowers of podcasting is it's authenticity scaled, right?

Speaker 1 If when I meet with founders, I listen to founders, and we have a three-hour dinner, they all, they all say the same thing. They're like, this is like a three-hour episode of Founders.

Speaker 1 It's like the same person there, right?

Speaker 2 Well, and I think that that is a thing that

Speaker 1 you

Speaker 2 did really well and we sort of accidentally did well. But I realized over time

Speaker 2 why that makes both of the things we've built as durable as they are. A lot of people play characters on the internet and

Speaker 1 which in other mediums

Speaker 1 is an easy trap to fall into.

Speaker 2 And like

Speaker 2 it's a way to catapult growth. If you adopt a polarizing character, you can get a bunch of followers.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of dividends that pay to it, but it's exhausting to maintain over time. And it has a conflict where when people meet you in real life, they're like, oh, weird.

Speaker 2 And so when you actually are just yourself, it's going to probably grow more slowly because I'm not like as polarizing.

Speaker 2 It would be horrifying to live as

Speaker 2 a polarizing character that you play on the internet in real life also. And so you have this more like slow, organic growth path.

Speaker 2 But like, it is, there is this cool byproduct now where like I sit down with someone and they're like, yep, exactly the same as I expected.

Speaker 1 This is why I said have Blake Robbins on here because he gave me the dynamic, that spectrum that he talks about. Blake is a super smart person in general, but he's like,

Speaker 1 the way you think about this is there's a spectrum. This is not my idea, this is a blade spectrum.
He goes, One end of the spectrum, he's like, How much time do people spend with you, right?

Speaker 1 He's like, On one end of the spectrum, you have these like 30-second TikTokers that dance, right?

Speaker 1 And then all the way on the other end of the spectrum, as you move down, they spend more time with you. All the way to the end of the spectrum, you have the Twitch streamers, right?

Speaker 1 Which he helped incubate 100 Thieves, 40 Thieves, 100 Thieves, where they're spending like 40 hours or 50 hours a week with you, right? Right.

Speaker 1 He goes, David, you're like one, you're not, they don't spend 40 hours with you, but you're one click, one click to the left, and they're gonna wind up spending 10 20 100 200 hours with you and you keep moving down and like let's say you do 10 minute YouTube videos, you know It's like the deeper you go down there It's why when I think the guy's name is Nadeshot when you're like 100 thieves has a new product and he announces it you'll see a line down the block because hundreds of thousands of people have spent all their time with them and so it's like oh nadeshot has something so I'll come down here and you see this over and over again and then Blake says you could have like a TikTok that has a TikTok already has like 10 million followers, yet they can't even get 3,000 people to show up somewhere.

Speaker 1 And so I think that is like the way to think about it.

Speaker 2 So that's algorithmic throttling too. TikTok is almost a zero signal if somebody follows you.

Speaker 1 It's all views.

Speaker 1 It doesn't actually matter.

Speaker 2 Or YouTube. It's like, oh, they subscribe to your channel.

Speaker 2 Like maybe that'll come up in one of the top eight videos that shows up at the top of the screen of like what they should watch next, but like maybe not.

Speaker 1 So my point in all that is if they're spending a lot of time with you, and I love, this is my flip of what Charlie Munger says, that you need to learn the big ideas in the main domains, like physics, psychology, because they carry the most freight.

Speaker 1 I flip that to time carries the most weight.

Speaker 1 As long as what we're doing, you said we're not playing characters, we are passionately interested in this, we're not going to quit, then we do this over a long period of time.

Speaker 1 You'll get what you deserve. You'll get the audience you deserve.
You'll get the business opportunities and everything else. It's like time carries the most weight.
I know I'm not going to quit.

Speaker 1 You're going to have to pry the microphone for my cold, dead hand, and I'm just going to let the chips fall where they are. And that doesn't mean I'm like lollygagging here.

Speaker 1 Like I'm on it seven days a week. I'm going to try to work myself in a position.
So it's something I learned from

Speaker 1 Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple, right? And he's like,

Speaker 1 people hear that speech he gives, which he's fantastic. He's like wearing shorts.
And he's like, and it's like, I don't even know if he's in the polo, the turtleneck yet.

Speaker 1 But he mentions like what they're going to do. And everybody focused on the fact that he's like, we're going to, you know, there's no sex in the products anymore.

Speaker 1 And we're going to do the four quadrant thing. A lot of people in the technology industry, particularly, know that speech.

Speaker 1 And they're like, yeah, let's, let's cut the fat and like put all of our A players, fire the BNC players, put all of our A players in these four products that we're going to make, right?

Speaker 2 But they missed desktop, laptop, high-end.

Speaker 1 Yep, consumer and pro for both laptop and desktop. Those are four categories, right? They miss what he said earlier when he talks about Nike.
He's just like marketing.

Speaker 1 He's like, Apple sucks at marketing. We have to be a great marketing company.
And so he said something where I read the quote and then my reinterpretation of this, right? And people don't know that.

Speaker 1 It's in Ken's, no, it's in this book called Insanely Simple. I think that guy's name is Ken Siegel.
And he's like, he was an ad guy at a company for Apple. And he's like,

Speaker 2 TWBA Chiat Day.

Speaker 1 That's the ad agency. So he goes and every Wednesday,

Speaker 1 actions express priority. So there's another maxim, right? He's like, I don't care what people say.
I care like what they do.

Speaker 1 So when people ask me, like, first, people, you talk to the founders like, hey, like, what would you do about this? I never answer. It's like, well, David Senro would do this.

Speaker 1 I'd say, hey, well, Charlie Munger would tell you to do this or Steve Giles would would do this or like, hey, I heard a story about here. Cause like, my opinion is useless.

Speaker 1 It's, you know, my opinion on business building on how I build my business. It doesn't matter what I say.
It's like, what is he, how is he approaching founders? Like, why is he making decisions?

Speaker 1 That's the important part, right?

Speaker 1 And so Steve told you, told you that marketing was important to his actions because every Wednesday at like three o'clock, or I forgot the time, they had like a three-hour meeting.

Speaker 1 He would approve, have to approve every single piece of advertising marketing that went out for Apple.

Speaker 1 There's not a billboard in Kentucky that went out without him saying, yes, it's going to go out, right?

Speaker 1 And so in that speech, if you actually listen to what he's saying, he's like, listen, I feel that the products we're making in Apple make people's lives better. I want,

Speaker 1 he says this line, he goes, I want everybody in the world to own an Apple device. We know that that's not going to happen because it's so expensive.

Speaker 1 But he goes, and to do that, we have to get really good at marketing. So my interpretation of that on the podcast, what I said is like, if you feel your product, can improve people's lives.

Speaker 1 I think you guys already know because you get thousands of messages, just like I do, that yes, listening to choir, listening to founders will improve people's lives and work, right?

Speaker 1 Then you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing.

Speaker 1 All that means is not get good at marketing so our ad rates are going to go up or that we can be celebrities or anything like that. It's no.
So

Speaker 1 these messages for all these of history's greatest entrepreneurs that are dead, that these ideas don't die with them.

Speaker 1 And then therefore, acquired and founders can gather these ideas and push them down the generations. So that's why I mean, it's like, I'm not daily dallion.

Speaker 1 Yes, I'm going to let time carry all the weight, but I'm going to do everything I can so more people at least know. And if you try, I found it and say, oh, this sucks or whatever, whatever.

Speaker 1 I'm cool with that. But I just want you to have the opportunity to know it exists.

Speaker 1 And me and you have had these, Austria have had these conversations where it's like, guys, I'm telling you right now, I've said this to you, there's millions of people that would benefit from listening to Inquired.

Speaker 1 They just don't know it exists yet. So we got to come up and find ways to make sure that people know it exists because they will love it and it will make their lives better.

Speaker 1 Amen.

Speaker 2 All right, listeners, this is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, Vanta, the leading agentic trust platform that helps you automate compliance and manage risk.

Speaker 2 David, I caught up with Christina and the Vanta team to get the latest.

Speaker 1 Ooh, nice.

Speaker 2 So listeners probably know, Vanta started by focusing on compliance automation, so helping companies to get their SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA.

Speaker 2 The big insight was to build a system that could monitor all of your compliance and risk continuously, not just once a year for your audit, so you could feel confident in your security posture all the time.

Speaker 2 But now they have realized that the business that they're really in is making it easier for you to earn the trust of your customers.

Speaker 2 Yep, makes sense. So when you start scaling, you end up with more compliance and security requirements and more tools, which can get very chaotic.

Speaker 2 Vanta has become the always-on AI-powered security expert that scales with you. And as Vanta puts it, they are the best security hire you'll never have to make.

Speaker 2 And of course, the fastest growing companies in the world like Cursor, Snowflake, Replit, Linear, and Ramp all use Vanta to make sure that their security programs are always a step ahead and function as a real driver of growth for the business.

Speaker 1 Makes total sense. It's funny.

Speaker 1 When we first started working with Vanta almost five years ago, I think it was, we thought, oh, this is one of those great acquired universe products that lets you focus only on what differentiates your product and outsource the things that don't.

Speaker 1 But over the last couple of years, their product has advanced so much that it's not just Vanta does that for you. It's now actually Vanta does that better.

Speaker 1 Without a real-time monitoring system, there's just no way that you could give your vendors and customers this level of confidence and trust. Yep.

Speaker 2 So, if your company is ready to go back to making your beer taste better and leave the compliance and security reviews to Vanta's AI-powered automation, join their now 12,000 customers around the globe.

Speaker 2 You can just head on over to Vanta.com/slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you, and you'll earn $1,000 of free credit. That's Vanta.com/slash/acquired.

Speaker 1 This may be an area, I'm curious what you think about this,

Speaker 1 where our shows and approaches are a little different. I'm also curious what you Ben think about this.

Speaker 1 A lot of these stories are just incredible stories, too, that are just like worth, I think, worth telling just for the sake of the story.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 it's interesting how sometimes I'm like, I'm not sure that we came up with a lesson that I would advise a founder to follow, but I know this was very entertaining and as true as we possibly can make it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so that, like, I.

Speaker 1 I mean, every single episode I've listened to, there's lessons in there. Oh, yeah.
I'm not saying there's not lessons. Of course there are.
But like, sometimes we'll do an episode like,

Speaker 1 I always feel this way about the most recent episode, but we just finished making the Nintendo episode. I'm just like, you cannot.
Like, if you put the best fiction writers in the world

Speaker 1 together and you said, come up with the best, like, corporate-ish story that you could imagine, You couldn't write something this good.

Speaker 2 I guess the thing I was referring to is a little bit the survivorship bias where like someone did something that I would not recommend anyone do and it still worked,

Speaker 1 but made for a great story.

Speaker 2 It's like Morris Chang and TSMC. It's like he invented the notion of a fabulous.
semiconductor company before there was any demand for that.

Speaker 2 And then it turned out that his timing was exactly right that like within a couple of years, a whole ton of fabulous companies spun up and wanted to use his foundry.

Speaker 2 But but like he created a solution in search of a problem. And like no founder should do that, but my God, did he pull a rabbit out of a hat?

Speaker 2 There's a good number of acquired episodes where I'm like, we should be crisper, I think, about pointing out where like, I don't, this was inadvisable, but amazing that it worked.

Speaker 1 I think that goes back to the game tape analysis where we talked about Kobe Bryant. Jordan did this too, where it's like,

Speaker 1 I've read this like 600-page biography of Kobe. And in the biography, they interview his high school school girlfriend.

Speaker 1 And they're like, what was it like to date Kobe Bryan in high school? I'm surprised he had a girlfriend in high school, right? Oh, not for very long.

Speaker 1 It's like, what was it like to date Kobe Bryan in high school? She's like, well, our dates consisted of me going to his house and watching tapes of Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson.

Speaker 1 I was just like, we're not leaving. I'm not taking you out to dinner.
Like, we're literally going to watch this thing.

Speaker 1 And so I think the game tape analysis of that is just like, it is helpful to realize that a lot of this stuff, it's impossible to plan in advance it's the one of the great i mean steve jobs has a ton of great quotes oh one of the best ones

Speaker 1 he's like

Speaker 1 it's impossible you're only going to connect the dots looking backwards so you have to put something faith in something you can call karma religion god intuition but you have to do something i just did uh reread ray crocs autobiography the guy from mcdonald's again and i it hit me yeah i've been thinking about the steve jobs quote too and this is why it's so valuable to reread your pastor you mentioned this in the in the

Speaker 1 McDonald's episode. If you think about this, he's a perfect illustration of what Steve observed 50 years after Reague dies, for God's sake.
He's just like, he goes from selling paper cups.

Speaker 1 Paper cups leads him to selling multi-mixers, which are like make milkshakes. Multi-mixers goes, like, why the hell are you have eight?

Speaker 1 Why do these McDonald brothers out in San Bernardino have eight of my machines? Like, people, he'd had a hard time selling one. That goes to the franchise system, which he didn't even do well.

Speaker 1 And then he meets Harry Sombore, and then Harry Sombore's like, dumb.

Speaker 1 You don't even know what business you're in. You're not going to.
He's like, you don't build an empire off a 1.4% cut of a 15-cent hamburger.

Speaker 1 You build an empire by owning the land upon which that hamburger is cooked. Those five things.
There's no,

Speaker 1 he's selling, he's spelled. From paper cups to real estate.
He sold paper cups for 17 years.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But he's just like, hey, I have to go in my gut to the point where he got divorced over this.
His wife was like, you can't do this, Harry. And he's like, you have to trust my instincts.

Speaker 1 That's one thing to what Ben said way back in the beginning of the conversation that you're really good at highlighting Ray Crocker. Like, he was a terrible person.
And he didn't try to hide it.

Speaker 1 Most people in autobiographies are trying to hide it. Yeah.
He's literally like, thank you very much, June Martino, my first employee, for missing every single one of your kids' birthdays.

Speaker 1 You're going to get some stock at McDonald's. It's going to get you rich, but 20 years later, I'm going to fire you.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he did, you didn't have to put that story in there. He put the, he chose to put that.
That's crazy, dude. I said on the podcast, I was like, listen, it's interesting.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm glad he persisted, interesting ideas for business, but like, not only do I would never want to do business with this guy, I wouldn't even want to be his friend. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, I wouldn't want to do business with Steve Jobs, but I want to be his friend. Oh, yeah.
He'd be a very interesting person to be his friend with.

Speaker 2 Oh, I feel like the opposite.

Speaker 1 What's that?

Speaker 2 Like, I'd want to do business with Steve because you could create incredible things together, but I'm not sure you'd want to be friends.

Speaker 1 I think the difference is from like a founder's perspective, like. There is no working with Steve Jobs.
It's working for.

Speaker 1 You hear the stories of how he even treated like his subcontractor or not like the owners of the companies that that contracted it's like yeah these guys are empire builders like they're literally building worlds they're not used to being like they're

Speaker 1 charlie was talking about this um because you know he he loves like uh

Speaker 1 liu the new guy the byd guy doo won i don't know his name something yeah yeah those guys um he loves lee kwan yu from singapore yep and what you realize is like

Speaker 1 It's like these are founder types, but you can't be like founders are benevolent dictators or in some cases they're dictators of their own company.

Speaker 1 And like some people call Lee Kuan Yoog, you know, a dictator is like, oh, like you can't do that in America, even if that would be beneficial. But

Speaker 1 all of them, there's no working with them. They're like, they're going to be in complete control of the situation, like even being in the room with them.
Like

Speaker 1 I'm not saying they'd be rude or mean, but like you're a subordinate to them. Because everything is in Break Rock.
Everything is, he says in the book,

Speaker 1 perfection is difficult. I'm demanding perfection of McDonald's.
I will constantly keep expanding this empire until I die. If you get in my way, I will run you over.

Speaker 1 He's like, he says in the movie, he's like,

Speaker 1 if my competitor was drowning, I'd walk over and put a hose in its mouth. And he goes, and he was on the other end of the call as McDonald's brothers, because they're fighting over this.

Speaker 1 And he goes, would you do the same?

Speaker 1 And the stated thing is, it's like, you're going to have to compete on my level or else I will literally destroy you. Yep.

Speaker 1 What? So

Speaker 1 Warren and Charlie are so interesting, right? I'm trying trying to decide if they are

Speaker 1 the complete opposite of that or if they actually are like that just in their own ways.

Speaker 1 Every single person has some kind of like their public persona is for that level, right? It's not like a podcast where they're going to listen to Joe Rogan for 1,600 episodes.

Speaker 1 Like, you know who Joe is. You can't hide.
He's doing three-hour shows three days a week for 15 years. You have probably a good idea who he is.

Speaker 1 You see flashes of like, you know, imperfection like we all have.

Speaker 1 I don't think you,

Speaker 1 you don't get to that level without having, he's got sharp, they all got sharp elbows. Like, you ever heard Reed's stories about how Warren negotiates? It's like 1250 bid.
What about 14? 1250 bid.

Speaker 1 What about 13? 1250 bid.

Speaker 2 It's because he's already, he spent 10 years analyzing your business and he knows exactly the price that he's going to buy it for. And so now he's telling you the price he's going to buy it for.

Speaker 2 This wasn't like a new consideration that popped up and he's like, oh, look at this, a business. It's like, no, at the scale he's operating at, like, he knows all the businesses.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And this, this is from Jim Clayton's autobiography, um, where he buys um Clayton homes. Right.
And he even said, like, he, he wanted to sell Buffett, he idolized Buffett. And he talks about, like,

Speaker 1 he wasn't insulting him by any means, but he's like, Warren wants the microphone. And if you're in an area where Warren doesn't have the microphone, he is not interested.

Speaker 1 And I've heard that about Warren a lot. You know, so it's just like, because they're youth, they're world builders.
Like, he runs everything.

Speaker 1 You think you're going to go from being poor to having $200 billion and not distort your perception of the world? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's impossible.

Speaker 2 Say more about Warren wanting the microphone. What does that mean?

Speaker 1 Like literally in person. Like they would do, I think they were doing, Jim Clayton was at either like an event to talk to the employees or whatever the case was.

Speaker 1 Jim wanted to have input and he's like, Warren would not allow it. Like he monopolized this, and I've heard that about Warren.
Like same thing. We're like, you're going to...

Speaker 1 There's got to be an element of him that

Speaker 1 loves the shareholder meetings. Oh, of course.
But he didn't need to do that. He created an event around.

Speaker 1 having a million people come. Yeah, you know how he loves it because he's still doing it.
Right. Right.
Like he doesn't, he doesn't have to do anything in the world that he doesn't want to do. Right.

Speaker 1 And that's how you know he loves it. Like they're, they're beyond.

Speaker 1 I told you, we talked about earlier how like just how disorienting it must be to like have, and I would love to know this feeling, don't get me wrong, like have a $200 billion net worth.

Speaker 1 It's like you're living life on like God mode. Like

Speaker 1 it's insane. Like I was watching this video.
I don't know if it's true, but it's like Jeff Bezos' private jet has its own private jet. Like,

Speaker 1 his new yacht has a chase yacht. Yeah, so it's like your yacht has a yacht.

Speaker 2 I think it's like a guest yacht. Like, I think it's so that, I mean, he now owns the biggest yacht in the world and there's a yacht that will sail behind it.

Speaker 1 This may be, uh, I don't know, maybe we'll become so successful someday that I will regret my words on this, but

Speaker 1 I got to imagine having a yacht is actually not like additive to your life.

Speaker 2 Oh, so this is a funny

Speaker 1 problem than yeah.

Speaker 2 So I'm, I think it was Ralph Lauren

Speaker 2 sold his yacht and it's now a charter yacht because he was like, this thing was more work than any of the businesses I've ever run.

Speaker 1 One of the most interesting ideas I've heard, and it comes from our mutual friend Jeremy, who I think we mentioned earlier in the podcast. Hopefully we did give him credit.
I actually

Speaker 1 was talking to him and David Perot,

Speaker 1 and I'm pretty sure Jeremy said this, not David, but

Speaker 1 he's like, I would actually make the argument because everybody's like, oh, like, what does Charlie talk about call the Berkshire Jet the Indefensible? Indefensible.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah yeah right and then wasn't there a second one the indefensible two

Speaker 2 before they bought net jets and now it's like we should be on net so you look you look at um

Speaker 1 you look at like those like how could you possibly spend like you know these yachts cost twenty five thousand dollars an hour to operate in fuel or some crazy number that planes are the same like you know how expensive they are and jeremy makes the point and jeremy knows because he's been buying businesses forever and he's exposed to like great wealth uh people you know unbelievable amount of wealth he goes he makes the argument that they're actually underpriced assets and and I was like oh tell me why he's like that's that's not what I would expect to hear yeah so I'm gonna tell you this book that just proved his point I actually got a text him and tell him this

Speaker 1 so he's like they they use it not for it's if you're not like yachting sitting there sunbathing right he's like they're using it for like customers and invest and potential and so I had heard this I'll tell you about how this relates to invisible billionaire so I had heard this because again I've never raised money I don't pay attention to the venture industry.

Speaker 1 I don't know anything about it. I just have a bunch of founder friends and founders tell founders everything.

Speaker 1 And so I'll have these discussions where they're like, they describe the courting process that they get from some of these well-known, super famous people.

Speaker 1 And it's like, well, you, the process you just described to me sounds like an old rich dude that like wants to sleep with like a young woman. Yeah.
What would you do? Right.

Speaker 1 And there's a, we actually didn't put it in the episode, but there's a bunch of

Speaker 1 this in Nintendo history

Speaker 1 because Warner Brothers bought Atari. And so Warner Brothers was running Atari as Nintendo was kind of like...

Speaker 2 And this is how they courted Nolan.

Speaker 1 That's how they courted. Yeah, so that's how Warner Brothers courted Atari and Nolan, and then how they tried to court Nintendo was the private jets, the, what was it? It was Cliny's Wood.

Speaker 2 So they put Cliny's Wood on the private jet with Atari

Speaker 2 flying coast to coast.

Speaker 1 It was determined by the company. History doesn't repeat.
Human nature does. These founder dudes are running

Speaker 1 technology companies now. And they're like, yeah, oh yeah, I'm not going to name who.

Speaker 1 They're like, oh, yeah, he gave us, he picked us up in Manhattan in his private helicopter and we landed at his Hampton state. Do you think he got the deal? He got the deal.

Speaker 1 This guy said, Hey, come, what are you doing? It's Friday night. What are you doing Saturday morning? Okay, come on my private job.
I'm gonna take you to California with me.

Speaker 1 Here, you want to stay with your girlfriend at this mansion that I'm not using in XYZ. So, Germany was explaining this to me.
It's like the equivalent of a luxury suite at a sports arena.

Speaker 1 It's forgetting deals.

Speaker 1 But they're operating at a different level where it's like, oh, these influence. And some founders, the smart ones, don't let

Speaker 1 like Sam Walton, you know, he's like, don't give us don't give me a freaking gift but it just

Speaker 1 that's why like the whole everything in Bentonville is like you can't like come in here and like because they know it works yeah if you give a Walmart salesperson like a bottle of gin or something it's gonna influence him where he's just like I want your price you guys did a great job in your episodes like tell me your lowest price and then I'm gonna go to your it better be your low price because I'm going to this guy and if you tell me a dollar he sells me 98 cents don't waste my time I'm going I'm not you're not going to hear from me again I have an obligation to the customer to do this to find the lowest price for them yeah because everything, his entire thing, the low-cost structure thing,

Speaker 1 that's a Walton thing. That's a sole price thing.
That's a Jeff Bezos thing. That's a Rockefeller thing.
That's the most common theme in the history of entrepreneurship. Every single thing.

Speaker 1 Jeff is like, we're going to have the lowest cost structure. We're going to have a low-cost structure.
We're going to be efficient. We're going to be efficient.

Speaker 1 Somewhere along the line, 25 years later, now the startup, the technology startups is like, we can just spread money all the time because there's no interest rate. There's just money coming back.

Speaker 2 He built Amazon at a pretty different time than founders today. The business laws of physics were different when There were interest rates versus when there weren't.

Speaker 1 Well, he started when there were none. That's true.

Speaker 1 And then the environment changed as he was building it. Yep.

Speaker 2 But like, you know,

Speaker 2 while it would have been stupid for Amazon to spend $100 million on something, on like crazy marketing activities in 1997, like you could imagine that in 2018, if all of your competitors had raised a billion dollars and were, you know, trying to chase market share as fast as possible, you either have to exit that market because you're going to lose or play that game on the field.

Speaker 1 Or find, even better, find a different way. Be more resourceful.

Speaker 2 But be more resourceful.

Speaker 2 It's easy to say, but like

Speaker 2 hiring all, when all your competitors are hiring all the best engineers by throwing a million dollars a year at them, like you're just not going to be able to build a good product if you don't try to play that game also.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure. But like the whole thing, like when Peter Thiel says this in his book, Paul Graham says it, it's just like startups don't have the advantage, right?

Speaker 1 Of you're not going to outspend Microsoft or Netflix on, so you got to find underdeveloped talent, right?

Speaker 1 You got to find these people that if they were the credentialed or if they were the well-knowns, then they're going to go take,

Speaker 1 you're going to work for me $80,000 and some stock options or go make a million dollars a year at Netflix. Like they're going to, so that's this whole thing.

Speaker 1 It's like you're not going to win unless you are capable of finding underdeveloped talent. Silicon Valley used to be able to build

Speaker 1 high growth and profitable startups. Well, the rule used used to be you couldn't go public until you had over $100 million in revenue and you were profitable.
Like if you didn't

Speaker 1 check both of those boxes, you weren't going to IPO.

Speaker 2 And in 2021, of all the companies that went public, it had to be single-digit percentage that were profitable.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's crazy.

Speaker 2 The game just changes.

Speaker 1 Well, to your point, if you have free money, you know, the money supply grass expands, it's raining down. That's going to build.

Speaker 1 Did you listen to Doug Leone on, I know you guys had him on your show, but did you hear him on Invest Like the Best? Yeah, he was great.

Speaker 1 Like, he said, he's like, this is, he was telling crazy stories. I loved everything about that guy.
I loved him when I heard him on your podcast, too. It was like that tough love.

Speaker 1 This is what I'm into, right?

Speaker 1 He still has, I think, maybe my favorite quote of all, favorite quote said live on an acquired podcast: you could burn cigarettes in our arms and we wouldn't flinch.

Speaker 1 And then he has a great line. He's like, I want you to know we were killers.
We weren't killers to make the most money. We were killers to get the job done.

Speaker 1 But he made the point, and you know, very few people probably know more about the adventure industry than that guy, right? One of one of, I would imagine he's up there.

Speaker 1 And he's like, of course. Like you have money raining down.
He didn't use that word. It's just like, it just creates bad habits.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It is crazy how many things in my life I falsely attributed to something that were not just interest rates. Like so many things.

Speaker 2 The answer is just like, oh, it is that way because we live in a zero interest rate environment. And

Speaker 2 the human brain likes to tell stories. And at the end of the day, it's like, things are the way they are because of mean reversion and what the current interest rate climate is.

Speaker 1 I wish I'm going to pull up something like, this is what I mean. Goes back to Buffett.
Like, if you just, we should have, I wish I knew this. I had read this.
I didn't remember it, though.

Speaker 1 This is Warren Buffett on interest rates, right? He says, oh, is this from Laws of Gravity? The log in Snowball? No, this is from his

Speaker 1 shareholder letters.

Speaker 1 He said it in 84, 80.

Speaker 1 I think the intro to Snowball, I think the scene that opened, the vignette that opens it is Sun Valley right before the bubble burnt, the tech bubble burst.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, this is like a decade and a half before. Oh, okay, okay.
This is why it's like, so it's like, God, like, you could have made such better decisions.

Speaker 1 I could have made such better decisions if you had just known this and he had known it for 40 years before it happened. I posted this on Twitter and I

Speaker 1 opened up the next day. I'm like, why does this have two and a half million views? It's like, Elon replied.
He goes, yep. I was like, oh, okay.

Speaker 1 I was like, what the? Like, what the, like, damn, these people really like interest interest rates. I remember

Speaker 2 on steroids.

Speaker 1 So I got Warren Buffett on interest rates, and the headline is they power everything in the economic universe. So that was what Elon was responding up to.
And this is Warren writing in the 80s.

Speaker 1 The value of every, to your, exactly what you're saying, the value of every business, the value of a farm, an apartment house, or any other economic asset is 100% sensitive to interest rates.

Speaker 1 That's because all you're doing when you're investing is transferring money to someone now in exchange for a stream of money, which you expect to come back in the future.

Speaker 1 And the higher the interest rates are, the less that present value will be interest this is fantastic interest rates are to asset prices press it prices sort of like gravity is to an apple yeah when interest rates are low there is little gravitational pull on on asset prices we just lived through this right totally when interest when interest book yeah when interest rates are low there is little gravitational pull on asset prices interest rates power everything in the economic universe because i found that because

Speaker 1 all this this remember this inflation went crazy like a year or two ago whatever and i was like okay well, every time that happens, all I do is I have, um, you can buy the Kindle version of Buffett shareholder letters for like two bucks.

Speaker 1 I know, it's crazy. And I search it for like interest rates, inflation,

Speaker 1 and I just go and I read, okay, this is what we need a billion dollars off that $2 purchase. There you go.
And so, like, you'll say, okay, this would have said inflation.

Speaker 1 And then you see what year he said it. And it's just like, and that's where I found that.
I go, what do you say about interest rates?

Speaker 1 Boom, 1980, whatever. And he just laid out exactly.

Speaker 2 It's so funny because what he also did right there is for every college finance sophomore that's having to go through a class to do DCFs and they're like, I don't understand this. This is complicated.

Speaker 2 Like he just explained conceptually a discounted cash flow model there in a way that was like unbelievably digestible. He's so good at that.

Speaker 1 The clarity of thought. Because he wants the microphone.

Speaker 1 Look, but also like he just educated you in a way that makes more sense and is interesting and you're entertained by and you might build a business off that and then you might want to sell one day or whatever the case is.

Speaker 1 This is where I'm spending a lot more time of like really trying to work on storytelling ability and concision, right?

Speaker 1 The value is in the compression and the distillation, right?

Speaker 1 If you could listen to like an audiobook for 25 hours, but if I can give you the best idea or one idea that changes your life and I can do it, you know, every week or whatever, like in a couple of minutes, like that is going, some of that value is going to be brought back to me.

Speaker 1 And all that comes from is what I realize is all my heroes have like, what they have in common is like the unbelievable clarity of thought like Steve Jobs Charlie like you're not gonna be like oh what does that mean they take unbelievably complex things like you're not advertising to a standing army advertising to moving parade make it in a memorable way and then you carry that maxim with you forever how do you get better at that you said you're working on it reps just straight up reps like thinking about it and then hearing yourself back so the advantage I have that I edit is

Speaker 1 you can say something and like oh that was so good and then you hear it back and sometimes it's even better better. Or many times it's worse.
It's like, oh, I lost. I was, I know what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But you miss this part that doesn't make any sense.
And so normally I have to cut it. I don't think I've ever re

Speaker 1 I don't think I've ever re-recorded it.

Speaker 2 We only did that for one episode ever. It's really hard to do.
What, re-record? Yeah. Do you know which episode we did it for?

Speaker 1 No. It was recent.

Speaker 2 NFL. David and I got on and re-recorded 40 minutes of material over maybe 15 different parts of the episode.

Speaker 1 The original recording of that episode was really rough.

Speaker 2 The NFL episode was too long when we started. It took way too long to get to the interesting part, the Pete Roselle era.

Speaker 2 And so we had this like massively bloated beginning, and then we had a story arc that didn't cleanly resolve. And we had a bunch of concepts where we didn't nail the explanation.

Speaker 2 And so we went in, we cut like half of the first epoch of the story. We recorded new bits to like create nice rising action and resolution on the Roselle era.

Speaker 2 And then we recorded another like 10 areas where we were just like, this wasn't said super tight. And

Speaker 2 I'm really curious if people noticed because we had to like, we basically had to voice act. Like we had to listen to the way that we sort of came into that segment, get that in our heads.

Speaker 1 This is your theater background coming in.

Speaker 2 And then like pick it up from there.

Speaker 1 But yeah. Your editing is so good.
We've talked about like back catalog sponsorship and you told me what you're doing with like Zoom info.

Speaker 1 And I've been listening to your back catalog and it's like dude it's like it sounds like it it was there the day you did it it is perfect and i know because we talk about this that that ad was not there yeah but it sounds like it's there that's the goal the nfl episode is what i meant of like it's a crazy story but even there is like a lesson where like you guys i texted to you like totally changed the way i think about things or maybe we were talking on zoom about this where it's like i never even thought of that the nfl is like the largest media company yeah i hadn't either and the funny thing is that's like that was a david rosenthal insight that like the nfl is the single single largest media property by value.

Speaker 2 And the funny thing is, if you go look at the, because we did this for the Nintendo episode, you go look at the largest media properties,

Speaker 2 they list Mario, they list Pokemon, and they lit, and then, and I think if you sort, the list includes like video games and movies, and so there's like the MCU in there, and there's Star Wars in there, but like they don't think the NFL is way bigger than all of those, but it's not on the list because people don't think of it as like a media property.

Speaker 1 I'm looking for stuff like that, both to do episodes on and as

Speaker 1 for investing too. It's like, what is something that is just so like in the air that people don't even realize what it is?

Speaker 2 Or what's a comparison we can make that is super eye-opening, but people haven't thought to compare those two things before.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 Which is why I tie things into past, because it's like, oh, this episode 244.

Speaker 1 No, but the idea behind this is like, we've seen this before. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
I reread like the show notes on like the Johnny Ive episode I did. Johnny said something was great.

Speaker 1 And he said, he goes, one of Steve's talents was identifying markets full of second rate products.

Speaker 1 And so like, he would be like, oh, there's the opportunity here. And we're both, we're all podcast addicts, right?

Speaker 1 And the reason that we get along is- And it's a market full of second-rate products. And because you know how hard it is to do.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And when you go and listen to other business podcasts, and like I had a friend,

Speaker 1 his friend has a podcast.

Speaker 1 and he's like hey these three guys they have large social media followings but it does not translate to episodes which people don't understand yeah rarely will yeah and they're like would you listen to their episode and give it feedback right

Speaker 1 and we went like so I was like yeah I listened to it and I go um

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 1 three guys sitting around talking whatever happens to pop to their mind What did you expect to happen?

Speaker 2 Which is kind of what's happening.

Speaker 1 I was thinking the same thing. I was like, we did.

Speaker 2 Listeners, we apologize.

Speaker 1 No, this episode lacks craft. There's zero chance that

Speaker 1 people interested in entrepreneurship and investing are not finding this interesting because the prep for this is not three guys that have a million other things to do.

Speaker 1 It's three guys that spent the last eight years doing this over and over again that's going to cop up naturally in a conversation that you can like, oh, I didn't know about this.

Speaker 1 Maybe there's a bunch of people probably like, I didn't know who Avrin Land was. I didn't know Oga V.
I never thought about the NFL as

Speaker 1 a largest media company.

Speaker 1 So, no, but their problem thing is like, there's no value proposition. This is actually something that I think ties into much of what we've talked about over the last couple of hours.

Speaker 1 People are going to do what they want to do.

Speaker 1 And if people can do what they want to do and are given unfettered freedom to run in it, they can do great things.

Speaker 1 If people are forced to do things that they don't want to do, they're not going to make great things.

Speaker 1 Or either forced to or choose, put themselves in a situation for whatever reason where they're doing something they don't want to be doing, they're not going to be very good at it.

Speaker 2 I think that's one of of the reasons why we find ourselves so attracted to episodes that highlight craft is because that's sort of like how we think about acquired.

Speaker 2 Like if LVMH, Benchmark, it's like people who do few things but do them exceptionally well are just so entrancing to study.

Speaker 1 I think this goes back to what you were just saying, like, and I want to go into the craft thing. It's like Charlie, again, has these simple ideas.

Speaker 1 Like most of the problems are that you're just not intensely interested in what you're working on. And he's like, I don't care how smart you are.
And Charlie's smarter than almost everybody else.

Speaker 1 He goes, I was not successful until I moved myself into a position where I worked on something I was intentionally interested in. That just, these like small rules carry most of the weight.

Speaker 1 It's like, how bad do you actually want it? And if you're not willing to do those things, then there's nothing wrong with that. Like entrepreneurship is for a very small percentage.

Speaker 1 I'm not one of these people who think everybody can be an entrepreneur. I would like to see more of them.
But there's no safety net. It's like no one's telling you what to do.

Speaker 1 No one had to tell you guys, hey, you should.

Speaker 1 buy microphones and do a bunch of research and pick up

Speaker 1 microphones to start. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 2 I think the most interesting thing is that, like,

Speaker 2 I think we've talked about this concept before on air is that

Speaker 2 if someone's going to advise you on starting a podcast, they would say, do a 30 to 40 minute episode and like do it weekly, you know, so there's, and you release it at the same time all the time.

Speaker 2 Have a guest so that way that person promotes it too. And we're like, okay, well, we do the opposite of all of those things.
And I think it's like, my, the conclusion I've come to is advice

Speaker 2 is an average and and reality is a distribution and averages suck because they hide the distribution.

Speaker 2 You kind of want to know the shape of the distribution and you kind of want to know like things that apply to your specific data point, not like the average thing.

Speaker 2 And I think like advice is always an average that hides the distribution.

Speaker 2 And if you know that you're actually an outlier in some way, then you have to sort of like selectively follow advice because it may not apply to you.

Speaker 1 Charlie told me a fantastic story about this where he's just like he was singing the praises of BYD that they're kicking ass. Like, he told me, like, the not just me, I'm with a group of people.

Speaker 1 Um, they make batteries for cars,

Speaker 1 yeah. But he started out like, like, uh, doing like knockoff cell phones in Korea or something.

Speaker 1 And then, like, he, he, I forgot the guy's founder's name, and I apologize, but like, he was telling me the life story, but he was saying that the founder, that Charlie and Lilu, Luli, Lilu, Lilu, gave the founder advice and he ignored it and he was right.

Speaker 1 He's like, don't go on electric cars or whatever it was that he did. He's like, and he, you know, selling, I think he said like 2 billion cars, like, I forgot what, 2 million cars.

Speaker 1 I just know he sold 2 billion cars in a year. So like, he's like, sold 2 million cars in China.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So he's just like, and he did it.

Speaker 1 And he gets all the credit because Lee and me told him. not to do it.
And he's just like, same to your point. It's game tape.

Speaker 1 It's just like when Kobe Kobe is watching this particular play of Michael Jordan, that may never appear in his life.

Speaker 1 And maybe the move he did wasn't the right move for what Kobe did, but maybe it influences his other thing. It's just like, the life is complex and messy.

Speaker 1 And like, you can think you're really smart until you have a two and a half year old and they ask you, why is that the way? And you answer the question.

Speaker 1 And then their follow-up question is going to be why. And eventually you're going to get to a level where like, I don't know.
Yeah. Like, I don't know why.
Everything ends at I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It's like, I don't know.
And so like, of course there's no certainty. Like, that's why if you have to, if you crave certainty, you've got to get a job.

Speaker 1 But there wasn't even Facebook when I was in college because I had to work full time. I went at night.
But my college did not have Facebook. It was just coming out.
So we had MySpace. And my MySpace,

Speaker 1 you could put a quote, right? Like at the header. That's right.
And I've always thought like this for my entire life. It was like, there's no security in life, only opportunity.

Speaker 1 And I think that's what you did. So investors and entrepreneurs are going for opportunity at the expense of security.

Speaker 1 And if you need security, you can get a job, but we see like everybody said, go into tech, go into tech, go into tech. You can make all this money.

Speaker 2 I think this is a super mispriced thing. I think people who crave security, which I get like all humans crave some level of security,

Speaker 2 sort of misprice security because no jobs are as secure as we think they are, but they definitely cap your upside.

Speaker 2 And people, it's like, is founding a company or going into business for yourself as an entrepreneur extremely risky? Yes, it is.

Speaker 2 But is it actually that much riskier than a job where you could get laid off or the sector could go through a downfall?

Speaker 2 Or like, there are a lot of things about having a job that are not nearly as secure as people think they are.

Speaker 1 Steve, Wozniak, and jobs. They're like, worst case scenario, if we just doesn't work, we'll just go get jobs.
We're broke anyways. Right.
Like, let's just try. And he like sells his van for like 50.

Speaker 1 Steve sells his van for like $1,500. Like, oh, I'm just all in on Apple.
Like,

Speaker 1 that's that. To me, that's like, again, I think a lot of this is like people are asked us like, it's entrepreneurship like innate, it can be taught.
Can there be a school of entrepreneurship?

Speaker 1 And I was like, well, ask Charlie Munger if he taught a business class. What did he say? He's like, I would just teach the history of what you guys do.

Speaker 1 He's like, I teach the history of 100 companies and I would talk about what went right and what went wrong. There's no security.

Speaker 1 He's not saying, yeah, take my class and on the other end, you get this degree that guarantees business success. That doesn't exist.
Well, that's what's cool. Like

Speaker 1 they have been teaching entrepreneurship for the last 50 years.

Speaker 1 So I was in entrepreneurship. So I went to UCF, which is this like diploma mill, essentially.
And I was in the pilot entrepreneurship program, right? The very first year. And as a two-year-old.

Speaker 1 Take us back to that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Were you thinking about

Speaker 1 what was your relationship to entrepreneurship before starting the Founders podcast? So like, I have never been on a job review. I've only had two jobs in my life.

Speaker 1 Like, I was, but I was like, there was no entrepreneurship, there was no entrepreneurship, like community. There was no entrepreneurship industry.
Right. So like my first business was,

Speaker 1 this is a long story, but like, um,

Speaker 1 I had been accustomed. I was talking about this yesterday.
By the time I was 17, I had been accustomed to working full-time and going to school, right?

Speaker 1 So like people are like, oh, you work a lot on founders. It's like, I don't have to go to school.
I can like do this all the time. You're working half-time as part of necessary.
It's like,

Speaker 1 there's a long story here. Like that would take me like 30 minutes, but like, um, like my dad sat me down when I was like 15.

Speaker 1 He's like, listen, you don't have to pay rent, but like, I don't have any money for you. So like if you want something, you got to go get it.
Right.

Speaker 1 And the good thing about my dad, he's a Cuban immigrant, not educated, but like

Speaker 1 the best piece of advice that he ever gave me and my brother

Speaker 1 was a maxim. He's like, don't have fast things.

Speaker 1 Right. So he does it in like a blue collar.
He's a truck driver. Like, you know, that kind of thing, where he's like, he prides himself on the fact that like,

Speaker 1 like, he'll work 72 hours straight. Right.
But he never made a lot of money and never had an education. Like, his mom wasn't good and whatever.
And they had escaped Castro's Cuba.

Speaker 1 cuba my dad was born in cuba wow so it's like imagine like i talked about this on um because you know patrick's at the end of invest like epic invest like invest episode he says

Speaker 1 yeah he's like he's like uh what's the nicest thing everybody somebody ever did to you or for you did to you

Speaker 1 uh for you and i was like man like something that it was a decision that happened way before i was born and like my grandfather is in Cuba in 1959

Speaker 1 um 1958 and he again not an educated man He worked as a butcher and worked in a factory that made shoes.

Speaker 1 He's married and he's got a baby. That baby is my dad.
And Castro comes to power. And he doesn't have a lot of money, doesn't speak English.
And yet he had some kind of insight that

Speaker 1 I need to get out of here, right? And he goes to a country, picks up, loses everything. Not that you had a lot anyways, goes to a country.
knows nobody, doesn't speak the language.

Speaker 1 When I sat down, the first thing me and Sam Zell talked about, and I think helped bond us to the point where at the end he said he liked my energy and everything. But so hopefully he liked me.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Was in his story. I was like, because I had obviously read his autobiography.

Speaker 1 And one of the first things me and Sam talked about was, Sam, I understand and empathize with your story because Sam's story is his dad being Jewish.

Speaker 1 getting the last train out of Poland before the Nazis bomb it. Literally the last train out.
18 members of his family, his dad went around to saying, we got to get out of here. This is not good.

Speaker 1 They're like, no, we're going to stay. They're all dead.

Speaker 1 Sam,

Speaker 1 Sam's dad and his mom have a daughter. They get to America.
His mom's pregnant. Sam was born in America.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And so in that book, Sam's dad's always telling him, you don't understand how lucky you are to be born here.

Speaker 1 And I was like, I understand that mentality because I grew up meeting the Cubans have this thing called Notroena, which is, they don't celebrate.

Speaker 1 my wife's Colombian, so they say I'm married into a Colombian family, they do this too. They don't celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day.
They do it the night before. It's like Christmas Eve.

Speaker 1 And so I grew up, you know, for as long as I can remember, I was like eight, seven, 10, 10 years old, meeting people that came over on rafts. And you would see these things.

Speaker 1 I've seen these in person, right? It's just like. The rafts.
Think about

Speaker 1 how bad it has to be.

Speaker 2 It's like 50 miles, right?

Speaker 1 90 miles, right?

Speaker 1 I'm going to go over to the study the University of Miami Miami just did on this. 90 miles,

Speaker 1 you're,

Speaker 1 you're a parent, just hopefully you might be a parent one day, like you love your kids way more than you love yourself.

Speaker 1 Like, there's people that came, hundreds of thousands of people went to the edge of the island and put their kids on a raft just to hopes that they get to America.

Speaker 1 And so the problem is, is like, you don't make the announcement. to the everybody's like, hey, tomorrow we're leaving on a raft because you get caught.

Speaker 1 Right, right. Imprisoned or killed or whatever case is.

Speaker 1 And so the University of miami did this study was like well how many people did this we know hundreds of thousands survived right and they estimate that like half at least i think something like half a million people perished never got there there's a the conversation with um there's this ufc fighter named jorge masvedal who lives in miami he's a cuban guy and his dad

Speaker 1 was one of the ones that escaped he went on a their raft was a made out of a like a truck tire like you know like think of like a size of like a bulldozer tire right wow

Speaker 1 it's his uncle and two 14 year boys. They get off path, right? They run out of their water, wound up being like contaminated.
So you can't drink.

Speaker 1 How do they propel it anyway?

Speaker 2 Like, how do you make sure it gets to Florida?

Speaker 1 So you have like, they, some have oars and some have, like,

Speaker 1 like, see that blanket over there? Like, you try to make a

Speaker 1 sail out of like a blanket or something. You know,

Speaker 1 some of these are unbelievably in, like, the level of ingenuity is like for uneducated, they don't have the internet. Like, they don't, it's an unbelievable.

Speaker 1 And so they're, in his case, they, I know they had oars. I think they had

Speaker 1 a sail.

Speaker 1 They get close enough to the Bahamas.

Speaker 1 They haven't drank water for like three or four days or something.

Speaker 1 A pigeon lands on the oar. They wind up killing the pigeon, opening it apart and drinking the blood.
That's the only thing that's saved.

Speaker 1 And so now his, so he gets to America, eventually gets to go from the Bahamas to America. Now his son is like, you know, makes millions and millions of dollars

Speaker 1 as a professional fighter and a celebrity and

Speaker 1 all this other stuff. So anyways, long story short, the one thing like I, my dad's still alive.
I told you my mom passed away.

Speaker 1 But like, I really think like my dad for just, like, he did not baby me at all. He's just like, you got to like figure out how to get a job.

Speaker 1 And so I worked at

Speaker 1 back then, this, this is something that Paul Graham made the point of, right?

Speaker 1 He's like, dude, when I was a kid, the only jobs available, you're like, you know, scoop ice cream or something. And like, you've probably met them.

Speaker 1 I met some 17-year-old founders, a bunch of founders. You talk to them and they're like, I own their second company.
I'm like, what?

Speaker 1 what they're like oh yeah when i was like ninth grade i like did this like gmail plug-in or like yeah it's like i made

Speaker 1 40 000 a month and like my i was making so much money my parents let me drop out of high school so i can uh do this business i'm like i worked at a car wash dude i made four dollars and 65 cents an hour you know um so anyways long story short um i uh i would go to school year round right because i had figured this out where it's like oh um

Speaker 1 if you most people went to summer school, they were forced to. I went to public school my whole life, right? Yep.
And so like people would go to public school.

Speaker 1 They would be forced to because you failed something else. But if you elected to do that in six weeks, you get a full semester's credit.
And there's two six week

Speaker 2 mini mesters.

Speaker 1 So I always, even when I was in college, I did this. I would go to school year round.
Right.

Speaker 1 And so in high school, I went to school so much that by the time I got to my last two years of high school, I always since programmed OJT, which is on the job training.

Speaker 1 So instead of having six periods, you would leave after the fourth period and you'd have to have a job and you would get two, your other credits

Speaker 1 through your employer. So your employer would have to like fill out paperwork.
Like, is David, you know, cleaning cars? And like, oh, there's a baby that came in and threw up.

Speaker 1 He did a good job with that. It was disgusting.
But the benefit of that was being able to work

Speaker 1 full time,

Speaker 1 make enough money where I could like buy, I bought like a new car with my own money, like all that other stuff.

Speaker 1 And so like, then I realized like, oh, like, I think I was making like $400 or $500 a week in high school, which is freaking really good. This is like late 90s early 2000s

Speaker 1 and then I was got promoted to being a detailer and that's like you have client list

Speaker 1 and then you start developing relationships and it's like every other business like right and they're like hey I love what you do would you do this at my house or would you do it on my boat that you don't do or like whatever and so my first business was just detailing cars and boats and taking all this other stuff where it's like okay I spent an hour waxing this guy's car I might make 20 bucks I do it at his house I make $150.

Speaker 1 And so like, I've always just had that, like, and again, there's just not like, this is a story you guys read in the books and the stories. It's like, there's no master plan here.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like, hey, I need to make the opportunity.

Speaker 1 All of my other friends were working at McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, where you just said something like they cap. Yep.
I never had a capped upside. Right.

Speaker 1 And then so I did all these other businesses. I started in college because I thought I was going to be a lawyer.

Speaker 1 And this is so silly because everybody, everybody, all my friends that are lawyers hate it. I dodged a bullet there.

Speaker 1 Well, this is that, that's the dream, like the immigrant dream is for like their kids to become lawyers and doctors. Or my parents, not with my parents.
So

Speaker 1 my parents never said the word college to me once, not one time, because they're both high school dropouts. So like

Speaker 1 they, they never let, like, I was one of the only kids in high school to never have a

Speaker 1 curfew. Like my parents knew I was independent and left me.
They gave me, that's the best thing they did. It's like, oh, damn it can take care care of itself.

Speaker 1 They thought, my mom told me, she's like, I just thought you were a lot smarter than everybody else in our family. So like we trusted you to make the right decision.

Speaker 1 Well, it's also driven too, but she,

Speaker 1 because you have to understand, like, being smart in this family is not like being, like, the bar is low in the sense that like they're, they're both coming from multiple generations of people that did not prioritize education or self-improvement.

Speaker 1 So that's why I'm so like ferocious in this because I didn't see that, you know?

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 this demonstrated demonstrated when my mom was dying of cancer um so like you know hippo has this thing where like they're not going to share paperwork or information unless like it gets permission from the person and like my mom could choose whoever she wanted to she could have chose her husband right they had a bad relationship they should have got they got divorced and then remarried they should have stayed divorced but whatever and she you see that with actions we said actions express priority she's like we're in there And she's like, who do you want the paperwork?

Speaker 1 Like, who do you want us to communicate? She's like, David, not her other kids, not her husband, not her sister. and she trusted me implicitly um

Speaker 1 and so i i i essentially like they never mentioned college so i just kept this routine i was like people are like oh um

Speaker 1 they're like what do you want to do for a living and like i remember watching tv when i was younger i was like well i want to be rich and you think when you're younger you don't anything like who's rich on tv like i liked freshmen to bell air i was like you can be a judge or a doctor and i was like oh i can't see blood like that freaks me out so now i could be an attorney so i went to school uh and i worked full time and I was trying to do hustle anything I could do.

Speaker 1 And so the idea was like, okay, I'm just going to go to undergrad for business because I'm interested in business anyways. But I'm only doing that till I get

Speaker 1 till I go to law school. Right.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 this point of this story was not to go on this deviation, but I was in the entrepreneurship program, the pilot won, right? Because I was already interested in trying to make money in any way possible.

Speaker 1 And this is how bad the entrepreneurship was.

Speaker 1 And this is why I'm kind of jealous of these young kids where now you actually have an entrepreneurship industry and there's there's stuff you could learn from.

Speaker 1 The head, the main, the, what is it called? Like the main subject, Entrepreneurship 101, right? The curriculum.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but there's all these other classes, but Entrepreneurship 101 is run the teacher, right? What is her credentials? Her dad started

Speaker 1 an AC company in Florida. You're going to make a lot of money.
Yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. And he died on the job because he got electrocuted to death.
Oh, God.

Speaker 1 And she inherited the company and then she ran it. And so she's the teacher.
And so like the curriculum was terrible. It was terrible.

Speaker 1 The best thing, and this relates to what all we do for a living now, which I could have never predicted, is there was a guy that

Speaker 1 this is kind of like Charlie Munger says you should read, if you want to learn about incentives in a really difficult business, read Les Schwab's autobiography, which I did because Charlie told me to.

Speaker 1 He did it like an episode a long time ago. And he's like, this guy made a ton of money in a really hard business, which is like tires and like oil changes and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 And so the guy was coming into the class. He was going to donate like three or five million dollars to have a building named after him.
And he had one pre-record set.

Speaker 1 He goes, I want to talk to your entrepreneurship students before I give you this money.

Speaker 1 And I learned more in one hour from that dude than I did in two years on entrepreneurship because he would talk for like 20 minutes and then he's like, open up your questions.

Speaker 1 And I lit him up with question after question. Question after question.

Speaker 1 And I remember to this day, just like the simple way, this is like, you know, he was building his business in the probably the 80s and 90s. And he's like,

Speaker 1 how did you know where to expand? And he's like, we would pull the car registration data from the DMVs, right? And we would know how many car owners there were in this specific radius.

Speaker 1 And we'd have to hit like, let's say we need 40,000 car owners in a three-mile radius.

Speaker 1 Are there any other stores? Put a store right there. And they did that over and over and over and over again.
Awesome. Yeah.
And so like, he had ideas like that. And just like.

Speaker 1 Again, you learn through experience. Like that guy could teach us way more because he actually did this compared to what I was doing.

Speaker 1 I think probably all three of us have a like unintended impact of college entrepreneurship programs on us.

Speaker 2 You definitely. I have a minor in entrepreneurship.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Really?

Speaker 2 Yeah, from Ohio State. Similarly, only ever went to public school.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I was a little different. Like I was really into computers.
Like

Speaker 2 when I was 10, my dad and I found a

Speaker 2 PC on the side of the road and he was like, do you want to install Linux? And I was like, what's Linux? And like, he taught me to to use a terminal.

Speaker 2 Like, I was really lucky to have my dad is an engineer, and so I went to college for computer science. But you wait, wait, wait, back up.

Speaker 1 You found a PC on the side of the road

Speaker 1 and you were like, Let's install Linux.

Speaker 2 And my dad's like, I'm willing to bet that thing is just old. Yeah, like he's like, Cause we're looking at the, you know, you're like,

Speaker 2 at that point, you could open computers. So we're like looking at it.
He kind of like picks it apart, looks inside. He's like, it's got all the pieces.
Like, this is just an old computer.

Speaker 1 He's always throwing away.

Speaker 1 That's amazing. All right, keep going.
So you majored in computer science?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I like went in thinking like, I want to have some kind of like, I want to do business and tech, but I didn't know what that meant. And so I found my way to a

Speaker 2 club called the Business Builders Club. And they were like, oh, there's like a real, like an actual minor that you can take.

Speaker 2 And so sort of like through student organizations, found my way to actually doing something in the College of Business, which like

Speaker 2 I go back and forth on whether undergraduate business stuff is useful. Cause on the one hand,

Speaker 1 you can plug it into your network. All your buddies are.
It's all about people. You guys have all done amazing things.

Speaker 2 We just came back from my bachelor party and half the crew is the Business Builders Club, Ohio State friends that I made there.

Speaker 1 The content sucks, but the relationships are everything. But the relationship, that's what.

Speaker 2 And it's not that the stuff you're learning is actually super important, but you don't have the context for why yet.

Speaker 2 It's like you're working on a DCF model and you're like, I don't, this is useless to me. Or you're like learning about depreciation and amortization.
You're like, this is awful because I have nothing.

Speaker 2 Whereas my physics classes were awesome. Like there's labs.
Like I can touch and feel the things and understand

Speaker 2 mechanical advantage and how the free body diagram works. But in these business concepts, they're like super abstract.
And

Speaker 2 they weren't useful to me then.

Speaker 2 But like I went and took a Coursera class last year, two years ago on accounting because I was just like, okay, like I want to actually understand accounting.

Speaker 1 In part, because we talk about it on Acquired all the time.

Speaker 2 And Damad understands this stuff more than I do and I keep it.

Speaker 1 But like,

Speaker 2 it is so much more useful when you understand where the rubber meets the road in the real world.

Speaker 1 Like, it would just be beneficial to just go out and try to sell something. Like, you know what I mean? Like,

Speaker 1 get real-world experience. Like, what did Charlie, I just reread.
Have you guys read The Tao of Charlie Munger? No. I've heard it's good.
Okay.

Speaker 1 I looked at it for the episode or not. I might have.
I own the hardcover. The Kindle, and the audiobook.
That should tell you, like, it's worth it.

Speaker 2 By the way, I own the audiobook and the Kindle of almost every book that I own.

Speaker 1 Including the hardcover too? No. I don't own that.

Speaker 1 You're not a hardcover person. Oh, because you can also switch.
That's the whisper sync or whatever it's called.

Speaker 2 And all the time, I actually hate that they sync and they because

Speaker 2 my common workflow in doing acquired research is I listen to the book and then I'll take some notes and Apple notes of like half quotes where I'm like, oh, I got to look this up later.

Speaker 2 And then I go back in the Kindle and I search for the actual quote and like pull out the data to be able to use it in the episodes.

Speaker 1 I think listening to the audiobook before reading the book is very helpful. It gives you a basic overview.
It's almost like reading a Wikipedia page before you read the biography.

Speaker 1 It's not enough detail, but like you have, okay, you have an area.

Speaker 1 It's like watching a movie for the second or third time, you know how it ends and it gives you pick up on things you missed the first time.

Speaker 1 In the town of Charlie Munger though, Charlie was talking about this where he's just like, I learned about business at the Buffett grocery store, right, from the cash register.

Speaker 1 He's like, because that money is the lifeblood of all, I think the quote in the book is like, money is the lifeblood of all businesses.

Speaker 1 And that's where the cash, that's where the money was at this point.

Speaker 1 And it's like you just learn, and he says, like, you learn the importance of like showing up on time, how to work with people you don't like, like how to service, like take care of your customers.

Speaker 1 Like, these are things that are all like universally applicable.

Speaker 1 That there, there's, it's another form of education. Like, that's the biggest, the key of experience and why it's so important.
It's the most valuable form of education because it's education of life.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like, I love to read like.
more than almost anybody else. Like, you guys obviously love to read.

Speaker 1 There's just so much things you can't learn from books. So it's just like, it's not enough.

Speaker 2 David, what was your college entrepreneurship?

Speaker 1 Well, it's funny. It's more thematic than an actual impact.
But

Speaker 1 I can't remember if I've talked about this before.

Speaker 1 Princeton had then just one entrepreneurship class. It was like one class in the Department of Electrical Engineering.

Speaker 1 I was not an electrical engineer, but people knew about this because I was like, oh, this is cool.

Speaker 1 And I, so senior year, I had already, the recruiting happened in the fall, so I was already like had my job, investment banking job that I was going to go do. Yep.

Speaker 1 a whole nother kit of worms. But

Speaker 1 I was like, oh, you know, I'll take this class. It's supposed to be good.
I'm going to go work on Wall Street. I should learn about high-tech entrepreneurship was the name of the class.
And

Speaker 1 it was like all, you know, guest lecture. It was, it was case,

Speaker 1 case method. And Ed Chow, the professor, would have guests come in.
One of the guests, either the last or like the second to last class, was Tim Ferriss.

Speaker 1 Right before he published the four-hour work. No way.

Speaker 1 He asked Buffett a question at the end of the meeting.

Speaker 1 He totally hustled this. He traded on that name for years before he made it as Tim Ferris.

Speaker 2 Because he just went in for one class.

Speaker 1 It was one class. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was one day of one course, and that was like this case study class. And I think he had taken the class when he was at Princeton.

Speaker 1 And the professor liked him and kind of took a shine to him.

Speaker 2 So you and I then are guest lecturers at Columbia.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah, oh, yeah.
yeah, we're yeah, we're guest lecturers everywhere.

Speaker 1 So, he came in, and so he was working on the book, but it was like done, but like was about to get published.

Speaker 1 And so, he came in, and the whole like class was like basically telling his story and then like chilling the book. I remember in my notes, like for the class, I titled them.

Speaker 1 I have them still somewhere on my, on an old computer. The title was Supplement Guy

Speaker 1 Do what you love, yeah, do what you love. Oh, my God, it was and then oh man, afterwards,

Speaker 1 talking about missed opportunities, he

Speaker 1 was, he's like, he's older than me, but he's not that much older. So you'd only been out for a couple of years.
So class ends, and he was like, hey, guys, anybody want to hang out?

Speaker 1 Like, I'm going to go, you know, I'm going to go hang at Terrace. Like, if you want to come at the Princeton has eating clubs instead of, they do have fraternities, but like,

Speaker 1 one of them is Terrace. And Jenny was actually in Terrace.
And,

Speaker 1 you know, it was like, basically, I'm going to go like hang out and have a good time with anybody who wants to come along. And I was like, nah

Speaker 2 no i'll see you on the podcast circuit later

Speaker 1 i love how this just was uncovered in random conversation right it was just like computer science investment banking law yeah no but like no common denominator no and like and look where i use theater more than i use computer science yeah like that was what yeah i like the idea for like from venture capitalists and podcasters right um i went and uh

Speaker 1 my daughter asked me to go speak at um at career day oh hell yeah. And this is last year, so she would have been

Speaker 1 the greatest thing. She would have been in fourth grade, right? I can't wait.
And so she's like, well, daddy, like you have a weird job. Like, will you come in?

Speaker 1 Yeah, she's like, will you come in and like give a talk? And so you mentioned earlier, like, entrepreneurs are like odd ducks and like crazy people. They don't like, they don't, like, they see rules.

Speaker 1 I was like, oh, that's just words written down on paper. Like, I'll just do my own thing.
So I show up. I was like, yeah, I'll do anything for you, like, whatever you want.

Speaker 1 And so I show up and

Speaker 1 there's two,

Speaker 1 each class at the school school she has has two teachers, right? And so they're like, oh, well, we didn't, hi, Mr. Sunder, we didn't get your email.

Speaker 1 Did you get like, did you bring like a thumb drive? I'm like, what was I supposed to email? And why would I have a thumb drive? And they're like, you're a PowerPoint presentation.

Speaker 1 And I go, have you ever made a PowerPoint presentation in your life? And I go, no, but this is right. I go, they're nine.
Why would I make a PowerPoint presentation?

Speaker 1 And so I go there and I was like, I was like, listen, I'm fine. Like, I'll wing, like, I got this.
Like, they're like, you're going to wing it.

Speaker 1 They didn't use the word wing it, but I forgot what it was.

Speaker 2 So you're like, no, really?

Speaker 1 I got this. And I show up, right? And they're all like sitting on the floor.
And there's like 39-year-olds. Like, you're like, stand up.
No, no, no, no, never. And so I want to see some energy.

Speaker 1 And I was like, I talk for two minutes, right? I have 30-minute slot. I go,

Speaker 1 I talked for two minutes. I was like, listen,

Speaker 1 don't listen to your parents. Don't listen to,

Speaker 1 don't listen to your teachers. I go, follow whatever you're intensely.
I just gave Charlie Munger's advice. I go, what are you interested in? Keep following that.

Speaker 1 Even if it doesn't, there's not an obvious career path. And I used a word, I go, it's highly likely that the job that you're going to have has not yet been invented.

Speaker 1 I was like, there was no such thing as a podcaster. Like, I couldn't go to school.
Yeah, they're all going to be product engineers.

Speaker 1 Or whatever. And like, so that was like the two-minute summary.
And I said a little bit more than that. I go, okay, now what questions do you have for me? And so I spent the next 28 minutes.

Speaker 1 I told them the importance of reading. I was like, listen, your friends are all going to be these stupid apps.
I was like, you're going to have no attention span.

Speaker 1 Learn how to read and read whatever you're interested in.

Speaker 1 your daughter's probably like oh no so I'll tell you the funny thing so then 28 minutes and then they're telling me about books they love they're like oh I like Harry Potter and I like this and I like travel and we had like the greatest time right

Speaker 1 so I come back I see this is like nine in the morning I leave

Speaker 1 and I my daughter gets out you know later on in the day and she goes

Speaker 1 daddy thank you very much

Speaker 1 My friends thought your talk was the best. I was like, oh, that's like interesting.
Like that's, I'm glad they liked it. I go, well, let me ask you a question.
Who came after me?

Speaker 1 And they're like, oh, it was, you know, John's mom or something. I was like, oh, what does John's mom do? She's like,

Speaker 1 I go, well, first of all, should you do a PowerPoint? She goes, yes, everybody did a PowerPoint. And I go, what does John's mom do? She goes, oh, she's a corporate attorney.

Speaker 1 I'm like, so you like, they're nine years old.

Speaker 2 And also, that's like the alternate future for you. Yeah.
Like it was like,

Speaker 1 you would have had a PowerPoint.

Speaker 2 It was like Bizarro David going after you.

Speaker 1 It'd be interesting, like what you would.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but then again,

Speaker 1 I'm was living in Florida and like the law there is not a lot, like you'd have to move to like DC. Like, the law there is like insurance.
Like, so I'm at the San Francisco airport, right?

Speaker 1 Which is way nicer than Miami International Airport, by the way. It's like, I've never been to Miami anymore.
Oh, it's like third world, man. It's real.
It's like the ceilings are low.

Speaker 1 They have the new vert, they built like this new part, but

Speaker 1 SFO is way nicer than mine. And I see this billboard of, it says the world's America's largest personal injury attorney.
That guy was in Orlando. Orlando.
I was going to school in Orlando at the time.

Speaker 1 His name's John Morgan. He was famous back then, and now he has.
So, like, that I probably work for him. Like, I'm like chasing ambulances or whatever.
No, no, no disrespect.

Speaker 1 Like, whatever you got to do to pay your bills. Like, I have no problem with that.
But,

Speaker 1 yeah, I just thought it was funny. I was like, you also have to think independently.
Like, they're nine years old. Like, they don't want to sit through.

Speaker 1 I don't even want to sit through a PowerPoint.

Speaker 1 You can't sit through a PowerPoint. No, you should, like, try to, like, I would have just brought a video game console or something.
I was like, that's just my video games.

Speaker 1 You know, maybe you could design.

Speaker 1 Blake and Mitch, Blake Robbins and Mitch Lasky made the point in one of their GameCraft episodes that I never even thought of. They're like, you know how hard it is how few pure software companies are

Speaker 1 that sell over a billion dollars a year in software and how many game companies they said on the podcast, like there's so many video game companies that make so much money.

Speaker 1 I think they say this is bigger than

Speaker 1 The video game industry is bigger than music, movies, and books combined or whatever. It has been since the 90s.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was the interesting thing we uncovered on the Nintendo episode is that stat gets bantied around bantered?

Speaker 1 Bandied?

Speaker 2 Bandied around a lot right now, which is it's very interesting because like the video game market has done this, but

Speaker 2 the video game market has basically always been larger than TV and movies combined, but has never gotten attention or like been thought of as a market.

Speaker 1 That's one of those secrets that's been out there for 30 years that people haven't paid attention to. Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right. I'm afraid of these memory cards filling up.
Um, this has been wonderful.

Speaker 1 Yep. Thanks for having me, guys.

Speaker 2 Listeners, thank you.

Speaker 1 We almost never say this, but I think we got to do this again. Let's do it again.
I'll be here next week.

Speaker 1 Thanks, guys. We'll see you next time.
All right. Bye.

Speaker 2 All right, listeners. It's time to talk about another one of our favorite companies, StatSig.
Since you last heard from us about StatSig, they have a very exciting update.

Speaker 2 They raised their Series C, valuing them at $1.1 billion.

Speaker 1 Yeah, huge milestone. Congrats to the team.
And timing is interesting because the experimentation space is really heating up.

Speaker 2 Yes. So why do investors value StatSig at over a billion dollars? It's because experimentation has become a critical part of the product stack for the world's best product teams.
Yep.

Speaker 1 This trend started with Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and Netflix and Airbnb. Those companies faced a problem.

Speaker 1 How do you maintain a fast, decentralized product and engineering culture while also scaling up to thousands of employees. Experimentation systems were a huge part of that answer.

Speaker 1 These systems gave everyone at those companies access to a global set of product metrics, from page views to watch time to performance.

Speaker 1 And then every time a team released a new feature or product, they could measure the impact of that feature on those metrics.

Speaker 2 So Facebook could set a company-wide goal like increasing time in app and let individual teams go and figure out how to achieve it.

Speaker 2 Multiply this across thousands of engineers and PMs and boom, you get exponential growth. It's no wonder that experimentation is now seen as essential infrastructure.

Speaker 1 Yep. Today's best product teams like Notion, OpenAI, Ripling, and Figma are equally reliant on experimentation.
But instead of building it in-house, they just use StatSig.

Speaker 1 And they don't just use StatSig for experimentation.

Speaker 1 Over the last few years, StatSig has added all the tools that fast product teams need, like feature flags, product analytics, session replays, and more.

Speaker 2 So if you would like to help your team's engineers and PMs figure out how to build faster and make smarter decisions, go to statsig.com/slash acquired or click the link in the show notes.

Speaker 2 They have a super generous free tier, a $50,000 startup program and affordable enterprise contracts for large companies. Just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

Speaker 2 Well, listeners, thank you for going on the journey with us with David. We would love your feedback on the sessions format as we sort of continue to refine it.

Speaker 2 It's obviously very different than our L VMH, Nintendo style episodes, and getting your thoughts on how we can continue to improve it would be hugely helpful.

Speaker 1 Also, go check out the Founders podcast.

Speaker 2 Search founders in any podcast player. Also, if you want to go deeper, you can become an acquired LP to come closer into the acquired kitchen.

Speaker 2 We have bimonthly Zoom calls, and we just announced that we will be asking our LPs to help us pick future episodes. So you can join at acquired.fm slash LP.

Speaker 2 You should subscribe to our second show, ACQ2, formerly the lp show for expert interviews with founders and investors just search acq2 all one word in any podcast player also join us in the slack discuss this episode and all the others there's now over 15 000 smart thoughtful kind members at acquired dot fm slash slack it's pretty cool i think david that represents only like five to ten percent of those of you out there who listen every month it's funny i literally texted ben yesterday and i was listening to the nintendo episode that we just released.

Speaker 1 And I was like, the way we talk about the acquired Slack, it kind of makes it sound like only 15,000 people listen to Acquired. No, that is 5% of the people that listen to Acquired.

Speaker 2 Yeah, all the rest of you come join us in the Slack, acquired.fm slash Slack. I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's just a great way for us to get a better pulse on all of you, who you are, and what you like or don't like or want us to improve about the show. So that's all we got, listeners.
Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 We'll see you next time.

Speaker 1 We'll see you next time. Who got the