David Senra - The Focused Few - [Invest Like the Best, EP.422]

If I think about founders and try to simplify what it is, I would say that an entrepreneur lives 40 years and builds something. A biographer spends 4-ish years researching them and writing something. You spend 40 hours reading the book, thinking about it, and tying it to all the other lessons, and then you spend 40 minutes, so we spend 40 minutes listening to your summary of that thing.

If you think about that incredible amount of distillation, that’s a big reason it’s so interesting and so valuable. So I guess my first question is to distill it even more: if you think about the entire project, the entire corpus, and we’re forced to distill it all—all your work, and therefore all the work that came before it—down to one thing, what would that one thing be?

1. Focus Beats Distraction

That one word would be focus. The way I think about this is, by the end of this year, I would have read over 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs. I’m 8 years into the project, and if I was forced to distill that down to one word, the word would be focus.

The reason I think that pops out is because when you read a biography of somebody—or an autobiography is an even better example of this—I feel you get to have a one-sided conversation with somebody. Obviously, if I do a monologue podcast, I like to talk, and so I can’t talk. I’m just forced to sit there and listen, and I feel that person is telling me the most important parts of their life, their 40-, 50-, or 60-year career.

Then I go online, and we live in this very modern environment. I open up Instagram, look at TikTok, look at X, and it’s the exact opposite of what this person did their whole career and what I’ve just spent 40 hours doing. It’s like, let’s not focus on something for 40 years or 5 decades or even 40 hours. Let’s focus on it for 4 seconds.

We were on the walk over here, and I mentioned that maybe the best thing for me to do is—I get joy from literally spending about half the time that I’m awake alone, and most of that is reading. I get a lot of joy out of that.

The way I feel after I read a good book or even make an episode that I’m proud of, and the way I feel when I go online, are the complete opposite. They’re the contrast. One feeds my soul and is good for me, and the other is the opposite.

So I told you, “Maybe what I should do is just not read online at all and just post all day long about the stuff I’m reading.” Use it as a tool instead of a giant distraction. I think for a lot of people, it’s completely destroying their ability to focus.

I think that’s maybe related to why you asked me the question. I’m very reluctant to have an opinion on things. When you listen to the podcast, when we have conversations, or when we’re on the phone, if something comes up, it’s like, “Well, Steve Jobs would say, ‘Do this,’ or David Ogilvy did this, or Buffett looked at it this way, or Munger looked at it this way.”

It’s not like David thinks you should do this, because I don’t really have an opinion on what other people should do. I just think about how I want to run my life. Now I’m thinking maybe I should actually be a little more vocal about this: “Hey, it’s kind of weird that the people who were literally the best at what they did in their life were completely focused and were not in this huge rush.”

They obviously worked very fast, but they didn’t have goals like what I’m seeing a lot online. It’s like, “We’re the fastest company ever to X revenue.” It’s just that they didn’t talk that way. Sam Walton did not talk that way. Coco Chanel did not talk that way. Enzo Ferrari did not talk that way.

They understood: they found something they loved to do and did it for an incredibly long time. I talk about this because I get to meet a lot of great entrepreneurs, and my favorite entrepreneurs—the entrepreneurs I’ve been the most impressed with—are all over the age of 70. All of them.

Everybody’s like, “Who’s the young entrepreneur you admire?” I’m like, “I don’t even know any of their names,” because I’m so focused on the fact that this person has spent 5 decades thinking deeply about what they’re doing. The stuff they can convey to you over a dinner, a phone call, or a conversation, I just don’t find anywhere else.

I think that’s a complete byproduct of the fact that they were able to focus on something for many, many decades, which is completely opposite of human nature. I think that is why it’s valuable, because it’s so rare for people to be able to do that.

Why does that interest you? Why is the 50-year version of a business story more interesting than a 10-year version? I’m picking 10 because 10 years is a long time.

2. Time Is The Best Filter

Time is the best filter. Time is the only filter that I trust. Most of the people I cover are dead. If they’re not dead, their career is at the end of its arc. They’re an older, wiser person, and they’re passing on these lessons.

I remember, I got a lot of pushback when FTX was taking off, and all these people were telling me, “You’ve got to do an episode on SBF. This guy’s a genius. He’s the fastest person to a $35 billion net worth,” or whatever the number was. So I was like, “Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe they’re right.”

And we’ve got to talk about Todd Graves in the episode I just did because I’m really proud of it, and I think, when people ask me—

It’s his favorite episode now.

Yeah. When people ask me who’s my favorite living entrepreneur, they expect me to say a tech entrepreneur. It’s like, no, the guy who owns Raising Cane’s. They’re like, “What are you talking about?”

I go, “He owns 90% of a business that he started in college. He’s been doing it for 30 years. The business is worth at least $10 billion, it’s growing at 30% a year, and he refuses to sell.”

What would be the opposite of that? The slow grind to really perfecting what you’re doing before you try to just scale it up. There’s a great line, I think, in Nick Sleep’s partnership letters, which I just did. He’s like, “We just don’t understand why we go to these companies that are losing money and they want to figure out how to get bigger and so lose more money.”

And he’s not talking about an Amazon, where you actually have to do that. With SBF, I’m like, “Oh, well, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe these people are right.”

The reason I thought about Todd Graves is because there are so many people in his career, which we’ll get to, who said, “No, you’re doing it wrong.” When he was younger, he was like, “Damn, they’re experts, they’re smarter, they’re older than me.” He started to doubt himself for a little bit.

Then he’s like, “Wait a minute. No, they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about.” And so I was really resistant to the SBF thing, so I started listening to all these podcasts on him.

When he does podcasts, he would multitask. My personal hero is Charlie Munger. I think he's the wisest person I've ever come across, the wisest person I've ever talked to. What does he say? He's like, "You're gonna get half-assed effort if you multitask." That is not an exact quote, but he just single-tasks. He's focused on whatever's in front of him.

He has this great quote that I put up that went viral, and it's obvious. He says, "I didn't succeed in life because of intelligence. I succeeded because I had a long attention span." That's what I'm so interested in, to go back to your point. But then I started watching these SBF podcasts, and no disrespect to him—I'm sure he's a nice guy. I'm not trying to insult him, but he's like, "I've been on a bunch of podcasts. I've never played fucking video games while I'm doing any—"

He did admit it. I interviewed him.

Yeah. This is so—first of all, it's kind of disrespectful on just a human level. It's like, you don't even deserve my full attention. My phone's not here. We're just having this conversation.

But then I started thinking, okay, maybe there are interesting ideas here. He explains what he was doing, and then I heard him say something, and immediately he said this. He's like, "Well, I actually think no one ever has to read a book." He talks about how he doesn't read books, books are stupid, and everything should just be a blog post.

I was like, "There's no way I'm doing this." What's the chance that this young kid arrived at a conclusion that, for the last 5,000 years of humanity, you have all these people talking about how valuable it is to write down the lessons from the people who came before us, to pick up that book, and read the lessons? Then this guy comes along and says, "No, no, just disregard that mass of humanity. That's not a valuable activity."

I'm sorry, I'm going to take Munger over SBF every day, and I'm so glad I didn't do the episode. Imagine if I had done an episode in the Founders back catalog, a podcast on history's greatest entrepreneurs, and it was about a guy who was essentially a fraud.

If you think about the over-70 category of entrepreneurs that you've learned so much from, what do they do most differently in contrast to the in-a-hurry, fastest-to-$100 million ARR-type entrepreneurs that you've also spent time with?

3. Durability Beats Growth

I think great anything takes time. A great business takes time. You can be phenomenal. If you look at the early days of Amazon, obviously Jeff was really gifted. He's really smart, and he was doing a lot of smart things even before he started Amazon. But if you look at how good he was and how great the business was a decade, 2 decades, 3 decades in, I always say this quote, and I think it's dead right.

It's fascinating that everybody in technology has read Zero to One. If you're only going to read 1 book, that would probably be the one to read. I think it's excellent. But they miss the part where he says, "Hey, there's a big problem with technology companies: they optimize for growth at the expense of durability."

But if you look at these giant companies—and he said tech companies, but you see this in all these companies—Raising Cane's is another example. They actually make more money 3, 4, 5, 6 decades into the future. All the real money is out there. Therefore, if you're optimizing for growth at the expense of durability, you're never going to get to the real rewards. The reason you do that is because you can track growth, and you cannot track durability.

I just did this episode on Ken Griffin, and what was fascinating is that he founded Citadel, I think, 35 years ago, and Citadel Securities 23 years ago. He just said, "We've had the most, the best financial years of our entire life in the last 4 years." He's 30 years into that business, and this is the best time he's had. Hopefully, he keeps compounding that.

Where does the durability come from? How do those long stories earn the durability?

4. Mission Drives Durability

I think what this really comes down to—and I think you're kind of hitting at this—is why, even though I'm not an investor, I like your framing of trying to back people for whom it's their life's work.

I'm very interested in people who have a mission. I don't know why it took me 32 years to find my mission, and another 5½ years to make it to where I can actually support my family. Now I realize, "Oh, this is it. This is the thing I'm doing."

I want to tie into something I read yesterday. You guys actually made this great profile on Neil.

Yeah.

There are a lot of good quotes in there. I feel like I should do a miniature bonus episode on that one.

He gave this analogy of a helicopter. Most people are doing due diligence on a company or whatever, and they're at 8,000 feet. They'll hover down to 5,000 feet, and they're like, "Oh, we did our job." Neil lands the helicopter, gets out of the helicopter, goes underneath the helicopter, and puts his hands in the dirt.

When I read that, I don't think of any living entrepreneur. I think, "Oh, that's Walt Disney. That's Steve Jobs. That's Estée Lauder." That's all the people I admire. That's Todd Graves.

I was just at a dinner last weekend with somebody who knows Ken, and they were telling stories that were very similar to that—paying attention to even the tiniest corner of the business that you wouldn't even think he's paying attention to, but he's willing to sit there and talk to the person responsible for that for 3 straight hours to make sure it's being done.

I just like people who take what they're doing seriously. The feedback on the Todd Graves episode is absolutely ripping, but the only negative feedback is about what he says in the episode: that he believes God put him on Earth to be good at chicken fingers to help people, so he can make a lot of money, and he does a lot of charitable work. People think they're smarter than him.

Too obsessed with chicken fingers.

They think they're smarter than him. Essentially, what they're saying is, "Have you built a $10 billion company? Have you done that? Are you the best in your profession? Are you at the top of your craft?"

It doesn't matter what the craft is. At least he has a mission. You may laugh at his mission or think it's ridiculous, but, 1, I know he believes it for a fact, or he's the world's greatest actor for 3 decades. We can go through the level of commitment he had to make that dream real.

You can make fun of the fact that he has a mission, but he's already ahead of most of humanity that is alive today and has ever lived. Most people don't have a mission.

There's a great example of this in Steve Jobs: he was heavily criticized early in his career because he would make the inside of the computer, which you couldn't even open up, beautiful. People said, "You're wasting your time." It wasn't a waste of time to him.

5. The Chicken Finger Dream

The reason I like the Graves one so much is because it's chicken fingers. The object of his obsession is this sort of low-status thing. I think so many people would love to build a fancy piece of technology or something very sexy as their lifelong mission.

But in many of my conversations with you, the object of obsession is something very simple, like chicken fingers. I just think chicken fingers are such a visceral thing. We've all eaten chicken fingers, and a man like Todd has devoted himself to 1 thing.

I think you said on the episode that he won't even make a sandwich. People wanted a sandwich, and he just took his chicken fingers, put buns around them, and that's the sandwich.

Exactly.

He is singularly obsessed with this chicken-finger dream, and I love the question now: What is your chicken-finger dream? Chicken fingers are better than something else because of almost how absurd they are.

Tell us a little bit more about what you've learned from studying him. It was probably my favorite episode of Founders ever, and maybe it just hit me at the right time. I needed to hear that message right then and there—to work on something for an absurdly long time, not think short-term, whatever.

There are lots of common lessons, but what is it about this person and this business, which are so simple and so lowbrow, that makes them resonate with so many people?

I truly believe this. I'm obsessed, and we've talked about this all the time. I literally get emails that are like, "Why do you quote Munger in every single episode?" It's because all I did was listen to this brilliant guy's advice and just do it.

I always say learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior. There have been a handful of times when I meet people, read a book, or have a conversation where literally my behavior changes. The trajectory of my life has changed.

The way he was able to describe things to me—there are a bunch of examples where he's...

And he's like, he knows everything about business history. He had 60 years of experience, and he would share freely with everybody. He's like, “Occasionally, we find scaling down and upping the intensity—you get an advantage.”

That sounds like Todd Graves to me. He's like, “My competitors have 10 things on the menu. I have 1. You can get 3 chicken fingers, 4 chicken fingers, 6 chicken fingers, and you want a chicken-finger sandwich? Here's 2 buns, and that's it.”

“Find a simple idea and take it seriously” is another Mungerism. Then what he realized when he analyzed Costco was, “We oftentimes in business find the winning system goes ridiculously far.” The most important 2 words in this sentence are “ridiculously far” when it comes to maximizing and/or minimizing 1 or a few variables.

I think it was Ken Griffin who talked about this. I've seen this with a bunch of investors. We talked about this with Richard Rainwater before. Jay Pritzker was like this. Sam Zell was like this, because we'll tie this to investing. If you bring him a deal and there are 7 different things that have to go right, the chance of every single one going right is very, very small.

I love what Richard Rainwater would do. He'd say, “You bring me your idea on 1 piece of paper. You write it on 1 piece of paper, explain it to me in simple words, and then at the end, just tell me how much of your own money you're putting in. Then I'll decide if I'm going to do this.” This guy's one of the best deal makers and investors of all time. You see that over and over again.

Sam Zell told me when I got to meet him—and it's also in his autobiography—“Jay Pritzker was the most brilliant financial mind I've ever come across.” He was like an older brother to Sam. He was about 20 years older, and his whole point was, “I'd come to him when I was younger and bring him, ‘Okay, there are 6 things we have to do,’ and Jay would look at it and say, ‘No. 1. If you nail that, everything else will either work out. It will either live or die off of that.’”

Think back to the huge mania in 2020 and 2021, with all this huge tech bubble, where Sam Zell goes on CNBC. He's like, “WeWork's going to zero. Nope, not going to work,” and it was at an all-time high. Maslow's was putting in, like, $20 billion, whatever the case is, and it was an asset-liability mismatch or whatever.

Yeah.

Nope, this guy in 1972 did this and failed. In ’82, this other guy did it. This is the company—failed. Why? Because there's only 1 thing that's important, and an app doesn't fucking solve that.

Yeah.

And so, when I look at Todd Graves, the reason I wanted to do that episode is, 1, I just saw a clip. This is what I mean about learning is not memorizing information. Learning is you changing your behavior. I talk to a lot of people, and they're like, “I love your podcast.” Some of them I become friends with, and I see the decisions they're making in their business.

Oh, that's not good.

You're listening, and you're just wasting your time because you're not actually applying the lessons.

Hm.

Take what they did and what they said and see if that works in your business. Then actually change it.

I saw a clip, I think on TikTok, where Todd Graves was being interviewed on a comedian's podcast, Theo Von, and he was talking about it. He said, “I've been a big believer in always doing 1 thing and doing it better than anybody else.” Then they kept cutting the clip. It was probably 45 seconds, and he even got down to the minutiae of it: “How simple is my menu? How easy can I make it to select what the customer wants?”

So that customer is now going to take 5 seconds to decide. I go to Raising Cane's, and I know exactly what I'm getting, right? As opposed to when you go to McDonald's or 1 of their competitors. Now, instead of a 10-second order, it's a 40-second order. That may not make a big difference when you're having 100 orders a day and you have 1 store. He's got 800 now. It makes a huge difference, and he immediately understood.

This is how I've fucking brainwashed myself about this: I don't think of Todd Graves when I hear that. I'm like, “Oh, that's like Rockefeller going over to 1 of his employees who was soldering—closing up oil cans—and saying, ‘How many drops of solder do you use?’” The guy's like, “40.” “Have you ever tried less? Try 38.” “Okay, I tried 38. It leaked.” “Okay, try 39.” “Oh, 39—it works.”

So we were wasting 1 drop of solder, which might not make a shit of difference when the business is making a couple thousand. That business wound up scaling 10×, 20×, 30×. It makes a huge difference. All of these people are obsessed with their business. They're in the details.

Another thing that Todd Graves said that was very fascinating was, “I had all these experts tell him, ‘Hey, you should delegate.’” He has the funniest line. He goes, “Delegate? What does that word even mean? What kind of word is that?”

He was literally being interviewed on 1 of the podcasts I use as source material to make mine. Again, this happened in the last few months, maybe a year ago, and he stopped the interview to look at the Instagram Reel because they just had an event. I think they were throwing a Super Bowl party or something like that, and he's like, “I'm going to watch it before it goes out.”

I don't think of Todd Graves. I think of Steve Jobs every Wednesday, having a 3-hour meeting at Apple to review every single ad that goes out. Nothing went out of Apple—not a billboard in Missouri, not what was on their landing page—without Steve looking at it.

There's a guy who wrote the book called, I think it's called Insanely Simple. I think his name is Ken Segall, if I'm correct about that. He was the ad executive for the marketing company, or the ad company, that Steve was using, and he said, “Steve would call me at midnight, and we'd have to talk for an hour about a single word.”

That's obsession. That's loving what you do. That's taking what you do very seriously. I don't care if it's building computers, making a podcast, or making chicken fingers. I just love people who take what they do seriously.

This idea of anything worth doing being worth doing for its own sake, and my favorite maxim that I've stumbled across—I think originally from Kevin Kelly, the old editor of Wired magazine—is that the reward for great work is more work. It seems like so much of the “fastest to $100 million of ARR” type thing is that the target is something that's not the work itself. It's some other thing.

The healthy orientation that you're describing that Todd Graves has, and all these other people have, is actually just toward the work itself. You had this really interesting notion of almost anti-business people. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, comes most immediately to mind. I love that book of his, Let My People Go Surfing.

Talk a little bit more—dig deeper—on this idea of anything worth doing for its own sake, the reward for great work is more work, and being anti-business as an entrepreneur. There's some depth to this that I think continues to pull at the same thread.

6. Work For Its Own Sake

You can change the name of a podcast. I can log into my podcast host and change Founders to whatever I want. Whatever. You can't change the URL slug for the RSS feed for the first name you picked, and the first name I picked for Founders was telling you from day 1. Back in 2016, the name of the podcast was called Autotelic. Autotelic—the definition of that is an activity done for the sake of itself. I was telling you from the rip: I don't care if nobody listens. I need to do this.

I got some advice the other day, and they were like, “Hey, I have a great idea for you. Have you ever thought about hiring other people to read the books for you?” That's not what I'm doing it for. I'm not taking the easy way. I love what Jerry Seinfeld said: “The hard way is the right way.”

And so I told them a story, and this is my response to this—this is the line that I say: You don't work all your life to do what you love, only not to do it. All I know is that person doesn't have a mission. They don't have a love. That's fine. Most people never do, but I don't go around giving advice to people about what they should be doing. The weird thing is where the source of this advice comes from.

I remember reading about Charles Schulz, the guy. I was a fucking kid, and I'd read Charlie Brown and Peanuts. Every Christmas, we'd watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. So I think it came out in the 1960s, and I was like, “I'm going to read his biography.” And then you read it, and it's crazy.

The guy ran the comic strip for, let's say, 40 or 50 years. He came up with the idea, penciled everything, drew everything—every single strip. Over 50 years, I think it was 17,000 different individual ones that he did.

He had already had one planned so that, when he died, no one could ever take it over. He said, “When I die, this is the last one that’s ever published.” People would go through it, if I remember correctly, living somewhere in California, and they’d come to his studio. At the time, he was an old, much older man—he was around 67 years old—and they were like, “Well, who’s doing this?” He was like, “What do you mean, who’s doing this? Me.”

These people touring the studio couldn’t wrap their heads around it. They were like, “Well, could you hire somebody else to do it so that you could take a vacation or take some time off?” That was his line. He couldn’t understand why they were asking him that, and he was like, “But you don’t work your entire life to do what you love to not do it.”

That’s why I think thinking a long time—most of this is trial and error. Some people find what they love to do really early. I think of Kobe Bryant and the episodes I’ve done on him. He was 12 years old, and he would tell you, “I’m going to be the best basketball player of all time.”

No one finds what they love to do at 12. I’m working on this Michael Dell episode right now. You could see from 12 years old that the guy was a moneymaker and was obsessed with computers. There’s a part in the story where he takes apart an IBM, and he has this realization. He says, “Wait a minute, IBM’s selling the computer, but they don’t make any of the components.”

You just see, as a little kid, that he’s thinking, “There might be an opportunity here,” and he’s going to pursue it later on. Then he gets in trouble in class because he’s not paying attention; he’s just reading computer magazines. He’s telling you what his life is going to be. You just have to listen, and every single person has something like that. They just don’t fucking listen. They don’t listen to themselves.

What does it feel like when you find it? Because you said earlier you were 32 before you—

Mm.

—you kind of stumbled on it, and then five years after that, was it actually the full-time thing that you could do to earn a living and much more? What was the change in feeling? What does it feel like to do the thing that you love, to you?

Unbelievable relief. A weight off your shoulders that I can’t describe. From there, that doesn’t mean, “Oh, now I wake up”—you know this—I’m kind of a tortured person. There was a clip of me on another podcast that just went out, and the person said, “You know the podcast is good if the host looks sleep-deprived.” I’m like, “That’s as good as I can look,” because my sleep score on my Eight Sleep right now is around 60. I’m not doing well because I am completely obsessed with what I’m doing.

People keep telling me, “You shouldn’t be obsessed with this. It’s low status.” I was like, “You’re wrong. I don’t—

It’s high status now.

I know, yeah, but I don’t even hear it because I know exactly who I am, and I know exactly what I want to do. We have mutual friends who are so obsessed, to their detriment, with what somebody else will think of them. They’re worried about the public perception or what their friends will think of them. I don’t think about that at all.

There’s a great line. The reason that people are surprised by some of the people I want to meet who are still living is that I have a list, and in the top 3 of that list is this guy named Jimmy Iovine. You and I share a love for The Defiant Ones. The Defiant Ones documentary and The Last Dance are the best documentaries. I watch them over and over again.

Jimmy Iovine has this great line. When you’re running after something, there’s this great editing job where it shows horses on a racetrack and goes back and forth between that and Jimmy. Jimmy says, “You know why they put fucking blinders on those horses?” He says, “Because if they look left or right, they’ll miss a step, and humans should have that too.”

“When you’re chasing after something, don’t look left, don’t look right. Go.”

That’s why I wake up every day. We talked about this when we did that live show in New York City. It’s obvious if you read the books that the great entrepreneurs, once they find what they love to do, have low to zero introspection. They think deeply about their business, but they wake up every morning not wondering, “What should I do today?” They know exactly what they’re doing.

For me to know I’m going to wake up and do this for as long as I have a voice, I have eyes, and hopefully I have life—that’s an unbelievable relief. Because it’s your mission, and because I’m also super competitive and kind of a little crazy, our mutual friend Daniel Ek told me the greatest line. He said, “One of the reasons I like you so much is because you’re like an LLM trained on history’s greatest entrepreneurs with the temperature turned up.”

Some people are not going to like that, and that’s fine. Then you kind of torture yourself. I did this episode on Jensen Huang, and he has a great thing where he doesn’t like to fire people. He says, “I’d rather torture them into greatness.” Then you realize, from how he goes about his life, that he actually tortured himself into greatness.

Even in recent years, they tell a great story. It was a blowout quarter; the company was doing incredible. He walks into the meeting and says, “Every morning I wake up, look myself in the mirror, and say, ‘Why do you suck so much?’”

We’ve heard that a few times from some exceptional people.

They’re all like this. They’re all like this.

Say one click more about this anti-business—you call it “anti-business billionaires” so that it would get lots of views on Instagram or whatever.

7. Product Comes First

No, that’s not why I did it, though. That’s what I believe them to be. I appreciate that you thought it was clickbaity; I’m not trying to clickbait anybody.

I’m just kidding.

Although Todd Graves and his $10 billion chicken-finger dream is probably a good—

That’s a banger.

That’s a banger episode. What I mean by “anti-business”—it really should be “anti-business-as-usual billionaires.”

I mind my own business. I don’t care. If people say, “I want to wake up and all I’m going to do is take a pile of money and make it into a bigger pile of money,” and they love it, cool. I have no opinion on what you’re doing.

The people I most admire, the people I’m trying to pattern myself after, are those who are obsessed with product quality. There are 3 people in that video: Yvon Chouinard, James Dyson, and Steve Jobs. One guy is making outdoor equipment, one guy is making high technology, and one guy is making fucking vacuum cleaners.

They have the exact same approach. The reason this company exists—and Jobs has said this multiple times—is that the only reason to start a company is the product. The company needs to assemble all the resources, but the product is why we exist. We exist to make the product. Of course, he talks about profitability a lot because the profits allow you to keep making the product. Everything starts from the product.

Everything I do—the reason I still do every single social media post, the reason I answer all my emails, the reason I don’t have an assistant, and the reason I don’t have an editor—is because I’m trying to make the world’s best product. I feel my podcast is handmade and artisanal, but it just happens to be technology with infinite leverage. The same amount of work is going to go into it whether 1 person listens or 10 million people listen.

I’m trying to build what drives me and, I think, annoys most of the people who are around me, because I can be pretty fucking stubborn about this. I want to make the best podcast—the best product—in the world, based on what I like, for the best people in the world.

The very first time we talked, when I had around 3,000 people listening, you kind of nailed it in our first conversation. You said, “You built it. You’re going to win by default. You built this pulling mechanism in the founder ecosystem. By the time people try to do it now, they’re going to try to catch you, but they’ll never be able to catch you.”

It’s really important to me, as a competitive person, that I build the best product for the best people in the world. I’m not interested—

I've told this story before. I know MrBeast. Jimmy’s been very nice to me. He tweets about the podcast, and he’s very nice. He’s invited me to go to his headquarters, and he’s like, “You can use our studio to record here.”

Jimmy uses no script. He said, “We’ll help you with the script. We’ll give you data analytics people.” I don’t even know how many fucking people listen to the podcast. I don’t look at analytics. I build what I want for me.

The reason I have to edit it is because when this is done, I listen to it. It’s the Stephen King thing: I am not just the writer; I am the first reader. That’s what Stephen King said. Quentin Tarantino says, when people ask, “When you make a movie, do you have an audience in mind?” he’s like, “Yeah. Me. I’m making it for me.”

What is your own measure of good or great for your own product?

That I like it.

But why? What is it about whatever that episode was, or the Todd Graves episode? If I stack-ranked your 50 most recent episodes based on your own perception of their quality, what’s different about number 1 versus number 40? What’s more true in number 1 than number 40? What is the measure of goodness?

I’ve been thinking about this recently, and it applies specifically to the fact that I’m covering people who build companies. What I realized is that I’ve never been around impressive people my entire life, right? We talked about this the very first time I was on your podcast. No one in my family even graduated high school, much less college.

And then you add the fact that my father—I’m the son of a Cuban immigrant. I grew up meeting people who risked their lives and came over here on a raft, and it’s kind of weird. We both have kids. We love them more than life itself. I would die for my kids. Everybody would die for their kids, and things were so bad in your country that you risked your 14-year-old son’s life and put him on a boat. How bad does it have to be?

Let’s go to Miami Beach. How many Americans are getting on a raft and going? That’s a one-way trip. So that tells you something is very special about where we live and very, very bad about where they’re coming from. What I realized is that, not being from an educated family, my parents never having money, and growing up terrified of being a loser, entrepreneurship’s a fucking miracle. Capitalism’s a miracle.

When I meet some of these other fucking people who might be the son or the grandson of somebody really wealthy, you’ll find a weirdly high correlation with almost socialistic perspectives, and I’m like, “This is so crazy to me.” Just like my wife is from Colombia: no one in South America who made it to America is like, “No, I want to go back there.” You don’t even understand what you have.

One of the reasons I’m so passionate about this is that, yeah, I like to read. It’s the most unbroken hobby I’ve ever had. I legitimately think podcasts are miracles. We were at this conference together, and you said something really funny. You walked over, and every time I was at another table, most of the people would listen to the podcast, but if not, I would grab their phone, and you saw me installing it. You had a quip. You said, “I wish I could find a way to make money for David’s ability to turn every conversation back to podcasting.”

There were 14 really successful capital allocators and me. I don’t even know what the hell I was doing there. The root cause is that I really believe entrepreneurship is a miracle. The fact that anybody could say, “Hey, I have an idea that makes somebody else’s life better.” That’s all business is. Business is just an idea that makes somebody else’s life better.

No one can stop me from doing it, from delivering value to other people. And then, if I deliver—the more value I deliver to a higher number of people—the more wealth that generates. Imagine going back to the 1100s and saying, “You could be the richest person in the world. You invented a button, and when you press that button, anything is delivered to you.”

Or Sam Walton. I told this story. I was in Miami Beach Marina on a friend’s boat, and I was like, “That boat’s huge. Who owns that boat?” I looked it up. It was Sam Walton’s niece, and I’m like, “This guy...” I had this great experience. I’m looking at this giant boat. It’s probably, I don’t know, $300 million, some crazy number like that, and I’m like, it came from your uncle just realizing, “Hey, if I just deliver everyday low prices”—again, another simple idea taken very seriously—“everyday low prices. No one’s going to beat us on pricing.”

So how do you work backward from that idea? There’s all kinds of technology. There’s the logistics. There’s talent. There’s all this other stuff that’s very difficult. The idea is simple, but the implementation’s very difficult, and look what he can generate.

People shit on Walmart. I had to shop at Walmart when I was growing up. I’m not shopping there now, but it did a service for my family and for millions of people. People are like, “They destroyed Main Street businesses.” It’s like, we couldn’t afford not to shop at Walmart. It’s a miracle that he gave us that. And what’s the byproduct of that? How many people do you think shop at Walmart? Billions by now?

That’s a lot.

Billions.

Everyone at some point.

Yeah. He deserves that money. Good. I’m glad he got that money.

He wrote a lot in his books about the relationship between simplicity and mastery. That’s the theme of our conversation; it shows up over and over and over again.

That conference you’re referencing with the capital allocators—you said, “I don’t know why I’m there.” Well, I know why you were there. I wanted you to go because I had a theory, which was correct: the people there were going to be more interested in you and your project than in the next guy’s latest great investment.

I think the reason for that is that everyone recognizes a truth in this basic message: the power of finding one’s mission and then pursuing it forever. I’d love to hear you riff a little bit on what that has taken for you in the last—I guess we met in 2022, so call it 3½ or 4 years ago. In that period of time, which is when this thing has really taken off, what are your drops of glue? What are the things that you’ve done, or had to do, to make this thing better?

I just want to keep bringing this point to life: once you find the thing, what kinds of things does it then take to make the thing great? What have those things been for the last 4 years?

I don’t even know if I have a good answer to that question. There are 2 other lines from Munger. Again, I go back to him. He says, “Intense interest in any subject is necessary to master it.” He has a better line; I’m messing that up. And then he says, “Follow your natural drift.”

We talk about this all the time. When I describe you to other people, I’m like, “Well, you have to understand, Patrick is doing Invest Like the Best episodes all day long, every day, 10 times a day. He just doesn’t record them.” He’s just naturally curious around other people in the way that I am, frankly, not. I’m interested in books. I can’t deal with people. That’s why I work alone, in general. Obviously, I have a handful of very close people, but I just think—I don’t know why.

I just did this Kenneth Griffin episode, and I made a point in the episode that I think is really important: I’m not interested in timely. I’m interested in timeless. There’s no book on Ken. There are a bunch of great stories spread throughout the internet that I use as source material, and then I listen to every single thing I can find—all these talks.

Most interviews he does are like, “What do people want to know? What do you think about the market? What do you think about this president?”

Yeah.

But I did find more. He had this hour-long talk at Yale. I highly recommend listening to it. It’s more like an oral biography, with more timeless principles. I transcribed that, and then I listened to, I don’t know, 30 other hours of him talking, and I maybe only made 5 or 10 other notes. Something small, but something he said is very fascinating.

He’s like, “For reasons I don’t quite understand, since I was in the third grade, I’ve been obsessed with the stock market. How does it work? How do you make money? What are the problems you can solve?”

That line—“For reasons I don’t understand”—I truly believe that Jeff Bezos nailed it when he said, “You don’t pick your passions; your passions choose you. You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.”

I was not, at 5 years old, wondering, “What’s a good hobby for self-development and my future? Maybe I should read.” I just read. I told you the first time we talked, my mom, before she died, said I would read the backs of cereal boxes. I have no idea.

And so all I do is stay intensely interested in everything that I’m learning, and I like the craftsmanship.

I heard there’s an idea Ken Griffin has that, again, I think is an entire reason that Founders is valuable as a podcast. He says, “You really want to know what’s going on in your business, you want to study your competitors, but you really should be grabbing ideas from other businesses far afield from your industry.” He told a story about a way to mitigate his risk, and he got an idea from Saudi Aramco. Saudi Aramco and Citadel are very different businesses, right? What was the idea?

Okay, so I’ll explain this. Make sure I don’t forget that, because I’m in the middle of the weave. He uses the term—I think they were a B player in risk. They weren’t doing well in risk, and he was still in Chicago at the time. He went and visited Saudi Aramco and saw this giant screen on a wall in their headquarters there.

It was 30 feet long, 10 feet wide, and had all the most important data—not 100 things, but a handful of metrics: where the ships were, how many barrels of oil they were producing, and so on. They just looked at it all day.

Yeah, their distillation.

Exactly. What’s going to happen? You look at it all day, and then you’re going to improve it, right? He was like, “Oh, what if we took all the important risk metrics and put them on a giant wall in our headquarters?” He said it took him from being a B player to being one of the best in their field.

His whole advice was that you really need to be taking ideas that are far afield from your own industry. That’s what you do when you read a book. I’m not going to build Walmart. I’m not going to build Ferrari. I’m not building Apple. I’m building my podcast, but there are all these ideas that I can take from them.

As I’ve exposed myself to that, I find little ideas that I can use in the craftsmanship of the product. One of the main ideas goes back to your question about the anti-business billionaires. The reason I say that—and I do this same book over and over again—is because I’ve done an episode 25, episode 200, episode 300, and it’ll be episode 400. It’s James Dyson’s first autobiography, Against the Odds: An Autobiography.

It took him 14 years and 5,127 prototypes until he got the world’s first cyclonic vacuum cleaner, which he owned 100% of and which was up to his standards. All I’m trying to figure out is, can I make something that I would listen to? I don’t know any other way.

Last week, I actually had to republish an old episode, which is still a great episode. The reason was that I read a book where I found a person I did not like, and I don’t want to spend any time in his mind. I’m not going to make an episode on him because not only do I have to finish reading the book, which I threw across the fucking room, but then I have to spend another 30 hours making the podcast. I just don’t want to be like this person. I’m looking for role models because I didn’t have any when I grew up.

Then I read a fabulous book that you and I both read, Pappyland by Wright Thompson. Excellent writing.

Great writer, too. Yeah.

Unbelievable. But I couldn’t figure out how to make an episode on it because, really, it’s about a family business. It’s really about a family, and it’s really about the relationship between a father and son. I’m very interested in that relationship. I think it’s the most powerful relationship in the world, which I got heckled at one of our live shows when I said that.

Why’d you get heckled?

I don’t remember. They were just heckling me because I said it was the most powerful relationship in the world. It’s not discounting the relationship between a father and a daughter or a mother and a daughter. It’s just clearly something that pops up in these biographies over and over again, all the time.

Wright Thompson has great writing about the relationship that the grandson had with the father, and the father with the.... There are just a lot of family dynamics. Excellent book. But I was like, “This isn’t good enough.” The book was, but I can’t make anything good enough, so I’m not putting anything out. Nothing. I’m not going to put out something I wouldn’t listen to.

One of my favorite things that happens with you is that someone will say something that just bothers you, sets you off, and gets you going on this stream of lessons we’re talking about today that you’ve learned and shared with people. What other things that you see people do bother you the most in business?

You have a great line on this. You talk to way more people than I do, and I’ll ask you, “Oh, this person reached out,” and you’re like, “Oh no, he’s a casual.”

Again, I don’t care what people do, because I study fucking people’s lives for a living. So much of what shapes you happens when you’re very young, and you can’t even describe why you’re interested in what you’re interested in. But I think the only thing that bothers me is that there’s a great line that I mentioned in the Michael Ovitz episode: “Mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.”

That’s a great line.

So many of the people that you meet, so many of the products that you deal with, so many of the people—it’s just like they’re casual. They have a casual affectation about them that I find personally disgusting. Again, it’s not like I go around judging people. This is going to make me sound like a terrible human being. It’s just a way for me to filter who I want to spend time with.

My favorite people to spend time with all work in vastly different things, but they take what they do so seriously, and it’s not a selfish thing. They’re making something that they feel makes somebody else’s life better.

The only thing I can think of is that I don’t like the casualness. I’m also not a fan, personally, of the overfinancialization of business. I think a lot of people aren’t starting companies; they’re creating financial instruments, which is fine. But I think you’re going to realize that these kinds of people just don’t have enough experience, and they haven’t read enough biographies.

You think what you want is money, but what you really want is meaning. You’re going to get the money and then be like, “Why am I so unhappy?” Because you’re human, and this happens over and over again. That doesn’t mean people don’t like money, and that obviously solves a lot of problems, but you’re going to feel a lot better—

If you think about the reasons that people sell a business, typically it’s either because they have a chance to make a tremendous amount of money, or some amount of money, or because they’re tired of the thing—the business, therefore the product, the whole endeavor. Why do you think the money thing has become—I would think about it as a false idol or something. It has become the unit of interest, obsession, showing off, status, all this kind of stuff. What’s your theory for why this seems to have inflected so crazily in the last couple of years?

Well, now we have a giant mirror into everybody else’s life that we never had this way. One good thing about the decentralization of media is that there are no gatekeepers. That’s also the bad thing, in the sense that now there’s a—somebody just put me onto the crazy rich Asians of TikTok, and it is some of the most—

Haven’t caught that one yet.

Oh. We should—I’ll send you some clips. And it’s some of the most disgusting behavior. One lady, I guess her parents own—she lives in California, but her parents own one of the largest cloud-computing companies in China. Another one is some giant, maybe even government collusion in Singapore or something like that.

Government collusion?

Singapore. But all the videos are just straight consumption. It’s, “Look what I got. Me and my mom went shopping today, and we spent $25,000 at Van Cleef, and then we bought a Hermès thing, and we did this.”

This is disgusting behavior because you shouldn’t take pride in what you consume. That doesn’t take skill or talent. You should take pride in what you built. That is the most selfish thing you could possibly do.

I’m not against it—dude, I’m building. The goal here is to change the trajectory of my entire family tree. I’m going to build generational wealth, not so my kids can do that shit. That’ll never happen. But I’m going to try to teach them that the wealth came because you made somebody else’s life better. You dedicated yourself to it. It’s a selfless act, even if you love it.

So I understand that. But then young people see that, and they’re like, “Oh, I need to figure out how to make money.” I was like this. I was so embarrassed when I was younger about how much I had to work, that I didn’t have a car, and all this other stuff that happened to me.

I remember being deeply, deeply embarrassed, and then it switching from embarrassment to almost a relentless self-belief that I am better than that person. I remember there was this kid who lived close to me and went to the same school as me. It was a public high school, but I remember hearing this crazy story that his dad owned, I don't know, 100 Domino's or something.

Yeah.

I just remember they used to take a helicopter to lunch, and I'm like, “What?” I remember him bragging about the car. His dad bought him a $120,000 car. He'd park it in front of the country club, which obviously I would never even be able to get into, and I remember flipping. I was like, “I'm better than that kid. I'm smarter than him. I work harder. I'm going to fuck him up.”

It turned into this competitive drive: I will prove to you that what was handed to you, I will get myself. There was some kind of weird drive behind that. So when I see people like that, where you're glorifying the wrong thing, I think about this great talk Steve Jobs gave when he came back to Apple. He's talking about how Apple spends all this money on marketing, but you would never know it. It sucks. All your marketing sucks.

He's like, “What is the best example of marketing?” And he talked about Nike. He's like, “What does Nike do?” Nike doesn't even talk about how the shoe has a bunch of air bubbles or whatever. They glorify great athletes. They glorify great achievement. That's why he did the “Crazy Ones” ad.

To some degree, I think that's what I'm trying to do. The reason I make these clips on the anti-business billionaires, the reason I spend so much time talking about these people and the craftsmanship, and talk about this guy who is literally a craftsman with his chicken fingers, is because I want to celebrate these people saying, “Hey, I'm going to dedicate my life to building the best possible product I can and to making somebody else's life better.”

I'll talk all day long about that and not about the fact that I'm building a yacht or doing all this other stuff. You can have all these things, but what are you actually proud of? You're not proud of your consumption. Anybody can go to the store and buy that. Not everybody can build a truly great product.

Why are the people who are doing it that way so much better at marketing than if you read a marketing book and tried to market your product, or had some marketing person at your company in charge of how the world hears about you?

I'm thinking about the Red Bull founder, Estée Lauder, and Steve Jobs, of course. This shows up over and over again. Not only is the ability to create an incredible product—I love that line, “Mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up to expose it.”

It exposes it.

“To expose it.” It's such a great line. I won't forget that one. The same thing seems to happen from all these same people on the marketing side. That's the product side. The same thing seems to happen on the marketing side. What is the flame behind that? What have you learned about that side of business, studying all these people who are not only responsible for the product, but also for how the world engages with it and hears about it?

8. Marketing Must Be Nonfiction

Again, I'd go back to those 3: Yvon Chouinard, James Dyson, and Steve Jobs. I think they have all these lessons in that. Yvon Chouinard calls it “nonfiction marketing.” He's like, “If you have a shit product, you have to dress it up. You have to have a mascot. You have to hire these expensive advertising companies. You have to make up all this stuff. It's all fiction.”

But in his case, he didn't even want to be a billionaire. He was like, “Hey, I'm going to build the product for myself.” He was a mountaineer. He spends all his time outdoors. He fishes, he skis, he climbs mountains, and he does all these super-risky sports. All the gear he was using sucked. He was going to make the gear that he used, and guess what? If he made the best gear, then everybody would ask, “Where'd you get that? Oh, that's good, too.” And it takes—

His best friend who wears his jacket.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly, and that'll compound. If you don't sell after 4 or 5 years or do anything that puts the durability of your company in jeopardy—

I think about James Dyson. He has this great line, and I'll paraphrase, about how he wants to spend his time. He wants to invent. He wants to be as close as possible to the design and manufacturing of the product. He will be on the production line even in his 70s.

But what he realized is that after he's done making the product, he's the one who went around the world and sold the product. He's like, “The creator is the only person who can explain what went into the process and the thinking behind it.” Then, with a full heart and complete belief in what he's saying, he foists it upon other people at a high price.

He knows, “Yeah, you can go and buy a vacuum cleaner for $40 or $600. Guess what? In my house, I have a Dyson. It's the best vacuum cleaner. It just is. I'm asking you to pay 10x for what you can get anywhere else. Why? I can tell you what went into it: the blood, sweat, and tears.”

I reject this purely rational way that people try to analyze business, because humans are nothing but irrational. They give money for reasons they can't describe. Why would somebody pay— I love this thing that you see with Enzo Ferrari. You guys did a great post about this when you did a Ferrari episode, and it showed the racetrack, the test track. They're like, “Here's the test track,” and literally, Enzo Ferrari's house. He built the racetrack around his house.

Why do people come from all over the world to meet this guy and buy a car that is 100 times, 10 times, 20, 30 times more expensive than just another car that could go fast? There's a story behind it. I think that's where you see that the people who love the product so much put so much of their life's energy into it that they can explain very clearly why it's valuable.

The reason I'm not trying to be obnoxious when I ask people if they listen to the podcast is that, if they don't, I tell them to take out their phone. I heard this great thing, and this is another idea I got from Paul Graham. He said that in the early days of Stripe, they called it the Collison installation. Another YC company would say, “I'd love to use Stripe,” and they'd be like, “Great. Give me your laptop,” and they would install it right then.

I saw that idea and thought, “Great idea. I'm going to do the Senra installation.” I've done this over and over. I don't even know; I've probably installed it, not joking, 500 times. I'm like, “This is going to be the best day you've ever had. You're going to look back on this day—unbelievable what this podcast is going to do for your career. Here, follow it right there.”

I think the James Cameron episode is the best episode I've ever done. Maybe the Red Bull episode, maybe the chicken-finger episode. But I can tell you that with a straight face and not feel shameful or shameless, or whatever the term is, about doing that because I believe in it. It took a lot of fucking work to make that, and I know the lessons are good because that guy told you they're good.

What is it about the Red Bull story? It's so unique and so different. It's one of my favorites that you've ever done.

So this is another—

What is it about him?

You know me well enough. I'm getting hot. You know me well enough. Somebody could offer me, “Come run my company,” or “We'll pay you more money,” and there's just no way I would do that. I'm not doing that. There are other ulterior motives for it.

If you're really smart, you can find a way to build a good business in almost anything. It's not what you do; it's how you do it. With Dietrich Mateschitz, his whole thing—

One of the stories is crazy because, at the time I did that episode, there were no biographies in English. This is also what drives me insane. In everything, you should be thinking about differentiation.

The reason I started a solo podcast—a history podcast—in 2016 is because I thought there were way too many people doing interviews with entrepreneurs. I can't go interview entrepreneurs. Everybody's already doing that, right? There's obviously something I didn't understand. There's always room for great, right?

I've had this natural inclination my entire life to go in the other direction from what other people are doing. So I knew it was differentiated. What I love about it is that the episodes I love the most are the ones where there's not even a book about it. You have to make the content for the episode.

A friend of mine translated that biography from German. First of all, I was like, “Oh, good. How many people have done an episode on this guy based on this book?” Well, if you don't speak German, none, right? Then you realize his story is just like—he was working for a bunch of CPG companies, traveling to Asia.

He's jet-lagged all the time. He winds up finding Red Bull, but it's in a different language. It's like 15 cents or whatever the case is, and he's like, "Oh, this works." There really is no energy drink category, so he helps create the category, masters the category, and then realizes you really need to raise the price.

The way he looked at things was, "We're a marketing conglomerate, so we're going to outsource everything else but marketing." Everybody's talking about content to commerce and all this other stuff today. It's like, nothing is new. You just haven't read enough history. You want to look at the best content to commerce? Right there.

And then what does he do? He optimizes for the fact that he did not want to have a board of directors. He did not want to be in the public stock market. He didn't want to be answerable to anybody. The guy wasn't married. Just look at it. People give you hints about what's important to them. Read between the lines, and you clearly see he doesn't like people telling him what to do.

He has a ton of fun. He's also crazy. Even well into his 70s, he was taking part in risky sports, mountain biking. He was flying his own planes or racing his own cars. He was like Red Bull. The brand of Red Bull was him.

Then you get to the point where he and his partner each own 49% of the company. They each put in $500,000. Then they had a small bank loan, and every single bit of growth from there was out of profits. How many people can essentially bootstrap?

If you and I have a business right now, you're going to put in half a million, I'll put in half a million, and we're going to get a small bank loan. You know how hard it would be—the unlikely outcome that you and I build a business that's worth $40 billion, $50 billion, or $60 billion? You know how hard that is? How the hell did he do that?

There's a great line by Charlie Munger. He says, "One of my favorite ways to gain knowledge is finding an extreme example and asking, 'What the hell happened here?'" In my case, it's people. There's some Austrian guy who owns Red Bull who turned down multiple offers where he would have made $20 billion for his 49%.

He's paying himself $500 million to $800 million a year. He's so private that he buys the magazine that's trying to write a story about him. There's a guy who's trying to write an unauthorized biography of him and goes to his mom's house. Dietrich Mateschitz finds the guy and says, "If you don't leave my mom alone, I'm going to pay a Russian guy to break your knees—your kneecaps."

It's like, what is happening here? Who is this person? I think that's really important because all it does is completely pop the top off your head about what is possible in life. The reason I'm obsessed with these maniacs on a mission, these super-driven people—the opposite of casual people—is because they stretch what I believe is possible.

Let me give you a perfect example. There's a recurring theme on the podcast that's in all these biographies, and the shorthand I have for this is, "How bad do you want it?" I just came across an example of this with Ken Griffin. The reason I did the Ken Griffin episode, even though there's not a biography on him—I think there's one, but it's crappy, and it's two stars on Amazon, so it's probably like ChatGPT wrote it, or the old version of ChatGPT.

The new version, Deep Research, can write. I use Deep Research every day. It's really good. He talks about when he was 33 years old and Enron blows up. John Arnold tells a story on Twitter, and it goes viral on Twitter. That's how I found it. That's what sparked me, because I keep hearing about Ken, and once I read that, I was like, "I have to do it."

Gotta do it.

This is a Founders guy. I have to do it. Enron blows up spectacularly in 2001. The day it blows up, Ken charters a Gulfstream jet, sends 16 people down to Houston, and interviews every single person in Enron's energy commodity business—everyone. He finds out how they made money, who their competitors were, what worked, and what didn't work.

Then he finds the head trader, John Arnold. Ken's assistant calls and says, "Hey, Ken wants to talk to you. Would you talk to him?" Arnold says, "Listen, I'm not open for a job right now. I'm trying to close the books. But I respect what Ken has built, so I will talk to him. I'm headed to Aspen for an event right now. When I'm back in Houston, tell Ken I will take his phone call." He hangs up.

The assistant calls back a few minutes later. "Ken is willing to fly to where you are. If he flies to Aspen today, will you meet with him?" Arnold says, "Yeah." How bad do you want it? Ken's point, which I don't think is in the Twitter post, is that he tells that same story in the conversation with you. He says, "I hired all the best people at Enron, and since then we've made about $30 billion trading commodities." How bad do you want it?

Correct.

Most people are like, "I'll wait until next week. I'll catch you in a couple of days." He's like, "I'm coming today." He was 33 years old. You always see their true interest revealed early.

He was doing stuff like that when Long-Term Capital Management blew up in 1998. He was 30 years old. He went and visited those guys: "What do you want to know? You guys didn't lose control of your business until over 90% of your equity. How the hell did you keep it after 30%, 40%, or 50%? How is that possible?"

And then what happened? That was in 1998. He was 30. In 2008, when he was 40, he lost 50% of his equity, and he says, "What I learned from those conversations I used 10 years later to keep Citadel in business."

I asked the marketing version of this question—the nonfiction marketing version. If you believe so deeply in the thing, it actually becomes easier to sell the $600 vacuum versus the $40 one. What about on the talent side? I know you've learned a lot from Brad Jacobs and other people about the power of hiring the very best people. Everybody says that. Of course you should have the best people.

Everybody says it, but they don't do it.

But they don't do it. Why don't they do it? What do true founders, in your sense of the word, do differently in talent? It's the same question I asked about marketing, but for talent.

9. Overpay For Talent

Yeah. There's a great line. I did this clip in a video called "Overpay for Talent" because you can't really overpay for talent. Brad Jacobs talks about that over and over again in his book. You and I went to his house, and he told us the numbers he was paying for talent. It would shock you.

MrBeast's video editor, the main kid, is a 22- or 24-year-old kid. If you knew what he paid him, you see this over and over again. Why? In the video, the example is: Did Apple really need NeXT? No, they needed Steve Jobs. So they paid $500 million to rehire the guy they shouldn't have let go, the guy they needed, and he produced whatever return on that money. They got a deal on getting him back.

The reason people don't do it is, first, I do think there's a limit to the actual application of everything we describe. I guess these ideas can scale down and scale up, but there aren't that many talented people in every field, and they're really hard to find. They usually take a long time to convince, they're usually really expensive, and in many cases they're working for themselves. There isn't an abundance of people.

This just happened with something you and I talked about. Your new editor-in-chief just wrote that Neil Maida piece. How did you find him? You found that he wrote the best Palmer Luckey—

The best profile, period.

Yeah, the best profile on Palmer Luckey. Palmer Luckey's got a lot of coverage. He does great interviews and everything. He's wildly entertaining, and yet this guy wrote the best piece on him.

Jeremy, yeah.

So it's very simple: Jeremy—

Stern.

Thank you. It's very simple. This is what Munger told our mutual friend Brent. He's like, "How do you find CEOs?" "I just find somebody who did a great job at being a CEO and say, 'Do that, but for me.'"

Then Brent's like, "What about hiring for potential?" Munger's like, "I don't do that. I just find the great guy and tell him to come over here."

You just did this. You're like, "Hey, that guy's really good." What's the chance that he's only able to write one good—

Right.

—possible?

Yeah.

You don't get that good without a skill there. I realized I wasn't even taking my own advice, because I would use all these people. There's inside baseball to this: when you see all these podcasts that have all these clips, they're outsourced. They—

Clip farms.

Yeah. They're all—

The pitch is that it's so cheap, and I even used some that my friends recommended. I'm like, “These are terrible.” I found a guy, and we met him together. He's really young and really gifted. His name is Maxim. He is, in my opinion, one of the best short-form editors in the world.

Shout-out Blake Robbins for—

For connecting us.

—turning us on to him.

It took me a while—a few months—to do this. It only works because he's obsessed with the podcast, and he was in the audience. He's predisposed, and he's already listening to it anyway. I was just like, “Do that for me,” and then he tells me the price, and the price is 6X what other people pay. I said, “Done. Where do I sign the wire?”

And then what happens? The clips start coming out, and the person doing your video right now, along with all these people with me, are like, “These are the best podcast clips.” Then you and I have talked: What’s the management? There is no management. I bought your taste. It's like I already know you're great because I watch your videos, and this is incredible.

It's like hiring Tarantino and being like, “I have some feedback for you.” No, you should shut up. That's Tarantino. This happens to me where I'll get emails with the subject line “Feedback on the podcast.” Don't even read it. Right in the garbage.

You link me to a podcast that you have made that's even in the same category, and then I will listen. But again, you think I'm making it for you. I'm making it for me. The act of publishing it makes it an act of service, but I made it for me first. So I can't do what you want me to do, because I'm not making it for you. I'm making it for me. I have to be satisfied first.

The answer to your question is this: even I, who overpay for talent on every single episode and find the best people, never, ever forget the dynamic range of humans. Steve Jobs says the best person is not 100 times better, or not twice as good. They're 100 times and 1,000 times better, which is obviously true.

Think about the best investors, like that profile you did on Neil Mehta. I don't know how many other investors in the world are better than him. It's not 10,000. Whatever the number is, it's a small number, especially if you say the same age group. Now what, 5, 2, 1? I don't know, but that's the—

And it's so hard to actually find the person. In this case, it came because somebody else who's really good at spotting talent told you and me about this guy, and I probably wouldn't have found him if it wasn't for that. So these things take a lot of time.

You have to actually ask yourself. I think I have a basic intolerance for casualness, for mediocrity, for not being completely obsessed with what you're doing, and so that weeds out most of humanity anyway. What I do is I have this great maxim: You should limit the number of details and then make every detail perfect.

For me, I don't need much. I don't need anybody to edit. I don't need anybody to make it. The only thing I can't do is be a video editor like him. I don't want to put myself in a position where my business only works if I find the 15 best people in the world. That's not the game I'm playing.

I love the answers on product, marketing, and talent. Maybe the last one is on capital. Is there anything that you've seen the people you've studied do differently or especially well when it comes to attracting the right sources and partnerships on the capital side specifically—raising money, doing clever deals, clever financing? Is there any dimension there that's worth exploring?

10. Build Before Raising

This is where I'm starting to get in trouble, too. I literally have no friends who aren't entrepreneurs. I just can't talk to anybody who's not an entrepreneur. What I always tell them is, they're like, “Yeah, I started this company. It's a software company,” and they're like, “All right, I have to go and raise a bunch of money.” I was like, “You should take a look at what Larry Ellison did, what Steve Jobs did, and what Bill Gates did.”

“You listen to the podcast, right? You told me you listen to those episodes. What did they do? They raised money? No, they sold the product. They started selling the product before the product was made. So maybe you should go out and see if you can find other ways to do this.”

It's shocking to me how the default is, “I must go out and convince other people who are not my customers to give me money,” and sometimes you have to. I'm not anti-raising money. I'm anti-wastefulness.

The point that Todd Graves makes in the episode is, “Listen, man, a lot of these PE guys come in and they try to buy you out and everything else.” Why do you think they want your equity? Because it's very valuable. That doesn't mean you can't exchange money for equity. Sometimes you have to do it. But you should be very, very careful.

Think about this: How bad do you want it? I'm doing the Michael Dell episode. I'm almost positive Michael Dell's initial startup capital for Dell was $1,000. I have to double-check, because I've already listened to the book 3 times. I've read it, and I'm going through it again. I'm pretty sure when he went public, he owned 70% of Dell.

It's not my opinion. I would just ask, how does Larry Ellison own so much of Oracle? Where did the funding come from for Microsoft? What about Apple? What did they do? They obviously raised money, went public, and did all this other stuff. Just think about that. Do you have to do that? This is a really important decision. You should not be casual about what you're doing.

So, Todd Graves—chicken fingers, right? How many people are going to criticize this guy for being put on this earth by God to make the world's best chicken fingers? And I love them. Fried chicken—I like fried chicken. I like it. I don't know what to tell you. I try not to eat it because I get fat immediately, but I like fried chicken. I've eaten a lot of fried chicken. I like his fried chicken. I think it's the best.

What did he do? He said, “Listen, I went to a bank.” He goes, “The idea for Raising Cane's was a paper in business school at LSU,” and he had the worst grade in the class. It's funny because FedEx's Fred Smith got a bad grade. Phil Knight of Nike got a bad grade. Maybe we shouldn't have professors judging business plans. Maybe this is kind of stupid, right?

Todd Graves goes to Office Depot and buys a briefcase, the little shitty one with the 0-0-0 combination. He buys a $99 suit and a briefcase. He puts the business-school paper that he got a bad grade on in the briefcase, and he goes down to the bank. They're like, “Dude, we're not in a position to loan you money.”

One of the reasons was that he had no experience. They told him he should work in the industry for 10 years, even though he'd already worked in it in college. But he wanted to just make chicken fingers, while the industry was going in the opposite direction.

This is where I got really pissed off in the episode. I was induced into a state of rage. They said, “Todd, obviously this isn't going to work out, because look what McDonald's is doing. They're going after variety. There are salads. There's all this other stuff on the menu. There are milkshakes. You just have chicken fingers. What's wrong with you?”

My point was, shame on that person at the bank, because nothing we're doing is new. Go back to 1948. Look up this guy named Harry Snyder, who founded a company called In-N-Out. All Todd Graves did, if you look at what he did, was say, “I'll just do In-N-Out, but for chicken fingers.” It's the exact same story, except he started earlier.

I think when Harry Snyder passed away, he only had 17 restaurants, and Todd's company has 800-something. That part really frustrated me, because there's already a historical equivalent of this succeeding beyond your wildest dreams. In-N-Out probably wasn't at LSU. The guy didn't know. Maybe there was no internet back then. Whatever the case is, I'm not being overly harsh on this.

So what's Todd left to do? You're not going to loan me any money. What do I do? I guess I'll just give up. That's what most people do: They stop right there. “Oh, okay, I go work for 10 years. These guys are right. I'm some young, stupid college kid.” They're in fancy suits in a nice office, like they know what they're talking about. History clearly shows that, in many cases, that is not the case.

So then what does he do? He's like, “Okay, these oil companies hire boilermakers.” If a refinery goes down, every day that thing is down is very expensive for them. So boilermakers come through, and they either update the equipment or fix the equipment. If you're willing to work 95-hour weeks in grotesque environments doing physical labor, you can make so much money working 100 hours a week for 5 weeks at a time.

So he makes a ton of money. He saves up a couple of tens of thousands of dollars doing that. Then one of the boilermakers, named Wild Bill, who was also one of his investors—which I love—had gotten his money from saving it from boilermaking, right? Then they told him, “Hey, you can go up and do commercial fishing in Alaska.”

At the time Todd was doing this, I was much younger, watching Deadliest Catch. The show was being filmed while he was doing this. You might fall overboard and die, but if you don’t, you’re going to make, you know, $50,000 in 2 months as a 20-year-old kid. He lived in a tent, ate nothing but ramen noodles, and risked his life on the boat.

Mm.

He went back to the boilermaker, and the boilermaker gave him a little bit of money. He said, “You keep talking about chicken fingers. You’re fucking crazy. I will give you a little bit of money.” Then he had a bookie. Guess what? His bookie had a lot of cash. He had a cash business; this guy didn’t have a bank account. So then he invested, and that’s how Todd got the money to do his first store.

From there, he was like, “Okay, well, how do I do store 2, store 3, store 4?” The first 28 stores after this were financed in a very unique way, which he says, “This worked out for me. Do not do what I’m about to tell you to do.” They were all geographically concentrated in Louisiana, right? He would go to people he called angel investors—they’re not angel investors—and say, “I have 2 chicken finger stores. I’m going to open a third. I don’t have any money, right? Banks are still not giving me money, right? But these things start cash-flowing right away.”

He would say, “Hey, dude, give me $200,000. I’ll give you a 1-page contract. I’m personally liable—not the company—personally liable, and I will guarantee a 15% return on this $200,000.” And you would say, “Okay,” and give him the $200,000. He would put the money in the bank, and the bank would now lend him more. They’d be like, “Oh, you have $200,000 in equity. I’ll lend you $800,000 on top of that—a million dollars, whatever the number is on top of that.” Then he would start the store.

What happens? On day 1, there are going to be some people buying chicken, so cash flow happens right away. He pays his rent 30 days later, pays payroll 2 weeks later, and pays for all his supplies net 30 or net 60. So it works as long as people come in and start buying chicken fingers. He was like, “I was rolling. I was balling out of control.” He got all the way up to 28 stores doing this, leveraged to the hilt.

To the hilt.

Exactly. Leveraged to the hilt, and then Hurricane Katrina comes through and goes, “Whoop, there go all of your restaurants.” So then he’s like, “Oh, my God, I’m going to lose everything.”

Then, with the hurricane, he does this—and this is what great entrepreneurs and investors do. They find opportunity in catastrophe, right? He said, “Listen, guys, we have to open up. One, you guys want a paycheck, right? Two, every single other restaurant in Louisiana is closed, so people need to eat. Three, if we don’t, I’m done. There’s nothing left. I need to make money.”

He winds up being the first restaurant to open after Hurricane Katrina. He had something like 60 to 90 days to himself. You live in Louisiana, and maybe you never tried Raising Cane’s. Guess what?

Try it now.

Now you try it. “Oh, this is really good.” Now you’re a fan, you tell other people, and it keeps compounding.

Same thing with the pandemic. All the restaurants are closed, but the government said, “Food is essential,” right? An essential business, but it had to be in the drive-thru. He went from doing something like—I don’t know—let’s say $1 billion a year in 2020 to like $5 billion.

Yeah.

That was by 2024. So he took something that’s terrible and turned it into an actual opportunity. That’s a pretty creative way to finance something, and his whole point is just like, “Yeah, or you could go—”

How bad do you want it?

How bad do you want it? Just think through what you’re doing, because his whole point was that he saw a bunch of other people raise money, and we know people that this happened to. They don’t have control. His thing was that he was not optimizing for money. If it’s your dream, the first thing—the most important thing—is survival. It’s making sure that they can’t take your company away from you.

Steve Jobs, again—people talk about this now like it’s something new—said in the ’80s, “Victory in our industry is spelled survival.” People think he was unbelievable. Here’s his line. He said something like, “You pay attention to the nickels because the nickels turn into quarters.”

At the beginning of Apple, he said, “We paid attention to all of our costs. We watched what we were doing. We bought intelligently.” He would call up his suppliers and haggle the hell out of them, and he was probably the best salesman who ever lived. Then when he started NeXT, he was like, “Oh, I didn’t do it anymore because I’m rich and I don’t need to. I have Ross Perot writing fat checks, and I’m famous.” He stopped doing it.

He said, “We’ve got to get back to the basics. We have to be very creative and pay attention to this.”

We started our conversation talking about focus. To conclude it, can you just define, after all this study, what the word “founder” means to you?

11. What Founders Make Real

That’s a good question. I don’t know if I ever thought about it. My definition for entrepreneur has always been somebody who has ideas and does them.

I think the reason I’m interested—we have this thing called, in shorthand, founder mentality—and the reason I profile not only founders but investors, athletes, filmmakers, and people like Napoleon and Churchill is because they saw something missing in the world. It could be leadership, as with Winston Churchill during World War II. It could be a nonprofit, a product, a company, or a service.

They’re like, “This thing should exist, and I’m going to make it come to life. The way I’m going to do this is by directing my energy toward creating this thing from nothing and making it real.”

I still think—you know this because you have small kids, and especially when they’re really small, they have a different kind of intelligence where everything to them is a wonder. They’re constantly like, “Why is that? Why is that?” My son is at this age right now: “Why, why, why, why, why?” Sometimes it can get frustrating, but it’s also kind of brilliant. It’s like the Midwit meme: all the way to the left, but really actually brilliant.

I don’t think I ever get over the fact that you can have an idea and not even know where it comes from. Maybe it comes from your subconscious. Maybe it comes from a dream. Maybe it comes from God, whatever you call it. An idea starts as an idea, and then it goes from your mind into real life.

The version of this that’s a little disorienting to this day is that I just sat in a room by myself reading, and then I spoke into a microphone not knowing what was going to happen, and that made something real: that act of creation. It’s the thing I’m most proud of.

I was talking to a friend of mine. We went on a walk right before I flew up here to meet you, and I said, “I think the thing I’m most proud of in my life is that I grinded for 5½ years with no visible progress, and I didn’t give up.” I don’t know if I’d do that today. I don’t know if I would do that today.

I look back and think, “You were making a lot of stupid decisions along the way, but that is a really good decision—that something told you, something you can’t explain or predict, to just keep going. You will figure it out. You have the self-belief. Keep going.”

It’s a wonderful closing thought. It’s so cool to think about everything you’ve done over the last, I guess, 8 years now—9 years now. I love how you close your thing by saying, “400 books down, 1,000 to go. There’s always 1,000 to go.” Wonderful closing sentiment. Thanks for doing this with me.