Founders - #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story

Episode Date: November 13, 2018

What I learned from reading I Love Capitalism: An American Story by Ken Langone. ---His early life: there was never much money (3:30)Ken's first jobs (5:35)[At school] I didn't apply myself at all . I did the absolute minimum . I was too busy having fun and working at all my various jobs (12:05) further adventures in entrepreneurship (13:24)Looking for work / finding excitement (17:00)stepping out into the void / getting creative to get a job (23:50)how he starts growing a business within the firm (26:33)his first big break (28:50)You treat a customer right and you never have to worry (32:00)A lesson about human nature and developing trust (34:45)Getting rich is one skill. Staying rich is a different skill altogether(43:10)moral of the story: who wants it the most? (48:25)Hubris and Redemption: Starting over (50:25)how he started his own business (54:00)learning about the opportunity for home depot from other founders and some early tactics to get traction for their stores (59:00) leave more on the table for the other guy than he thinks he should get (1:03:32) ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

If there's one lesson I could pass along to kids today, it's this. The opportunities today are the very best they've ever been. You might have to look for them harder than in my day, but they're there. Boy, do I wish I was 21 again and just starting out. Like so many college kids today, I wanted to go to Wall Street and get rich. That's a good way to make a lot of money, but it's also a way to fail big, not to mention burn out fast. I learned early how essential it was to love the work I was doing. Sometimes I look back and wonder, how did this all happen? And then the answer comes.

I was at a place where I was having the time of my life. I still remember what Hudson White Knight said to me 60 years ago. If you really love your work as much as I think you're going to, you're going to be a big success. So I'm saying to a kid, I learned that ex post facto. You should learn it up front. Yes, I've been lucky and you can't learn good luck. My old man used to say to me,

you could fall in a bucket of shit and come up with a gold watch and chain. But we all fall in that bucket from time to time. What distinguishes the winners from the losers is the ability to turn adversity around through resilience and creativity. I still love my work today, all of it. At 82 years old, I'm still excited to get out of the bed in the morning, still charged up about what the next deal might bring. And though the money my enthusiasms have brought me

has enabled me to live well and help others, I can honestly say that if it came down to it, I would pay to go to work every day. How many people can say that? And that is from the end of the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is called I Love Capitalism by Ken Langone. So if you listened to last week's podcast, you know that we were introduced to Ken through Bernie Marcus' book, Built From Scratch. And although Bernie Marcus' book is filled with a collection of eccentric characters, somehow Ken was able to stand out even amongst a group of rather unique and kind of crazy people.

So that was the first I'd ever heard about Ken through that book. When I read Bernie Marcus's book, I then searched Amazon to see if maybe anybody had written a book about Ken Langone. And turns out he wrote his own book. So this is an autobiography that he's writing towards the end of his life. He's still alive, but he's in his 80s when he's writing the book. And how the book is structured is it's broken down into like these little stories that tell you a little bit about his early life and then all his adventures that he had building all these different businesses. And usually he's very explicit about the lessons he learned from either experiences or from other people. So what I did today is I just pulled out

a few of those stories that I found interesting, the ones I highlighted and took notes on. And I'm just going to share a couple of them with you. So let's go ahead and get right into the book. And I want to start out where I normally like to start out, which is learning a little bit about his early life. Because I find a lot of the personality traits that cause these entrepreneurs to go out on their own or to attempt whatever it is they're trying to build. Usually you see like glimpses of these early in life or there's like a reason behind it. And I think one of the reasons that Ken was so motivated from a young age is because he grew up rather poor. So let's learn a little bit about his family real quick. And this is Ken talking about his early life. He says, my grandfather had left school

when he was six years old and never went back. When he died at 72, he couldn't read or write. From the time he was six years old until the day he died, he had a shovel in his hand. His right hand was totally deformed. The thumb had lost the ability to bend from 60 years of holding a shovel. There's actually pictures in the back of the book that shows his grandfather's hand. So now he's going to tell us a little bit about his parents. And he says, my parents were also very simple people. Neither of them ever got close to graduating from high school. My mother dropped out in the seventh grade and my father didn't want to work in the sand pits. So he went to trade school and learned to be a plumber. For four years during the Depression, from 1930 to 1934,

and this was before Ken was born, my father didn't work at all, not only because of economic conditions, but also because of his health. He had colitis, and he was also a manic depressive. For four years, my parents effectively relied on the help of lots of relatives and friends. And now he's describing his reality once he was born. And he says, there was never much money. My father was an excellent plumber, though not a financially successful one. We lived from paycheck to paycheck.

My mother worked at the school cafeteria. But I didn't realize I was poor and I had a wonderful childhood. And so now he goes into some of his first jobs, which I always find very fascinating. And it says, my dad had good initiative but poor follow through. So what he's talking about is his dad uh would try to first he worked for a union and then his dad started his own plumbing business but he was never successful at it because he had really what he's talking about poor follow-through uh he would do the work and then never send the bill so he'd just focus on fixing people's plumbing uh once he'd get close to running out of money he would send the bills sometimes months and in some cases years later because he realized, oh, I forgot to collect

money for that. So Ken is making a distinction here and he says, I was different. I began working at age 11. I was always on the lookout for opportunities and I loved making money. I started out delivering newspapers. Then one Christmas, I took some of my paper delivery money and went to a greenhouse where they were selling Christmas wreaths for 75 cents each. I bought a couple dozen. I then went door to door and I charged a buck 50 for the wreaths and netted a nice little profit. So in the interim, he goes on and I'm going to share with you some of the other first jobs he had. But I realized there's this great paragraph in here that some of you who also grew up in humble circumstances probably empathize with this point. I definitely had experiences like

this when I was a kid. And he says, in Rosalind Heights, there was a section called Rosalind Estates where the rich people lived. So he's talking about every Sunday they'd have to drive through from their poor neighborhood through a rich neighborhood to get to church. And he says, and every time we drove through Rosalind Estates on a Sunday, my mother would say to me, would you like to live here one day? And I'd say yes. And then she'd say, well, then you've got to work hard and get an education. I listened. I knew damn well I didn't want to be poor. I wanted to be rich.

So we're going to go over some more of his first few jobs. It says, I had an after-school job in the butcher shop, and after work every night from 6 to 7, I'd go to work in a little store that made rotisserie chickens, cleaning up the grease from the rotisserie spits. The guy who owned the butcher shop didn't know I was helping the chicken guy because he thought they were competitors. When I was 15, a supermarket opened down the street and I moonlighted there too, helping set up the store, putting the canned goods on the shelves at the same time and doing all this work while I was working at the butcher shop as well. At the same time, I caddied at the golf course. I started my own landscaping business,

cutting lawns. So the note I was just jotting down, what I realized after the fact was this pattern he's discussing right now. You see the echoes from his childhood later in his life. He never worked on one thing. He was always involved in an insane number of businesses and different projects. And so he's doing this now where he's carrying on maybe three or four different jobs in addition to going to school. But he does that later in his life as well. And I found that really interesting. So he says, when I got bigger and stronger at 16, I got a summer job as a day laborer in road construction. I was a hardworking little bastard. As long as I'd get that money in my pocket, I was okay. So we're seeing his drive. And later in the book, he says something like he prays at the feet of hard work or the altar of hard work um and reading the book you

definitely get that impression so i'm um he's gonna go to college he doesn't really want to go to college at first he doesn't go to college um and it's not till he's visiting other friends that he knew from high school they invited him up to this place called Bucknell and he's going to these parties and then one day one of his friends is like hey why don't you just come here like you're here all the time partying anyways so he just drops by the admissions office and he long story short he winds up getting in but before this we're going to talk about like why going to college was important to his family and you see this a lot with a lot of lower class or poorer families where they see that, and rightfully so at this time. Maybe you could make the argument against it at this day and age,

but at the time he's living, it was seen as like a ticket to the middle class. So he says, When I say I had the most wonderful childhood in the world, I mean every word. My parents gave me the one thing that a kid needs more than anything else unconditional love when i read that paragraph it reminded me of when we discussed when you and i were talking about um paul allen and he talks about that even if his parents disagreed, remember his dad in the story was like, why are you obsessed with computers? Like, I think programming is an abstraction, but you're into it. So I'm going to support your decision where, you know, there's a lot of parents

would be like, no, you have to do what I say. You have to have the career I say. So just as a reminder, like we don't get to choose the parents we have, but we can choose for those of you that have kids, like you can choose the parent, the kind of parent you're going to be. And we just need to be good parents. Like we have to support our kids in whatever endeavor, as long as they're not harming themselves, like it's their life. They have to be able to pursue it as they see fit. And that's something that he got from his parents. Now, one prerequisite they did have is they really tried to nudge him to go to college. So he said, they just wanted me to go to school.

And they had one dream, that I would go to college. And here's a problem that he has that I think we've talked about many, many times. That a lot of these kind of self-starting rebels, these eccentrics, they don't do well in these uniform, like organized environments, like organized schooling. So he says, but the problem was that even though I was a bright kid, I wasn't a good student. I was never academically curious in high school. I didn't apply myself at all. So not being curious and not applying himself. Once he finds, remember at the opening, he was talking about that it's so important

to find work that you love. Once he finds something he really loves, he is unbelievably curious and applies itself to the extreme. And I think that's where my one critique of school, at least in the country I live in, it's just one size fits all and that just doesn't make any sense especially for since we live in the age of the internet and i think

we're going to see like the great unbundling of that at least i hope i see it over my lifetime so it says i did the absolute minimum i was too busy having fun and working at all my various jobs um so uh he winds up like i just said So he winds up, like I just said before, he winds up getting into Bucknell. So he's enjoying the freedom of college, but something feels off. And he's talking about internally, and I think this obviously leads

to the amount of drive that he has. But he's like, there was another piece to it, an uncomfortable piece. I would drink beer and laugh with my new friends but when the parties were over i felt alone more left out than any time before in my life bucknell was full of waspy kids with money the sons of doctors and lawyers and business executives and here i was an italian american kid from the wrong side of the tracks the son of a plumber and a cafeteria worker i can remember being uneasy telling people what my mother and father did ashamed inferior okay so skipping a little bit ahead um he has well this is how he learned supply and demand so

this whole trend from trying to to have these side businesses and other jobs when he's high school continues in college and so i want to talk to you about a few of the first little ways he was make making money and some just some of his adventures in early entrepreneurship so he said supply and demand goes through everything in life. Early on, I caught the fact that if you have a special talent or if you have something unique that provokes people to do something that you can make a profit on, that that's a good thing. Late in my freshman year, I hit on an idea.

I remembered that as soon as they'd get to Bucknell as freshmen, a lot of the rich kids, and he says practically anybody who wasn't me was rich, were buying stationery with their names printed on it or the Bucknell seal on it. I thought, how could I make money selling stationery? Then the light bulb went off. Freshman orientation. The first couple of days you're there,

you haven't met anybody and you're melancholy. You miss your high school friends and they've all gone someplace else. I thought this would be my moment to strike. So he contacts a company that produces custom stationery and he convinces them to send him samples. So he says, before I started my sophomore year, I got them to send me samples and I put the samples on a piece of cardboard. As soon as the freshmen arrived, I'd go into their dorm rooms with my sample board and say, look, you're going to be writing a lot to your friends. I'd remind them that a long distance phone call was 65 cents for three minutes. That was a lot of money then.

I'd say, let's see, you have how many friends? 10? You're going to write them two, three times a week. And they're nodding. I can see their homesick and blue. And I'd say, okay, three times a week. And they're nodding. I can see their homesick and blue. And I'd say, okay, here's what you'll need for your freshman year. But you'll get a price break if you order enough. I made damn sure I got their check or money order right away. And here's why. Within two weeks after they got to school, they'd forgotten their friends at home.

They'd made new friends. And they were going to rush a fraternity writing letters was the last thing on their minds suddenly supply and demand was more than a theory to me and his further adventures in entrepreneurship continues and he says everybody at bucknell had to wear a tie and a jacket at dinner in the in those days i used to buy a box of a hundred ties all different colors bring them back to buck now on sunday night and then on monday i'd hit the freshman door dorms and sell them for a buck 50 a buck 75 a piece i could make 50 to 75 bucks on a box. So he somehow finds time to study amongst all his other different side jobs and all the different ways he's trying to make money.

And so now he's getting out after school and he's going to look for work and he wants to find excitement. And when he was in his senior year, we're going to talk about this, he gets married. So he says, Elaine, that's his wife, Elaine and I got married in September 1956, the beginning of my senior year at Bucknell, and we were poor as church mice. At that point in my life, all I knew was that I wanted to make money. And where did you make money? Wall Street. All I knew about Wall Street was that that was where you bought and sold stocks and bonds. In other words, I knew nothing. But I read Fortune magazine

religiously every month in the library at Bucknell. I was intrigued by mergers. I was intrigued by companies growing and how they financed their growth. I don't know why I was so fascinated by Wall Street. I wasn't from an Ivy League school. I really had no family connections. It was all just exciting to me in a way I couldn't put my finger on yet. So now he's going to go out and he can't get hired by anybody on Wall Street. So he goes to this firm called Equitable Life, which is kind of like a half insurance, half investing. And the guy that was giving him advice at the beginning of the podcast about if you love your work, you're going to be a big success. His name was Hudson White Knight. This is when he first meets Hudson White Knight. So that's just the guy from

the beginning of the podcast. And it says, White Knight told me that they were just starting a new program to hire trainees in the investment department. So that's the department that Ken really wants to get into. But they were only looking at people with MBAs. I said, how about if I go at night to get an MBA? And he asked, would you really want to do that? It'd be a lot on your plate. And I said, sure, I'd do it. I suppose I pray at the feet of hard work. And I really was excited about the securities industry.

I was just thrilled by the notion of financing buildings and railroads and raising money to buy and sell businesses. I loved every part of it. It was meaningless shit. And this is such an important part. The truth is that I loved what I was doing from the day I went to work, which is one of the great joys in life I found. And this is a theme that he will talk about over and over again in the book. And I think he's trying to tell, remember, he's writing this in his 80s. He's saying the advice I'm giving to kids, he doesn't mean children.

He calls anybody younger than him kids. So you can be 50 years old and he's going to call you a kid. And the advice that he's giving to kids in that, in that context is fine. If you really want to be great at something, you've got to find something you love doing it and then just, just channel your passion into it. So I just want to give you a description. So you're caught up of his life at the time, early twenties, trying to make his way in New York. He's like, he's, he says, I live in a little one bedroom apartmentroom apartment with his wife in Auburndale, Queens for $128 a month. Now remember that $128 a month in a few years from now before he's out of his early 20s. He's going to be buying a house for a lot more

than that. And he says, Christ, we struggled, but my in-laws and parents were good to us. We had a lot of hand-me-down furniture. We bought a second-hand china closet. I cut the legs off at the bottom and painted it blue over the mahogany. I remember we had an aluminum outdoor chase lounge in our living room for a sofa. But what the hell? You could sit on it. We didn't plan to be poor.

We just were. So he's hardworking. And by this time, he has his MBA. He's still working at Equitable Life and he's teaching. Remember, he cannot just do one job at one time. So he picks up a job to teach at NYU at night. So he says, I was feeling pretty good about life. I'd gotten a couple of raises and now I was making $9,000 a year at Equitable Life. Together with my income from teaching, I was making between $12,000 and $13,000 a year. And this is the amazing thing. It's a positive thing in the sense that it can propel you forward, but it also can make you miserable. It's the idea of hedonic adaptation, which is you could set a goal and once you get there, you might be pleased for a few moments.

And then usually human nature is you look forward and you set a new further away goal, which there's nothing wrong with trying to do your best. But if you're never appreciative for your present, you're going to spend your entire life just in love with this idea of this fake future. So the reason I bring that up is because, well, this is what he says. I remember that when I graduated from Bucknell, my dream was to earn $10,000 a year. So he already accomplishes that.

There's a heavy influence at Equitable Life that he needs to serve his country in the military. So he joins the reservists. And he has to do that, you know, a week and a month, a few weeks a year, that kind of thing. But something happens. And he says, in August 1961, I went to army summer camp at Camp Drump, upstate New York.

And on August 13th, Khrushchev closed the border between East and West Berlin and started building the Berlin Wall. It was a national crisis. President Kennedy activated that 100,000 reserves and lo and behold, I'm one of the 100,000. So for a short period of time, it's about the next year and a half, which I'm going to skip over. He has to leave his job at Equitable Life. He doesn't see his wife. And I think at the time they have two small kids and he's not teaching at NYU. So he figures out a way to get, he wants to go back to work. He's not going to be sent overseas at this time. They just kept all the reserves in the country.

So NYU helps him. They said, if you get out by June, you can teach in the country. So NYU helps him. They said, if you get out by June, you can teach for the summer. So I put in an early discharge and I was approved. He said, I mustered out in May. In that same month, May 1962, the stock market had its biggest crash since 1929. Actually, so he was in the reserves

for a little less than a year. Because from August 61 to May 62. All right, he says, so the stock market has its biggest crash since 1929. And this is his counterintuitive idea at the time. He said, this is it. I said, I'm going to Wall Street. It was strictly counterintuitive. Investment banks were cutting staff like crazy.

To me, that meant it was a golden opportunity to get my foot in the door. My father-in-law disagreed, to put it mildly. His father-in-law worked on Wall Street. Elaine's dad was really upset. Here, his beloved daughter living in a little rented cottage out in Brookville with a toddler and another baby on the way, and his crazy son-in-law wants to quit a secure position with solid benefits and a good salary. It does seem crazy when you describe it that way. I was making almost $10,000 a year at

Equitable Life. And this is the important part, the equivalent of about 80 grand today. And he's still in his 20s. He said, look, you've got a great job you've got a family please don't do this and this is ken's response i have to go to wall street it's what i've always wanted and here is the problem with his plan and he says now i knew that nobody on wall street would talk to me as long as I was still at Equitable Life. Many investment banks did business with Equitable Life, and if one hired me away, it would risk retribution. I had to quit before I got a new position, not after. I had to step out into the void.

So let's just take a moment and see where we're at in his life he's in his mid-20s he is making a good living uh he's got to support his wife one uh and two two kids one on the way it's the place he wants to work at wall street just had its biggest crash in 40 years and ken thinks this is a good idea, a good time to quit with no safety net and then go try to get a job in the industry. How many of us would make that same decision? So as you could expect, no one is hiring on Wall Street.

So he has to get creative to get a job. And he actually does something really smart here. So he's interviewing in a place called press bridge and he said uh and they're actually on wall street he said we talked for a little while longer and then he said i'd like to hire you but i just can't uh but i know i'm gonna hear a lot more about you so good luck and all the best i took the elevator down to the lobby and suddenly i stopped where i stood wait a minute i said to myself i got back in the elevator down to the lobby and suddenly I stopped where I stood. Wait a minute, I said to myself. I got back in the elevator and went upstairs. I just left Mr. Cullen.

Remember, this guy's name is Jack Cullen. He's going to appear in a story in a few minutes from now. So he said, I said to the receptionist, could I go see him again for a minute? And Jack came out. Did you forget something, he asked? No, I said said can we talk again we went to a little conference room and i said how much do you pay a secretary about 150 bucks a week pay me what you pay a secretary i said and i'll come work for you

you can't make ends meet on that jack said yes i can i'm teaching at n at night. Believe me, I'll make ends meet. That's my problem, not yours. Finally, he said, I'll do it. Jack, there's only one condition, I said. Now he smiled. You have a condition? You have to give me every account you're not doing business with, I said. If you're not doing business with an account, I have the right to call on them. So Jack agrees to that. And that part is actually really important because this is how he starts growing a business within the firm. And he's talking about starting out at PressBitch. And he said, the firm had a research department that covered every industry, retail, consumer products, steel, chemicals, so on.

For any stock that was listed, the research department would have an analyst who made it his business to know about the fundamentals of that industry. And then all the research analysts had investment recommendations like buy GM or sell Ford, et cetera. And he says the model on Wall Street was that analysts would give their recommendations to the salesmen, and the salesmen would try to sell the idea to institutional investors in what was known as the carriage trade. Now, carriage trade is just a weird euphemism for rich people. And the salesman, that's what he's doing. He becomes a salesman that's trying to sell the opinions of analysts for people that are looking for ideas to invest in.

So he said, I had scheduled meetings with the analysts in the bank trust department. These are the people who are looking for investment ideas. And he'd say, look, we like US Steel and here's why we like it. My research background from Equitable plus the fact that I was teaching at NYU put me a few cuts ahead of the typical salesman because I could talk quite knowledgeably about what I was selling. As I'd requested, these were accounts that nobody had been doing business with, and this is a super important point, which meant that whatever business I did was brand new.

I would make more money because I wasn't competing with anyone else. I didn't give a damn about the size of the accounts and I worked my ass off. So he's got basically this blue ocean that he's trying to bring in business back to that no other salesperson or no other department is doing. And he has a few big breaks in his life. And his first big break is this tiny little company out of Cincinnati. And here's how he discovered it. And he says, one night over Christmas, just before that first trip to Cincinnati, I'd been putting away the kids' toys when I noticed something.

My in-laws had given the baby some Flintstones building blocks. And on the blocks was stamped Kenner products. This intrigued me because the Flintstones TV show was very big back then. There was Flintstones marketing all over the place. My natural curiosity about supply and demand made me wonder how big a piece of the pie this Kenner products was getting. I went to the office and looked the company up in the big Moody's and Standard, Moody's and then Standard and Porous manuals. So I want to pause right here. Remember, if you remember last week, this is how he found Bernie Marcus

and the precursor to Home Depot, which was that company Bernie Marcus was running called Handy Dan, which is that super profitable, smaller version of Home Depot. I think they were making like $7 million a year in profit at the time. And these moody, like these big books and the standard and poor manuals, this is what they had to use before there was computers to look up information about these public companies. So he says, I found out that Kenner Products had been planning to do an IPO, but then because the market collapsed, the offering was canceled.

Okay, so here's his way in. So I dialed information for Cincinnati and got the number for Kenner Products. So he goes to them on his next trip. So he was going to go to Cincinnati no matter what for other business. He says, hey, I'm not going to waste any time. Let's see if I can meet with these guys at the same time. He calls up, can I speak to your CFO? They're like, we don't have a CFO.

It's just three brothers running this very nice business out in Cincinnati. So he asked them, hey, why are we trying to IPO? They're like, we want to raise funds. They're building physical products, so they always need more capital. And so he sells them on the idea of letting him sell $5 million of bonds. And if this deal goes through, he, uh, would net a hundred thousand dollars from the deal or the firm he's working for would net a hundred thousand dollars for the deal. So it's kind of, um, it's not a normal, like what he's doing is brand new. So it's not,

they, the, the company's working for has no, he's not in normal like what he's doing is brand new so it's not they the company's working for has no he's not in the investment department so he there's no way they have no like standard set of procedures how to bring it in so he has to go and start working with another guy in a department and these guys we're gonna he calls him David G we don't ever real know his real name but there's always like this friction because there's like just bureaucracy there and then you're stepping on other people's toes. But the reason I want to talk about this part because he has a great, this is how he learns, like not how he learns, but he's imparting a lesson that was important to him throughout his whole career to us. And that is a very valuable

lesson on customers. And so he goes, I went over to the investment banking department. Now the fellow who was running it, let's call him David G, was a stiff. When I told him I had this deal, he got all edgy about it. Here I am, this punk kid, 27 years old, stepping out of the bounds of my department and right on his toes. What do you mean you've got this deal? He said, I have an Ohio company that wants me to raise money for them. And I'm going to show the deal to all the Ohio insurance companies I've been selling to. That's And I'm going to show the deal to all the Ohio insurance companies I've been selling to That's who he's going to sell the bonds to He looks suspicious

This sounds like a lot of work, he said And then he goes on to list all the reasons why you couldn't do the deal And he says, this is David G He goes, what about our out-of-pocket expenses? And this is Ken's response Don't be so damn cheap, I told him. What the hell are my out-of-pocket expenses? I go to Cincinnati anyway. I make a few phone calls. I'm not going to hit them for out-of-pocket expenses. That's nickel and dime shit. I want

these guys to trust us. I didn't give a damn that this guy was senior to me. He was the head of the corporate finance department and I didn't work in that department. Right around this time, he describes himself, Ken describes himself as a misfit. And we're seeing a lot of his personality here. These are traits that lead you to become entrepreneurial because you can't stand when guys are getting in the way of business and his explicit lack of respect for authority in this case. So he says, and this is the important

takeaway. He says, the way I thought about it then and the way I still think about it today, I had only one boss, the customer. You treat a customer right and you never have to worry. Within 30 days, the deal closed and the $100,000 commission came in. So now Ken jumps over David G's head and he calls a meeting directly with the managing, like the lead. There's like 20 something partners in PressBitch. He winds up becoming one, but that happens later on in his life and this is the guy that his name is mr brown he basically runs he's like the managing partner and he said mr brown it's hard enough to sell a deal

in the first place i'm willing to work my ass off but i don't want to have to sell a deal then come back and have to sell it to you guys all over again so he's wanting some autonomy and he's describing the issues he had with this this other guy david g and this is mr brown he goes he took his pipe out of his mouth and got straight to the point what do you want 30 i told him all right fella mr brown said the firm gets 70 and, 30 and you get 30%. So what he means by you, he's like 55% of that 30% goes to you. The rest is divided up amongst your partner. So he's in this, this group called, I think unit 15 or section 15. Uh, it's just a group of salespeople. And he said, my three partners, uh, were, were, who were strictly salesmen. They wouldn't have known a deal like this.

If they tripped over it, each got a nice gift of four and a half grand. This is from him going out. They didn't do anything, obviously. This is him going out and bringing more business from Cincinnati. And he says, I netted $16,500, which was over twice my annual salary. So as you could imagine, he realizes, wait a minute, I can make way more money bringing in business with this new structure than my regular job.

So, that's what he does over and over, and he becomes kind of like a rainmaker. And he does this through developing relationships and constantly following up and working in areas that other people aren't really paying attention to. Now, during this time, the guy that hired him, Jack Cullen, is also becoming kind of like a mentor to Ken. And he teaches something really – he teaches Ken a valuable lesson that Ken is now writing about, let's see, 50 years after the fact. And this is a lesson about human nature and how to develop trust. This is what I like about this book. The book is kind of making my job easier this week

because it's like, these stories come with an explicit lesson. Usually we have to kind of tease that out and talk, you know, come up with our own opinions about what you could learn from them. He's saying this is exactly what I learned. So, he said,

Jack Kellan once taught me a lesson I will never forget when one of our analysts came up with a buy recommendation for a company called, let's just call, uh, it's Harbison Walker refractories and they make, uh, refracting brick with super high heat tolerance. So I guess this is the brick that lines, uh, steel furnaces. And so he told Jack about it. And Jack made an appointment for him and me to go try to sell the stock to a man by the name of Menhana. So I've never heard about this guy before, but in the book, they say he's really famous. His name is Shorty Menhana. And let me just give you a quick background about why this guy is, they call him legendary, but Shorty Minhana was a legendary fund manager. The guy who had bought Xerox at 19 cents a share in 1957, just a couple years before

it went through the roof. A meeting with Shorty Minhana was a very high level one and I was nervous. Remember this part about him being nervous because he also learned something from a co-worker of his about just not idolizing other people. And it says, and in the cab on the way uptown, Jack said to me, listen to me, you're going to walk in there and the first thing you're going to do is tell Shorty all the negatives, all the reasons he shouldn't buy. What's wrong? What could go wrong? What needs to be fixed but can't be fixed? What the hell are you talking about? I said I'm going to go up there and tell him to buy it

Jack looked me in the eye You just remember, he said, give him all the negatives first Why am I doing this? I asked You just do it and I'll tell you after we leave So they go upstairs and Ken says, Mr. Manjana, I'm here to sell you a stock, but let me tell you all the reasons why you shouldn't buy it. What do you mean? He said, well, I said nothing is perfect. As I proceeded to go through a list of every downside, the company had a very limited product line, faced strong competition in a

limited market, a recession could impact it badly, and there was a couple problems with current management. I mean, Hanna looked thoughtful. Now, I said, let me tell you why I like it. I said that because the economy was picking up, demand for steel looked like it was going to take off. I told him that Harbison Walker was the Cadillac of the industry. Everybody respected the quality of what they did, and they were also the lowest cost producer of their product. Well, he finally said, do you like it more than you don't like it? Yeah, a whole lot more, I said. I think this is a great stock. Okay, he said, let me think about it. And Jack and I left. In the cab downtown. I said, Jack, why did I just do that?

I'm going to tell you why you did it this afternoon. He's going to call. This is the lesson, the very important part to pay attention to this afternoon. He's going to call up all of his buddies on wall street and he's going to ask them, what do you think of heart harvest and Walker refractories and his pals? And if his pals tell him anything negative about the company, he's going to ask them, what do you think of Harbison Walker refractories? And if his pals tell him anything negative about the company, he's going to tick it off the list. He'll say, well, Ken told me that, and Ken told me that, and Ken told me that, and your trust is going to go through the roof with him. And sure enough, that's exactly how it happened.y manhanna bought harbison walker through me and then he bought a lot more lesson learned and uh that's another thing that he would repeat throughout

the entire book i don't think i'll cover it in in the actual podcast but um this idea that the relationships you never know like just just don't screw people over in the deals you're doing. Don't lie to them because like what Jack is trying to teach them. Once they have trust in you, they'll go back to you repeatedly. And Shorty Manhana does. This other guy that winds up becoming like a whiz. They call him like a whiz kid. I think his name is like Stanley Druckenmiller or something like that.

Ross Perot, all these people that he does business with that helped Ken become a billionaire because of stuff he did for them years previously. And it's just a lesson to be a good person, actually, if you really think about it. All right, so this is the lesson in confidence that kind of goes well with the story he was just saying about like, you know, before he's a young kid, this is the first time he's ever meeting somebody that's like written about in the papers, shorty Manhattan, he's nervous. But he gets over that. And so this is a lesson in confidence. And this comes from his partner that's working in the same department as him. And this guy named Bindi Banker. And the first big lesson Bindi taught me was one that he

taught by example. I had begun encountering some of the big guys on Wall Street, legendary guys, men I'd read about in Fortune magazine. These men were gods to me. And I saw right away that Bindi simply wasn't in awe of them. In short order, he taught me to understand that a man's public persona usually has very little to do with his private persona. The note I jotted down, left myself as, I bet you that this is even more true in the age of social media

where people have now become advertisers for themselves. And they're, of course, just like a company. Well, they're going to highlight, they're they're the best side of them And then there's always that great quote or I guess it would be like aphorism or Maximus like never meet your idols Because you're surely gonna be disappointed. I think it's also important to point out here like we're trying to learn from the company builders of the past, but I don't think we're under the illusion that these people were perfect by any means. They,

there's tons of personality flaws, mistakes, um, poor decisions. They're human. Just like us. We probably have all the same thing. Like we're going to make bad mistakes.

I'm sure there's parts of, uh, of who you are that you want to improve. So it's just important to remember these. They're not different. They're, they're like, we're. They're not above making mistakes. And so we shouldn't idolize them. We should take the ideas that we can distill through

the experience. And if they're good and it makes sense for your current situation, use them and discard all the rest. Certainly have respect for other people, but idolatry usually is just a bad idea in general. So it says, without that lesson, I would have felt subservient towards these muckety-mucks. I don't know what that word means. But with that lesson under my belt, I felt completely equal to anyone I dealt with. And this is what he took away from it. And without Bindi in my life, I don't think I would be as certain of myself as I am and as outspoken as I am. And that goes back to, you know, the whole idea of imposter syndrome and, and in his case,

you know, growing up really poor, like he referenced earlier, he's like, I'm doing deals with these really rich guys and I'm some poor Italian kid, the son of a plumber and a cafeteria worker from the wrong side of the tracks. So Bindi was essential in helping him overcome that kind of mindset because that's mindset's not going to help. I mean, I always go back to what Elon Musk said. He's like, I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. So if you're in a situation like that, just assume that you belong there and act like it. Okay. I love this part because it's something near and dear. I read a lot about, in addition to, I guess I read about a lot about everything, but I'm always fascinated with

people's impressions of wealth. And there's this great guy I've been reading lately. I think his name's like Morgan Housel. I think he blogs blogs at collaborative fund, but he has a bunch of great essays on finance sometimes corporate finance a lot of times personal finance and I'm always fascinated with He has this essay. It's like well. Well real wealth is hidden. It's all the stuff You can't see so like we we kind of attribute like oh they have fancy car fancy clothes or fancy things usually when you're describing what you the possessions of somebody you think is rich you're just listing off liabilities which is actually the opposite of wealth

so I think his name is Morgan Morgan makes the point in the essay that you know finance is the only I think the only I don't know if you use the word career but basically like uh he used the example of this one lady never made a lot of money but saved it she dies uh with you know middle class say she's a secretary or something like that i don't recall the exact details at the moment but she dies and she gives away like seven million dollars to like charity and then so the other guy is like an investment um like he's an investor and he financial advisor all this other stuff but he has three houses and he's got like tens of thousands of dollars in monthly bills and he winds up going bankrupt and i think dying broke and he's like

this is the only discipline in which a so-called expert and like a novice could wind up with such like large variances um and he obviously says he's a way better writer than than i can describe his writing so he said a lot more eloquently that but um that's a personal interest to me and he's and ken's about to make a really interesting point that i think that is obvious but is not internalized because uh well the the punchline is getting rich is one skill and staying rich is a different skill altogether. And so he's going to talk about, you know, there's many examples in the book where he's, you know, his ego is getting, he's very confident now,

he's having success and he gets hubristic and he makes decisions that he, now at 80, he wouldn't have done. But that's the whole point, right? Going through experience and learning. And so we want to distill his experiences and learn ourselves, even though I don't know how many of us will actually – like you can intellectually understand what you should be doing with your money, but it's a behavior issue.

And there's a whole human nature, biological imperative thing going on there, but I guess it's outside the scope of what we're talking about. So I just want to share this one story that illustrates, he understands at a very young age, or no, actually he's not understanding this at a young age because his actions are saying otherwise. Well, let me just read this and you'll see what I mean by what his assumption is. So he says,

By the spring of 1965, I was earning $100,000 a year on commissions alone, the equivalent of about three quarters of a million, so $750,000 today. So I went to a real estate broker in town. He saw a house and he says, what's this house worth? And the guy says, I think it's around $75,000 to $80,000. The house is in the person that owned it died. So the bank is handling the estate so he calls out the bank he says i called the trust manager at chase bank and i said i'd like to buy that house and i was prepared to bid seventy seven thousand dollars for it remember

he's buying seventy seven thousand dollar house six or seven years before he was living in a rented apartment in queens for 128 a month um so he So he says, I took a, the guy's like, I'll get back to you. I took a deep breath while I waited for his response. $77,000 was a lot of money for a house in 1965. And it was a lot of money for me. So he winds up getting the house. I was thrilled. But the truth is that buying that house for 77,000 bucks was a big risk for me relative to my net worth at the time. Any number of things could have gone wrong. I could have wound up not being able to swing the payments. And it's not, this is his takeaway, it's not the kind of bet I would make

today. And here's why. I can name too many people who were wealthy, very wealthy, even enormously wealthy, and wound up literally going broke. So now you can see my note that getting rich is one skill and staying rich is a different skill altogether. So he knows a bunch of people that were able to get rich, but not so many that were able to stay rich um okay so so even though he's he's most well known for being the co-founder of home depot a lot of the home depot stories i covered last week so i'm not going to um i'm not going to uh like rehash those here but i do want to talk a little about his second big break and that's obviously um he before he found home depot he takes uh ross perot's company eds public and the moral of this quick story i'm not going to share all of it

it's just it's sometimes you you want to analyze like who wants it the most, like who is actually gonna do the best job for you, not based on who has the most experience, but who needs it the most. So this is a conversation with him and Ross Perot and Ross Perot is deciding which company is going to do their IPO. He says, Hey Ken, do me a favor. When you come down, bring the prospectuses of all the offerings you've done. Yes, sir, I said. But the fact was, I didn't have any because we hadn't done any. I had never done an IPO. And I was hoping he'd just forget about the prospectuses. I hope I'm pronouncing that word correctly. I'm probably not. Then Perot drove me to the airport. By the way, Ken, he says, do you have those prospectuses? I said, no, sir, I don't.

Did you forget them? No, sir, I didn't forget them. What do you mean? Well, there aren't any. You're it. What do you mean I'm it? Well, you'll be the first one I'll do. He gave me a long look.

And this is how he sells Ross on this. And this is the important part. Ross, I said, your deal is going to get done because you've got a great company and investors are going to want it. An idiot could do your deal. I've got a bigger risk in this than you do. If I mess up your deal, my one chance of success is gone. But if I do a great job for you, my reputation is enhanced. I have every incentive and I promise you I will handle every detail of the deal personally. Okay, so this is now we've gotten to the point where he names this chapter hubris and redemption. And this is a tale as old as time.

It's just the same as we've seen like history doesn't repeat but human nature does and so we're seeing the same uh mistakes over and over again uh done by different people in different countries different environments different time periods but the same behavior happens over and over again so what what's going to happen? Well, he took Ross Perot public. Ross Perot is super, super famous. And everybody wants to do business with Ross Perot's banker. And he said, just like that, Wall Street took notice. One day, I was an unknown salesman at a small Wall Street firm. The next day, I was Ross Perot's banker, the guy who had made him a millionaire.

And not only was I Perot's banker, but I was president of Presbridge. So he negotiated. He said he wanted to be a partner. They made him a partner, and he's president. I lived in a big house on a hill on Long Island. I was 34 years old, and I was pretty full of myself. So the good times don't last very long at all. Then in April, the roof falls in. Nixon is battling the Vietnam War protesters. Soon the Ohio National Guard will kill four kids at Kent State. The market swings wildly and suddenly the world is coming to an end. Now there are people on Wall Street smarter than me and more objective than me and they decide they're going to put a short on every stock press pitch is trading. So there's a downside. Remember how we always talk about like some people, what's the reason you want to

be an entrepreneur? Like is it for control? You want to set your own path? Is it because you want to get rich? Some people want it like they want to quote unquote be famous or whatever the case is or get attention, whatever adulation, whatever you want to call rich some people want it like they want to quote unquote be famous whatever the case is to get attention whatever adulation whatever you want to call that well there's a downside to the adulation so my thing is like it's much better if you can to make a lot of money and be anonymous so you don't have to deal with the downside because now this guy's famous and well now he becomes a target and you know you can't be a target if people don't know you exist and so what happens is they're gonna destroy him basically is what these people are doing right now so he said my hubris kicked in and i stupidly thought we could make a stand that we could

support the stock and the others we held by buying up what the short sellers were selling big mistake what i didn't realize was that i selling. Big mistake. What I didn't realize was that I couldn't play that game if I didn't have unlimited funds and I didn't have unlimited funds. We got wiped out. We didn't go broke, but our capital was gone. It was the biggest defeat of my career and it hit me like a kick in the stomach. Before I used to love coming to work every day. Now I'd walk through the trading room seeing the glum looks all around me, knowing what everyone else knew.

We were wounded, maybe mortally wounded. Every day I'd stay in the office until 4 o'clock, I'd leave, change into old clothes, go out in the garden and and weed the garden and cry so that's quite a swing in his fortune when he saying earlier at the book you know I love coming to work every day I'm excited to the point where like even today I would pay to do the job I'm doing now he's leaving at the first chance he gets and he's going home gardening and crying. So there's basically a proxy war here.

The partners want him out. He won't leave. He gets to the point where he's like, I can't work in this environment anymore. And this is when he goes out and starts his own business. And he's like, I decided it was time to go out on my own. Early 1974 i told mr brown and the other partners i was going to leave and start an investment and venture venture capital firm of my own with a focus on the health care field well that that doesn't actually keep he doesn't really focus on the health care field he does everything else uh they all wish me well and i know more than a few of them were happy to see me go. The only problem was that I had no money.

I was worth almost a million dollars at that point, but it was all on paper. So I don't actually understand this, and he didn't explain it in the book, but all his wealth was tied up in his shares of what he owned as being a partner for Presbyterian, but they were put up as collateral. The firm would then borrow again, and there's no way for him to get the money out. So when he says it's all on paper, he says explicitly the partners would never let me get that money out.

So I don't even know how you would get yourself in a situation like that. So he's not really worth a million dollars. Now he's basically starting over from nothing. So again, just if you were thinking in your mind like the the timeline here like you have these vast vast peaks and now he's in the the bottom of a very deep valley um so he's this is how he gets he gets started um so he goes i went out and did something I was good at, selling equities, except that in this case, I was selling my own expertise. What he did, he's like, he offers his services as a personal financial advisor. So Ross Perot is going to pay him $60,000 a year.

This other guy is going to pay him $35,000 a year. And another person is going to pay him $15,000 a year. So he finds a way, he's like, listen, I have $110,000 a year coming in, the equivalent of about half a million dollars today, of which I would allot myself a salary of $35,000. I was determined to keep overhead as low as possible. And he did this by buying used furniture. He was subleased unused office space. And he's just really trying to just scrap, to just scrap for business at this time. And cause he's very close to going broke. And I want to share a little bit because, you know, the whole mental aspect of, of running your own company, I think is very hard for everybody has

stress and anxiety to deal with, but it's very hard for people that just have normal jobs to understand like the high, the highs are gonna be higher than you ever felt. And the lows could be Everybody has stress and anxiety to deal with, but it's very hard for people that just have normal jobs to understand. The highs are going to be higher than you ever felt, and the lows could be very, very lower than anything you've ever felt. This is his mental state at the time. By early 1975, we were still struggling. I wasn't afraid, but I was anxious, and my anxiety drove me to be almost maniacal about bringing in business so this whole idea about turning anxiety into a driving force i was listening to a podcast with the one of the founders of bumble and i guess she was talking about she was suffering from crippling anxiety

uh to the point where like she'd she'd be awake for like two hours and go to sleep and then be awake for another two hours and go to sleep and then be awake for another two hours and go to sleep. And she was just very, very, um, deeply depressed and troubled. And her doctor actually said that you need to channel that into your work. And she found a way to channel her anxiety into her work. And she said it was helpful. That's kind of, uh, echoing what, what Ken is doing in 1975. So I thought that was interesting because I don't know if I've ever heard that advice before. So he winds up building up slowly but surely. One of the guys that he's a personal financial advisor for, we talked about last week,

it's the guy that knows Bernie Marcus because he's running a company that Bernie Marcus's handy damn was going to purchase or thought about purchasing didn't go through. So that guy, I think his name is Gary Erbaum. He is the one that introduces Ken to Bernie. And now we're in the point of the story where we're learning about the opportunity for Home Depot from other founders and some early tactics to get traction to the store. Same thing. There's a lot of in this book that was covered in the last book. So I'm obviously going to skip over that since I already did a podcast about it. But he's talking about, well, I want to bring up what I brought up last week because I think it's important for people to understand.

It's the importance of equity. Bernie Marcus is in his mid-40s at the time. He's got fancy titles, making good money, but it's very hard to get wealthy as just a high-paid employee without equity. So he's talking about, this is Ken talking about his feelings when he realized the scope of the opportunity for handy dan remember he buys handy dan sock anywhere from like three to nine dollars a share i think if i remember correctly and he unloads it at 20 22 50 if i can remember correctly so he says i was starting to get excited hell i was bouncing in my seat this company was a major steal and unbelievably bernie marcus owned no stock in it

he had no options he was strictly a professional hired gun he was running that company and running it very well just for his salary so we all need to learn not to make that same mistake if we can avoid it um so he says i mean compare that He's 49 when he starts Home Depot, basically broke, has child support, alimony, and within 10 years he's a billionaire because he owns equity and the company was successful. So this is one part. I don't know if I talked about it last week,

but I thought it was interesting. So sometimes you see the opportunity of what you're going to do way before it exists. So at the time, Bernie and Ken are just partners on HandyDan, but they're going to have this conversation that Bernie learned from other founders. And if you remember like the books on Sam Walton or Jeff Bezos, Jeff, one of the most important meetings he ever had in his life was advice he got from the founder of Costco. And Sam Walton, obviously Jeff learned from Sam as well. Sam Walton would learn from people from JCPenney and all the other retailers as well.

And Kmart. There's actually anecdotes in this book about Sam Walton learning from Kmart. But this is how they identified what Home Depot could possibly be by another founder. So Ken's all jumping up. He's like, they're touring a store at the time. He's like, if all the stores we open are like this, we're going to make a fortune. Just then Bernie grabs me by the arm. Don't get carried away, he says in a low voice. What do you mean carried away? He says, we're very vulnerable. To what? I can't tell you. What do you mean you can't tell me? I can't tell you, he says.

We could be in trouble. Even though the store is great, even though all the indications are that it's going to do very well, even though our business is going to do very well in general, we could be in serious trouble. What I didn't know at that moment was that Bernie had a friend in San Diego by the name of Saul Price. Saul had come up with this brilliant concept of buying in bulk and selling at very low profit margins in big, clearly organized stores. So that theme right there is what they applied to the home improvement industry, which didn't exist before that point. Okay. Price Club was similar to what Costco does today. It was charging membership fees to

supplement its profits. One day in the mid-1970s, Price invited Bernie down to take a look at how Price Club operated. As they walked through the aisles, Saul said, you see this store, Bernie? Someday, somebody is going to do this in home improvement. And whoever does it is going to change the face of the industry dramatically. And if that somebody isn't you,

you're going to be in trouble. Bernie never forgot that. I love that idea about who knows, like Bernie's life might be fundamentally different if he never got that advice from another founder. And so skipping over a lot of parts of this because we know how that story ends. But I did think it was interesting to just share a couple ideas they had to get traction in the early days of Home Depot. And this is Ken writing. It says, the Home Depot didn't exactly get off to a flying start. At first, we had so little cash that we could only afford to open two of the four stores we planned to open. And we had nowhere near enough stock to fill those two stores. Miles of empty shelves were not going to inspire customer confidence.

Then Pat Farah came up with a genius idea. Pat Farah is one of the co-founders of Home Depot. He went to the vendors and asked them for boxes, just boxes, with a product label on the outside and nothing inside to fill our empty shelves. Customers would walk in and see what appeared to be a prosperous store packed with merchandise. So a little bit of smoke and mirrors there. And then I found this very interesting. How are you going to get people to come into a store? They only have two stores in Atlanta at the time. They were not shy of doing the work themselves.

And he says, at first, Bernie was so worried about attracting customers that he used to shuttle back and forth between the two stores, standing outside the entrances and handing out dollar bills to anyone who'd go in. And this is Ken's takeaway and the explicit lesson he talks about from the early days of Home Depot. If there's anything I would take about throughout this whole process, it would be this, never giving up when the chips were down and thinking creatively instead of just reactively.

It's a style I recommend highly. And just another short story I want to share with you. Like I said before, he's involved in tons of other businesses. Home Depot is what he's best known for and what made him probably the most of his wealth. But he had all kinds of different business partners and investments that he had going on. And this is an explicit lesson that you need to leave more on the table for the other person than he thinks he should get. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier, how he felt that being decent to people earlier in his life paid compounded dividends later in his life. And this is an example. It said, back in 1986,

Tommy Teague and I decided to take our truck leasing business private to get the benefit of new tax laws. I was putting up the money to buy out the public shareholders. All the company's shares were going to be reallocated to Tommy and me. So he's the investor and the strategist, and then Tommy's the operator. And he says, Ken, Tommy said, if there was some way I could get more stock, I'd sure appreciate it. He owned around 8% to 9% of the company at the time. Tommy, leave it to me. At the closing, Tommy and his lawyers were on one side of the table, and my lawyer and I were on the other side.

Suddenly, I saw Tommy whispering to his lawyer and getting agitated. Finally, he blurts out to the lawyer, I'm telling him. Tommy gets up and tells me, I've got to talk to you outside, Ken. Did you read the contracts, he asked. Uh-uh, I didn't read them. I didn't read them, I said. Well, your lawyer fucked up, Tommy said. My lawyer didn't fuck up, Tommy, I told him. Those contracts are exactly as I told him they should be. This is Tommy's response. The way it's written, I'm going to own two-thirds of the company and you're going to only own one-third. Tommy, I said, my one-third is going to be worth a hell of a lot more than if I owned two-thirds and you owned one-third. He's really picking up on how important incentives are to human nature. So he says, now, if I'd given Tommy 20% of the company,

he would have been happier than a pig in shit. But I knew that with two thirds of the company in his hands, Tommy was going to work his ass off to make Salem Leasing succeed. And I was right. We took the company private for a value of about $15 million. Today, my one-third is worth $150 million. One of the most important lessons in my life is this, leave more on the table for the other guy than he thinks he should get. And that is where I'm going to leave this story.

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nowhere else. And then every week your podcast player will automatically update with a new founders only our founders members only podcast. So if you're getting value out of this podcast, you go to founderspodcast.com forward slash support, and you can choose any level of support that you want on a monthly basis. I leave that up to you depending on how much value you feel that I deliver to you. Regardless of your support amount, everybody gets the same. They all get the same podcast. So it's completely optional if you want to support at a higher level, and I appreciate those of you that do.

And finally, if you're interested on getting a weekly email from me, if you're interested in learning about the ideas that entrepreneurs and company builders have, which I assume you are because you're listening to a podcast about that, I have this side project called Founders Notes. So foundersnotes.co. What that is, is the same way I take notes and highlights from when I read a book. I take notes and highlights when I listen to podcasts. And these are podcasts specifically of when entrepreneurs speak about what they learned from building their business. And if you are an entrepreneur already, or you're interested in

being one, the information in this email is invaluable. There's no fluff, it's no noise, it's all signal. So foundersnotes.co, you can sign up there. If you stay on the free list, you'll get I think 20% to 30% of the notes I produce on a weekly basis. That's a good way for you to try it out, see if you like it. And if you like it, upgrade to become a paid become a paid member, and you'll get 100% of the notes that I make, plus access the entire back catalog, all the archives. And I think I'm already over like, I think by the time you hear this, 60 notes on 60 different founders about what they learned from business. So it's very small monthly fee. And for those of us out building companies are interested in it, I just think the information is just well worth that small monthly fee. So foundersnotes.co, everything I said is also in the show notes. So you can go to the website

of Founders Podcast if you want to. If not, you can just click directly the links. The second, another thing before I go, two actually more things. One, if you want, instead of reading the books, if you want to listen to the books, look for the link that I have in the show notes. It's a way for you to get two free audio books by trying Audible. This is not like a standard, it's not one of their standard, uh, offers they have. Cause usually you get one book. This is two, you have to use the link in the show notes. And even if you don't continue with the membership, um, you get to keep those books forever, which is really cool. Uh, but I think that that link expires in December. So if you're interested in doing that, you should do it now. And then finally, um, another way for you to get extra additional content from me is I need a favor from you.

If you like this podcast and you're willing to leave a review wherever you listen to it, on Apple Podcasts or otherwise, take a screenshot of that and email it to foundersreviews at gmail.com. I will reply back with a private RSS feed. That's all a podcast is. It's just an RSS feed. I've already done two of them. back with a private RSS feed. That's all a podcast is. It's just an RSS feed. And this is, I do, I've already done two of them and they're reviewer only podcasts. So short little podcasts that I've done just for people that are nice enough to leave a review and to tell others what they enjoy about this podcast. One of them is on Steve Jobs with stories that I've never heard anywhere else.

And the other one is on Max Levchin, which is one of the co-founders of PayPal. He actually worked with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk before they were Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, which he's got some interesting insights into the beginning of PayPal. So if you'll do that, foundersreviews at gmail.com. If you're here, please tell a friend.

I'd really appreciate it. And I will talk to you next Monday.