Founders - #331 Christian Dior

Starting point is 00:00:00 Back in 2019, one of the co-founders of my favorite app, the best app I pay for, I literally could not make the podcast without it, is called ReadWise. I've been talking about it for years. I've been tweeting about it for years. Every single other interview on other people's podcasts I go on, I talk about this. And I did this way before I knew I was going to partner with them on my own product. So I built this product with ReadWise. It's called Founders Notes. You can see it at foundersnotes.com and it's founders with an S just like the podcast. So foundersnotes.com. I got a DM from Tristan in 2019 and he was the one that made me aware of ReadWise. It was perfect. And the reason it was perfect is

Starting point is 00:00:34 because I have way more highlights and notes on my books than most people do. So I have over 20,000 over the years, I've added over 20,000 highlights and notes for all the books that I read for the podcast to the ReadWise app. And the reason I do that is because I'm able to search everything that I've ever done. I use this every day. I search it every day. It really is the world's most valuable notebook for founders. So I contacted the founders of ReadWise and said, hey, can we do this? Can we actually do this project together? I want to make my own version. I want people to have access to everything that I see.

Starting point is 00:01:11 Literally, if you sign up at foundersnotes.com, you are able to search and see every single one of my highlights and notes. It's exactly what I see. And so as an illustration of just one of the ways that I use this is at the end of this episode, I'm going to include this 20 minute episode I made where somebody asked me, like, how did history's greatest entrepreneurs think about hiring? And anytime I'm asked a question like that, anytime I'm making a podcast, what I do is I'm constantly searching my Readwise app, which is now available at foundersnotes.com. And just it gives me a complete list of all the different ways that

Starting point is 00:01:47 history's greatest founders have thought about whatever subject I happen to be thinking about or working on or investigating. So at the very end of this episode, you're going to hear me speak for 20 minutes. And it's answering the question, how did history's greatest entrepreneurs think about hiring? And all that information came from me searching my notes and highlights, which is exactly what you can do with founders notes. Keep in mind, this is made for founders already running successful companies. Those already running successful companies will get the most value out of this because it's a way for you to reference the thoughts and ideas of history's greatest founders. And then you know how to apply them to whatever's going on in your company at this very moment. The other thing I want to tell you,

Starting point is 00:02:28 it is currently priced at 50% what it will be. So it's actually going to double in price. And the reason I did this is because I'm adding a bunch of features that I think are incredible. And I have to build out the landing page and everything else. If you sign up now, obviously, as I add features, you don't have to pay any additional. I truly do believe it is the world's most valuable notebook for founders. And the value you get out of it will be incredible. You can get immediate access to over

Starting point is 00:02:48 20,000 of my highlights and notes right now by going to foundersnotes.com. A sensation was caused by an unknown designer named Christian Dior. He was producing long, full dresses using prodigious quantities of precious materials and thumbing his nose at wartime austerity. His new collection electrified rich, fashion-conscious ladies in all nations. But who was Christian Dior and where did he come from? His father was a successful businessman who ran a fertilizer factory specializing in liquid manure. The foundation of the Dior empire was shit, in the literal sense. 50 years from now, Dior would be the beginning

Starting point is 00:03:29 of Bernard Arnault's LVMH empire, which I talked about on episode 296, if you haven't listened to that episode already. It's one of my favorite episodes I've ever made. The profits of liquid manure allowed the Dior family to maintain a house in Paris, and a young Christian Dior took full advantage of it. He would love to draw, love dressing up with the help of his adoring mother, and he enjoyed

Starting point is 00:03:50 designing dresses for his sisters. He's a kid when he's doing this. That's another example of something you and I talk about all the time, that true interest is revealed early. But he did not start out working in the fashion business. One of his first jobs, he actually became a partner in an art business. His father putting up the, he actually became a partner in an art business, his father putting up the money on behalf of the son. This is the prehistory of Dior's fashion business. Then troubles came. His brother was locked up in an insane asylum.

Starting point is 00:04:15 His mother died. And then in 1931, during the Great Depression, his father went bankrupt. Virtually all of the art galleries, including Dior's, failed. Without this financial disaster, Dior would probably have spent his life as a middle-ranking art dealer and died unknown. That's another example of one of my favorite ideas that comes up in these biographies over and over again, that opportunity is a strange beast. It frequently appears after a loss at this time. This is the best thing, him failing as an art dealer is the best thing that ever happened to him. He just certainly didn't feel so at the time. And so after this, Christian Dior actually gets a job working for

Starting point is 00:04:55 the designer Lucien LeLong, and he actually spends about 10 years working for him before he gets his break. And they describe this as hovering on the fringes of the fashion industry. Then came a unique stroke of fortune that transformed his life. Something that would allow a frustrated would-be creator to fulfill his destiny. Dior certainly believed in luck, and that is even an understatement. Christian Dior believed in fortune tellers. He believed what they told him when they forecast his destiny to be true. A wise woman, as he called him, that is a fortune teller, had told him that women will be very lucky for you. You will earn much money from them and travel widely. As of July 1946, however, this is one of the craziest

Starting point is 00:05:37 sentences when you think about the life of Christian Dior. As of July 1946, however, Dior was a nobody in his 40s with nothing in his design career to suggest genius. Then that month he met Marcel Boussac. So I'm going to pause right there. One of my favorite paragraphs I've ever read in anything I've read for the podcast so far came from this excellent essay by Paul Graham. I covered it all the way back on episode 314. The essay is called How to Do Great Work. This is what Paul Graham noticed because he's read a bunch of biographies,

Starting point is 00:06:07 and I noticed the same as I read a bunch of biographies. When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it is remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of chance, meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck. And the way to do that is to be curious. Christian Dior is going to meet Marcel Boussac because of the relationships that he developed

Starting point is 00:06:29 in the previous decade working in the Paris fashion industry. So it says that that month he met Marcel Boussac, a textile magnate who was called King Cotton. Boussac wanted to own a big Paris fashion house to give prestige to his booming but humdrum business. Someone told him that Dior might be able to produce ideas, hence their meeting. So they went at meeting and this is Dior did something that was genius. And then as you understand his personality so far outside of his normal personality, he was, when you read his autobiography, most of the people you and I talk about, they have a lot of self-confidence. Christian Dior is the opposite. He is constantly

Starting point is 00:07:03 plagued by imposter syndromes and doubt and uncertainty. And so looking back at his life, the fact that he said this to Boussac, what I'm about to read to you, is a miracle. So Christian Dior takes a tour of Boussac's factory. He's like, I don't want to run this at all. And so he says, I am not interested in managing a clothing factory. What you need and what I would like to run is a craftsman workshop in which we would recruit the very best people in the trade to reestablish in Paris a salon for the greatest

Starting point is 00:07:31 luxury and the highest standards of workmanship. It will cost a great deal of money and entail much risk. Boussac liked the idea and offered to set up Dior with an investment of 10 million francs. This was later increased to 100 million francs for the investment that Boussac is going to make in Christian Dior, and then it's going to pay off handsomely. At the last minute, this is what I meant about him constantly struggling with imposter syndrome. He had never started a business before. His first experiment as an entrepreneur is going to be the Christian Dior brand that still exists to this day. At the last minute, Dior was frightened and almost turned down the offer, but he was persuaded into it by his fortune teller. Dior doubled the risk of opening a new fashion house with his revolutionary new look, a deliberate and defiant return to the most

Starting point is 00:08:15 extravagant use of material. He spat in the face of post-war egalitarian democracy and said, I want to make the rich feel rich again. His first collection turned out to be the most successful in fashion history. Christian Dior recruited and continued to employ the best people to be found in France, men and women who would rather die than turn out a piece of clothing which was in the tiniest degree below the best in the world. When I first read this, the note I left myself was this is the Pixar of fashion houses. When Steve Jobs, he said the first 400 employees at Pixar was the only company he ever came across in his entire life that was an entire company of A players. When he went back to Apple in 97,

Starting point is 00:09:07 I think he said they had around 3,000 employees. And he's like, of course, you can't have a collection of 3,000 A players. But Pixar proved to Steve Jobs that it was possible to have 400 A players inside of one company. The success of the fashion house was immediate and prolonged. And the volume of business continued to grow steadily

Starting point is 00:09:21 in the 10 years up to Dior's death in 1957, by which time the House of Dior employed a thousand of the finest experts ever gathered together under one roof. During this decade, Dior sold over 100,000 dresses made from 16,000 design sketches and using a thousand miles of fabric. Okay, so that was an excerpt not from the book I'm going to talk to you about today. That was actually this book called Creators. It was written by one of my favorite authors, this guy named Paul Johnson. It is like a 15, I think it has 15 chapters on some of history's greatest creators. So people like Picasso, Walt Disney, Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Shakespeare, Mark Twain. It is an excellent little book. I highly recommend you pick up a copy for yourself. But the reason I wanted to start there is because I had previously attempted to read

Starting point is 00:10:09 Christian Dior's autobiography, which came out almost 80 years ago. And Dior is very much an eclectic, a very, he's an odd duck. The way I described this book before was that Christian Dior writes like Willy Wonka speaks. Even the structure of the book is bizarre. He puts his, the last chapter is on his childhood, like his early life. But reading Paul Johnson's overview of the life and career of Christian Dior inspired me to pick up his autobiography and reread it. And I'm glad I did because Christian Dior is maybe one of the most unique people. He just stands out.

Starting point is 00:10:41 Think about it, like you and I study people, and even Christian Dior is uncommon amongst uncommon people, because how many people do we study that had no entrepreneurial leanings at all that other people would describe by the time they're in their 40s that they were nobodies and they had nothing to suggest any kind of genius? There's a lot of people that become successful and achieve their greatest work later in life. But you'll hear from people when they were younger that they showed signs of talent or obsessiveness or drive that was unusual compared to the people around them. No one describes Christian Dior like that. He doesn't even describe himself like that. So I want to go through his autobiography and I want to see if you and I together can figure out the mystery that is Christian Dior. I have to start with something that was very fascinating because again, like I'm pretty sure you don't believe

Starting point is 00:11:28 in fortune tellers, just like I don't believe in fortune tellers. But the important thing is like that Dior believed in them and that sometimes it's helpful to have something outside of yourself that pushes you, even though you're right, you're filled with, with doubt. Dior was rife with insecurities and uncertainties, certainly before he was successful, but even after he was successful. And he does credit the multiple visits to his fortune tellers with helping him move forward in times of doubt. And this is so important to him that the very first chapter, the very first chapter, very first paragraph, this is what he says. I must acknowledge my debt to the fortune tellers who have predicted it. And there's several examples in the book where he quotes what they tell him.

Starting point is 00:12:08 This is way before he had any success. And this is what one of them said. You will suffer poverty, but women are lucky for you. And through them, you will achieve success. You will make a great deal of money out of them and you will travel widely. Do you want to know when that happened to him? That happened to him in 1919. He was 14. He was 14 years old when she's reading his palm and she gave him that prediction for his future success. And so it's obvious from a young age that he was rife with insecurities and doubts about himself and his talents. He was also, as he ages and he goes through his career, he's also packed full of hypocrisies. And you'll see this because he says, listen, I had spent 10 happy years as a designer at Lucien Lalonde and it was

Starting point is 00:12:50 a delightful existence. Why? Because he just had a job. He did not want to be an entrepreneur. He did not want the stress that comes from leading your own fashion house. He says, I had none of the responsibilities of putting my designs into practice, nor the burden of an executive job. But yet 10 years in, he's like, well, maybe I'm just making another man rich. The good, the interesting thing about the Paris fashion industry at this point in history, it's like a lot of the other, there's this idea of seniors that the highest quality people tend to cluster together in very important times. So if you are young, mechanically inclined, talented person interested in automobiles and it's your 1900, you're living in Detroit. If you love making hand-built cars to

Starting point is 00:13:30 race in the 1940s and 50s, you're living in Italy. If you're interested in computers and software in the last 50 years, you're probably in Silicon Valley. In this part, if you're interested in fashion and you're alive in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, you are in Paris. And so he sees other people working inside of his same company leaving. So one of these guys, I'm not a fashion person, so I can never pronounce any of these names. But a lot of these brands are still around. Obviously, Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga. But there's a guy named Pierre Balmain. And so he leaves and he decides to start a new house under his own name. This company is still, it's 78 years old and it's still in existence to this day. And so this is why I'm

Starting point is 00:14:10 telling you all this, because this is what's going on inside the mind of a young Christian Dior. This had the effect of making me think seriously about my own future. For the first time, I wondered whether I was really devoid of any personal ambition. Up until this point, he didn't think he was ambitious. I was working all the time to achieve the financial success of another man. I was toiling in the bonds of his creative inspiration. And so there's a friend of his that is saying, hey, everybody knew who Marcel Boussac was. It's like, you know, he's like one of the most famous entrepreneurs and financiers at this point. And they're like, they're looking for this, somebody to make a fashion house.

Starting point is 00:14:41 And meekly and with great reservation, Christian Dior offers himself up and he says, would I do? And that took a lot for him to do because this is how he describes what happens. These harmless words were scarcely out of my mouth when I was overcome with horror. I suddenly foresaw the dreadful consequences of my rashness. This is not a self-confident man. This is not a risk taker. He is terrified of risk. He just saw his entire family fortune, which goes back to his great-great-grandfather. His great-great-grandfather was one of the first people in France to ever import bat guano, which is just bat shit. His great-great-grandfather, I think in 1832, was the first person in France to import bat shit from Chile and use it as fertilizer in Europe. That was the beginning

Starting point is 00:15:31 of the Dior family empire, which had just collapsed 100 years later in the Great Depression. So it makes sense that he was terrified of being an entrepreneur or taking any kind of risk because he saw his family fortune that lasted 100 years disappear in one decade. And so what Christian Dior has at his core is imposter syndrome. And the way he got around this is he literally invented a character, an alter ego. This is very similar. If you ever heard Kobe Bryant talk about when he plays basketball, he's like, Kobe Bryant is only off the court. When I'm on the court, I'm the black mamba. And so throughout this book, Christian Dior talks about this, and there's a Christian Dior, the person, and then there's Christian Dior, the designer, the courtier, the fashion house. That is over time at the very end

Starting point is 00:16:13 of the book, which is published. He's writing right before he dies. He doesn't know he's going to die because he dies relatively young. He dies at 52 from a heart attack. But he's like, over time, they merge together. But at the beginning, he saw them as completely separate entities. Having entered very late into this profession, where others had spent a lifetime learning, and having had no training to guide me except my own instincts, I had always been afraid of betraying my ignorance of it. He does not think he has talent. Perhaps it was this very fear of remaining the perpetual amateur that spurred me on to

Starting point is 00:16:40 brush aside my doubts at last and invent the character of Christian Dior. And so this is his description of going to meet Marcel Boussac. And at this point, he was trying to restore this brand called Gaston to its former glory. And Christian Dior thinks, oh, this might be a good opportunity. Then he takes a tour and he's depressed. He's like, I don't want to do this. And this is what he says. My heart sank at the thought of the hazards involved, the cobwebs, which would have to be swept away, the difficulties of coping with a staff which had been set in its ways for so many years and would certainly resent changes. So essentially saying, I don't want to come in and fix this decaying company. I want to start from scratch. I want to do it my way is what he's

Starting point is 00:17:19 saying. In short, it's the impossibility of making something new out of something old. In a trade where novelty is all important, I decided that it was not meant by nature to raise corpses from the dead. I was not meant by nature to raise corpses from the dead. My answer to him was no. As I sat down facing him, I suddenly realized what my true ambition was. Here was a famous financier who was at the same time a man of wide and cultivated intelligence. I suddenly heard myself telling him that what I really wanted to do was not resurrect Gaston, but create a new court courtier house. I don't know how to pronounce any French words.

Starting point is 00:17:59 I'm sorry, but create a new fashion house under my own name. I wanted a house in which every single thing would be new. I described to him the house of my dreams. I envisioned my house as a craftsman's workshop rather than a clothing factory. And so that's when he lays out this hugely ambitious project, completely different with Marcel Boussac kind of mind and Marcel Boussac being obviously a very formidable individual, very, he was an entrepreneur through and through, took a lot of risks. He's like, okay, let's do this. And here's the unexpected problem.

Starting point is 00:18:30 That's not what Christian Dior wanted him to say. When he hears that Boussac is definitely interested in his project, he spends several days in what he calls a tortured state of doubt. He is terrified of taking a risk. He says, on my side, this was not intransigence from conceit. It was from a secret unacknowledged desire to escape from the whole thing. This feeling of panic eventually led me to send a telegram breaking off negotiations completely. Now, this is why it's so important. It was at this juncture that I went to see my fortune teller.

Starting point is 00:19:03 Now, this is, again, the mind is a powerful place, what you feed it affects you in a powerful way. He believed this to be true. It doesn't matter that other people, you and I from this vantage point, it's like, obviously, probably don't believe in fortune tellers. That's irrelevant. Dior believed it to be true. This conversation with the fortune teller actually convinces him, regardless of your self-doubt, how terrified you are, you must do this. She ordered me sternly to accept the Boussac offer at once. You must create the house of Christian Dior, whatever the conditions. Nothing anyone will offer you later will compare with the chance which is open to you now. I therefore resign myself to the inevitable.

Starting point is 00:19:43 Listen to that advice. You must create the house of Christian Dior, whatever the conditions. Nothing anyone will offer you later will compare with the chance which is open to you now. So once he decided to go ahead, this is when he starts to, the way I think about this, he starts building the Pixar of fashion houses. He's building a team of fanatics and Christian Dior is definitely a fanatic. And so he talks a little bit about his thinking behind this. I knew that if I were to emerge victorious, I had to be equipped with a first class staff. So he's just going to go over a few of the first people that he hires. So Raymond was to become my second self. She is my exact

Starting point is 00:20:21 compliment. She plays reason to my fantasy, order to my imagination, discipline to my freedom, foresight to my recklessness. She has supplied me with all the qualities which I have never had time to acquire for myself. Another early hire is Burkhard. Burkhard is one of those people increasingly rare who make elegance their sole reason for being. She is superbly indifferent to such mundane considerations as politics, finance, or social change. All she cares about is fashion and elegance. And this is one of the most important sentences in him describing her. Her high standards are inflexible. He finds and hires yet another fanatic. This is how he describes

Starting point is 00:21:04 Marguerite. Marguerite is so much in love with her work that our partnership has had the character of a grand passion. If the world came to an end while she was pouring over a dress, I really do not believe that she would notice. Nothing is ever beautiful enough or perfect enough for her. She will stitch, unstitch, cut, cut again a hundred times, and she still will not be satisfied. She was exactly the sort of person I needed, someone whose love of clothes equaled my own. And so in addition to hiring only the most

Starting point is 00:21:36 talented people he could find, he also, of course, studied the history of the industry that he's operating in. He talks about Balenciaga. He calls Balenciaga the master of us all. I go into more detail about that on episode 315, the episode I did on Balenciaga, because it's hard to believe that they consider him the greatest of all the Paris fashion designers, given the state of the brand today. But I just want to pull out one thing. He's talking about Coco Chanel, and I love what he said about her here. Outstanding among them all was Coco Chanel, who dominated all the rest. In her personality, as well as in her taste, she had style, elegance, and authority. I've done two episodes on Coco Chanel. The one I'd recommend listening to, though, if you haven't listened to it already, is episode 199. Coco

Starting point is 00:22:18 Chanel is very different from Christian Dior in the sense that there is all these people that run into a very young Coco Chanel, even before she was rich and famous, and just saw an unbelievable amount of talent and drive, where obviously that's not true for people to interact with Christian Dior earlier in his life. In fact, one of my favorite things, one of my favorite historical anecdotes about Coco Chanel was the fact that, I think she's dating the Duke of Windsor at the time. And Duke of Windsor was friends with Winston Churchill. This is way before World War Two. This happened in 1927. And we have copies of Churchill's the letters he's writing to his wife. And he talks about meeting Coco Chanel for the first time. And he says this in 1927 about her. And he said that Coco Chanel was fit to rule a man or an empire. I just love that idea of Churchill writing about young Coco Chanel. So he goes back to, hey, this is, I'm going after, he's designing it for the rich.

Starting point is 00:23:11 He wants the people to feel rich again. He wants to fight against this post-war, post-World War II austerity. So he says, I aimed at a fairly restricted clientele. There's a great line about Dior and Balenciaga that Dior was for the rich and that Balenciaga was for the wealthy. But he's talking about his relationship with Boussac. Boussac realized that he was dealing with a conscientious craftsman and not a megalomaniac. Craftsmanship, the importance

Starting point is 00:23:35 of being a craftsman is something that Dior repeats over and over again. A few pages later, he repeats this. Far from wanting to revolutionize fashion, I was chiefly concerned with producing a high standard of workmanship. I aimed at being considered a good craftsman. He uses that word again. That idea of craftsmanship, something you and I talk about over and over again. Steve Jobs talked about it a bunch. My favorite description of this actually came from this biography of George Lucas. I read, I think it's episode 35 of Founders.

Starting point is 00:24:02 I read it years ago. I need to reread it because it's such an excellent book. It's called George Lucas, A Life, and it's written by this author who does, he's a great biographer. His name's Brian J. Jones. But in that book, this is what George Lucas said. My thing about art is that I don't like the word art because it means pretension and bullshit. And I equate those two directly. I don't think of myself as an artist. I'm a craftsman. I don't make a work of art. I make a movie. I just did Christopher Nolan's biography. I think it was episode maybe 317. He said the same thing. I feel more of a craftsman than an artist, genuinely. With people that get excessively good at what they do, we see

Starting point is 00:24:38 that theme over and over again. Same thing, Brunello Cucinelli in his autobiography. My goal is to produce high quality items manufactured with Italian craftsmanship and manual skills. This is not a new idea. Socrates would go around Athens constantly asking people, he loved to question people about how they did their work. And there's a great line in his biography. It says craftsmanship fascinated him. And something Christian Dior talks about is the amount of work and time and effort that goes into building something that you can be proud of. Steve Jobs echoed that same sentiment. He says they have no conception of the craftsmanship that is required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. As Christian Dior is building out his first collection, he says an idea that's really fascinating.

Starting point is 00:25:21 That a lack of information and an increase in mysteriousness can actually cause speculation and that this gossip is actually free advertising. He calls it free propaganda. It is widely and quite erroneously believed that when the House of Christian Dior was launched, enormous sums were spent on publicity. On the contrary, not a single penny was allotted to it. The relative secrecy in which I chose to work aroused a positive whispering campaign, And yet here's the interesting part. He was doing his best to avoid publicity, and yet it found him, likely influenced by the fact that he was avoiding it. So this is likely influenced by gossip and whispers. And this is really important

Starting point is 00:26:06 because he's going to get profiled in Life Magazine. His biggest customers by far were not the French. They were not the Europeans. They were the Americans. Think about where we are in world history. This is post-World War II. America economy is booming. And so this was an unbelievable lucky break.

Starting point is 00:26:22 My most fortunate piece of publicity was quite unplanned. Life Magazine asked me to do a piece. At the time, I had no idea of the importance of an article in life in launching anything. Like fortune, the goddess of publicity often seems to smile most favorably on those who court her the least. And what's fascinating is the closer he gets to the launch, the more nervous and the more tortured he becomes. His collection's cut. He's got really talented people. He likes what he's making. He's starting to get a lot of publicity. And he's constantly trying to, like, I need to run out of here.

Starting point is 00:26:52 He's just, there's just constant self-doubt that he's got to force himself to overcome. I felt that too many hosts were being pinned on me, and I was incapable of fulfilling them. It was only with the greatest possible reluctance that I was finally persuaded to show my dresses to my friends one evening just before their formal presentation to the public. And so the next day is when he launches what they said was the most successful fashion line launch in fashion history. And there's a few sentences from here. The entry of each model was accompanied by gusts of applause. I stuffed my ears, terrified of feeling confident too soon. It was an immediate success. The response by all the people inside of his fashion house couldn't be more enthusiastic. And this is what he says. As long as I live, whatever triumphs I win,

Starting point is 00:27:43 nothing will ever exceed my feelings at that supreme moment. And throughout the book, you just can't help but root for his success because really it just comes down. He just he was obsessed with what he was doing. He loved it. He was fanatical about it. And at the end of the day, he essentially when I'm reading this, there's a bunch of

Starting point is 00:28:01 notes where I have to myself, which is like my interpretation of what he's telling us. I just wanted to make something that people love. And he says, all my pleasure arose from the fact that my dresses were being appreciated by the public. And he has a very unique way of describing the way he views his work. Design is definitely his entire life. And then everything he experiences fuels his designs. I must admit that clothes are my whole life. Ultimately, everything I know, see, or hear, every part of my life turns around the clothes which I create. They haunt me until they are ready to pass from the world of my dreams into the world of practical utility. This continues. I know exactly what I must give my designs, care, trouble, and enthusiasm.

Starting point is 00:28:42 When I read that sentence, I was thinking of James Dyson's mentor, maybe the most influential person in his entire career was this guy named Jeremy Fry that gave James Dyson one of his first jobs. And one of the most important things that Jeremy Fry taught James Dyson was that you should believe most of all in the power of enthusiasm. You should believe most of all in the power of enthusiasm. Christian Dior is saying, hey, I'm going to give everything I have to my designs. I'm going to give them care. I'm going to give them trouble, and I'm going to give them enthusiasm. The most passionate adventures of my life have been with my clothes. I am obsessed with them. They preoccupy me, they occupy me, and they post-occupy me. This makes my life at the same time heaven and hell. he is describing the fact that there is no off switch for entrepreneurs,

Starting point is 00:29:26 which again, he was 41 years old until he discovered it for himself. Goes back to this idea that everything he experiences, the world is a classroom for Christian Dior, just like it is for Da Vinci, which he's going to get to in a minute. Everything he experiences fuels ideas that he can use in designs. I scribble everywhere. Constantly putting ideas on paper is what he's talking about. I scribble everywhere, in my bed, in my bath, at meals, in my car, on foot, by day and by night. As Leonardo da Vinci walked in the Florentine countryside,

Starting point is 00:29:56 he observed the patterns in the sand or the sky and transposed them into his pictures. My dresses take shape all around me as my fancy works on whatever it happens to see. And what's fascinating is that Christian Dior had one of the greatest assets, which is humility in the presence of a good idea. He says, I give way to my instinctive reactions. So this idea, it's like, I have an idea in my mind, I'm gonna get it on a paper as soon as possible. You don't over-intellectualize that.

Starting point is 00:30:18 It's like, oh, this isn't a good idea, just get it on a paper. There was advice that David Olgovie got from this guy named Albert Lasker. I did a podcast on him as well. Albert Lasker is one of the most important advertising agency founders to ever live. He made more money in his advertising agency than any other advertising agency founder ever did. And this is what he told David Olgovie.

Starting point is 00:30:36 When asked what the best asset a man could have, Lasker replied, humility in the presence of a good idea. And Olgovie says, it is horribly difficult presence of a good idea. And Ogilvy says, it is horribly difficult to recognize a good idea. I shudder to think of how many I have rejected. Research cannot help you much in this domain because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea. Tie that into what Christian George has said. I give way to my instinctive reactions back to this internal battle that's happening. Like he just loves it. He's completely obsessed with it, but it also torments him. I will follow the progress of each dress

Starting point is 00:31:08 like an anxious father. They have absolute power over me and I live in perpetual dread that they will fail me. I find myself in a terrible mood all the time. What he's describing is every year he has to make new products. Every day the fever mounts, new crises arise, which I have to calm down.

Starting point is 00:31:31 I nearly kill myself repeating over and over and over again that if the models go wrong, it is after all my fault and nobody else's. And the only way he deals with this intense stress and the torture that he imposes on himself, I would describe him, he's not really a grinder. He has to in certain periods when they're getting a new collection. And then once it releases, he takes long extended vacations. So I would say the way he works is sprint, rest, sprint, rest, sprint, rest. To me, peace and quiet are a necessity of life. If I am in one sense, a very busy man, in another sense, I'm a very lazy one. The application and care which I devote to my work are rooted in my desire to be finished with it as soon as possible. I am innately conscientious and therefore never stop until I'm altogether satisfied with my work. And maybe the most important theme, like if I was going to

Starting point is 00:32:14 remember one thing from his autobiography, is I just love people that truly care about what they're doing. I don't care what that is. I'm not interested in designing fashion dresses, for God's sake. But I am intensely interested in people like Christian Dior. The most common note I have that I leave to myself over dozens of pages in this book is he gives a fuck. He truly, truly cared. You can tell by the effort, the time, the enthusiasm that he puts into this. And I just like the way that he thinks about his work in very intense and passionate terms. I think of my work as ephemeral architecture dedicated to the beauty of the female body. That reminds me of Enzo Ferrari.

Starting point is 00:32:53 There's a new movie coming out on one of the biographies. I've read three biographies of Enzo Ferrari, and they're turning one into a movie. But the way I describe the obsessiveness, and Enzo Ferrari is no doubt one of history's greatest obsessives, is he had soul in the game, and he describes his products the way you might describe your lover. Let me read two sentences to you. And this is Enzo talking about his cars. Does this sound like somebody describing a car? This kind of love, which I can describe in almost a sensual or sexual way, is probably the main reason why I no longer want to see my cars race. To think about them, to see them born and see them die, because in a race they're always

Starting point is 00:33:30 dying. Even if they win, it is unbearable. He spoke about his cars as if they were alive. Cars possess unique behaviors. They breathe through their carburetors. They were skinned with metal. The engine of a car was both its heart and soul. It's rumble, the heartbeat of the creature.

Starting point is 00:33:47 He said Ferrari's aim was to perfect an ideal, to transform raw material into a living machine. This is incredible, right? We have Enzo Ferrari saying, I can't even watch my cars race. That's why he created them. How crazy is that? Because they're always dying and it hurts me

Starting point is 00:34:04 because I see my creation dying. Listen to this. Listen to this. This is a completely different industry. I'm pretty sure Christian Dior and Enzo Ferrari did not even know each other. Yet to both of them, their creations are alive. My poor dresses, my poor dresses.

Starting point is 00:34:18 What a fate is there. As the right to buy my dresses includes that of examining the dress thoroughly. They're measured. They're turned inside out. They're unstitched, sometimes literally pulled to pieces. This is how he describes what's happening. During this slaughter, I prefer not to enter the salon in order to spare myself the spectacle, which would upset me almost as much as it upsets the dresses. Clearly the words of somebody that cares deeply about what they're

Starting point is 00:34:43 doing. Marc Andreessen has one of the greatest quotes I've ever heard about the emotional state of being an entrepreneur. It says, the entrepreneur only ever experiences two states, that of euphoria and terror, the highest highs and the lowest lows. And usually they can occur in the same day or one right after another. So Christian Dior is now launching another collection, which to some degree is a finish line or a temporary break. And this is how he describes it. I remain alone and ask myself over and over again, have I imported enough novelty? Is this novelty wearable?

Starting point is 00:35:14 Are the models sufficiently striking? In fact, I am no longer capable of judging. The most exacting jury in the world is assembling to conduct my trial. He's talking about the market. My life, in fact, revolves around the preparation of a collection with its torments and happiness, with its euphoria and terror is another way to say that. I know that in spite of all the delights of a vacation, it will seem an intolerable gap. My thoughts stay with my dresses. It is now that I like to sit down in front of my dresses, gaze at them a last time altogether, and thank them from the bottom of my heart. And that is where I'll leave it.

Starting point is 00:36:11 What I would do, my first recommendation, if you want to learn more about Christian Dior, I would actually buy Paul Johnson's book. I'm going to leave links for both down below. So I'd buy Paul Johnson's book, Creators, and I'd read chapter 13, which is on Balenciaga and Dior. And then if you want more, I would buy, I would read chapter 13, which is on Balenciaga and Dior. And then, if you want more, I would buy, I would read them in the order, in that order. Then, if you want more, I would buy the autobiography of Christian Dior. I will leave a link down below to both of those books. And if you buy them using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.

Starting point is 00:36:38 That is 331 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon. Okay, so what you're about to hear is this question I was asked a few months ago. I actually recorded this a few months ago. They asked, how did History's Greatest Entrepreneurs think about hiring? All the answers. People think I have a better memory than I actually do.

Starting point is 00:36:59 You know, if people say, oh, David, you have a great memory. My wife would laugh at that because I forget things all the time. It's not that I have a good memory. It's I reread things over and over and over again. Every single answer, every single reference you're about to hear in this 20-minute mini episode came from me searching all of my notes and highlights. That option is now available to you. If you like what you hear, if you think it's valuable, if you're already running a successful company and you want an easy way to reference the ideas of history's greatest entrepreneurs in a searchable database that you can go through at your convenience anytime you want, then you can go to foundersnotes.com and sign up.

Starting point is 00:37:36 I want to start out first with why this is so important. There's actually this book that came out in like 1997. It's called In the Company of Giants. I think it's episode 208 of Founders. It's two Stanford MBA students, if I remember correctly, and they're interviewing a bunch of technology company founders. And in there, Steve Jobs is one of them. This is right, I think, even before he came back to Apple. And they were talking about, well, yeah, we know it's important to hire, but in a typical startup, a manager or a founder may not always have time to spend recruiting other people.

Starting point is 00:38:08 And I first read Steve's answer to this, I don't know, two years ago, and I never forgot it. I think it's excellent. I think it sets up why this question is so important. And you should really be spending, especially in the early days, basically all your time doing this. In a typical startup, a manager may not always have the time to spend recruiting other people. Then Steve jumps in. I disagree totally. I think it's the most important job.

Starting point is 00:38:31 Assume you're by yourself in a startup and you want a partner. You take a lot of time finding a partner, right? He would be half of your company. I'm going to pause there. This idea of looking at each new hire as a percentage of the company is genius. Why should you take any less time finding a third or fourth of your company or a fifth of your company? When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players?

Starting point is 00:39:05 If three, three of the 10 were not so great, why would you start a company where 30% of your people are not so great? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does. Okay. So to answer this question, the advantage that I have making founders and that you have as a byproduct of listening to founders is not only that I've read 300-something biographies of entrepreneurs now, but I have all of my notes and highlights stored in my Readwise app. And that means I can search for any topic. I can look at the past highlights of books,

Starting point is 00:39:39 or I can search for keywords. So what I did is, first of all, what I've started to do with these AMA questions is I read them, decide which ones I'm going to do next, and then think about it for a few days. I don't put any, I just literally, I know that's the next question, just let my brain work on it in the background for a few days. And then I'll go through and start searching all my notes. And so that's what I did here. And so there's a bunch of, you know, I don't have, I may have like 10 or 15 different founders talking about hiring. The first idea is the most obvious, but I think probably works best when you're already established. So Steve Jobs is talking about, hey, you know, the great way to hire is just find great work and find the people that did that and then try to hire them. When

Starting point is 00:40:22 you're Steve Jobs, that's a lot easier, right? Than if you're just somebody that doesn't have reputation, maybe you don't have resources, maybe your company's rather new or not as well known. David Ogilvie, I just did Confessions of an Advertising Man a couple episodes ago, I think 306 or something like that, 307. And he did the same thing, but he's David Ogilvie at that point. So he would find, he'd go through magazines, find great advertising, great copywriting, and he'd write the person a letter and then set up a phone call.

Starting point is 00:40:50 And he says he wouldn't, he was so well-known and, you know, he's one of the best in his field that he wouldn't even have to offer a job, just the conversation, then the person would, he'd want to hire the person, never mention it, and the person would apply to him um and so again i think if you can do that then of course it's straightforward who find for somebody does great work usually you can do this i actually have a friend i can't say who it is he's doing this

Starting point is 00:41:16 right now actually um i have a friend that's really good at doing this he's finding people that do great stuff on the internet and then just cold DMing them and then convincing them to work on things. And that usually works, especially with people like younger people earlier in their career. There's a bunch of different ways to think about this and a bunch of different ways to prioritize. So the first thing that came to mind that I found surprising is you read any biography on Rockefeller. And he had a couple ideas where he felt the optimization, you know, table stakes, that you're intelligent and you're driven and you're hardworking, right? We don't even have, like, if you're listening to this, you already know that. But he prioritized hiring people with social skills. And so this is what he said. The ability to deal with people is as purchasable

Starting point is 00:42:01 a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I pay for And I pay more for that ability than any other under the sun. There's a second part to this, though. And this also works well if you have access to more resources. Rockefeller would hire people as he found, as he found talented people, not as he needed them. It's not like, okay, Standard Oil has six open spots. Let's go find six candidates, right? He'd come across what he considered a talented person.

Starting point is 00:42:27 It didn't even matter if he didn't know what they were going to do. He's like, I'm just going to stack his team. And if you really think about his partners at Standard Oil, he essentially built a company, an executive team of founders because he was buying up all their companies. So it's very rare. But there's a line from Titan I want to read to you. Taking for granted the growth of his empire, he hired talented people as found, not as needed. And then I found another idea in the hiring,

Starting point is 00:42:54 like the actual interview process. So there's this guy named Vannevar Bush. I did two episodes on him. I think it's 270 and 271. He is the most important American ever in history in terms of connecting the scientific field, private enterprise, and the government. The most important person to keep alive for the American war effort was FDR. The second one was Vannevar Bush. Vannevar Bush is like the Forrest Gump of this historical period. He is involved in everything from the Manhattan Project to

Starting point is 00:43:22 discovering like a young Claude Shannon to building a mechanical computer. Like this guy literally has done, he's just, he pops up in these books over and over again. If you were reading about American business history during World War II and post-World War II, you are going to come across the name Vannevar Bush over and over again. I read his fantastic autobiography called Pieces of the Action, and I came across this weird highlight. And so this is his brilliant and unusual job interview process. And so he's talking about this organization he's running called Amrad. At Amrad, I hired a young physicist from Texas named C.G. Smith. The way I hired him is interesting. An interview of that sort is always likely to be on an artificial basis

Starting point is 00:44:01 and somewhat embarrassing. So I discussed with him a technical point on which I was then genuinely puzzled. The next day, he came in with a neat solution and I hired him at once. Here's another idea. This is from Nolan Bushnell. Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari, founder of Chuck E. Cheese, and Steve Jobs' mentor.

Starting point is 00:44:19 He hired Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs was like 19 at Atari. He would ask people their reading habits in interviews. This is why. One of the best ways his whole thing was he wanted to build all of his companies laid on a foundation of creative people. So that's what he's looking for. He's like, I need creative people. One of the best ways to find creative people is to ask a simple question. What books do you like? I've never met a creative person in my life that didn't respond with enthusiasm to a question about reading habits. Actually, which books people read is not as important as the simple fact that they read it all. I've known many talented engineers who hated science fiction but loved,

Starting point is 00:44:53 say, books on birdwatching. A blatant but often accurate generalization. People who are curious and passionate read. People who are apathetic and indifferent don't. I remember one... That's such a great line, and I obviously agree with it. I remember one, that's such a great line, and I obviously agree with it. I remember one, I'm going to read it again, a blatant but often accurate generalization. People who are curious and passionate read people who are apathetic and indifferent don't. I remember one particular woman who during an interview told me that she had read every book that I had read. So I started mentioning books I hadn't read, and she had read those too. I didn't know how someone in her late 20s found this much time to read so much. But I was impressed.

Starting point is 00:45:30 I was so impressed that I hired her right there and assigned her to international marketing, which was having problems. This is why. This is why I'm reading this whole section to you. A job with a lot of moving parts benefits from a brain that has a lot of moving parts. It wouldn't be possible to have read that many books without such a brain. So do you see what I mean? Like we start with Steve Jobs saying this is the most important thing that your role as the leader of the company,

Starting point is 00:45:55 the founders do, right? And you are, and it's so important to study. And this is why I'm glad this, this question exists and why I'm glad that I've, I took the time and I I had the foresight to like, hey, I should really organize my thoughts and notes. Because there's no way I would have remembered all this without being able to search my read-wise, right? But you have Rockefeller saying this is what's important to me. You have Bush saying this is how I hire. Now you have Nolan Bush now saying, well, here's another weird thing that I learned. Let me go through what Warren Buffett says about this. So this is about the quality. One thing that is consistent, whether it's Jobs, Buffett, Bezos, Peter Thiel,

Starting point is 00:46:30 this just pops up over and over again. They talk about the importance of trying to find people that are better than you. The hiring bar constantly has to increase. Now, obviously, the larger the company gets, that's impossible. Steve Jobs has this great quote where he's like, you know, Pixar was the first time I saw an entire team, entire company of A players, but they had 400 players. They had 400 team members. He's like, at the time, Apple had 3,000. It's like, it's impossible to have 3,000 A players. So there is some number that your company may grow to where it's just, you're just not, you're not going to have thousands of A players. In my argument, I don't even know if you get a 400, I guess you, I mean, I'll take Steve's word for it on there and Pixar definitely produce great products, but it's probably a lot lower

Starting point is 00:47:12 than that as well. So Warren Buffett would tell you to use David Ogilvie's hiring philosophy. And so Warren said, Charlie and I know that the right players will make almost any team manager look good. Again, that is why it's the most important function of the founder. Maybe directly next to the product or right above the product, actually, because those are the people building your product. We subscribe to the philosophy of Ogilvy and Mather's founding genius, David Ogilvy. This is what Ogilvy said. If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we should become a company of dwarfs.

Starting point is 00:47:40 But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants. Jeff Bezos used a variation of Algovie's idea too. Jeff used to say in Amazon, every time we hire someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire so that the overall talent pool is always improving. They talk about this idea on Amazon where the future hires that we do should be so good that if you had applied for the job you already have at Amazon, you wouldn't get in. That's a very interesting idea. Take your time with recruiting. Take your time with hiring. There's this great book on the history of PayPal. It's written, actually, I've recently become friends with the author. His name is Jimmy Soni. And this is in his book. The most fascinating thing that I found was that PayPal prioritized speed.

Starting point is 00:48:31 So from the time they're founded to the time they sell to eBay, it's like four years. Jimmy spent more time researching the book than – he spent six years researching the book. I always tease him. He goes, like, you took longer on a book than they took to start and sell their company. It just speaks to, like, the quality he's trying to do. But as a byproduct of that, like obviously they move fast, but they prioritize speed over everything else except in one area, recruiting. Max Lutgen kept the bar for talent exceedingly high, even if that came at the expense of speedy staffing. Max kept repeating A's hire A's, B's hire C's, so the first B you hire takes the whole company down. Let's read that again.

Starting point is 00:49:09 A players hire A players, B players hire C players, so the first B player you hire takes the whole company down. Additionally, the company leaders mandated that all prospects, here's another idea for you, all prospects must meet every single member of the team. Now, the next one is the most bizarre. It makes sense. If you study, I did this three part on Larry Ellison, three part series on Larry Ellison. I should read those books again because the podcast is like 50 times bigger than when I published those episodes. And he's just, he's crazy. So he would hire based on the confidence the self-confidence level of the candidate listen to this i have tears in my eyes i don't know why i'm laughing okay this is just so because this is you read about larry ellison and he's one of these people it's like really easy to interface with

Starting point is 00:49:59 because you just you just know exactly who he is and what's important to him. That's why I think it's so funny. Ellison insisted that his recruiters hire only the finest and cockiest new college graduates. When they were recruiting from universities, they'd ask people, are you the smartest person you know? And if they said yes, they would hire them. If they said no, they would say who is, and they would go hire that guy instead. I don't know if you got the smartest people that way, but you definitely got the most arrogant. Ellison's, and this is why,

Starting point is 00:50:27 the personality of the founder is largely the culture of the company. Apple is Steve Jobs. Apple's just Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives, right? I was just texting a founder friend of mine. He listens to the podcast. I actually met him through the podcast, and he's going through this process of self-discovery.

Starting point is 00:50:43 He's already started a bunch of companies that are really successful, but he's like, I think I'm more of this type of founder than the other type of founder. And that's good that he's doing that because hopefully his next mission is his life's mission. And you can't get to your life's mission unless you figure out who you are. Ellison knew who he was. Ellison's swaggering combative style became a part of the company's identity. This arrogant culture had a lot to do with Oracle's success.

Starting point is 00:51:06 Here's another odd idea for you. Izzy Sharp, the founder of Four Seasons, actually could figure it out that in his business, which was hotels, right, that hiring the right person could actually be a form of distribution for his hotel. He gave me the idea because of what? What do we know? What do you and I know in our bones? That history's greatest founders all read biographies. They all read biographies of people that came before them and took ideas from them. Izzy Sharp is trying to build Four Seasons. What do you think he did? He picked up a biography of Cesar Ritz, the guy that Ritz-Carlton is named after, arguably the greatest hotelier of all time. And when he realized that, oh shit, Ritz, he says, remembering that Cesar Ritz made his hotels world famous by hiring some of the foremost chefs, we decided to do something similar. So what is he talking about? Cesar Ritz went out and partnered with August Escoffier.

Starting point is 00:51:55 What Cesar Ritz was to hotel, to building hotels, August Escoffier was to French cooking. And so what happened is you partner with world famous chefs, people come into your restaurant that's in the hotel because the world famous chef, and now they know about your hotel that leads to more get that leads to more activity in your restaurant that you own, but also leads to more brand recognition of your hotel. And then by as a byproduct of that, more people staying at the hotel. So hiring as a form of distribution, this is fascinating as a fascinating idea. Okay, here's the problem. You can identify great people, right? Maybe they even want to come work.

Starting point is 00:52:29 Like you've identified them. You've sold them, hey, this is our mission. This is what we're doing. And yet humans have complicated lives. They have spouses. They have kids. They have a reason maybe they can't move across the country to work for you, even though they want to. So there's a problem-solving element that you see in these books on you have to solve.

Starting point is 00:52:52 Like, you've already identified the person. You've recruited them. They can't go for some other reason. Okay, well, the great founders are not going to take no for an answer. I read in this book called Liftoff, which is about the first six years of SpaceX. This is what Elon Musk did. They had anticipated his friend's issue. Having convinced Musk they needed to bring

Starting point is 00:53:09 this brilliant young engineer from Turkey on board, it became a matter of solving the problem. His wife had a job in San Francisco. She would need one in Los Angeles, right? Because that's where SpaceX is at the time. These were solvable problems, and Elon's better at solving problems than almost anyone else.

Starting point is 00:53:24 Musk, therefore, came into his job interview prepared. About halfway through, Musk told the guy that he wants to hire, So I heard you don't want to move to LA, and one of the reasons is that your wife works for Google. Well, I just talked to Larry, and they're going to transfer your wife down to LA. So what are you going to do now? To solve this problem, Musk had called his friend Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. The engineer sat in stunned silence for a moment, but then he replied, given all that, he would come to work at SpaceX.

Starting point is 00:53:51 That's really smart. There is another idea when you're promoting. Are you going to promote from within or from without? You know, that's dependent on you, depending on what's going on. I do think this is interesting, though. There's this guy named Les Schwab who built this really valuable chain of tire companies in the Pacific Northwest. I actually found out about him because Charlie Munger is like, hey, you should read this biography. He said it in, he didn't say it to me personally. He said it in one of the Berkshire meetings

Starting point is 00:54:19 that to study, Les Schwab had one of the most, one of the smartest financial incentive structures of any company that Charlie Munger had come across. So this is what Les Schwab did. He did not want to hire from, he didn't want to hire other people from other companies because they might come with bad habits. He liked to train his own executives. And so he says, in our 34 years of business,

Starting point is 00:54:40 we have never hired a manager from the outside. Every single one of our more than 250 managers and assistant managers started at the bottom changing tires. They have all earned their management job by working up. And then another thing, if you're going to hire the best of the best and A players, A players don't like to be micromanaged. And so this came in Larry Miller's autobiography called Driven. He owns like 93 companies all throughout

Starting point is 00:55:05 Utah, car dealerships, movie theaters, all kinds of crazy stuff. But he also owned the NBA team, Utah Jazz. And what was fascinating is he's trying to recruit Jerry Sloan as the coach at the point. And Jerry Sloan would only take the job on one condition. And I really like it. I really like this idea. If you hire me, let me run the team in business, right? That's what you're hiring me for. One of the best things we had ever done was hire Jerry Sloan as coach. At the time, he said, I'm only going to ask you for one thing. If I get fired, let me get fired for my own decisions. If you hire me, let me run the team slash business. Here's another idea from Thomas Edison that I think is fascinating. Really, the way I think about a founder is like,

Starting point is 00:55:45 you're developing skills that you can't hire for. You're going to hire for everything else, but you shouldn't be hireable. And Edison wasn't. Edison expressing his views on the preeminent role of applied scientists, which that's what he considered himself, coined the expression, I can hire mathematicians, but they can't hire me. And so when I read that paragraph for the first time, the note I left myself was develop skills that they can't hire me. And so when I read that paragraph for the first time, the note I left myself was develop skills that you can't hire for. Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. Estee Lauder would give you advice that you need to hire people

Starting point is 00:56:14 aligned with your thinking and values. Hire the best people. This is vital. Hire people who think as you do and treat them well. In our business, they are a top priority. So this idea is like, that seems kind of weird. Like hire people who think like you. There's obviously not one right way to build a business. I think that your business should be an expression of your personality and who you are as a person at the core. And so I think there is an art to the building of your business. And the reason I use the word art, I don't mean in like a hoity-toity, you know, pretentious manner. That's not me at all. I don't even care about art at all, really.

Starting point is 00:56:50 I mean that you're making decisions not just based on economics. Like there are non-economic important decisions based on how you're building your business. Like you could probably make more money doing decision A, but decision A goes against who you are as a person, or you just don't like it, or it's just not as elegant or beautiful. And so therefore you don't do it. So that's what I mean about, you know, hire people who think as you do. And for whatever reason, when I read Estee Lauder say that, I was like, okay, there's like this art to what she's doing. One thing that's going to be helpful in recruiting, this comes from Peter Thiel. I think this is the book Zero to One. Understand that most companies don't even differentiate their pitches to potential

Starting point is 00:57:29 recruits and to hiring. So therefore, as a byproduct of that, you're going to wind up with a lower overall talent base. And so he says, what's wrong with valuable stock, smart people are pressing problems? Nothing. But every company makes these claims. So they won't help you stand out. General and undifferentiated pitches to join your company don't say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of many others. So that idea of like your pitch, your actual, he would tell you you shouldn't be building an undifferentiated commodity business, but even above and beyond that, like the mission that you're trying to engage everybody to join you in, that pitch, that sale you're trying to make to potential recruits should be differentiated. Should not.

Starting point is 00:58:11 If that person's applying to five other jobs, there should not be like, it's like they may not like your mission. They may not like your pitch, but they shouldn't be able to compare it to anything else. Another quote from Nolan Bushnell, hire for passion and intensity. That's what he would do. Or that's what he did when he found Steve Jobs. If there was a single characteristic that separates Steve Jobs from the massive employees, it was his passionate enthusiasm.

Starting point is 00:58:32 Steve had one speed, full blast. This was the primary reason we hired him. And one thing all these founders have in common is that he know how important hiring is. And when something's important, you do it yourself. This is again, Elon Musk on hiring. He interviewed the first 3,000 employees at SpaceX. That's how important it was. One of Musk's most valuable skills was his ability to determine whether someone would fit his mold. His people had to be brilliant. They had to be hardworking and there could be no nonsense. There are a ton of phonies out there and not many who

Starting point is 00:59:02 are the real deal, Musk said of his approach to interviewing engineers. I can usually tell within 15 minutes and I can for sure tell within a few days of working with them. Musk made hiring a priority. He personally met with every single person the company hired through the first 3,000 employees. It required late nights and weekends, but he felt it was important to get the right people for his company. And then to close on this, we started with Steve Jobs telling us why it was so important and why it should be a large part of how you spend your time. And now we'll close with what you do after. What do you do after you hire the person? This is what he says. It's not just recruiting. After recruiting, it's building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are.

Starting point is 00:59:42 The feeling that their work will have a tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision. So that is the end to that 20-minute mini episode. I just re-listened to the whole thing. And it really does, I think, it's a perfect explanation and illustration of why I think Founders Notes is so valuable. Because some of those books I haven't read in five, six years. And just the ability to have a searchable database of all these ideas, like this collected knowledge of some of history's greatest entrepreneurs to reference and then contextually apply to our own businesses. It's nothing short of like, it's magic. That's really the way I think about it. I think it's a massive superpower. It gives me a massive superpower. I couldn't make the podcast without

Starting point is 01:00:23 it. I also think if you have access to it, it'll make your business better. And so if you're already running a successful business, I highly recommend that you invest in a subscription. And you can do that by going to foundersnotes.com.

Founders - #331 Christian Dior

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