Anti-Business Billionaires: Lessons from Steve Jobs, James Dyson, and Yvon Chouinard

they're like would you be interested in selling on your company the response was fuck you this is a family heir loan i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back okay so what we're talking about today is yeah basically i don't listen to any business podcast podcasts other than founders the only business podcast i listened to i listen to founders and i listen to mma and true crime that's pretty much it and so like i i i've view you as my friend but i also am i'm a fan of yours and you it's tweeted out this amazing thing it was about the anti business person the anti businessman billionaire so the first tenet of these anti business billionaires is they have high levels of disagreeable this is very important because everybody around you i just used a reference of michael dell michael duck could be on this list too that i'm reading his auto bike like i said earlier and i got to the point where they're like he's he's taking the company private and they're just it's so difficult what he's trying to do and was just like why don't you just give up michael you're already rich you can start another company he's like i don't wanna start another company i want this this is my first and last company and in his case like that's very rare to have your first company alaska company this is my last company but he is a line he goes i'm gonna care about this company after i'm dead and and i was like oh that's a different level so the disagreeable ness like if we use the three people within in the clip which is like steve jobs james dyson and s it's like they are hell bent on making the they don't bend to the world right they make the world bend to them and they were refused to compromise on the product quality even when it seems absurd and like james dyson i gotta tell you a crazy story about james because you know i like yeah dyson the guy that like i wash my hands and like dries my it's a hand dryer in the bathroom everywhere and it's that iconic vacuum cleaner it's like no the guy has been one of the most successful companies of all time i think it's one of the largest privately owned companies in the world you wanna hear some great so there's always rumors right and again privately held you not to tell and it was like oh yeah he's probably worth like ten or twenty billion i was you you're off by like a lot so a friend of mine happens to know somebody that works for it and usually you can find you can find hints you know if you look at their family office right and you know a friend of mine knows somebody at the family office so there's just like man we have a big problem like they have to deploy like four to five billion dollars every year right okay and so they're like they you look and he's like james dyson now is like the largest producer of green peas in europe he owns the most cheap in the entire world like you see all these crazy so like why where's the four or five billion dollars coming from he's like it's the rumor is that he's been taking out you know four or five six seven billion dollars a year in dividends retaining the enterprise value obviously because he never saw community company still a hundred percent of so i was just this like super fancy private investor only conference right there's the only handful of people there one guy controls a shit ton of capital and he listed the podcast we were talking and he has a problem where like the more assets or manager we have the bigger you have to just talks talked about this over in and again like to move the needle the opportunity to be just so large and so they were buying like smaller family companies maybe in like the billion to two billion range and so now he's like i have too much too many asses or arrange i have to like i had have to swing bigger so they go to approach dyson okay i'm gonna para the response back from dyson is getting i answer your question about high levels of disagreeable ness right they're like would you be interested selling your company the response was fuck you this is a family heir loan so it's like again he's not doing it for money he's run out of the money he will ever spend he's doing it because he loves it he wants you just talk about maybe if your kids wanna work in the business you see that a lot they they're doing it because they wanna pass into the next generation they want to die still owning this thing there is not you can't go to him and like i'll give you two try it doesn't matter it's just there's no amount of money they could give james dyson to stop working on dyson just like there would've have been no amount of money you could gave steve jobs to stop if you go to steve jobs imagine going to steve jobs i'm like hey this iphone you created it you created the the most successful consumer products of all time how much could i would i have to pay you to not do this there's just no could you there's no number that you could have spit out that you'd like okay i'll retire like i just this is what i like to do who's the most disagreeable person you've ever studied oh that's a good question i mean james dyson gotta be up there because if you see the books show that's in back of me it's it's an order by episode number starting in the upper left hand corner so she goes all the way down and so i'm gonna hit like four hundred biographies read of his christmas furniture this year and my number one recommendation is still his first he wrote when he's forty five and he wrote another rock biography when you seventy five they're both great but the first one's really great be the reason i recommend that one is because it's all struggle the ninety percent of the book it's just him failing over and over and over again and him refusing to give up and and and and what's he up obsessed with like because ob assessing over vacuums is strange so he would describe himself as an inventor and an engineer definitely as an inventor and so i what i would say is what he's obsessed with is is obsessed making the world bend to what he wants to happen and so in many cases if you look at their his early career he was inventing a bunch of other successful mentions and they were like taken from him because he didn't keep control of the company there's like all these little things are happening to him that caused him a lot of emotional pain that then he fixes in the the new company and so for him it's just like he spent fourteen years we before he had the idea like he's kind of and similar to steve jobs and of art they're offended at the mediocrity of most of everything around us they always talk about like why is every product where you suck they talk about over and over again and to his idea is like i bought a vacuum cleaner from hoover it it gets clogged after the first time i use it because it has a bag this is stupid why do all vacuum have bags and those then from that thought it's fourteen years five thousand one hundred and twenty seven prototypes till he has a the world's first iconic vacuum up to his incredibly difficult standards dating owns a hundred percent of when does having that trait of high disagreeable go too far that's a good question i don't know does his family love him like do they like does is does he have a good relationship with his children like steve jobs did did not right and so can you be highly disagreeable and still loved by your children could you be highly disagreeable and still be proud of how you treat one another so there there is a devastating line in steve jobs biography by walt tries inc because walter was collaborating with him as he was dying and he told walter one of the reasons he wanted to do this biography is because he wanted his kid he sacrificed so much of his time at apple that he wanted his kids to know the kind of person he was and what was important to him that's devastating line dyson from what i understand he has great relationships with he's still married to the same wife has great relationships as kids some of them work inside the company some don't but yeah again i spent a lot of as you know because she in the podcast i spent a lot of time talking about their childhood their relationship with their father dyson dad passed away when dyson was like nine and he said you know he's writing a biography he seventy five and he still cries and gets and sad that his dad he didn't get to nose dad as an adult his dad didn't get see him grow up see a success meet his grandchildren and so i think having that experience which just like man i wanna make sure my kids don't have that massive hole that i had in my life not did any fault of own his dad died of cancer from you at a young age no so i don't think they're usually mutually exclusive but yeah you you you definitely see a lot of these highly with people like james cameron it's probably the best podcast i've ever done in in terms of like what i like craft and i'm really proud of that episode i did like two or three years ago and i start the episode kinda you know giving you a hint of the highly disagreeable personality where i'm like reading from this g article and it's like james cameron has moved to new zealand with his fifth wife it's like nobody could have a fifth wife without that's that that should tell you if you're lines that's a difficult person to deal alright everybody i know when you think to yourself what is the best video series you think of us when you think of who is the best creator you think of us and the webb awards are happening right now it's like an online awards thing and we are nominated for best video series and best creator but it's stiff competition same who are we going up against okay so we are up against i shade my va for this which is sort of interesting i've listened to a few episodes but honestly a few a few we we're we're up against club s shay which frankly if you're listening to this i think you should just you should just vote for club shake i i agree so please go vote for the webb but don't vote for us vote for club shay alright back to the pod alright number two they have extreme self confidence and they do what works for them so what's an example of that so that line that they do works for them there's this guy named tim grover who was the trainer both michael jordan and kobe bryant and you wrote a book all about comparing and contrasting them it just really fascinating and he says what they had in common was that they do worse for them regardless what other people do like they were indifferent there's another great line in that book that i think is a lot of people that you and i gonna talk about having in common where it's like everyone wanted to be like mike mike didn't wanna be like anybody else and so in in situations situation like that was like they are i would say there's this line in in dyson book where he calls his method of invention his method of company building he calls it the edison estonian principle of design he is not a big hey i have a master plan he's like i'm going to just do an experiment get immediate feedback and do a constant set of iterations there's just great book that i i'd i've read three times i think every single entrepreneur in the planet should read it it's called creative selection it is written by ken c he was a programmer who demoed jobs and in that book is the most detail he helped he was the one that in that programmed the initial safari browser and then he created safari browser and then the keyboard for the first iphone what he shows in there is like it was just all the great products that came out of apple were just a series of iterative demos to steve and steve applying his personal taste this is why i think when i you talked to a lot of investors and to me when i talked to him like man you you think about business way too academically you know like if as if you could sit at a whiteboard like plan and master plan everything out it's like i don't see that in the books i read it's like these little a series of just small decisions every day getting a bunch of feedback and then essentially just changing course slightly every single day and then doing that over a long period of time and constantly proven you get to amazing products and amazing businesses are the people who have extreme self confidence were they self confident at a young age or did something happen like i guess born versus becoming that all three of those so if we're if if yvonne and steve jobs and james license excessively self confident at a young age and i think part of this has to do and i'm speaking for my own personal experience it's like you grow up with almost like you were seeking revenge for the circumstances in which you've been born in you know steve jobs was adopted von had no his family didn't have any money james dyson doesn't have a dad and you just like everybody's around you he's like oh you're not good and you're like no i'm pretty sure i'm better than you are and i will show you and i'm willing to work and make sure to prove what i believe i always say belief comes affordability ability and you know i that's this over overnight people are like you shouldn't be confident should generate evidence for like no you have that completely backwards they believe that they can do great things way before the like there's any proof in the physical world let me give you an example in the michael del book he hits the fortune five hundred but he's like twenty six years old and bit basically for the listener michael dell i believe at the age of sixteen seventeen eighteen in call it in a college dorm he was selling computer parts to help people assemble computers right he was he started dell in yeah as a really the pre history of dell really happened when he's like sixteen seventy he officially started as a freshman in his freshman dorm at university of texas but the the fortune five hundred thing is important because it's like yeah he goes could the kid grew up reading fortune magazine possibly predict that i'd start a company that broke into the fortune five hundred and he goes yeah i always thought big he doesn't try to he's like yeah i had a lot of confidence like i knew i could do this i believed i could do this now he did he think he did hit a at twenty six probably not but he he got their investor that's the point he had the belief first and then he demonstrated the ability you also say that the so the third principle is they're obsessed with product quality and i hear people say this a lot but i've because i've never had a job i've never been able to like intern or apprentice at one of these folks who are obsessed with product i've never been able to see firsthand what they're like on a day to day basis can you give me an example of what they do each day in order to actually be product obsessed you know i i love that you frame that question like that what do they do each day i was thinking about this this morning i was thinking about the conversation we're gonna have today and i think what all the the the entrepreneurs admire have in common is how they wanna spend their time is working on their company so like i get invite to a lot of things i say no to most of them because like everything that's not working on the podcast is a giant distraction and so if you go and actually look tim cook said this after steve jobs died he's like if you took an inventory of how steve spent his time he was at apple then when he wasn't an apple who's at home in his family he wasn't going conferences he wasn't trying to be on the scene if on what is he doing he's working on product and he's testing the product james dyson seventy five the guys probably with a hundred billion dollars if we're being honest and where's he yet he's on the front he he's on literally the factory floor and then he's with the design team the important thing and you see this is a problem with modern day entrepreneurship industry is they like like everything except actual what their company actually does so if you can find love right in the activity itself you're able to do it for a long time i got to have this one the main thing i had lunch at same cell who we could talk about too that two hour lunch changed my life right and his main advice to me was never re the freedom on what you work on he goes the the the more successful you you become people are gonna try to constantly dang opportunities that are distractions in front of you and they're gonna do that for two reasons they're gonna try to offer you more money and more status he's like retain your freedom and he said something is fucking brilliant he goes go for freedom if you have freedom you can control with what what you work on if you could control what you work on you can choose to work on what you love if you love it you'll do it all the time if you do it all the time you'll get good at it and money will come as a result of that and so all of the people that admire it's like they don't wanna go you know they're not trying to go out fundraising they're not trying to like go party all the time they're literally like just obsessed with what they're doing and so everything that like if you take inventory of their time it's like the time is just spent on the company because like that let me give you my example for me right you know this because you have a podcast we can log in to our podcast host right now in chain you can charge you could change the name of my first million right to to sam's club alright you can change you whatever you want i could change founders whenever i want the thing you cannot change is the rs the url slug that for the for your the first time you set up your rs feed right and that url slug will have the first name of or your podcast my podcast went through multiple names the first one was auto tel the definition auto is an activity done for the sake of itself i was telling you right from the rip i don't care if no one listens i'm going to do this i aid is in inside of me and i have to get it out i'm going to do this i would be reading these books and talking about history and entrepreneurship and founders and crazy psychotic people because that's what i love to do i'd be doing it if no one listened i love hearing you talk about this do you think that you've gotten more crazy and more obsessed reading about these people for sure for sure so first of all the do you know this because we've talked about podcasting a bunch and and a lot of people like try to like part time it and i think literally like podcast podcasting is a miracle the idea that anything you wanna learn right it mean you grew up similarly we didn't have a access a lot of money we didn't i don't think you went to ivy be league school like i couldn't go to an ivy league school hey anyway at all right my wife went to an ivy league school and when i met her and she told me first i'd she said you went to pen and i was like is that where that football rap coach guy goes and she's like no it's like it's she's like it's like it's like a it's like a big school it's like a big shot like we're like we're part of the ivy league i was like what the fuck is ivy league is that hogwarts i don't know what that means dude i'll i i i have a a rather embarrassing story like first of all not only did my parents member grade graduate college i never graduated high school so the entire time was growing up they never mentioned the word college to me one time and so i remember being in high school and they're like what college you you're applying to i'm like what the one i could drive to because i gotta go school nights because gotta work full time during their day like what are you talking about i i moved in i went to student housing and i my roommate was from colorado somewhere that was the first time i ever knew this is really embarrassing that people didn't work and go to school like he just went to classes that's all he did like he had nothing else i i couldn't even fathom that so the reason i'm so obsessed with podcasting and everything else is like you have all any subject you wanna learn about you have somebody that is usually to spend five ten you know templates years studying that and you can learn from them for free on demand anytime you want to how could you not be absolutely obsessed with that so here's your question how the reason i started reading this and i didn't even understand this a friend of mine is the one that told me this he he visited me in miami and he's like it's pretty this is like two years ago and he's like it's pretty obvious what you're doing i go what he goes you didn't have any mentors or any good good example so if you're like how you are which is kinda like psychopathic obsessed he's like so you just started reading and trying to find like good examples for yourself and so there's a line there's just getting named larry ga and who built us like multi billion dollar art business that he controls a hundred percent of and on the the profile that i read to make the episode there's a line about it says he got so good at selling art to the masters of the universe that he became one he starts out literally selling art in a parking lot and he got so successful he's now a peer so the reason i'm doing this is like i'm trying to build the best product for the best people in the world and so yeah i'd like it it is you know i i take a lot of the ideas in the podcast and just apply it to my own business which just happens to be the podcast where i derive the the insights from to begin with the next one is retention of total control what are the trade offs of owning everything and being man about the details versus delegation because oftentimes for example my favorite author business author is felix dennis he brought the book how how to get rich he's not nearly as serious as these other guys he's like kind of like a mick ja and richard branson combined he's like a rock mole part but he became a billionaire there he says that doubt delegation is the reason why he's anything is he's like i'm a master del which i would imagine a richard branson type of person would say a similar type of thing whereas you have elon musk or maybe cocoa chanel or a couple other folks where they are good examples of being in total control and man about the details i think est lau i believe she was pretty nutty what are the pros and cons and trade offs and which do you prefer i love that you you asked this question because this is the the great thing about entrepreneurship it's like you get to decide what's best for you like darius is not one way there's not one right way i could give you examples of people i covered that delegated everything and people have delegated nothing i just did todd graves so if you're were eight a recent game you used to live in austin you're you're a fellow fat boy well i former fellow former boy yeah justin but i saw him talk i think i'm theo von or something like that and i was like wow you're amazing and so i went to racing cane and started eating it just because he was man like you don't think of a fast food restaurant as being focused on the product but there's a a a need for it for sure but he was like we only do these types of fries we only do chicken and we own and like it's the simplest thing where i'm like how hard could this possibly be that you need thirty years sam massive this let's go figure it out alright so i just did an episode on him them which i think he's gonna be one of the most talk episodes ever just because i when people would ask me like who's i you studied dead entrepreneurs is like what about the living ones that you like and i bring up todd grayson and like the chicken finger guy like no got got a he's got a really relatable demeanor yeah you wanna hang out with but also even if i was even if he was was a jerk the way he built his business you know he owns over ninety percent of a business that's worth at least ten billion dollars it's growing thirty percent year over year and he's been doing the same thing you know for thirty years and i just love everything i'm obsessed with simplicity i love everything about them but the funny thing is in one of the interviews i found with him he literally says you know people told him when he was younger you're you're you're micro manager you have to delegate you can't possibly do the stuff you're doing now and he has a great line he goes delegate what kind of word is that like he just like that that doesn't even make sense to me and he goes to all the people the experts that gave me that advice i'm bigger than they are now and so he's literally gave this interview and they interrupt the interview because they had some event and his social media team was showing them the real of the video reel that was about to come out this guy's you know running a business he has fifty thousand employees eight hundred stores you know unbelievable amount of responsibility and he's like it doesn't go out until i approve it he's approving every single steve jobs at the exact same thing he wouldn't let apple guys go out without approving it he there's a there's another thing every single location i approve every single new location either mentioned elon musk early days of spacex the he personally elon personally interviewed the first three thousand employees is spacex sam walton go back even further he approved he picked out i think the first few thousand walmart so a lot of them are i would consider micro managers there are some that you know del delegate while delegate widely what's more important than that though is like it depends on your personal personality type like for me i am a complete micro manager i i'm one of the only podcast still like still making podcast podcasts that actually edits his own podcast podcasts every but every every other podcast tells that you're fucking idiot why are you doing that and it's just like i'm completely obsessed with it and i hate it but i love it at the same time i it's the the part of our pie podcasting i like the least but it's so important for me to completely control the final product so again i i don't think there's one right way here it's just like really you have to think about like how do you wanna run your business another thing that you said was that they refused to make me two products is there a story that you have were standing out by having a different product was key to them winning or also nearly ruin them let's i don't know about anybody ruin them let let's use the the the pre pre history of pat right which is worth a couple billion dollars privately held company you know and as you know because it's in the book in the episode it's like he did he was kinda like a communist he didn't wanna start a business he was a he calls himself a dirt bag he was like i was a dirt bag climber i lived in a van i traveled around just trying to climb mountains and you which by the way that it there's a dichotomy there if you want if you're a communist why do you fully own your company versus giving out equity because he's obsessed with exactly there's it's almost like a paradox right yeah the yeah because it's obsessed control so that that go all i'll ties back to control now sometimes you can maintain control public company z mark zuckerberg has complete control facebook public company steve jobs that complete control of apple public company dyson obviously private bloomberg private you know pat private but if you start there it's like his his whole thing was just like hey i'm my life is literally hangs in the balance of these clips that people use for mount climbing and he's like these clips are plastic they suck they break this is not good and they they they would optimize for for cost because most dirt bad climber send no money and so it would be like seventy five cents each and what did he do you you ask him what's his profession is he's said i'm a blacks myth because that was his his trade his craft he's like hey i could do a better job this he starts using higher and steel and now he sells what it used to cost seventy five cents because he's differentiated for four dollars well the four x what what the market is used to paying and he wanna sealing up like eighty to ninety percent market share because his was so much better so they if they feel that the they're not starting companies just a start companies they're starting companies to make products and so therefore they're not gonna make a product if somebody else is already doing that no one made the products to see jobs made no one made the products that james dyson made no one made the products evo yvonne way made and i talked to founders all the time and even podcast and like man you why are dick especially in in in arch trade it's like why aren't podcast thinking more about differentiation when i started my podcast in two thousand one i thought it was too late i was like oh my god i missed the boat but i looked around was like what is we doing everybody's doing the same thing like two people one person interviewing another this is why i my first million first came on my radar when i came on your podcast two years ago i mentioned that i listened over a hundred hours of it because it was truly differentiated it's like two guys have great chemistry they're funny they're both entrepreneurs and sometimes they're gonna just shoot the shit and talk about ideas and brainstorm sometimes they'll bring people in like it was a very unique format you've seen since then obviously because the successful show like what happens like you have a bunch of people trying do it and then none of them achieve the same stuff because they're not first of all they're they're not they're the copier so not the ones that actually came up with the format came up with the idea so one thing i would just say is it's like it if the product already exists i would only make it if you see that there's a giant hole and a way to like make it better in the case of james dyson there's everybody head vacuum from here they were all crappy compared to his i paid listen i you go on amazon right now buy a vacuum cleaner for four forty bucks i have a dyson it was six hundred dollars it's literally the best it's the best do you think that there's a common theme amongst so everyone most most of the people you've named and of maybe most of the people you cover on founders they're creating higher end product where the margins are probably a bit higher so i have a six hundred dollar dyson yeah i have you know pat now is more mid tier maybe but you've covered a lot of you know luxury brands and i think that a lot of like l like luxury brands tend to be the biggest and best businesses that appears yeah is there a commonality of you being different and thus being able to charge more and profit more i don't like the one person if if you ask like my own personal mount rushmore more of like issues greatest entrepreneurs is they actually had like some of them obviously have big margins like apple right but then like think of sam walton like sam walton had the tiny margins why because like his idea was like hey i'm gonna be totally committed to this one simple idea which is like everyday low price and so the margins are small raising cadence it's one of my front favorite entrepreneurs his margins like less than ten percent so yeah i don't i i think these ideas can work for it it really just depends on the industry in the business but like you see them appear over and over again where there's it's a high margin business a low margin business if it's physical goods if it's luxury goods if it's software it's just like the kind of the same personality type over and over again i'm gonna combine the last two which is this the the the first of the two was they wouldn't sell at any price and this is the second one their exit strategy is death which i love i absolutely love is this particularly with ai i don't know if you've seen i know you're not like with it when it because you're so focused like you i think you've said you don't pay attention to the news you don't pay attention to social media too much there's this thing called vibe coding have you seen vibe coding it's basically yes yeah so it's like young kids of which we've had a few of them on who in a matter of six months can go from zero to a million a month in revenue because it's so fast and easy to make apps yeah do you think that people today are thinking shorter term than before or has all we've been a gap of a very few amount of people are willing to think long term versus the short term i think both i think yeah undoubtedly more a larger percentage of humanity is thinking short term and that we've always has a species she's been wired to be short term jeff bezos is a great idea of this is why why he would be constantly willing to have a longer term view his point was that like if you're planning on a year if you're investing in a product that may not you know reap any benefits over a year you have a lot of competition five years less competition ten years no competition like just nobody is thinking that long so if we have a i think he calls a long term if we have a long term orientation then i wanna do that because we just have by default by sheer numbers i have less amount of competitors now i need to back up i am only interested in people to do things for a long term and i'm interested in your last business i am not interested in your you know your startup your first business in many cases what i'm interested in is like what is the thing that is going like the reason i become so close with the founders of ramp it's because and we have this it's like one of the things i love is i talked to cream i'm actually seeing him tonight who's the the c founder and cto of ramp but one of the most brilliant technical mindset that i know and one of the things way before we became friends way before we became partners and he's just like ramps the last my last business like like this is i have all you know ninety ninety nine percent of my net worth into it i spent all my days i'm not thinking about anything else i was like that's what i'm very interested it and many cases to get to that last business you usually have to start cream it already started start and sold a company like usually have to go to a ton it's very weird for like the mark zuckerberg the michael dell you know even see jobs like just to be your for your first company to be your last company which is what i had i think and i did it because i saw a theme that a lot of the people who had who i had admired had a hit in their twenties or thirties that allowed them to think longer term did that is key right one i think it's a mistake if you ever sell your best idea whether you have money or not so never sell your best idea but in in the case you're describing it's like if you can relieve you know financial pressure mean you grew up with pressure it feel and it's real like it it's it it destroys you you can't there are people who can overcome and just go all in at a young age in general it seems it's easier when you have a wealthy parent or when you have some type of you don't need to worry about rent for three or four years that that is it it is easier that way so so to get that like hey i'm not gonna have to worry about feeding taking my wife my kids feeding myself and give yourself room to breathe and then you're able to step back and like here's the thing a lot of this is just self exploration like dude i know myself so much better now than i did think about when you're like you're supposed to be picking your career when you're in high school because then you gotta figure out what you're gonna major and it's like the stupidest thing ever like nobody if you're the same person you were at eighteen it's very bizarre and so like i i just think part of picking a successful company and a successful career you can do for a long period of times like you have to go through this expiration of who you are a person and what your true interests are figure the problem is with humans like we think oh like vibe coatings really cool i like these kids are making money but eventually through all these experiments they might discover what they actually you know truly wanna dedicate their lives to so i think it's like a an overall good thing but yeah i i think the advantage that if you as an entrepreneur as a podcast or as a writer as an athlete whatever the case is like if you can think lot you just have a massive event if you could just have a longer term perspective then other people and this is the important thing is like when i'm able to choose what i work on i'm not worried about what like my downloads today or like my audience size today it's just like as long as i do this forever right and i keep focusing on adding value to other the people's lives because money comes out as a service then i'll get as long as i wake up every day i read a biography of great entrepreneurs and sit down once a week we can talk about what i learned and do that forever i'll let to the score it yourself the chips will fall where it is like i would don't want to deserve i don't want the listener to think long term means it's it's okay if i don't kick ass today and a lot of people will justify this and say well it's a marathon not a sprint and to them i say yeah but have you ever ran like a hundred meters at the world record marathon pace it's gonna feel like a sprint to you like you have to be able to run fast for a long period of time and what i and what and what i mean by that is that doesn't excuse day to day lack of urgency you still need to be impatient on a daily level but patient on an annual level additionally can you tell me the people who thought long term they were still maybe you can give me examples but that doesn't mean that they were broke five or ten years and to starting their company or that they didn't have traction or did that am i wrong so the the to like close the loop on what you just said i agree completely if you think of like there's not there any entrepreneurs who had a longer term perspective the jeff bezos and his lying about this was hey we long term to but like we're gonna take step by step ferocious was his motto step by step not like oh we're gonna lol guys it's like no no i'm fine being you know you know we're gonna be the company we want ten fifteen years now but every day for the next ten to fifteen years like we're pushing the pace and we're doing this as much as we can people that were broke five or ten years in jet james dyson for sure he was literally going to sleep covered in dirt because he's trying to build a vacuum and cleaner for the entire type go go going inside crying himself to sleep as his kids are small and then his kids are completely grown up he was in massive amounts of debt he couldn't find no one the reason he owns a hundred percent of his companies because no one would do would would actually want the equity which is hilarious considering how valuable it is now but also he was like he had second loans out of on his he had second mortgage on his home he was crying still to sleep so he was he was nearly bankrupt the he was oh yeah for for and if it's at the full fourteen years it was a good chunk because then he started licensing yet yet he had some small wins where he can actually pays his bills but he was not like a a wealthy man steve jobs rich from the get you know app he builds the first apple in his garage four years later he's worth a hundred million dollars and the company's public like it was pretty crazy font broke for an excessively long period of time like there isn't like a you know it just it's a case by case basis jeff bezos already wealthy that he worked for this hedge fund in new york called d shaw and he quit that and gave up a huge bonus to move to seattle but he was already you know able to live in manhattan and he was working for a billionaire sam walton now here's another by the way i think amazon had like a hundred million in sales like four years in or something super fast super fast he was like by the time he was thirty so he starts the company at thirty i think by thirty five years a billionaire i tracked him on this when i like had my i had this sheet where i tracked probably three hundred people and i had timelines for each of them of when they were born when they started a thing that allowed them to be a little bit financially free when that period ended and then when they started the thing that made them huge yeah and he started amazon at thirty two in between the ages of like twenty four or whenever you graduate college at thirty two presumably he was making some amount of money like the equivalent of two hundred fifty to five hundred thousand dollars a year today for sure for sure sam walton his first this is an interesting thing because there is an idea a principle i've noticed is like go slow now so you can go faster later and what i mean by that is like sam walton greatest retailer of all time undoubtedly he had one store for five years and so he was obsessively learning everything he possibly could about retail doing all these experiments and so then you fast forward you know one store for five years then you fast forward let's say twenty five years into his career he has the idea he's already walmart but he's like hey he meets to getting him sole price i've done episode many years do you say twenty five but let's say twenty five years into his right so so the first five years of his career it's one store twenty five years in let's say around there he he's got walmart but then he he has this idea for sam's club which he got he's took from other people he took from guy sole price who's he came up with the warehouse club idea the founder of costco was sole prices meant tea when he was like jim senegal it was like eighteen working for a sole price that's where we got the eighty for costco sam walton season days he's like it's a great idea i'm gonna do immediately so twenty five years in years career he didn't have to stick with one store for five years so when he launched sam's club within the first five years he gets to like a hundred and five stores and like seven billion dollars in revenue same period when he started out he can only master one tiny little store arkansas but this your skill set and your resources and everything compounds that's the point todd graves talks about you know i think he by the time he gets like he's ten the to raising kane guy he i think he's ten to twelve years interest crazy he's got twenty eight stores sounds like a lot right he opens like a hundred and fifty stores a year right now or a hundred between a hundred and a hundred and fifty stores a year go slow at the beginning to go faster later he's learning and he's gonna apply that is this is an important thing about not jumping for business to business business because if you jump from business to business business all you're doing is interrupting and compounding was it clear a lot of these you know the world's greatest entrepreneurs was it clear that their tam was big enough to achieve their ambition no absolutely not no like for example you'd be like look this chicken figure thing that's maybe silly but i guess mcdonald's are huge i guess you could be kinda like mcdonald's yeah i think he's if he did think of anything he thought of in and out in indianapolis was from nineteen forty eight if you look at in and outs menu looks looks like todd graves either there's other people be or him was like to me todd graves is just harry snyder rein who was the founder of in and out but instead of in burgers he does he does chicken fingers but no like i i just went over this because i'm going to the michael da right now like there's just like no way like you knew computers were like most people didn't even see a computer and like he just completely us so there's no way he could predict the financial success he was gonna have and the the and how big the market could actually get he started with dell with a thousand dollars no venture capital a thousand dollars and his main competitor was compact who started with like twenty five million of venture capital and michael del is super competitive but nice the the books called play nice and win play play play nice butt win but he's like he's constantly contrasting he's like i start with thousand they start with twenty five million i'm kicking their ass it's really funny and dell would tell you that having the constraints of limited capital was really good at the beginning because it it forced him to innovate into in a way that you wouldn't if you have money and i was like oh wow that's interesting so i go and pull my highlights from sam walton sam malt said the same thing kmart existed before walmart kmart was dominating the big cities because you're gonna start retail where you're gonna go you're gonna go chicago go to new york and where all those places he's like can't go there i don't have any money so he starts going these little towns and rural arkansas and what he learned he goes oh constraints to your friend because if we were if we if we were better capitalized i would have never went out into these tiny little communities and what it discovered is in these tiny little communities there's far far more business than what we could have ever predicted perfect example to your to your question you're the man david i appreciate you doing this i could just like i think the listener will notice this is probably the podcast that i've spoken the least amount of all of all seven hundred i i've i've listened to hundreds of your episodes i think you're at like what four hundred i think i've listened to half of them now i appreciate that i appreciate you that's it that's the pods i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back