Founders

What I learned from rereading The Invisible Billionaire: Daniel Ludwig by Jerry Shields.

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[2:00] Obsessed with privacy, Ludwig pays a major public relations firm fat fees to keep his name out of the papers.

[4:00] An associate speaks of his unlimited ingenuity in dreaming up new ways of doing things.

[5:00] Ludwig’s most notable characteristic, besides his imagination and pertinacity, is a lifelong penchant for keeping his mouth shut.

[5:00] I'm in this business because I like it. I have no other hobbies.

[6:00] Holding strongly to an opinion, purpose, or course of action, stubbornly or annoyingly persistent.

[8:00] Risk Game: Self Portrait of an Entrepreneur by Francis Greenburger (Founders #243)

[10:00] At his peak, he owned more than 200 companies in 50 countries.

[23:00] War makes the demand for Ludwig's products and services skyrocket.

[25:00] Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Founders #290)

[28:00] He did not mellow as he grew richer and older.

[28:00] Some years later, the captain of a Ludwig ship made the extravagant mistake of mailing in a report of several pages held together by a paper clip. He received a sharp rebuke for his prodigality: "We do not pay to send ironmongery by air mail!"

[29:00] Ludwig’s tightfistedness, however, persisted after the Depression, putting him in sharp contrast to such free spenders as Onassis and Niarchos. It also was largely responsible for many of his innovations in the shipbuilding industry.

[29:00] Onassis: An Extravagant Life by Frank Brady. (Founders #211)

[30:00] Ludwig’s ridding his ships of any feature that did not contribute to profits pleased his own obsessive sense of economy and kept him a step ahead of the competition. When someone asked why he didn't put a grand piano aboard his ships, as Stavros Niarchos did, Ludwig snapped, "You can't carry oil in a grand piano."

[31:00] Stay in the game long enough to get lucky.

[32:00] The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think. The Pmarca Blog Archive Ebook by Marc Andreessen (Founders #50)

[37:00] The yacht was as much a business craft as any of his tankers and probably earned him more money than any of them.

[40:00] Like the Rockefeller organization, Ludwig had mastered the practice of keeping his money by transferring it from one pocket, one company to another, while appearing to spend it.

[42:00] He had learned something by now. Opportunities exist on the frontiers where most men dare not venture, and it is often the case that the farther the frontier, the greater the opportunity.

[43:00] The way to escape competition is to either do something no one else is doing or do it where no one else is doing it.

[43:00] Much of Ludwig's success was due to his willingness to venture where more timid entrepreneurs dared not go.

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What I learned from rereading Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

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[3:11] His mind was never a captive of reality.

[5:16] A complete list of every Founders episode on Steve Jobs and the founders Steve studied: Steve Jobs’s Heroes

[7:15] Steve Jobs and The Next Big Thing by Randall Stross (Founders #77)

[9:05] Steve Job’s Commencement Address

[9:40] Driven and curious, even when things were tough, he was a learning machine.

[10:20] He learned how to manage himself.

[12:45] Anything could be figured out and since anything could be figured out anything could be built.

[14:10] It was a calculation based on arrogance. — The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen (Founders #255)

[18:00] We were no longer aiming for the handful of hobbyists who liked to assemble their own computers. For every one of them there were a thousand people who would want the machine to be ready to run.

[17:40] He was a free thinker whose ideas would often run against the conventional wisdom of any community in which he operated.

[19:55] He had no qualms about calling anyone up in search of information or help.

[20:40] I've never found anybody who didn't want to help me when I've asked them for help.

I've never found anyone who's said no or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked.

Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask.

[21:50] First you believe. Then you work on getting other people to share your belief.

[24:55] All the podcasts on Edwin Land:

Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg (Founders #263)
A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War by Ronald Fierstein (Founders #134)
Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg (Founders #133)
The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experienceby Mark Olshaker (Founders #132)
Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land and Instant: The Story of Polaroid (Founders #40)

[25:00] My friend Frederick’s newsletter I was interviewed for

[30:20] He was an extraordinary speaker and he wielded that tool to great effect.

[31:00] Never underestimate the value of an ally. — Estée Lauder: A Success Story by Estée Lauder. (Founders #217)

[32:50] If you go to sleep on a win you’re going to wake up with a loss.

[33:00] Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson (Founders #140)

[34:20] Software development requires very little capital investment. It is basically intellectual capital. The main cost is the labor required to design and test it. There's no need for expensive factories. It can be replicated endlessly for practically nothing.

[38:10] He cared passionately and he never dialed it in.

[39:45] To Pixar And Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History by Lawrence Levy (Founders #235)

[42:58] Time carries most of the weight.

[43:30] People that are learning machines and then refuse to quit are incredibly hard to beat. Steve jobs was a learning machine who refused to quit.

[44:17] Steve Jobs and The Next Big Thing by Randall Stross (Founders #77)

[49:40] Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull

[50:30] There were times when the reactions against Steve baffled Steve.

I remember him sometimes saying to me: Why are they upset?

What that said t...

What I learned from rereading Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos.

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(0:01) The most obvious parallel is to Apple Computer.

Both companies specialized in relentless, obsessive refinement of their technologies. Both were established close to great research universities to attract talent.

Both fetishized superior, elegant, covetable product design. And both companies exploded in size and wealth under an in-house visionary-godhead-inventor-genius.

At Apple, that man was Steve Jobs. At Polaroid, the genius was Edwin Land.

Just as Apple stories almost all lead back to Jobs, Polaroid lore always seems to focus on Land.

(1:22) Both men were college dropouts; both became as rich as anyone could ever wish to be; and both insisted that their inventions would change the fundamental nature of human interaction.

(1:37) Jobs expressed his deep admiration for Edwin Land. He called him a national treasure.

(3:12) All the podcasts on Edwin Land:

Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg (Founders #263)
A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War by Ronald Fierstein (Founders #134)
Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg (Founders #133)
The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experience by Mark Olshaker (Founders #132)
Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land and Instant: The Story of Polaroid (Founders #40)

(4:07) Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

(5:51) Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor. — Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson (Founders #214)

(7:07) All the podcasts about Henry Ford:

I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford by Richard Snow (Founders #9)

The Autobiography of Henry Ford by Henry Ford (Founders #26)

Today and Tomorrow Henry Ford (Founders #80)

My Forty Years With Ford by Charles Sorensen (Founders #118)

The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten Year Road Trip by Jeff Guinn (Founders #190)

(9:16) Another parallel to Jobs: Land's control over his company was nearly absolute, and he exercised it to a degree that was compelling and sometimes exhausting.

(11:43) When you read a biography of Edwin land you see an incredibly smart, gifted, driven, focused person endure decade after decade of struggle. And more importantly —finally work his way through.

(13:32) Another parallel to Jobs: You may be noticing that none of this has anything to do with instant photography. Polarizers rather than pictures would define the first two decades of lands intellectual life and would establish his company. Instant photos were an idea that came later on, a secondary business around which his company was completely recreated.

(14:26) “Missionaires make better products.” —Jeff Bezos

(17:44) His letter to shareholders gradually became a particularly dramatic showcase for his language and his thinking. These letters-really more like personal...

What I learned from rereading The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis

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[1:23] Maybe somewhere in a footnote, it would be mentioned that he came from nothing, grew up poor, dropped out of high school, and made himself three or four billion dollars.

[7:41] She explained that the shares in Netscape that Clark had given them had made them rich.

"And you have to understand," she said, “that when this happened, we were poor. I was ready to cook the cat."

I assumed this was a joke, and laughed. I assumed wrong.

[12:48] He was expelled from school and left town. One time he came home talking about nothing but computers. No one in Plainview had even seen a computer except in the movies.

[13:21] I remember him telling me when he came back from the Navy, ‘Mama, I’m going to show Plainview.’

[14:42] In under eight years this person, considered unfit to graduate from high school, had earned himself a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

[15:05] I grew up in black and white. I thought the whole world was shit, and I was sitting in the middle of it.

[17:17] If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, “This sucks. I’m going to do my own thing. — Yvon Chouinard

[17:56] The most powerful paragraph in the book: One day I was sitting at home and, I remember having the thought ‘You can did this hole as deep as you want to dig it.’ I remember thinking ‘My God, I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this fucking hole.’ You can reach these points in life when you say, ‘Fuck, I’ve reached some sort of dead-end here. And you descend into chaos. All those years you thought you were achieving something. And you achieved nothing. I was thirty-eight years old. I’d just been fired. My second wife had just left me. I had somehow fucked up. I developed this maniacal passion for wanting to achieve something.

[19:00] Two part series on Vannevar Bush

Pieces of the Action by Vannevar Bush. (Founders #270) and Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century by G. Pascal Zachary. (Founders #271)

[21:38] New Growth Theory argued that wealth came from the human imagination. Wealth wasn’t chiefly having more of old things; it was having entirely new things.

[22:54] On creating new wealth/companies: A certain tolerance for nonconformism is really critical to the process.

[24:31] The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers, and most people haven't figured this out yet. —The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Naval Ravikant and Eric Jorgenson. (Founders #191)

[25:06] A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

[27:36] George Lucas: A Life by Brian Jay Jones. (Founders #35) and Steven Spielberg: A Biography by Joseph McBride. (Founders #209)

[33:10] The independence and the control is worth a lot more than the money.

[33:32] These people could never build the machines of the future, but they could sell the machines of the present.

[35:02] Clark on how to avoid being disrupted: For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself. If it didn’t, someone else would. “It’s the hardest thing in business to do,” he would say. “Even creating a lower-cost product runs against the grain, because the low-cost products undercut the high-cost, more profitable products.” Everyone in a successful company, from the CEO on down, has a stake in whatever the company is currently selling. It does not naturally occur to anyone to find a way to undermine that product.

[40:41] The young were forever eating the old. In this drama technology played a very clear role. It was the murder weapon.

[40:55] The art of storytelling is critically important. Most of the entrepreneurs who come to us can't tell a story. Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because that's how the money works. The money flows as a function of the stories. —Don Valentine

[42:53] The Pmarca Blog Archive Ebook by Marc Andreessen (Founders #50)

[45:48] What is the role I want to play in my company? I need to make sure to design...

What I learned from reading Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

The conventional wisdom of the time said to take a deep breath and wait for the next big thing to arrive in due course. Musk rejected that logic by throwing $100 million into SpaceX, $70 million into Tesla, and $10 million into SolarCity. Short of building an actual money crushing machine, Musk could not have picked a faster way to destroy his fortune. He became a one-man-ultra-risk taking venture capital shop and doubled down on making super-complex physical goods in two of the most expensive places in the world, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. [2:13]

What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. [9:17]

The life that Musk has created to manage all of these endeavors is preposterous. [9:53]

He felt as if the public had lost some of its ambition and hope for the future. [14:34]

His fears that mankind had lost much of its will to push the boundaries were reinforced one day when Musk went to the NASA website. He expected to find a detailed plan for exploring Mars and instead found bupkis. [14:58]

The men were heading to Russia at the height of its freewheeling post-Soviet days when rich guys could apparently buy space missiles on the open market. [24:32]

Musk wheeled around and flashed a spreadsheet he’d created. “Hey guys, I think we can build this rocket ourselves.” [27:53]

Some of these people had spent years on the island going through one of the most surreal engineering exercises in human history. They had been separated from their families, assaulted by the heat, and exiled on their tiny launchpad outpost— sometimes without much food — for days on end as they waited for the launch windows to open and dealt with the aborts that followed. So much of that pain and suffering and fear would be forgotten if this launch went successfully. [32:17]

It took six years-about four and half more than Musk had once planned — and five hundred people to make this miracle of modern science and business happen. [34:38]

Well that was freaking awesome. There are a lot of people who thought we couldn’t do it. There are only a handful of countries on Earth that have done this. It’s normally a country thing, not a company thing. My mind is kind of frazzled, so it’s hard for me to say anything, but this is definitely one of the greatest days in my life. [35:19]

To avoid bankruptcy Musk made a last-ditch effort to raise all the personal funds he could and put them into the company. “It was like the fucking Matrix,” Musk said, describing his financial maneuvers. [42:53]

The 2008 period told him everything he would ever need to know about Musk’s character. He saw a man who arrived in the United States with nothing, who had lost a child, who was on the verge of having his life’s work destroyed. “He has the ability to work harder and endure more stress than anyone I’ve ever met. What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. He didn’t just survive. He kept working and stayed focused.” [48:37]

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