We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP223: Billionaire Michael Dell Lessons (Business Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. On today's show, we talk about the billionaire founder of Dell Computers, Michael Dell. As you'll learn on the show, Mr. Dell started his company out of his college dorm room and now has a personal net worth of over $28 billion. During the show, we talk about how he built his company and the things he learned along the way. We cover his company's rocket shiplike growth, and we also talk about some of the struggles that he had to overcome to achieve such enormous business success. So without further delay, here's our discussion on billionaire Michael Dell.

Starting point is 00:00:34 You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. All right, welcome to the Investor's podcast. As usual, I'm accompanied by my co-host Stig Broderson. My name is Preston Pish. Like we said in the introduction, we're going to be covering Michael Dell. And so we're just going to jump straight into the questions. Mr. Dell was asked, what was the story behind starting up Dell? This was his response. When I was freshman at the University of Texas, I was going to school, had every intention of going to school. And I was kind of playing around with this as a hobby while I was going to school. It was sort of a really fun hobby for me because I was really interested in computers and kind of selling upgrade kits and enhancing computers. And, you know, my parents kind of got wind of this, and they were really upset because, you know, they thought that I should really only focus on going to college. My father's a doctor. My brother's a doctor. Lots of doctors in the family. So I was going to be a doctor. And so they were very, very upset with me.

Starting point is 00:01:56 Michael, you've got to get your priorities straight, you know. So around Thanksgiving of 1983, my parents kind of made me, commit that I wasn't going to do this computer business anymore is only going to focus on my studies. And so that lasted about 10 days. And it was during that time that I decided that I was going to start a company. Actually, you know, my parents kind of telling me to stop doing it is probably what caused the company to get created. If they hadn't done that, it might have just been a hobby. But what I kind of reflected on in those 10 days is I really love this. And it was enormously exciting, tremendously fun. And so like any other 18-year-old who wants to do what their parents don't want them to do, you just don't tell them. And so that's what I did. I kind of went about

Starting point is 00:02:47 path to start the company without really telling my parents. I kind of moved into a larger apartment that really high ceilings, so I could kind of stack things up and, you know, manage to conceal it from them for quite some time. I basically kind of, came to an arrangement with my parents. I said, look, I really want to go do this. And I know you don't want me to go do it, but I've checked with the University of Texas and the way it works at UT is that you can take a semester off and you can come back. And so I said, well, why don't you, we'll agree to this. I'll take the semester off the fall of 84 semester and I'll go and do this. And if it doesn't work out, I'll go back to school. And if it does, I'll just

Starting point is 00:03:32 keep doing it. And so they agreed. If they hadn't agreed, I probably would have done it anyway, to be honest with you. So in May of 84, I incorporated the company and off we go. I just love the story. I don't really know what to say because the story tells so much. I think my comment on this would be if you're a parent and you have a child that is going against the grain and you're trying so hard to push them in a certain direction, you might, might want to just replay that story because sometimes the best way to exercise control is to provide free will, right? In this scenario, the harder the parents push, the harder he went the other way. That's a cool story. I think for every time you would play a story like that, the hit rate or the

Starting point is 00:04:21 success rate might be one out of ten. And so I think that's important for people to keep in their mind as well as like Stig and I are providing an example of a success, a major success. You couldn't get a bigger success. And that was his story. But we could probably go and record Joe Schmoe, who's now not owning his own business and working for some other firm who has that exact same story and he wasn't successful. I think it's a great story. It's a cautionary story at the same time.

Starting point is 00:04:53 But I think it's a common story that you see from the people that we, study, they almost all start out like that. It's really neat. Yeah, and I also feel that as an entrepreneur, it might be easy for me to say so, but if you won't allow your kid who is 18 years old and, you know, live in a dorm, if he's not starting a company, I mean, when should he? I mean, it's not whenever he's 28 and he has, you know, kids and wife and that mortgage to pay. That might not be the right time, but, you know, you're 18 years old. Why not give it a break for like six months or so? The reason why. I wanted to play this clip, partly because of the story. I kind of like the story about how he moved

Starting point is 00:05:33 into a place where the idea was that he would just stack up the equipment that he was selling. That was quite a cool turnaround story. But also, studying so many self-made billionaires as we have here on the show, I've always trying to decipher how much of a road luck place. How lucky was it then? Whenever he started up in 84, he could sell out, you know, specific, I've been, BM PC compatible parts and upgrades to that. Was that just luck? Bill Gates has talked so much about being born in 1955, how that was the luckiest time he could be born, because otherwise he couldn't have been so successful in terms of

Starting point is 00:06:12 acquiring the programming skills and really started a business based on that that was so big simply because no one else did that. Was that just luck? I know that this, by definition, you can't really answer this. You know, you can't say if Michael Dell was born 20 years before or 20. 20 years later, how successful would he have been? We don't know. But I think that someone like Michael Dell, and you will get to learn much more about him here later in the episode, I think he would be very successful with the drive that he just has, almost regardless of when he was born,

Starting point is 00:06:45 perhaps not where he was born, but when he was born. And if he wouldn't be $20 billion successful, which he is, I'm sure he would have done quite well and he probably still wouldn't have told his parents. The next question we have, you started with almost no capital. How did you manage to grow so fast? And this is his response. I started with $1,000. Almost no capital. The interesting thing about the business that we started was that because we were selling directly to the customer, customer would pay us often right at the time we shipped the product. You know, we were able to get credit lines from suppliers. And we had what's known as a negative cash conversion cycle, which is a very good thing. In a business like ours, we still have that

Starting point is 00:07:30 today and it helps us generate significant positive free cash flow. Essentially, what it means is that when you look at the complete balance of how fast do our customers pay us, and how fast do we pay our suppliers, how much inventory do we have, the net of all that is that we actually collect money way before we paid the money out. And so that's a beautiful thing. And in fact, it allows a company to grow very quickly because you have sort of negative working capital. We didn't require lots of capital. We weren't as efficient then as we are now, but we were able to grow quite rapidly without a ton of capital. Now, we were growing at such enormous rates. We needed some capital because we needed some buildings and we needed some infrastructure. And so, you know, we got a little bit of capital.

Starting point is 00:08:24 We got a credit line. And then we eventually did a private placement, went public in 1988 on NASDAQ and attracted some capital so we could expand around the world and continue growing. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all

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Starting point is 00:12:47 I really like what you said here about your money, cash flow in and cash flow out. It's basically what is referred to as the cash conversion cycle, which is if you're an accounting geek like me, it's something I like to talk about. If you look at how fast Dell grew, it might seem that it's almost impossible. You know, how can you have a company that is buying equipment and then reselling that to customers and start up with a thousand bucks and then, you know, in a matter of no time, you're just like this huge company that just IPOed. Basically, what he talks about here is that it balls down to cash flow coming in and when cash flow is going out. Because if you can get the money up front and then pay your suppliers later, it doesn't really matter if you start with a thousand bucks or

Starting point is 00:13:34 a hundred thousand bucks. And if you just reverse this really to get a grasp of this, say that you even have $100,000, if you have to buy, say, 100 pieces of equipment for $1,000 each, and then had to wait 30 days to collect that money before you have the cash and then go out and ask your supplier, oh, by the way, could you send me some more and I'll have to pay up front for that? It's not impossible, but the speed you can gain by the opposite is just exponentially different. That's also one of the reasons why you've seen some of these major tech companies like Amazon and why they have been able to grow as fast. Yes, it's a great business model and yes, they have great products, but a lot of it really comes down to something that we tend to oversee, which is the cast conversion cycle.

Starting point is 00:14:20 It's so important in growing companies. All right, so the next question we're going to play, Mr. Dell was asked. What are your thought processes on creating a strategy that could sustain high growth for years to come. And the question was asked in the context of very early in his company, what were those strategies that they would implement in the coming five years? So this was his response. I was 22 years old. We actually had a pretty important meeting about seven or eight months earlier. And we kind of went off for a few days with some of the really smart people in the company and a few outside advisors. And we said, said, well, what are we going to do with this company? I mean, this thing's really growing fast.

Starting point is 00:15:00 What do we do? So we kind of had three strategies that we clued in on as our growth path for the future. First one we said was, you got to go outside the U.S. because 96% of the people in the world live outside the United States. And it's going to be at least half the opportunities outside the United States. And you can't just be a domestic company. Second thing we said was we really want to go after large companies because they underwrite their purchase of technology through productivity and they can afford the best tools. And that's, we know it's going to be a lucrative opportunity and we really want to go after that in a big, big way. Kind of a odd thing for a little company like ours to go after, particularly with IBM and others in the field. The third thing we said was differentiating our business is going to be really key, and the way to do that is on service.

Starting point is 00:15:59 You've got to have better service than the competitor. So we invented this idea of on-site service for the PC, which should really never have been done before. The way this would work is, you know, let's say you went to computer land. There used to be such things in the United States and around every street corner, and you bought a computer and it didn't work. Well, you'd put it back in the car, and you'd go there and fix this thing and come back. a week or so later and they'd give it to you. So our idea was that you'd call us on the phone, say, hey, my computer's not working, and we'd come the very next day and fix it. It turns out there were all sorts of third-party companies that had field service networks, companies like Xerox,

Starting point is 00:16:40 for example, who had all these technicians all over the country who were kind of waiting for copiers to fail. And so they had this fixed capacity. And so we could buy up that excess capacity at way less cost than we could put it in ourselves and instantly have, you know, way better service and actually Xerox is the company we use for quite some time in that. Customer isn't so much interested in all the bits and bytes and how fast is the computer and what does it do? They want to know that this installation of a critical system

Starting point is 00:17:10 that they're putting inside their business is really going to work well. So they're looking for a solution. And so we have to know a lot about their business, and we have to really be able to consult with them and tailor a solution that meets their needs. After hearing the response there, the thing that I kind of took away, his first answer for his first of the three strategies was to go international to create more growth. But I really like the second two responses because the second two responses were focused on basically the customer, right?

Starting point is 00:17:43 It wasn't, hey, we're going to do this, which is a benefit to our company. It was, hey, we're going to do this because it adds more value to the customer. And then that's going to put us above and beyond the other competition that isn't providing this value to the customer. And so the first one he said there was that they're going to become more lean in their manufacturing so that they can produce a product that's lower price. And then the second one was the service model that he got into a lot of depth on that was not being conducted.

Starting point is 00:18:12 And I think that any time a founder is customer focused, it is going to help them dramatically succeed against whatever competition they've got. And so it was interesting to see how he named those two things. I'm curious to hear Stig's thoughts. I really like the third part that he brought up with the service. Well, you didn't really have IT or very little, so you didn't have an IT department. And I think my takeaway here is that as business people, we need to understand that while we can be super nerdy about something, say computers or whatever it is, most people don't care

Starting point is 00:18:48 about that. I mean, most people can't tell the difference between megahertz or gigahertz or they don't know, but they do know whether or not the computer is not working. And that was really what he was getting at. And why there was also so consistent with the second part of the strategy, we will deliver a great service so it always works. But we will only do that for the customers who afford to pay that. The big companies, because the big companies have high opportunity costs. So it just, it needs to work. And we can charge superior rates for that because it's just so important. And really his idea of that customer focus, as you talked about before, Preston, I think it's so important. Just make it easy for the customer. Give them no excuse why not to buy.

Starting point is 00:19:38 Well, what I like about it is it provides a sustained cash flow, too. So if you You can crack into this revenue stream of service and you can win in that area. That's going to be providing a consistent cash flow, whereas the rest of his business, which is hardware sale, is more of a, I sell it. I have to wait three years for some customers. I might have to wait five years for another customer before they make another hardware purchase. And then they have to be happy with the service.

Starting point is 00:20:07 They have to be happy with the performance of that hardware in order for them to buy my hardware again. I think the service model was a great approach that a lot of people at this point in time were not doing and it's there providing this constant cash flow. And so then he's able to take that money reinvest it into better processes so he can make his hardware better. And you can kind of see how his model and the thinking kind of compounded on itself more so than his other competitors at that point in time. So the last question we're going to play for you. He was asked, which challenges and setbacks have you had? And how did you overcome them? And this is his response. We had problems in 1993 that I think were multi-faceted. One big challenge is that the company had grown so

Starting point is 00:20:54 fast. You know, we had grown from in 1988, you know, maybe 150 million to by 1993, almost two billion in revenues. And the infrastructure and the systems and processes, was not really keeping up. In fact, in one year, we grew from less than 900 million to over two billion. It was a real mess. We sort of had to stop, reevaluate things. We had real challenges in how fast can you build factories and how fast can you hire people and put up, you know, new buildings and hypergrowth, you know, sounds really fun and exciting. But I learned the hard way, there is such a thing as growing too fast where the wheels sort of come off. You know, and you have to sort of take a time out and say, hey, wait a second here. Let's prioritize. And

Starting point is 00:21:48 I was absolutely to blame. We were going and doing so many things at one time because we were really excited. I mean, we're like, okay, we're going to go in this business. We're going to go in that business. We're going to go this country and this new product and this new service. And It was just too much of a good thing. And so we had to really hone it back. Olympic was a project that we created. Still, it was there. And so we made the decision to recall all of those batteries.

Starting point is 00:22:18 Now, the interesting thing, if you go back and look at when we made that decision, the popular wisdom was that it was an issue that was unique to Dell. And Dell was the only company in the world that had this problem. It must have been because Dell did something wrong in the way it designed its computers. Several weeks later, another computer company announced a similar recall for the same Sony batteries. And then several weeks after that, another company, eventually all of the companies that use the Sony batteries announced recalls were very proactive in doing it.

Starting point is 00:22:51 And I think our teams did a fantastic job in sort of doing the right thing. You could have had all sorts of arguments about, well, it's a really small percentage or those kinds of things. but we actually knew the problem was there, even though there were debates about, okay, is it going to be six batteries that fail or is it going to be 10 batteries that fail? It doesn't really matter. One battery failing is one too many. And my experience is that when you find a problem, you fix it as fast as you find it and just move on.

Starting point is 00:23:20 And whatever the consequences are fixing it, you just deal with it and just keep going. His first response there in reference to growing too fast, I kind of see this from two different vantage points. So in tech especially, if you're not moving fast, you're going to get clobbered or you're just going to miss the boat. There's a book called Inside the Tornado. And this is actually one of Steve Jobs' favorite books. If you're in tech, I would highly, highly encourage you to read this book because it talks about how you can have the best product. If you miss the timing of where the rest of the market's at or you're just a little bit late to the market, you can just totally miss the boat.

Starting point is 00:24:00 It's hard for me to put myself in Michael Dell's shoes as to why he was growing at the speed he was growing and whether he could have dialed it back a little bit or he had to move at that pace just because of all the dynamics that are talked about in this book. And I'm telling you, this is a fabulous book, especially if you're in tech. But I think the downside of growing too quickly is the culture piece of your business, the long-term sustainability of your culture. when you grow at that speed, you're basically putting butts in seats as fast as you possibly can. And you're not necessarily doing that filtering that you need in order to establish the culture that you truly want to have inside of your company. And so the long term impact of this, this massive growth is that you might be dealing with cultural clashes within your company for a very long period of time.

Starting point is 00:24:49 And it might not even be something that you can correct. And that might be a really extreme comment. But I think that for me personally, I think culture is extremely important. If you have a product or service that doesn't need to move fast, you're able to sustain your competitive advantage because maybe it's something that's not tech related or the necessity to move fast is not there. I would tell people to go at a pace that allows you to continue to control that culture within your business because it's going to lead to a longer sustained success and control

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Starting point is 00:28:41 fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. It's interesting. that you should mention inside the tornado and the advantages of scaling so fast. I'm currently reading a book by Ree Hoffman called Blitzscaling who talks about this concept. It's a very interesting concept in terms of how fast should you grow and especially if you're in a winner takes all or winner takes almost everything kind of industry. Why that blitz scaling is so important and why you should sometimes ignore defaction the products and why you should ignore the more angry customers. And it's a very interesting discussion. In continuation of that, I think

Starting point is 00:29:24 it's interesting how Michael Della talks about this growth, but also how there were some problems with that in terms of, say, the idea of the batteries, you know, sending out flawed products. You know, how much time should you spend on fixing the issues that you have and how much time should you spend on, you know, just keep on going because you need that first mover advantage. whether it's professional or personally, I think it's very important to stay humble, which was really what I took away from what Michael Dell was talking about here. Be the first one to fix it. We are as human beings very good at forgiving, and we're really good at people redeeming

Starting point is 00:30:06 themselves, but we're not good whenever it comes to arrogance. It's this short-term pain and long-term gain, because, of course, the extra cost is not fun, and the media coverage the next day. It's, you know, it might be quite embarrassing with you as a person or for you as a company. But going back to the culture piece that you talked about before Preston, you know, what really remains in that organization is to be proud of what they do because they know that the quality is there. And even if it's not just going to be fixed.

Starting point is 00:30:35 And then the image of the company who is humble. It's whenever we start becoming arrogant, you know, that's whenever you see politicians or celebrities really fall from grace. You know, you can't put yourself up on that pedestal. But if you do, the downside is just going to be so much more harsh for you. So blitzscaling is fantastic. The high growth is fantastic. But if you are not delivering the kind of product that you're proud of and you want to deliver,

Starting point is 00:31:01 I don't see what the growth is useful for. All right. So we hope you guys enjoyed some of the questions and responses that we played there from Michael Dell. At this point, we're going to transition into a question that was our. from the audience, and we think that the question has a good parallel to some of the conversations that were happening with Michael Dell because it relates to finding a business partner. Now, this question was asked to us by Viam. This is what he asked.

Starting point is 00:31:29 Hi, Preston and Stig. My name is Viam Joshi. I've been listening to your podcast since 2015. You guys have been doing a great job. I've been loving it and keep up the good work. The question that I had was to do with the startup culture that we have going on these days. where people recommend that we find a co-founder who complements our interest and our skills. So I just wanted to ask you guys how both of you met each other and how you founded the Investors'

Starting point is 00:32:00 podcast and more or less your journey on how you got to where you are today. Thank you for sharing and keep up the good work. Thank you. Man, I'd like to say it was very strategic and we had like this whole plan. The fact of the matter is it was none of that. This is my vantage point. I'm kind of curious if Stig sees it the same way. So I started to Buffett's books videos, the website, and stood up a forum.

Starting point is 00:32:26 And on the early days of the forum, it was kind of me and like two people talking on the forum about accounting. And one day this guy named Stig shows up. And, you know, we're probably posting comments that are four sentences long. Like, oh, yeah, I like General Electric or I like that. this company and this guy shows up and all he wants to talk about is oil. And not only is it a post about oil, but it's like a five page analysis just going into detail all about oil. And he just kept talking and each post just got longer and longer and longer. And I was like, who in the world is this guy? And so after, I don't know, after a few months of watching his posts on this forum and

Starting point is 00:33:11 kind of talking back and forth. I shot him a personal message and I said, hey, tell me about yourself, whatever. And so he's like, oh, you know, I studied at Harvard and this and that. And I was like, wow, this guy, he's pretty interesting guy. And so I was in the process of writing an accounting book at the time, but was really having, I was struggling with time and I was not able to get it across the finish line. And it was just like, this is never going to get done. but based on how this guy writes and he seems really, really aggressive in really wanting to be a part of anything finance related. So I reached out to him. I was like, hey, do you want to finish this book or work with me on getting this book done? And he came back. He's like, absolutely, let's do it. And so Stig and I finished writing the Warren Buffett accounting book together.

Starting point is 00:34:03 And we ended up publishing that book together. And this was right at the point where the podcasting stuff was starting to be. really popular. And so I said the stick, I said, you know, I think this would be a lot of fun. We could just record conversations. Like you and I could just have conversations about finance, about what stocks we're looking at. We'll record it. And if we have five people that listen to it, we have five people that listen to it. I said at the end of the day, it'll just be fun for us to have conversations about something we're learning. If we're reading a book, we can talk about that or whatever. And so the stick was just like, I don't have like a real radio voice, but I'll do it. And so we just started recording our conversations. You know, one thing led to another and here we are. And there's

Starting point is 00:34:51 people that actually listen to this. So I would like to say it was something that we had planned, but it really wasn't. It was just something that we did for fun. And we kept doing for fun. And then it just slowly turned into a business. And so the thing that I would tell people about, at least from our vantage point from our story, is if it's not something that you are willing to, I'll give you a perfect example. This episode right now, I woke up at 445 to record this episode. You have to love what you're doing to do that. There has never been a day where I've just dreaded doing this. Like, this is just fun for me. And I think Stigwood, tell you the same thing. It's just, it's just a lot of fun. This is what we'd love to do. We'd love

Starting point is 00:35:37 to sit around and talk about an income statement. That is not normal for most people. Most people would absolutely hate that. And so you've got to find a person who just absolutely loves the business or the product or whatever it is you're working on just as much as you, because if they don't, it's just not going to work in the long term. Two years in, they are going to be so sick of whatever it is that they're doing that is just not going to last. So I think finding a partner that has the same passion and the same interest as you is extremely difficult to do. Now, one other thing that I think was a big advantage for Stig and I is because we have read so many books together, we have a very, very similar mindset on how our business should be run. It's almost hilarious how Stig will

Starting point is 00:36:31 come to me and say, I think we should do this and be like, yeah, absolutely, let's do it. And vice versa, I'll go to him and say, hey, I think this is a bad idea. And like, yeah, you're probably right. Let's not do that. And I think one of the reasons why, and that can be bad at times because you need to have some friction points at certain points in time. But as far as the ease of like running a business, it is really nice to have a person who's grounded in a lot of the same fundamentals. And so I guess what I would tell you is if you're looking for a co-founder or you're looking for somebody to do the business with. I would highly encourage you to try to read some of the same books, especially if they're good core fundamental books, because you're just going to be in sync with

Starting point is 00:37:12 each other. And I think that that's really important to kind of have that framework. There's a saying, I don't know where it comes from, but it says, if you want to go far, you're going to go together. If you want to go fast, go alone. And I think that that's really representative of whatever your interest are of starting a business, you've got to kind of understand that mindset. If you're going really far, I think having a partner is really, really good. It's really hard to find the right person. And I just want to say this publicly. I really, really treasure my relationship with Stig. It is, man, I feel so blessed and so lucky. So Stig, I know I just took all the time, but let's hear your vantage point. So I experienced this completely different than you. No, I didn't

Starting point is 00:37:58 at all present. I think you described the story very well. Typically when people ask, I always say that we met online because then people always like, oh my God, what happened there? But we kind of met online in the sense that we met on the online forum. You know, you created Buffett's books. And that's how we started to chat. And I think that was very fortunate. And in the way, also think we created our own luck in the sense that who sits and talk about accounting on an online forum? I think you said something about it being serendipitous at some point in time, you know, just before we started the podcast. But, you know, sometimes I think back on that and be like, no, Preston, if you can find two people in the world who wants to talk about accounting and gap rules on the online

Starting point is 00:38:42 forum in writing, it's not serendipitous, you're just too sad people with too much time. So perhaps that's more yet. I almost feel bad about playing this question, you know, and talking about how Preston I met after having four questions. about Michael Dowell. It's probably not a fair comparison. The one thing I would say that the red thread here is really that he was having a lot of fun. He started this business up because it was a lot of fun. Then he realized he could also make money and he started growing and made a bunch of money, but it has to be fun whenever you start. Don't find a business partner or start by yourself to make money. If you start up by having fun, perhaps you will make money,

Starting point is 00:39:23 most likely not. But it's not going to be the other way around. It's not going to be fun. if it's not fun to begin with. That was also one of the things that we talked about, Preston, when then we started that it had to be fun, first of all, then see where it takes us. Because going back to the oil forum, which is not even online anymore, I wrote over a thousand posts,

Starting point is 00:39:42 over a thousand posts about accounting. Oh my God. And about oral, apparently also, I remember that specific threat you talked about. In my defense, if people were saying, Stick has no life, it's absolutely true. So it's not really in my defense.

Starting point is 00:39:55 I was on a one year, God leave for a job. I was technically not permitted to work or to do anything for a year. I was permitted, though, to sit and talk about accounting in the forum. I had a lot of time on my hands. And whenever I stumbled across this forum with people who are just like-minded, I had this idea if you just kept on giving, something good will come back to me. And that was you, Preston.

Starting point is 00:40:17 No, and that's such a true statement. If you're just doing something because you love doing it and you're just trying to make a better impact, I think that everything else will kind of fall in place. I think when a person is chasing money, maybe they're starting a business because they want to make a lot of money. What you often find is if they're successful, because sometimes people can be successful in their pure motivation was to make money. But their success is usually short-lived. What kind of falls out of some of those motivations is the person wants to make even more money. So then they go out and they raise venture capital.

Starting point is 00:40:50 Next thing you know, they only own 5% of the business and they got some venture capital person that's breathing down their thing. throat. They're absolutely miserable. They're in a position where they've made a lot of money, but it was just a completely miserable experience for five years or 10 years. Some people would say, hey, I'll take that. And that's fine. There's people out there that that fits their motivation. That's not something I ever want to go through. I want to be happy. I want to enjoy my time with my family. I want to have an impact. And so for us, this was a great fit. And it was very casually put together and just kind of happened. You know, listen to some of Michael Dell's comments, because Stig's exactly right. This is not about Stig and I, but it's more about Michael Dell. I get the sense from his response

Starting point is 00:41:32 that he absolutely loved this stuff that he was doing. He was having a blast when he's telling the stories about back in the day when he's in college. He wasn't enjoying his classes. He was enjoying this stuff he was doing with creating hardware and selling it and having an impact in that way. So you've got to take a look at yourself. What is it that you love? do and really kind of make sure that something is centered around that because if it's not, I just, I think it's hard for people to sustain the motivation to go through it. One thing I would like to add, because you specifically talked about how do you find that other part and what kind of skills should he or she possess. I would say that I would not find

Starting point is 00:42:12 a person who would compliment me. And I know that sounds counterintuitive, especially in this day, it where especially here in the Western world, we have a culture where everyone has to have high self-worth, we celebrate diversity, everyone is good at something, no one is bad at anything, it's all about complimenting each other. There's a lot of good reasons why that's true. But I would think in terms of finding a business partner, it's okay to have a ton of different blind spots. You know, it's okay that you have a business partner and you still don't know how to do accounting or combine, you still don't know how to do design. I think that's completely fine. I think the one thing you need to look for in a business partner is having this narrow

Starting point is 00:42:55 focus and how can you together become 5% better than everyone else so you can get that 10x, 100x return because you are better together that specific item. All right, Viam, thank you so much for asking your question. This one was really fun for Stig and I to respond to. In a token of appreciation for asking your question and getting it played on the show, we're going to give you a free subscription to our TIP Intrinsic Value course that we have on our website. If anybody's interested in checking out this course, it's TIPintrinsicvalue.com. Just go to TIP intrinsic value.com. The course there teaches people how to value an individual stock pick. So if you want to figure out the value of company X, it teaches you how to look at the accounting, how to determine the discount

Starting point is 00:43:40 cash flow, how to do an IRR calculation, all of that fun stuff is all wrapped into this course. We're going to give that to you completely for free. So if anybody else out there, if you want to get your question played on the show and receive a free subscription to our course, it's a lifetime subscription. You can go to AsktheInvesters.com and record your question. And if it gets played on the show, you get a free course. All right, guys. That was all that Preston and I had for this week's episode of the Investors podcast. We see each other again next week. Thanks for listening to TIP.

Starting point is 00:44:09 To access the show notes, courses, or forums, go to TheInvestorspodcast.com. To get your questions played on the show, go to Asktheinvestors.com and win a free subscription to any of our courses on TIP Academy. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making investment decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the TIP network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting. TIP!

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