Founders - #47 Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way

Episode Date: November 19, 2018

What I learned from reading Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Wayby Richard Branson----Business is a fluid, changing substance. A mutating, indefinable thing [0:45]I just pick up the phone and get on with it [7:50]smart ways to get initial traction [9:51]to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent [14:19]Richard Branson's early business philosophy [14:49]the beginning of Virgin [19:00]what he learned from going to jail [23:01]the scope of Richard's ambition at 21 [24:44]a model of compatible businesses [27:00]how Richard Branson made his first fortune [29:00]how Richard Branson gets Necker Island and the idea for Virgin Airways [34:45]protecting the downside risk [38:40]Richard Branson's view on public companies [46:12]taking Virgin private, funding secured [52:00]questioning the direction of his life at 40 years old [59:54] ----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

Even though I'm often asked to define my business philosophy, I generally won't do so because I don't believe it can be taught as if it were a recipe. There aren't ingredients and techniques that will guarantee success. Parameters exist that, if followed, will ensure a business can continue, but you cannot clearly define our business success and then bottle it as you would a perfume. It's not that simple. To be successful, you have to be out there. You have to hit the ground running.

And if you have a good team around you and more than your fair share of luck, you might make something happen. But you certainly can't guarantee it just by following someone else's formula. Business is a fluid changing substance, and as far as I'm concerned, the virgin group will never stand still. It has always been a mutating, indefinable thing, and the past few years have demonstrated that. But it is only when you come to write a book such as this that you discover how far you still want to go.

That's how I see this book. A comprehensive account of the first 50 or so years of my life. The struggling years. But also a work and a life in progress. This book was never intended to be as dry as a balance sheet, but will, I hope, give an idea of what has been important to my life and to the people around me thus far. Okay, so that is Richard Branson writing in his autobiography, and the book is called losing my virginity how i survived had fun and made a fortune doing business my way so this book was originally published in 1998 and i went back and checked my Amazon account. And the first time I read it was back in 2005. And rereading it now, what, almost 13 years later, I realized how much of it had fallen away from my memory.

So everybody, Richard Branson is probably what, one of the most famous entrepreneurs of all time, like in history, certainly one of the most famous living entrepreneurs. And what I forgot about it is how much of the book is what he's describing there. Struggle. And it's not until he sells, what surprised me now rereading it, and I'll get to it eventually later in these podcasts, is it wasn't until he was able to sell Virgin Music some 25 years after he started out as an entrepreneur that he actually had, for the first time in his life,

money to do other things that he wanted to do. So we'll go into detail about how he would just constantly build businesses, but never had too much money to speak of because he kept reinvesting in the business and keep expanding the Virgin Group. And so one other thing before I also get back into the book is, as you probably saw in the title of this podcast, this is going to be part one of a multi-part series on Richard Branson. So in the past, I've done multiple podcasts on certain people, Henry Ford, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, because there's multiple books written about their businesses. And what I want to start doing now, which I think is more helpful, is if I'm going to be covering entrepreneurs multiple times, I want to try to do it all at once.

There's probably five different books I want to read on Steve Jobs. And so what I would do if I could go back and redo it is I would do all of them in order. Because you're reading about the same material. You have a deeper understanding as you continue. And I think that's a little better than, you know, maybe doing one podcast on Henry Ford, for example, and then waiting two months. Sometimes you forget all the detail.

So I'm going to do a, this is an experiment, see how it works. But for Richard Branson, there's several books of his that I want to read. And I think this one, obviously, we should start with this one because it's an autobiography. He released another autobiography like a year or two ago, which I'm going to definitely read. And it'll be one of the parts in this multi-part series. But I think Losing My Virginity is the perfect place to start because this is what I'm most interested in and why I'm doing a podcast where I read biographies of entrepreneurs is because, first of all, I think it's very inspiring. Not just my opinion, but, you know, there's tons of other founders that have talked about the same

thing. It's very inspiring about reading the life story of people that have accomplished something. And specifically for me is like seeing how they started out and how they, you know, many times, you know, they don't start out building massive, massively profitable businesses. And in Richard Branson's case, he starts out just trying to run a magazine and then starts a record label and then an airline. And now, present day, Virgin Group is a collection of about 400 different companies. So we're going to spend a lot of time studying his early days. Before I get back into the book, though, I just want to remind you that Founders is supported by the people that give value from listening to this podcast. So once I get back into the book, I'm not going to interrupt our time together with ads. And the only way I'm able to do that is if you support,

if you get value from my work, if you'll support it directly by becoming a member. So if you go to founderspodcast.com forward slash support, or you just click the link in the show notes in your podcast player, for a small monthly fee, essentially it's the price of a cup of coffee, you could make sure that this work continues to get done. And not only that,

you get access to the Founders Members exclusive episodes. So right now, as of today, if you sign up, you'd automatically unlock 11 additional podcasts that I've done just for members that are available nowhere else. Plus, I make a new members-only episode every week. So if you like the podcast I'm doing, and if you're getting value out of it, please become a member. You can support at any level, any monthly contribution level. They all get the same thing. So it's just totally up to you to decide what level of value that you get from this. Okay, so let's get into the book. And I just want to start with, there's just a paragraph from the prologue, and then I'm going to move through the book in chronological order. So this book very much reminds me of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, his book, where all the chapters are named after the years in his life, which makes it really easy to

understand the progression and to keep track of what's going on. But he's talking to us a little bit in the prologue about, you know, what is Virgin Group? And where is it going? And so I think that's a good introduction into his autobiography. And he says, the wider question of where the Virgin Group will end up is impossible to answer. Rather than be too academic about it all, which is not the way I think, I have written this book to demonstrate how we made Virgin what it is today. If you read carefully between the lines, you will understand what our vision for the Virgin group is, and you will see where I am going. Some people say that my vision for Virgin breaks all the rules and is too wildly kaleidoscopic. Others say that Virgin has become one of the leading brand names of the

century. Others analyze it down to the last degree and then write academic papers on it. And this sentence is, to me, the most important of the entire paragraph. As for me, I just pick up the phone and get on with it. So I'm going to skip ahead into his life. And before I get into that, there's just some one-liners that I've highlighted and taken notes on throughout the book. I just came across one of them right here. There's a lot of his thoughts that echo other founders that we've covered. And they're just a – I almost think that instead of calling it the founders members, it should be like founders misfits.

Because I think almost every single person, not only is it like an homage to the great Apple ad, here's the crazy ones. But all the people that we are discussing together and that we're learning about together, they just don't fit into normal society. So he's reflecting on that from an early age. He says, I think my parents must have instilled a rebellious streak in me. I have always thought rules were there to be broken. And to me, that echoes one of my favorite quotes that I've learned from doing this podcast, you know, because now I'm up to almost 50 of these books read. And what is that? Probably hundreds of thousands of words. And it's just funny to me what actually sticks out

even as time passes and I keep reading more of them is one of those concepts is the Yvonne Chouinard, which is one of my favorite books, definitely in the top five out of the ones I've read. And he's the founder of Patagonia. If you haven't listened to that podcast, I would definitely recommend going back and reading it. And then of course, buying his book, it's fantastic. But he always he has this great quote. And he says, if you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. And we're going to get into that a little later when Richard gets arrested. So at this point in the book, he is starting a magazine and it's called Student.

And I'm not going to go into too much detail about that. I just wanted to highlight things that are useful for us. So this is smart ways to get an initial traction when you're building a new product. And he says, I drew up lists and lists of people to call and slowly work my way down them. Most of them rejected the idea of paying for advertising in an unpublished magazine. But gradually, I began to find ways of attracting their attention. So this whole thing about finding different unique ways to attract attention, that's something that you're going to see throughout Richard's life.

And I think that gives him a huge creative edge over most other people building businesses that he just constantly like okay well there's got to be a different way to do it than the way everybody else is doing it and so this is an example he just said hey we haven't even made our first our first edition of the student magazine, yet I'm going to find a way to sell advertising. And he says, I called up Coca-Cola and told them that Pepsi had just booked a big advertisement, but that the back page was still free. I then called up the Daily Telegraph, these are newspapers, and asked them whether they would prefer to advertise before or after the Daily

Express. So he's playing, what he's doing here is obviously he's playing their uh you know calling up coco hey coca-cola hey do you want to uh advertise in student magazine they're just gonna hang up on you but if you start the conversation and frame in a different way like hey oh pepsi just took an ad but you know we still have some some uh some advertising space in the back they're like oh okay pepsi's doing it maybe we should do it as well um so around this time he says my schoolwork was going from bad to worst but i was giving myself a wonderful lesson in confidence building had and this is such an important point about the naivete of young people had i been five or six years older the sheer absurdity of trying to sell advertising to major companies in a magazine that did not yet exist, edited by two 15-year-old schoolboys, would have prevented me from picking up the phone at all.

But I was too young to contemplate failure. So embedded in that paragraph, he starts his first business at 15 years old. Something that I don't know. There's this phenomenon. I can't remember what it's called, but once you're made aware of something, you start seeing that same thing over and over again, even though it probably already existed all the time. So like, think about when you buy a new car, and suddenly when you're driving the road, you see all these other people have the same car as you that you may not have noticed before. And so as I'm reading these

books week to week, there's just been a theme that maybe it's just on my mind now because I've been thinking a lot about what kind of parent I want to be and reading about parenting and just questioning my assumptions to make sure that I do a good job. And so this is a reminder for myself, and I just want to share it with you. The note I left myself is be good parents. And he's talking about the support that he got from parents. And this echoed something that Paul Allen talked about. we talked about it last week with ken lingone and he said i was lucky i always felt that i could speak to my parents as if they were my closest friends rather than closing down on me they reacted very well to this letter and we kept our lines of community or we kept open our lines of communication. At about this time, I noticed that a good many of my friends

stopped confiding in their parents, but I never felt embarrassed or rebellious towards mine. They always encouraged me to go ahead and do whatever I wanted to do, and if they did not always praise my projects, they never expressed less than sympathy and support. So two things I just want to elaborate on here is the letter. He's writing a letter to his parents at 16 years old apologizing for the little time he spent with his family over Easter because he's trying to build the magazine Student. And the second thing is when he talks about they always encourage me to go ahead

and do whatever I want to do even if they didn't always praise my projects, there's an alternate reality where he had different parents and he's not the Richard Branson who he is today without the support and encouragement that he got clearly at a very young age. So like many of the people we cover on the podcast is he's a really crappy student. He did not like structured learning. And so this is another example to understand the entrepreneur study, the juvenile delinquent. So he's leaving school and he says, when I left in 1967, aged almost 17, my headmaster's parting words to me were congratulations congratulations

branson i predict that you will either go to prison or become a millionaire and he does both of those things actually they wind up not being mutually exclusive okay so um i'm always fascinated when we're able to capture you know because because you're going to study your opinions on business when you first start out and how you structure the company you do or any work that you do really. It's going to change over time as you expose yourself to more ideas and have different experiences that you're hopefully learning from. So we're going to capture a little bit of Richard's early business philosophy here. And he says, I was becoming an entrepreneur almost by default. Although if anybody had mentioned the word to me then, I probably would have to ask what it meant. I certainly didn't regard myself as a businessman.

Businessmen were middle-aged men in the city obsessed with making money. So this word, the city city i had to look it up because i didn't understand what he meant um obviously not from england and it's their financial district so as i understand it's like their version of wall street they wore pinstripe suits and had wives and 2.4 children in the suburbs of course we needed money to survive but we saw it much more as a creative enterprise than a money-making one. So he's very much into like counterculture at this time. You know, he wasn't too heavy into drugs, even though most of his friends were at the time, very much into free love. That's one thing that's not in

the podcast, but it's in the book constantly. He's very graphic descriptions of his sex life, which I've never come across in an autobiography of an entrepreneur before. So let me go back to this paragraph. So it's saying, hey, this is a more creative enterprise than a money-making one that we just need to make money so we can continue doing what we're doing. Later, it became apparent to me that business could be a creative enterprise in itself. If you publish a magazine, you're trying to create something that is original, that stands out from the crowd, that will last and hopefully serve some useful purpose. Above all, you want to create something you're proud of. That has always been my philosophy of business. I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money.

If that is the sole motive, then I believe you are better off not doing it. So when I heard this, when I was younger and I heard this advice, because I've heard it before, I always thought it was like silly nonsense. And then you realize that at a certain point, if money is your only motivator, you're going to stop doing what you're doing. Or you're going to be deeply unhappy since money really can't buy happiness above a certain amount of money. But if you're loving what you're doing and you're being creative and it's something you're proud of, then you're going to spend more time on it. You're going to work harder at it and it's going to be better. And that along with that will come money.

I didn't, you know, when I was younger, I didn't understand that distinction. So he says a business has to be, and he's going to summarize this here. A business has to be involving. It has to be fun. And it has to exercise your creative instincts. And their distinction is, you know, this entire book is about struggle and stress and being on the precipice of bankruptcy constantly. So these are not by themselves fun things, but what he was doing, the challenge he talks about,

like, you know, how, you know, it's up to you echoing what Ray Dalio taught us a few weeks ago. Like you have to be who you are. And for Richard Branson, he wanted to like, his main goal in life was to set these big audacious goals and see if he could raise rise to the challenge. So that was fun to him. That doesn't mean every day is going to be fun. And I think that's something, you know, I struggled, I had to struggle to understand for a long time. Okay. So this is the beginning of Virgin. And he's doing the magazine. It's not really going well. And this is how he gets in.

The first Virgin business is going to be the record store. So it says, one thing I knew from everyone who came into chat or worked for us was that they spent a good deal of their time listening to music and a good deal of money buying records. He's talking about people that came into the student magazine and he talks about these are the kind of people he goes people who would never dream of spending as much as 40 shillings on a meal wouldn't hesitate to spend 40 shillings buying the latest bob dylan album i began to think about setting up a record distribution business i thought about the high cost of records and the

sort of people who bought student magazine and wondered whether we could advertise and sell cheap mail order records through the magazine as it turned out the first advertisement for a mail for mail order records appeared in the final edition of student so um something that he talks about a lot i would categorize as like second order effects. It's starting an opportunity, understanding you don't know where that opportunity is going to lead you to. But then once you get to that next level, it's easier to hop to the next opportunity because you're already at a different place in life. So if he never, even the student was struggling and, know was not necessarily successful if he didn't start student he wouldn't have realized hey all the people that are interstudent like you just noticed

this this anomaly like why would they be so cheap to feed themselves but because they have such a passion for music that they'll buy bob dylan's new album and so that led him to this uh to this next opportunity so they put in an advertisement saying, hey, we're going to sell records. And they put it in their own magazine. And it went crazy. So it says, but the offer of cheap records brought in a flood of inquiries and more cash than we had ever seen before. So overnight, from a very struggling magazine, he's on the phone all day trying to sell advertising to, hey, people are just handing over money because we're able to sell records slightly cheaper than the next guy. So he said, we decided to come up with another name for the mail order business, a name that would be eye-catching, that would stand alone and not

appeal to just students. So he has a young woman working for him and she goes, I know, she said, what about Virgin? We're complete virgins at business great i decided on the spot it's virgin so two things happening here one his what i'm on at is richard's ability to make decisions rapidly he talks about within the first 30 seconds he kind of summarizes what he feels about people and and what about and um and uh like the value of business opportunities. Maybe this comes from being dyslexic and a bad student, but he really feels that he has no other choice

but to rely on his intuition. The second thing is this whole thing about complete verges of business. Again, going back, he's in a group of basically counterculture socialists, not the people, like if you look at his peer group around this age you would never think that out of this group is going to become one of the most influential entrepreneurs or business people you know of all time um but i

think that really does speak to the value in his approach of like hey can i make business fun like it doesn't who says going back to like danny meyer right if you uh one of my favorite things about reading that book and doing that podcast a few months ago it might have been a year ago by now but um was his his whole idea is like whoever said you know and that's basically his way to get to first principles thinking like whoever said that um you had to have like you couldn't have a nice upscale restaurant that didn't wasn't overly expensive or whoever said that you couldn't have a new take on barbecue and that you could have a successful barbecue restaurant in new york and he has all these other examples in the book but of just a way to get to the ideas like in what i'm being told actually true or is it just conventional wisdom that may be a little bit outdated?

So he winds up going to jail. I'm going to skip over because I think the story is pretty well known. But if not, it's in the book if you read it. And it's this idea that he figured out how to save on taxes by basically faking like he was going to export or import records. And it was just like convoluted scheme about like driving across borders and suddenly you save, you know, $5,000 or whatever the number is. So it's illegal at the time. I think it probably still is today. And he winds up in jail.

And so I'm going to skip over the story. But the important part is the lesson he took away from it. And this is what he learned from going to jail. And so I'm going to skip over the story, but the important part is the lesson he took away from it. And this is what he learned from going to jail. That night was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. As I lay in the cell and stared at the ceiling, I felt complete claustrophobia. I have never enjoyed being accountable to anyone else or not being in control of my own destiny. I have always enjoyed breaking the rules, whether they were school rules or accepted conventions, such as that no 17-year-old can edit a national magazine. As a 21-year-old, I had lived life entirely on my own terms,

following my own instincts. But to be in prison meant that all the freedom was taken away. I was locked in a cell and utterly dependent on somebody else to open the door. I vowed to myself that I would never again do anything that would cause me to be imprisoned or indeed do any kind of business deal by which I would ever have to cause to be embarrassed. In the many different business worlds I have inhabited since that night in prison, there have been times when I could have succumbed to some form of bribe or could have had my way by offering one. But ever since that night in prison, I have never been tempted to break my vow. My parents had always drummed into me that all you have in life is your reputation. You may be very rich, but if you lose

your good name, you'll never be happy. I had never really focused on what a good name truly meant, but that night in prison made me understand. And this is, so as you heard, now he's 21 years old. This is the scope of his ambition at 21 years old at the same time i had the customs fine the mortgage and the thought of prison hanging over me so the customs fine i think he has to pay like 75 000 um over the next like three or four years or he'd risk going back to jail and it says the mail order business was doing well but mainly seemed to attract the serious music buyers who were looking for quite rare records it seemed difficult to expand it

further we realized that if we were going to make money it would have to come from opening up more virgin record shops nick this is his co-founder and i began a program of serious expansion towards the end of 1971 and throughout 1972, we aimed to open a shop every month. By Christmas 1972, we had 14 record shops. We reached 21 at the time. Several in London and one in every big city across the country. But here's why I included this in the podcast because I think it's a really good idea. After negotiating the lease until we were sure that the landlords would go no lower, we would push for a rent-free period for the first three months. This was the single most crucial element.

When we opened, we knew that record sales in the first three months would help pay for rent on the previous shop that we had opened. The sales also demonstrated, without committing to a huge overhead whether the site we had chosen attracted enough people off the streets to make the shop viable so this whole idea of um continuing to expand and then taking the money that you made and expanding further is is his modus operandi up until um he achieved freedom, which I think at the time he must have been, I don't know the age, he might have been close to 40 years old. Let's see, we're going to skip ahead. So this is some more, we see more insights into something

that he does later on. He's still in his 20s, but he has an idea in his mind of a model of compatible businesses. And so they're having some success with the Virgin Records stories. He's like, well, is there any of these related businesses that we could open up that kind of like almost like a vertical integration into the music industry? So he says, if Virgin set up a a record label we could offer artists somewhere to record For which we could charge them. So let me let me back up So right now he has the chain of Virgin record stores, right? Then he bought this house that he calls the Manor and he did it because He wanted to

Have a recording studio where people could go and basically live at while they were making their album and then record whenever they wanted to. He's saying at the time, recording studios were so, like, they were so tightly scheduled that you could have somebody like the Rolling Stones come in and they'd have to record at 9 a.m. and they'd have exactly two hours and then they'd have to leave and they'd have to go and spend some of that time setting up Their own instruments and and doing everything else sick. Why isn't just we have a place where you could stay it's a you know big old like mansion kind of thing and If you if instead of you know, maybe you don't want to record at 9 in the morning Maybe you want to record from 11 p.m

Till 5 in the morning and then you want to take a few days off or whatever your creative process is So that's what he's talking about. We could offer artists somewhere to record which we could charge them so says we if we have the record label we also have the recording studio we could publish and release their records from which we could make a profit and we had a large and growing chain of shops where we could promote and sell the records and again make the retail profit margin the three businesses were mutually compatible and would also benefit the bands we signed since we could reduce prices at the Manor, that's the recording studio, the manufacturing end, and increase promotion at the shops, the retail end, while still making our own

profit. This is exactly what they wind up doing. And this whole idea of a record label, it is what actually got him his biggest break because in the future, I think about 20 years from where we are now, he sells that record label for a billion dollars. And this is, I mean, he uses the word fortune here, but those are things of a matter of scale but this is how this is him telling us how he made his first his first fortune

he said most small record labels licensed their records since it was easy money they received 16% royalties from the other company meaning like a large distributor okay we're gonna go into some numbers here so hopefully this isn't too confusing so most little you know at the time Virgin Records is very small they're expected to just license their records and they would receive 16% royalties from the other company and paid out whatever they had agreed to an artist say five or ten percent out of that sixteen percent but Simon this is the guy that he co-founded Virgin Records with, and I decided that we would

go for a manufacturer and distribution deal. Again, the thing I'm most impressed with Richard is he has a set of fresh eyes to any deal that he does, and he winds up negotiating in a way that limits his downside and caps his downside and leaves his upside virtually unlimited. And this is one way he does it here. So they have these distribution deals called pressing and distribution. It's also referred to as P&D. It was a bold move, but even then I knew that it is only by being bold that you get anywhere. If you are a risk taker, then the art is to protect the downside.

It seemed to us that Tubular Bells was so good that we could promote it ourselves. So he's talking about the very first signee. The record label is a guy named Mike Oldfield, I think is how you pronounce his last name. He made this very esoteric and bizarre album called Tubular Bells that was 45 minutes long with no lyrics. And that's actually going to be a huge hit for them. So he's like, okay, well, this is what we want to do instead.

He goes to Island Records. He says, no, no, no, we don't want your standard deal. We want the P&D deal. They refuse at first. So they offered us a highly attractive licensing deal instead with royalties of 18%. We were paying Mike 5%, which meant that if we accepted Island's offer, we could collect 13% on the sales of Tubular Bells for ourselves, which would mean a total profit of us around $171,000 if the record did astonishing well and sold, say, 600,000 copies.

So if you sell 600 in the standard licensing deal, they'd make about $171,000. If we reached a million copies, then Virgin would make $285,000 without having to pay for any of the cost of promoting and marketing a record. Most small record companies in our place would have accepted it, and certainly both Island and our lawyers urged us to do so, but Simon and I felt differently. We had 14 Virgin record shops across the country which could promote Tubular Bells. If sales of Tubular Bells had faded, Virgin Music would have been dead in the water, But if we managed to sell 600,000 copies, Virgin would receive around 920,000. So on their deal saying, hey, we just want you to press and distribute. We're going to take care of the marketing and promotion ourselves, right? Which

is kind of what he's known for. And so the difference is at 600,000 copies, they'd go from making, let's say 171,000 to 920. So what's the worst case? Why wouldn't you try to cap your marketing expenses at that point and have a much greater upside? You're talking about the upside's almost 4X. Oh, I guess he's going to say, I'm jumping ahead. I'm running over my own highlight. He says, this was the upside. The intellectual copyright of Tubular Bells was our birthright and we were determined to build on it. So we turned down Island's offer and insisted insisted we stick to P&D deal. We committed ourselves, this is so important, we committed ourselves to selling Tubular Bells with our own resources. We became rich beyond our

dreams as the sales of Tubular Bells shot up over a million copies. Remember, they were thinking, hey, if we could sell, we could just be so lucky to sell 600,000 copies, we'd make about 900 grand. So they sell over a million. Two Breeler Bells went on to sell millions of copies and still sells around the world today. Our gamble that we could promote it ourselves made us our first fortune. Something that I'd say Richard's pretty famous for is the

fact that he owned his own island and it's called Necker Island, in case you weren't familiar with it. What I found shocking and why I included this part in the podcast is how little he paid for it. So he has this idea. He's dating with soon to be his wife, Joan. They have really no money to speak of at the time, even though he just said a few years earlier that they made their first fortune. They would re now we're about eight years after the fact they reinvested most of that into other acts. They have tons of debt. So they use that money to pay off like the mortgage on the manor or pay down some of that. They use it as collateral to get more loans for banks. Because again, his whole thing is he's just this kind of psychotic guy that wakes up every day trying to expand his empire in these really unique ways. And he's fighting in industries. It's not like,

you know, these are highly competitive industries. So it's not like there's high profit margins so it comes with this idea that hey i want to go to the virgin islands with uh this beautiful woman that i'm dating um he knew that if you they still have these arrangements today if you say hey i want you know you talk to like uh salespeople they're trying to sell real estate in these islands, that you're interested in buying real estate, they'll fly you down and put you up in accommodations just to have the sales pitch to you. So he does that. And they wind up landing on Necker Island.

And I'm just going to skip over this part so we can get to the main point. But he says, how much does he want for it i asked meaning necker island three million uh how much were you thinking about spending this is now the uh the real estate agent the estate agent asked suddenly smelling a rat we could offer 150 000 i said uh 200 000 i added trying to make it sound more. I see. As we flew back to the villa, it was clear that we were no longer welcome. So not only are they no longer welcome, this, this guy, they pack up their bags and they have to leave that same day. Um, so he says back in London later, I found out that the owner of Necker Island wanted

to sell it in a hurry. He wanted to construct a building somewhere in Scotland, which would cost him around 200 grand. I upped my offer to 175 grand and held on for three months. Finally, I got a call. If you're to offer 180,000, it's yours. There was never a hint that 180,000 was only a fraction of the 3 million asking price, so I agreed on the spot and Necker Island was ours. Even at such a low price there was a snag the Virgin Islands government had decreed that whoever bought Necker would have to develop it within five years of its ownership excuse me would have to develop it within five years of its

owner or its ownership would pass to them it would cost a good deal to build a house and pipe the water across from the neighboring island, but I was determined to make enough money to afford it. So in the very next paragraph, so this section could be called how he gets Necker Island and the idea for Virgin Airways. So they're staying on this thing called Beef Island. So it says, Joan and I stayed on Beef Island for the rest of that holiday, and it was there where I set up Virgin Airways. We were trying to catch a flight to Puerto Rico, but the local Puerto Rican scheduled flight was canceled. The airport terminal was full of stranded passengers. I made a few calls to charter companies and agreed to charter a plane for $2,000

to Puerto Rico. I divided the price by the number of seats, borrowed a blackboard, and wrote Virgin Airways, $39 single flight to Puerto Rico. I walked around the airport terminal and soon filled every seat on the charter plane. As we landed at Puerto Rico, a passenger turned to me and said, Virgin Airways isn't too bad. Smarten up the service a little and you could be in business. I might just do that, I laughed. Okay, so this is another example of how I was saying earlier that you don't, these like second order effects, like you can't get to another opportunity unless something happens before that.

So that little anecdote or story about setting up Virgin Islands, that happened, let's say 1979, 1980. It's not till three or four years later that he actually does set up Virgin Airlines for real. And this is something I think like, if I could only say, if I could say, hey, what's the one most important thing that you learned from reading Richard Branson's autobiography? Is this idea of optionality, that he always protected his downside risk. This is one of the examples where I wish I had the Kindle version of the book because you can search for specific, like how many times a specific term appears in the book. And this whole thing is protect downside, limit downside. What's our downside? Cap our downside. I have like, I would guess it appears 20 times in the book. So this is the way he does that. And

he's always trying to broaden Virgin. So he doesn't, so we don't have to rely on a single source of income. So there's two things, the two notes on that page is a really good way to summarize Richard's approach to business. It's like let's cap down our downside risk, right, maintain our optionality, and make sure that we're not relying on a single source of income. So this is the start of Virgin Airways. In February 1984, a young American lawyer called Randolph Fields

asked me whether i was interested in operating an airline he sent me a proposal which i read it was obvious that he contacted lots of other investors before me a record label owner is hardly going to be his first call so i skimmed through the proposal and i kept saying to myself don't get tempted don't even think about it in the same way that I tend to make up my mind about people within 30 seconds of meeting them, I also make up my mind about whether a business proposal excites me within about 30 seconds of looking at it.

I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics. The idea of operating a Virgin airline grabbed my imagination, but I had to work out in my own mind what the potential risks were. I wrote out a list of things. Keep in mind, we're going to get to this in a minute, but lists are very important in the way he operates his life. I wrote out a list of things I wanted to understand

about how the aircraft leasing would work. If I could lease the plane for one. Okay, so before I read it, this is, I don't remember if it came from this book, if it came from a YouTube video or a previous podcast I had heard. But this is one of the most famous like Richard Branson stories I ever heard about like how do you start an airline by, remember we started this section with how do you start an airline by, remember, we started this section with how do you protect your downside risk? Because starting an airline seems like it's unbelievably capital intensive, right? Well, this is how he comes up with it. He goes,

if I could lease the plane for one year and then have the chance to return the plane, we would have a clear escape route if if it all failed it would be embarrassing but we would limit the amount of money we lost by the end of the weekend i had made up my mind if we could limit everything to one year the employment contracts the leasing of the aircraft the exchange exposure and anything else that's starting up a new york route involved then i wanted to have a shot at it. I think that's a really good idea. Like who starts an airline? It's really like an experiment. It's going to be a one-year experiment. Can we do something here of value within one year?

I think that could be applied to everything that you're working on. Um, I also heard, I just heard a variation of this. Um, I was taking notes on this podcast of a founder that started a podcast. She just got into Y Combinator and the way she started her business is like, you know, can I, can I do a four week test to see if there's actually like demand here that I could fulfill as opposed to, you know, a lot of people, they keep their idea hidden. They work on it for 12, 18 months, two years, whatever. And then just it doesn't work out like crap. I wish I could have got to that failure point faster. So Richard's saying, hey, I'm going to do this in a year. I forgot her name. I can't remember. I wasn't expecting to talk about this, but she did it in four weeks. And it was like, how do you do vetted childcare?

And she winds up now building a business that is relatively successful just off of a four-week test, which again, that's her maintaining optionality and limiting her downside. So I'm going to skip ahead a little bit in the book. And this is a problem with co-founders we talk about this a number of times how um it's really hard to maintain co-founder relationships it's like it's hard to stay married right and be happy and this is a problem co-founders and richard's philosophy on life and this is him kind of arguing with one of the co-founders of virgin records simon it says the argument that lunchtime was a turning point in my relationship with simon over the years i had had unnerved him several times but this time he felt that i was prepared to bet the company and all

our accumulated wealth on a scheme that he thought was totally harebrained. So Simon's like, don't do the airline. Just stick to record. We're in the music industry. Why are we going into this, what Richard calls a lateral move? Simon's interest and love for life comes from the arts, from music, books, his collections of paintings, and beautiful cars. And now we're going to hear Richard's philosophy. My interest in life comes from

setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them. From a purely commercial perspective, Simon was absolutely right. But from the viewpoint of wanting to live life to the full, I felt I had to attempt it. From that lunchtime onward, a tension sprang up in our relationship, which never fully dissolved. Okay. So I always like to discuss numbers because I feel, I don't know, to me, they just say how to kind of like level me. Like they put me, they give me like an anchor in reality it gives like a context that words don't even though i love words obviously um but in 1984 just want to show you a little bit about virgin's growth 1984 they made 12 million dollars in profit they had 3 000 employees he's around

33 years old at the time and think about how crazy it is to start an airline at 33. By 1986, right, so that's two years later, they have 4,000 employees, sales of $189 million, and a pre-tax profit of $19 million. So wait, let me redo that so it's a little more understandable. In 1984, profit of $12 million, 3,000 employees. 1985, profit of $15 million, so went up another 3 million. And then 1987, 19 million. So, you know, 2, 3 million a year they're adding.

And this is on sales of anywhere from 119 million to 189 million. And he's employing at this time anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 people. Now, this is very interesting. I didn't know. So, again, I hadn't read the book in 13 years, something like that. And I'm halfway through the book, and I'm like, what the hell? They're talking about Virgin being a public company. I thought it was private.

I forgot that Virgin at one point went public and then he read and then he took it private because he hated being a public company so I always like to explore this because I find it interesting I find all aspects of business interesting from you know one person building a product by themselves all the way up to these you know giant public companies my own you know personal philosophy is like I think smaller is better but I do understand some people want to these you know giant public companies my own you know personal philosophy is like I think smaller is better but I do understand some people want to build like a giant conglomerate and some cases they want to make that public even though you could have a

private conglomerate which is what virgin group is today but it's just fascinating to me about you know people's opinion like there's not a right way It just depends on who you are and what's important to you. And in his case, he hated being public. And we're going to find out why. Firstly, the city had insisted that Virgin appoint some non-executive directors. I found it difficult to comply with all the formality that the city insisted we adopt. I was used to chatting with Simon and Ken about which bands to sign and then letting them get on with it. Virgin board meetings had always been highly informal affairs. I found our business was not one that could be boxed into a rigid timetable

of meetings. We had to make decisions quickly and off the cuff. My own personal philosophy is very much in alignment here. I would much rather keep things informal. He's talking about the difficulty to comply with formality. I think that's a great way to put it. I definitely empathize with that. So he said, I also had a number of disagreements, notably about dividends. I was extremely reluctant to follow British tradition and pay out a large dividend. I preferred the American or Japanese tradition whereby a company concentrates on reinvesting its profits to build itself and increase share value. He makes a good point here.

To me, a large dividend meant a loss of cash, which would be better employed within Virgin than by paying it away. It seemed to me that our outside shareholders had entrusted their money to Virgin in order for us to make it grow, not for us to hand back 5% of it back on a plate, which would then be taxed as income and so immediately lose 40% of its value. This may sound like a petty argument, but it illustrates the general loss of control I experienced. So there's that word control again, something that you and I talk about constantly is why are you or is this person that we're studying an entrepreneur? Is it because they want to make a lot of money? They want to build fame. They want to change the course of an industry.

In many cases, it comes down to a lot of these people's like they want control so it says most people think that 50 of a public company is the key to controlling it while this is true in theory to a large extent you lose control just by having to appoint non-executive directors and generally giving up your time to satisfy the city previously i had always felt confident about any decision we made but now virgin was a publicly quoted company i began to lose faith in myself i felt uneasy about making the rapid decisions i had always made so now you could see that his it's causing the idea that you can hypothetically determine the entire value of the company at any given time,

and it's readily accessible to everybody, makes him kind of doubt himself, where before he would just really trust his gut and then realize that most of the decisions we make, they're reversible. So I'm going to make a decision quick, and then if it's wrong, I'll just backtrack and I'll go a different direction. So now he's losing that ability. And this is the result. In many ways, 1987, our year of being a public company, was Virgin's least creative. We spent at least 50% of our time heading off to the city to explain what we were doing to fund managers, financial advisors,

and city PR firms rather than just getting on and doing it. Okay, so he said they were know, they, they were a public company for one year. So this is how, um, he takes Virgin private. Um, he tweets out that funding is secured at $420 a share. Oh wait, I'm sorry. That, that was somebody else, but this is how he takes Virgin private. Um, uh, let me give you some background before I get into it. They spent about $35 million buying up public stock of this other record distributor called Thorne EMI. And then right during this happens, there's a massive stock market crash. It says the share price of Thorne EMI had dropped from $7.30 a share

to $5.80, a drop of over 20%. And the value of our shareholding had crashed to 18 million. And then it says, I guess this isn't that important, but somebody calculated that he had lost $41 million

of personal wealth and his shares are virgin group just from the stock market crash. Since I was focusing much more on profits and cash flow from EMI, I began to see the stock market crash as a golden opportunity to buy the company. That week, I had a furious argument with two non-executive directors with whom we had brought in to represent the outside shareholders' interest when Virgin went public. So these two non-executive directors were utterly opposed to continuing the siege of Thor and EMI. He thought it was a great idea. He had an idea of like, these guys had huge back catalogs, and he thought you could make a lot more money off them than you could with like cassettes,

and then eventually he does this later with CDs. And this is his counterargument. But it's a unique buying opportunity, I said. It simply cannot be true that Thorn is now worth only two-thirds of its value on Friday. We know the cash we can earn from its back catalog. So in terms of straight cash, Chuss, it's a bargain. I could not persuade them, and I had to let the matter drop. That stock market crash was the final nail in Virgin's coffin as a public company.

Trevor and I set about finding other companies who might wish to invest in any of the Virgin subsidiaries as joint ventures. We wanted to replace the shareholders in the city with one or two key partners in various Virgin subsidiaries. The structure of the Virgin Group was about to become extremely complicated. So he does this. Okay, so I want to stop, I guess guess before I get to finishing how he goes private this whole thing about how it's going to get a lot more complicated I didn't know so he has this term that he uses later on in the book describing Virgin Group as branded venture

capital and I don't know if I'm just ignorant to that, but I've never heard that term before. Obviously, I know what venture capital is, but I've never heard branded venture capital. So I was shocked when I was doing some other research. I was like, how does Virgin Group have 400 companies? That's insane to me. So this whole idea is, once they do, so he starts doing this, you're going to see this because he's going to sell 25% of Virgin Music for about $100 million. Once he finally sells Virgin Music a few years from now,

and he reaps, I think after they pay off all their debts and everything else, I think he has like $500 million in the bank. And he's still, now for the first time in his life, banks don't get to tell him what to do. And he sets up the structure where, and it's actually, to me, like the structure has a fundamental understanding of human nature. He doesn't like big companies, right? So what he does is he takes on these usually 50-50 partnerships. So he says, okay uh we're gonna do you know a clothing company a coke a cola company whatever virgin you know they have a

million of these things what how he does this he says he he finds somebody that's either already an entrepreneur or is entrepreneurially like minded says hey we're gonna come in you're gonna own 50 of the company so you have a huge. Remember what Ken Langone said last week about why he gave that guy the truck company? He winds up making like 150 million from having 20% of this company because he gave the majority of the company to the guy running it because that guy has a larger incentive to make the company successful. That's basically what Richard's doing here. He says, okay, you're going to call your new company, let's say Virgin Cola or whatever. You're going to own 50% of it. It's going to be a small company. Usually, most of his companies have less than 60 employees. And we're going to come in,

you're going to use our branding, we're going to put up some of the money, and then you run the company, and then we're going to share 50% of the profit moving forward. And so what happens is he has these, they're almost like a bunch of options like these financial instruments where 10 of them fail it's okay because he's got 390 of them uh 390 other ones and so he's he's got a diversified uh he's got a cap downside so he's maintaining his optionality he's got an extremely diversified income uh um uh stream and he has all the upside in the world because some of these you know they start out like uh i think the it's like a small airline like a subsidiary of virgin airways in australia that i think they they started with like three million dollars and winds up going on and

making them like 250 million so you see that like we use this all i can lose in this airline it's three million dollars but he winds up making a whole lot more um now it gets you know very complicated like how are you going to there's no central organization but they're loosely tied to a bunch of holding companies and within each holding companies a bunch of um tiny companies it kind of reminds me of and this is you know not that it's important but like it echoes my own personal philosophy of like uh businesses much more in line with remember what edwin land said the founder of polaroid he had this uh he had this dream of a thousand small companies instead of one large polaroid and that each company would be doing like 20 million – I forgot the numbers exactly. Let's say 25 million in revenue every year, and every company would dedicate like 10 or 20 percent of their annual budget to R&D.

And so what you have is these hugely diversified scientific machines because his primary purpose was not business but inventing technologies that help people. And, you know, with a Polaroid camera, he did work for the Defense Department. He's the one that solved, I was just telling you this story a few days ago, he was the one that solved why we can drive at night and not be blinded by oncoming headlights. That's polarization that he invented 80 years ago that still exists today. So Edwin Land's, if you read the book Insisting on Impossible, his whole dream about these thousand small companies all diversified and reinvesting their money in R&D, which was his primary goal, is very similar to what Richard Branson's doing. Although I think with Edwin Land, he was more important about inventing new technology. Richard Branson, you know,

he'll jump into already existing businesses like airlines, trains, bridal gowns, all that kind of stuff. All right, so that was a hell of a tangent, but I never know when I sit down what I'm going to talk to you about. I just know what my highlights and notes say. So I just kind of have to go wherever my thoughts go at this moment. Okay. So he winds up being correct about

going private. He does this. He says, by selling 25% of Virgin Music for $100 million, we had vindicated our argument that the city, meaning the public, had undervalued Virgin. The sale was a clear sign that the company alone was worth at least $400 million. Another thing, I keep using the word dollars. He's talking about pounds. I know there's no way I'm going to keep that straight, so 400 million, he's talking about pounds. I keep saying dollars.

Just know that every time he's referencing, he's obviously going to do it in his local currency. And that was without any value at all placed on the various other companies, such as retail, which had made up the public group. That's what he means about being complicated. This was way above the 180 million pounds at which the city had valued us before we'd offered to buy the company back and was still above the 240 million pound price we had eventually paid to go private so it cost them 240 to go private they just sold 100 million out of one of their i mean virgin music is the most profitable one but they sold 25 of just one of their businesses for what is that almost a little

under 40 uh around 40 of what the value they had placed the value at and what he was able to buy the company back from. So he wound up being vindicated and being right. And I think, you know, if you could make the money of a public company but be private, I think everybody would pick to be private. So now I'm skipping ahead in the book because i think that the important thing is that we realize that even though we we might be impressed by the accomplishments of the people that we're studying on this podcast and that are their lives appear in the books and rightfully so they accomplish some wonderful things there there's just a an element of human nature that can't be avoided. And it's, you know,

we all have to deal with these bouts when we're not feeling well. And this is, um, you know, he's, he's writing rather honestly on the outside looking in at this time in his life, we're in 1990. Um, you know, it looks like he's got it all. Um that's not how he's feeling. So I just want to spend a little time reading this part too, just because, you know, no one's life is perfect. We're just all human beings trying to figure out our way through life. And it's normal to not always feel 100% or happy for that matter. So he said, we had celebrated my 40th birthday the previous month. I had found myself feeling uncharacteristically depressed.

Turning 40 had also made me wonder what I was doing with my life. After the grape leap into setting up Virgin Atlantic, I now found that it was difficult to develop the airline as quickly as I wanted. I began to question whether I should start doing something completely different. And a few pages later, we see more of this. And this is, I heard somebody call this the entrepreneurial roller coaster, that the highs are the highest highs you ever feel,

and the lows are the lowest lows you ever feel. so it's just a reminder um that you know no one's immune to this so he says in september 1991 when it really looked as if my world was falling apart after the high point of signing janet jackson and getting into heathrow earlier that year everything was now going wrong so the previous year he didn't know what he was doing. He felt depressed. He was still feeling that way even after having two of the biggest highlights of his career, which is kind of counterintuitive, right? With the burden of funding the Janet Jackson deal, even Virgin Music was having difficulties. And the airline was stretched almost to breaking point by trying to operate out of both Gatwick and Heathrow.

On top of that, the rumors about Virgin's financial troubles were mounting. And this is his, he's describing his emotional state here. It was like being engulfed in a bushfire. Although I kept stamping out flames, I was aware that more and more people were talking about my impending bankruptcy. I had taken so many telephone calls from journalists demanding to know whether our checks were bouncing that I could barely think straight and on the very next page it says will Richard Branson's balloon burst was the headline on the Guardian the entire post on the headline of

Guardian the entire page of the Guardian's business section was devoted to discussing my debts. And this is a quote from the article. It says, behind the man with the Midas touch, there is a picture of a highly indebted and not very profitable conglomerate. And up until that point, that is a very accurate description of his business. So we now know he sells the record label, has this huge fight with British Airways, and he winds up coming out of it to now where his company is estimated to be worth about $5 billion.

But the whole point of the beginning of this book was that it was very much a struggle. And he doesn't get to the point where he feels, I call it the opportunity of a lifetime. And that doesn't happen till the mid 90s. So that's where I'm going to leave the book today. If you want the full story and you wanna support this podcast at the same time,

go to founderspodcast.com forward slash books. If you buy this book or any of the other 45-ish books that I've covered so far on the podcast, it's a great way for you to get a book. And Amazon sends me a small percentage of the sale at no additional cost to you. So it's a win-win. It's very good for you and very good for founders. If you want to learn more about Richard Branson, keep in mind every week I do additional member-only podcasts. So this week, the Richard Branson version of that, we're going to go into the dirty tricks that British Airways played on Virgin Atlantic. We're going to go into how they actually forced him. He admits to losing that battle battle so they force him to sell

virgin music um how you can have a feeling that you know you've just made a billion dollars and you're running down the street crying um which is you know a cautionary tale um his opinions on surviving being the key priority of a business and how he structures his models to ensure that that happens. Going into the opportunity of a lifetime, his idea about branded venture capital, which I thought was fascinating. Talks about why he likes 50-50 partnerships. His philosophy on building Virgin and the simple way he accomplishes this, his belief that big is not beautiful. All these interesting other ideas. And of course, I'm going to elaborate more on how Virgin protects their downside risk, which I think is, I love that idea, 100%.

So if you want to hear that and 10 or 11 other member-only episodes, plus get a new one every week, and support a podcast that hopefully is providing you value, become a Founders member. Founders.com forward slash support. Every single link that I mentioned to you, obviously, you don't have to remember the domain if you don't want to because I include them in the show notes. If you want to read the book or if you want to know what's in the book, but you don't feel like reading it, another way you could support the podcast and it's mutually beneficial to you is there's a link down there that will give you two free audio books. And I think you have to use it soon though, because I think the link expires this December, if I'm not mistaken. It might be January.

But in any case, if you want two free audiobooks, you can try Audible. And even if you cancel, you get to keep the two books. So you can listen to this one. And I think next week's podcast is going to be on the book. So this one is called Losing My Virginity. And then his other autobiography that he released about 20 years after this one is called Finding My Virginity. So if you want to jump ahead and be ready for next week,

you can get both those on Audible if you want that as well. In addition to that, I would appreciate if you join my email list. So Founders has meant, you know, we're trying to learn about building companies from people that have built companies, right? And we're doing that primarily from a historical context using biographies and autobiographies of entrepreneurs. Just like I've said before,

like the genesis of the idea happened when I was listening to a podcast, Elon Musk was on and he was asked, hey, how did you – before you started a company, he's like, how did you learn about this? Did you read business books? And his reply was, no, I didn't read business books. I looked for knowledge in a historical context. And to that end, he's read a lot of biographies.

He said – I think the direct quote is biographies are helpful. So if Elon Musk thinks biographies are helpful, maybe they'd be helpful for all of us. And definitely from the feedback I'm getting, I find a lot of people that agree with that sentiment. I definitely do as well. So Founders takes care of it in a historical context. But what about all the people that are building companies right now? And so for that, Founders Notes, it's very simple. Takes notes on podcasts that entrepreneurs come on and talk about their business. They talk about where they got the idea from, how they got their first customers, what their business philosophies are, what tools they use are helpful, what books they read that they enjoy that they think have an impact on their business. To me, these podcasts are like lectures from people that are some of the smartest people in the world that have domain

expertise in a very narrow way. And that narrow way is building a very specific company. So it doesn't mean that all these ideas are applicable to you, but I do have a fundamental belief that you should collect as many ideas as possible because you never know when an idea you might learn today might help you years from now. And people that are, whether executives, whether their founders are ready or want to be founders, there's very few people that have as much leverage over information as you know entrepreneurs do i think maybe only pure investors being the other the other group um and to that end like you don't want to miss a good idea because you know you didn't have time to listen to a podcast you just missed it so

the problem founders notes is is solving is you know you have all these really smart people talking about what they learn from building businesses. Like how do you go and collect all the information and make it in a way you can easily digest? Like, so for that, we just take notes on the key ideas and it turns, you know, maybe an hour of audio turns into like a five minute read. And what if you could have five to 10 different founders every week appearing in your inbox just giving you their best ideas. Well, that's what Founders Notes is. So if you want to sign up on the email list, foundersnotes.co. You go straight there.

You put in your email address. Really simple, really fast. You'll get one to two of the notes that I take every week. And then if you like and you're learning from that, you can upgrade and then you get five to ten. You get much more. And you get access to the entire archive. And the archive is growing rapidly. There's notes from 58, maybe 60 plus founders already. So I just think it's unbelievably valuable for the tiny, tiny monthly fee that it is.

So check it out. You might think that it's the same. And then finally, if you want to help out the podcast and get extra content from me for free, then leave a review, take a screenshot, email it to foundersreviews at gmail.com. I check this email just about once a week. And I will reply back with a private RSS feed, which is exactly what a podcast is. You just put in your podcast player. It's really easy.

And you have access to these podcasts that I do. They're episodes of founders that I don't put in the main feed. I don't put in the members feed. I just send it to people that have taken time out of their day to recommend my podcast to other people. And that's unbelievably nice of you to do so. So I'd like to give you something in return for

doing that. So let's say an Apple podcast, Stitcher, these things, it's easy. You can leave a review. You can talk about what you like about the podcast screenshot and send it to me. But a lot of you guys listen on Overcast and apps like that, like Breaker, things where there's no really review process. But there is a way to recommend that. And they use it. So Overcast specifically uses a star and they want you to star specific episodes. So go find your favorite one or two episodes

or you just do it for one if you want to. I appreciate if you do it for more, but you don't have to. Find your favorite episode of Founders. You press a star. It'll turn like a gold color. You take a screenshot of that, email it to me, and I'll send you back this private RSS feed.

And that way, what that does is, you know, just lets other people become aware that this podcast exists. And that's the hardest thing about trying to bootstrap a podcast. I don't have a large social following. I'm not really into social media. And I'm not part of a podcast network. I'm not really into social media. Um, and I'm not part of a

podcast network. I'm just one guy reading books, highlighting it, recording, editing, and publishing it. So I do every, like I have zero people helping with this. And I like that because I want it to be more of like an intimate, um, you know, I don't, it, I just wanted the feeling I was getting is like, what if you could just sit down with a friend and tell them a bunch of interesting stuff that you read? And why don't I just record that so people all over the world can get these ideas too? So by you becoming members, by you signing up and paying for a founder's notes, by you leaving reviews, by you telling your friends, spreading it on social media, like, you know, that's, that's all those things are support. So, and that's only going to make these ideas go farther and hopefully, you know, make sure that, that founders can continue. I've said before that

if you really step back and look at what, like, if if we if this can go over a long enough time period like we are kind of documenting the history of entrepreneurship so right now i'm on pace to read about 50 books this year like what what does that look like when you you do that over several years and like what is the value of all the ideas in here like is there a better way to learn about entrepreneurship like the best way to learn about entrepreneurship is by doing something trying to go out and sell something right and then the second way the best way is by learning from people that have already done it um and both the podcast and the newsletter are trying to help you achieve that objective which is you know can we take can we learn from the experience of other people that have already done what we're trying to do and then apply those ideas in our own unique, useful way? So anyways, I think I've talked enough.

With that, I will be back next week with part two of what may be a maybe three-part series. I'm not actually sure. We got to see how many of these books there's actually valuable information in. My guess is it's going to go three parts. But next week, you already know what it is, Finding My Virginity. Thank you very much. I'll talk to you then.