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

Anti-Business Billionaires: Lessons from Steve Jobs, James Dyson, and Yvon Chouinard Speaker 1: They're like, would you be interested in selling your company? The response was, fuck you, this is a family heirloom. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road less traveled, never looking back. Sam Parr: OK, so what we're talking about today is, yeah, basically I don't listen to any business podcasts other than Founders. It's the only business podcast I listen to. I listen to Founders and I listen to MMA and True Crime. That's pretty much it. And so, like, I view you as my friend, but I also am a fan of yours. And you tweeted out this amazing thing. It was about the anti-business person, the anti-businessman billionaire. So the first tenant of these anti-business billionaires is they have high levels of disagreeableness. Speaker 1: This is very important because everybody around you, I just use a reference of Michael Dell. Michael Dell could be on this list too. I'm reading his autobiography, like I said earlier, and I got to the point where they're like, he's taking the company private and they're just, it's so difficult what he's trying to do. And everybody's 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 want to start another company. This is my first and last company. In his case, that's very rare to have your first company be your last company. This is my last company. But then he has a line. He goes, I'm going to care about this company after I'm dead. I was like, oh, that's a different level. So the disagreeableness, if we use the three people in the clip, which is Steve Jobs, James Dyson, and Yvon Chouinard, they are hell bent. On making the, they don't bend to the world, right? They make the world bend to them. And they refuse to compromise on the product quality, even when it seems absurd and like James Dyson. I got to tell you a crazy story about James Dyson, because, you know, everybody's like, oh 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 cyclonic vacuum cleaner. It's like, no, the guy has built one of the most successful companies of all time. Sam Parr: I think it's one of the largest privately owned companies in the world. Speaker 1: You want to hear some crazy? So there's always rumors, right? And again, privately held, so you don't have to tell. And everybody's like, oh yeah, you know, he's probably worth like 10 or 20 billion. I was like, 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 hints, you know, if you look at their family office, right? And a friend of mine knows somebody at the family office. So they're 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 sheep in the entire world. Like you see all these crazy, so like, why, where's the four or five billion dollars coming from? It's like, 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 sold a company, he still has 100% of it. So I was just this like super fancy private Investor-only conference, right? There's only a handful of people there. One guy controls a shit ton of capital and he listens to the podcast that we were talking and he has a problem where like the more assets in management we have, the bigger, you have to, Bob talks about this over and over again, like to move the needle, the opportunity has to be 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 assets in management. I have to like, I have to swing bigger. So they go, To approach Dyson, okay, I'm gonna paraphrase. The response back from Dyson is gonna answer your question about high levels of disagreeableness, right? They're like, would you be interested in selling your company? The response was, fuck you, this is a family heirloom. 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. You just talked about maybe if your kids want to work in the business, you see that a lot. They're doing it because they want to pass on to the next generation. They want to die still owning this thing. You can't go to him and be like, I'll give you $2 trillion. It doesn't matter. There's no amount of money that you could give James Dyson to stop working on Dyson, just like there would have been no amount of money you could have gave Steve Jobs to stop. If you go to Steve Jobs, imagine going to Steve Jobs and be like, hey, this iPhone, you created the most successful consumer product of all time. How much would I have to pay you to not do this? There's no number that you could have spit out that he'd be like, okay, yeah, I'll retire. He's like, this is what I like to do. Sam Parr: Who's the most disagreeable person you've ever studied? Speaker 1: Ooh, that's a good question. I mean, James Dyson's got to be up there because if you see the bookshelf that's in back of me, it's in order by episode number, starting in the upper left-hand corner. So it goes all the way down. And so I'm going to hit like 400 biographies read of history's greatest entrepreneurs this year. And my number one recommendation is still his first autobiography. He wrote an autobiography when he was 45 and he wrote another autobiography when he was 75. They're both great, but the first one's really great. The reason I recommend that one is because it's All struggle. The 90% of the book is just him failing over and over and over again and him refusing to give up. Sam Parr: And what's he obsessed with? Because obsessing over vacuums is strange. Speaker 1: So he would describe himself as an inventor. And an engineer, definitely as an inventor. And so what I would say is what he's obsessed with is making the world bend to what he wants to happen. And so in many cases, if you look at his early career, he was inventing a bunch of other successful inventions and they were like taken from him because he didn't keep control of the company. There's like all these little things that are happening to him that cause him a lot of emotional pain that then he fixes in the new company. And so for him, it's just like he spent 14 years before he had the idea. It's like he's kind of similar to Steve Jobs and Yvon Chouinard. They're offended at the mediocrity of most of everything around us. They always talk about like, why is every product we use suck? They talk about over and over and again. And so his idea is like, I bought a vacuum cleaner from Hoover. It gets clogged after the first time I use it because it has a bag. This is stupid. Why do all vacuum cleaners have bags? And then from that thought, it's 14 years, 5,127 prototypes till he has the world's first cyclonic vacuum up to his incredibly difficult standards that he owns 100% of. Sam Parr: When does having that trait of high disagreeableness go too far? Speaker 1: That's a good question. I don't know. Sam Parr: Does his family love him? Does he have a good relationship with his children? Steve Jobs did not. Can you be highly disagreeable and still loved by your children? Can you be highly disagreeable and still be proud of how you treat one another? Speaker 1: There is a devastating line in Steve Jobs' biography by Walter Isaacson. I'm 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 a devastating line. Dyson, from what I understand, has great relationships with, he's still married to the same wife, has great relationships with his kids. Some of them work inside the company, some don't. But yeah, again, I spent a lot of the, as you know, because you listen to the podcast, I spent a lot of time talking about their childhood, their relationship with their father, Dyson's dad passed away when Dyson was like nine and he said, you know, he's writing a biography when he's 75 and he still cries and gets sad that his dad, he didn't get to know his dad as an adult. His dad didn't get to see him grow up, see his success, meet his grandchildren. And so I think having that experience was just like, man, I want to make sure my kids don't have that massive hole that I had in my life. Not any fault of his own. His dad died of cancer at a young age. No, so I don't think they're mutually exclusive, but yeah, you definitely see a lot of these highly disagreeable people. Like James Cameron is probably the best podcast I've ever done 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 kind of, you know, giving you a hint of the highly disagreeable personality where I'm like reading from this GQ article and it's like, James Cameron has moved to New Zealand with his fifth wife. And it's like nobody could have a fifth wife without, that should tell you if you're reading between the lines, that's a difficult person to deal with. Sam Parr: All right, 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 Webby 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. Sam, who are we going up against? OK, so we are up against I Shaved My Vag for this, which is sort of interesting. I've listened to a few episodes, but honestly, a few, a few. We're up against Club Shea Shea, which, frankly, if you're listening to this, I think you should just you should just vote for Club Shea Shea. I agree. So please go vote for the Webby, but don't vote for us. Vote for Club Shea Shea. All right. 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? Speaker 1: So that line that they do what works for them, there's this guy named Tim Grover who was the trainer of both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant and he wrote a book all about comparing and contrasting them. It was really fascinating. And he says what they had in common was that they do worse for them regardless of 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 are going to talk about have in common where it's like everyone wanted to be like Mike. Mike didn't want to be like anybody else. And so in situations like that, I would say there's this line in Dyson's book where he calls his method of invention, his method of company building, he calls it the Edisonian principle of design. He is not a big, hey, I have a master plan. He's like, I'm going to just We do an experiment, get immediate feedback, and do a constant set of iterations. There's this great book that I've read three times. I think every single entrepreneur on the planet should read it. It's called Creative Selection. It is written by Ken Koscianda. He was a programmer who demoed Jobs, and in that book is the most detail. He was the one 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 you talk to a lot of investors, and to me when I talk to them, I'm like, man, you think about business way too academically. You know, like as if you could sit at a whiteboard and 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 improving, you get to amazing products and amazing businesses. Sam Parr: 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? Speaker 1: All three of those. Yvon Chouinard, Steve Jobs, James Dyson, excessively self-confident at a young age. And I think part of this has to do, and I'm speaking from my own personal experience, it's like you grow up with Almost like you're seeking revenge for the circumstances in which you've been born in. You know, Steve Jobs was adopted. Yvon Chouinard had no, his family didn't have any money. James Dyson doesn't have a dad. And you just like, everybody's around you is like, oh, you're not good enough. 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 before ability. And I see this over and over again. People are like, you shouldn't be confident, you should generate evidence first. I'm like, no, you have that completely backwards. They believe that they can do great things way before there's any proof in the physical world. Let me give an example. In the Michael Dell book, he hits the Fortune 500 when he's like 26 years old. Sam Parr: And basically, for the listener, Michael Dell, I believe, at the age of 16, 17, 18, in a college dorm, He was selling computer parts to help people assemble computers, right? Speaker 1: He started Dell in as a really the prehistory of Dell really happened when he's like 16, 17. He officially started as a freshman in his freshman dorm at University of Texas. But the Fortune 500 thing is important because it's a gift. Sam Parr: He goes. Speaker 1: Could the kid that grew up reading Fortune magazine possibly predict that I'd start a company that broke into the Fortune 500? And he goes, yeah, I always thought big. He doesn't try to hide. He's like, yeah, I had a lot of confidence. Like I knew I could do this. I believed I could do this. Now, did he think he'd hit a 26? Probably not, but he got there even faster. That's the point. He had the belief first and then he demonstrated the ability. Sam Parr: 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 because I've never had a job, I've never been able to 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? Let's talk a little bit of what they do each day in order to actually be product obsessed. Speaker 1: You know, I love that you frame that question like that. What do they do each day? I was thinking about this morning. I was thinking about the conversation we're going to have today. And I think what all the entrepreneurs I admire have in common is How they want to spend their time is working on their company. So like I get invited 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. 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. And then when he was at Apple, he was at home with his family. He wasn't going to conferences. He wasn't trying to be on the scene. Yvon Chouinard, what is he doing? He's working on product and he's testing the product. James Dyson, 75. The guy's probably worth $100 billion if we're being honest. And where's he at? He's on the front. He's on literally the factory floor. And then he's with the design team. The important thing, and you see this, this is the problem with modern day entrepreneurship industry, is they like, like everything except actually what their company actually does. So if you can find love, In the activity itself, you're able to do it for a long time. I got to have, this is the main thing. I had lunch with Sam Zell, who we can talk about too. That two-hour lunch changed my life. And his main advice to me was never relinquish the freedom on what you work on. He goes, the more successful you become, people are gonna try to constantly dangle 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 that was fucking brilliant. He goes, go for freedom. If you have freedom, you can control what you work on. If you 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 I admire, it's like they don't want to 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 an inventory of their time, it's like the time is just spent on the company because I like that. Let me give you my example for me, right? You know this because you have a podcast. We can log into our podcast host right now and you can change the name of My First Million to Sam's Club. You can change it to whatever you want. I can change founders to whatever I want. The thing you cannot change is the RSS, the URL slug for the first time you set up your RSS feed. And that URL slug will have the first name of your podcast. My podcast went through multiple names. The first one was autotelic. The definition of autotelic 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. It is 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. Sam Parr: I love hearing you talk about this. Do you think that you've gotten more crazy and more obsessed reading about these people? Speaker 1: For sure, for sure. So first of all, you know this because we've talked about podcasting a bunch and A lot of people try to part-time it and I think literally podcasting is a miracle. The idea that anything you want to learn, right? Me and you grew up similarly. We didn't have access to a lot of money. I don't think you went to an Ivy League school. I couldn't go to an Ivy League school at all, right? Sam Parr: My wife went to an Ivy League school and when I met her and she told me first, she said she went to Penn and I was like, is that where that football rapist coach guy goes? And she's like, no, it's like a big school. It's like a big shot. 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. Speaker 1: Dude, I have a rather embarrassing story. Like, first of all, not only did my parents never graduate college, they never graduated high school. So the entire time I 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 are you applying to? I'm like, The one I could drive to because I got to go to school at night because I got to work full time during the day. What are you talking about? I moved in. I went to student housing and my roommate was from Colorado or somewhere. That was the first time I ever knew, and 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 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 want to learn about, you have somebody that is usually just spent five, 10, you know, 10 plus 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 to answer your question, 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 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 examples, so if you're like how you are, which is kind of like psychopathically 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 this guy named Larry Gagosian who built this like multi-billion dollar art business that he controls 100% of. On the profile that I read, To make the episode, there's a line about him. He 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 I'm trying to build the best product for the best people in the world. And so yeah, it is, I take a lot of the ideas from the podcast and just apply it to my own business, which just happens to be the podcast where I derived the insights from to begin with. Sam Parr: The next one is retention of total control. What are the trade-offs of owning everything and being maniacal about the details versus delegation? Because oftentimes, for example, my favorite business author is Felix Dennis. He wrote the book, How to Get Rich. He's not nearly as serious as these other guys. He's kind of like a Mick Jagger and Richard Branson combined. He's like a rock and roll partier, but he became a billionaire. He says that delegation is the reason why he's anything. He's like, I'm a master delegator, which I imagine a Richard Branson type of person would say a similar type of thing. Whereas you have Elon Musk or maybe Coco Chanel or a couple other folks where they are good examples of being in total control and maniacal about the details. I think Estee Lauder, I believe she was pretty nutty. What are the pros and cons and trade-offs and which do you prefer? Speaker 1: I love that you asked this question because this is the great thing about entrepreneurship. It's like you get to decide what's best for you. There is not one way. There's not one right way. I could give you examples of people I covered that delegated everything and people that delegated nothing. I just did Todd Graves. Have you ever eaten Raising Cane's? You used to live in Austin. You're a fellow fat boy. Sam Parr: Well, I was a former fellow fat boy. But I saw him talk, I think on CEO of VON or something like that. And I was like, wow, you're amazing. And so I went to Raising Cane's and started eating it just because he was maniacal. You don't think of a fast food restaurant as being focused on the product, but there is a need for it for sure. But he was like, we only do these types of fries. We only do chicken. It's the simplest thing where I'm like, how hard could this possibly be that you need 30 years to master this? Let's go figure it out. Speaker 1: So I just did an episode on him, which I think is going to be one of the most popular episodes ever, just because when people would ask me, like, you study dead entrepreneurs, like, what about the living ones that you like? And I bring up Todd Grace and like, the chicken finger guy? Sam Parr: I'm like, no, you have to study. He's got a really relatable demeanor. Speaker 1: Yeah, you want to hang out with him, but also, even if he was a jerk, the way he built his business, you know, he owns over 90% of a business that's worth at least $10 billion. It's growing 30% year over year, and he's been doing the same thing, you know, for 30 years. And I just love everything. I'm obsessed with simplicity. I just love everything about him. 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 a micromanager, 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? He's like, that doesn't even make sense to me. And he goes, and all the people, the experts that gave me that advice, I'm bigger than they are now. And so he's literally giving this interview and they interrupt the interview because they had some event and his social media team was showing them the reel, or the video reel, that was about to come out. This guy's running a business. He has 50,000 employees, 800 stores. Unbelievable amount of responsibility and he's like, it doesn't go out until I approve it. He's approving every single, Steve Jobs did the exact same thing. He wouldn't let Apple Glass go out without approving it. There's another thing, every single location, I approve every single new location. You mentioned Elon Musk. Early days at SpaceX. Elon personally interviewed the first 3,000 employees at SpaceX. Sam Walton, go back even further, he picked out, I think, the first few thousand Walmarts. A lot of them I would consider micromanagers. There are some that delegate widely. What's more important than that, though, is it depends on your personality type. For me, I am a complete micromanager. I'm one of the only podcasters still making podcasts that actually edits his own podcast. Every other podcaster tells me, you're a 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. The part about podcasting I like the least, but it's so important For me to completely control the final product. So again, I don't think there's one right way here. It's just like, really, you have to think about like, how do you want to run your business? Sam Parr: Another thing that you said was that they refused to make Me Too products. Is there a story that you have where standing out By having a different product was key to them winning or also nearly ruined them. Speaker 1: I don't know about anybody who ruined them. Let's use the prehistory of Patagonia, right, which is worth a couple billion dollars, privately held company, you know, and as you know, because it's in the book and the episode, It's like he was kind of like a communist. He didn't even want to start a business. He calls himself a dirtbag. He was like, I was a dirtbag climber. I lived in a van. I traveled around just trying to climb mountains. Sam Parr: Which, by the way, there's a dichotomy there. If you're a communist, why do you fully own your company versus giving out equity? Speaker 1: Because he's obsessed with control. It's almost like a paradox, right? Yeah, because he's obsessed with control. So that all ties back to control. Now, sometimes you can maintain control. Public company. Mark Zuckerberg has complete control of Facebook. Public company. Steve Jobs had complete control of Apple. Public company. Dyson, obviously private. Bloomberg, private. Patagonia, private. But if you start there, it's like his whole thing was like, hey, my life He literally hangs in the balance of these clips that people use for mountain climbing. He's like, these clips are plastic, they suck, they break, this is not good. And they would optimize for cost, because most dirt bag climbers have no money. And so it would be like 75 cents each. And what did he do? You ask him what his profession is, he says, I'm a blacksmith. Because that was his trade, his craft. He's like, hey, I could do a better job than this. He starts using higher end steel. And now he sells what used to cost 75 cents, because it was differentiated, for $4. More than 4X what the market is used to paying, and he wound up sealing up like 80 to 90% market share because his was so much better. So if they feel that they're not starting companies just to 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 that Steve Jobs made. No one made the products that James Dyson made. No one made the products that Yvon Chouinard made. And I talk to founders all the time, and even podcasters, and I'm like, man, why are, especially in our trade, It's like, why aren't podcasters thinking more about differentiation? When I started my podcast in 2016, one, I thought it was too late, right? It was like, oh my God, I missed the boat. But then I looked around, I was like, what is everybody doing? Everybody's doing the same thing. It's like two people, one person interviewing another. This is why My First Million first came on my radar. When I came on your podcast two years ago, I mentioned that I'd listened to over 100 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. It was a very unique format. You've seen since then, obviously, because of the success of the show, what happens. You have a bunch of people trying to do it, and then none of them achieve the same success because they're not, first of all, they're the copiers. They're not the ones that actually came up with the format and came up with the idea. One thing I would just say is, if the product already exists, I would only make it if you see that there's a giant hole and a way to make it better. In the case of James Dyson, everybody had a vacuum cleaner. They were all crappy compared to his. Listen, you can go on Amazon right now and buy a vacuum cleaner for 40 bucks. I have a Dyson and it was $600. It's literally the best. It's the best. Sam Parr: Do you think that there's a common theme amongst, so everyone, most of the people you've named and maybe most of the people you cover on Founders, They're creating higher-end products where the margins are probably a bit higher. So I have a $600 Dyson. I have, you know, Patagonia 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 LVMH, like luxury brands, tend to be the biggest and best businesses it appears. Speaker 1: Yeah. Sam Parr: Is there a commonality of you being different and thus being able to charge more and profit more? Speaker 1: I don't like the one person if you ask like my own personal Mount Rushmore of like history's 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 tiniest margins. Why? Because like his idea was like, hey, I'm going to be totally committed to this one simple idea, which is like everyday low price. And so the margins are small. Raising Cain's one of my favorite entrepreneurs. His margins like less than 10%. So, yeah, I don't I think these ideas can work. It really just depends on the industry and the business, but you see them appear over and over again, whether 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 the same personality type over and over again. Sam Parr: I'm going to combine the last two, which is 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. Particularly with AI, I don't know if you've seen, I know you're not with it because you're so focused. 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? Speaker 1: I've seen that, yes. Sam Parr: 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. New York City founders, if you've listened to My First Million before, you know I've got this company called Hampton and Hampton is a community for founders and CEOs. A lot of the stories and ideas that I get for this podcast, I actually got it from people who I met in Hampton. We have this big community of a thousand plus people and it's amazing, but the main part is this eight person core group that becomes your board of advisors for your life and for your business and it's life changing. Now, to the folks in New York City, I'm building a in real life core group in New York City. And so if you meet one of the following criteria, your business either does three million in revenue or you've raised three million in funding or you've started and sold a company for at least $10 million, then you are eligible to apply. So go to joinhampton.com and apply. I'm going to be reviewing all of the applications myself. So put that you heard about this on MFM so I know to give you a little extra love. Now back to the show. Do you think that people today are thinking shorter term than before or has there always been a gap of a very few amount of people are willing to think long term versus short term? Speaker 1: I think both. I think, yeah, undoubtedly more, a larger percentage of humanity is thinking short term and that we've always as a species been wired to be short term. Jeff Bezos has a great idea of this is 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-term. So if we have a long, I think he calls it long-term orientation. If we have a long-term orientation, then I want to 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 that 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 to, like the reason I become so close with the founders of Ramp. And we have this deep partnership. It's like, one of the things I love is I talked to Kareem, I'm actually seeing him tonight, who's the co-founder and CTO of Ramp, one of the most brilliant technical minds that I know. And one of the things way before we became friends, way before we became partners, and he's just like, Ramp's the last, my last business. I have 99% of my net worth into it. I spend all my days, I'm not thinking about anything else. That's what I'm very interested in. In many cases, to get to that last business, you usually have to start. Cream had already started, started and sold a company. Usually you have to go through a ton. It's very weird for the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Michael Dells, even Steve Jobs, for your first company to be your last company. Sam Parr: Which is what I had, I think, and I did it because I saw a theme that a lot of the people who I had admired had a hit in their 20s or 30s that allowed them to think longer term. Speaker 1: 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 the case you're describing, it's like if you can relieve You know, financial pressure, me and you grew up with financial pressure. Sam Parr: It feels. And it's real. Speaker 1: It destroys you. You can't sleep. Sam Parr: 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. It is easier that way. Speaker 1: So to get that like, hey, I'm not going to have to worry about feeding, taking care of 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 got to figure out what you're going to major in. It's like the stupidest thing ever. Like nobody, if you're the same person you were at 18, that's very bizarre. And so like, I just think, Part of picking a successful company and a successful career you can do for a long period of time is like you have to go through this exploration of who you are as a person and what your true interests are. The problem is with humans, like we think, oh, like vibe coding is really cool. I like these kids are making money. But eventually through all these experiments, they might discover what they actually, you know, truly want to dedicate their lives to. So I think it's like an overall good thing. But yeah, I think the advantage that if you as an entrepreneur, as a podcaster, as a writer, as an athlete, whatever the case is, like if you can think a lot, you just have a massive advantage if you could just have a longer term perspective than 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 are 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 people's lives because money comes naturally as a result of service, then I'll get, as long as I wake up every day, read a biography of history's greatest entrepreneurs and sit down once a week and talk about what I learned and do that forever, I'll let the score take it for itself. The chips will fall where it is. I will get everything I actually deserve. Sam Parr: I don't want the listener to think long-term means 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 100 meters at the world record marathon pace? It's going to feel like a sprint to you. Like you have to be able to run fast for a long period of time. 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 into starting their company or that they didn't have traction, or did they? Am I wrong? Speaker 1: To close the loop on what you just said, I agree completely. If you think of like, there's not many entrepreneurs that had a longer-term perspective than Jeff Bezos and his line about this was like, yeah, we have long-term, but we're going to take step-by-step ferociously was his motto. Step-by-step ferociously, not like, oh, we're going to lollygag. It's like, no, no, no. I'm fine being, you know, we're going to be the company we want 10, 15 years from now. But every day for the next 10 to 15 years, we're pushing the pace and we're doing as much as we can. People that were broke five or ten years in. James Dyson, for sure. He was literally going to sleep covered in dirt because he's trying to build a vacuum cleaner for the entire time, 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 100% of his company is because no one would actually want the equity, which is hilarious considering how valuable it is now. But also he was like, he had second loans out on his second mortgage on his home. He was crying himself to sleep. Sam Parr: So he was he was nearly bankrupt. Speaker 1: He was. Oh, yeah. And if it's not the full 14 years, it was a good chunk because they started licensing it. He had some small wins where he actually pays bills, but he was not like a wealthy man. Steve Jobs, rich from the get-go. You know, he builds the first Apple in his garage. Four years later, he's worth $100 million in the company's public. Like, it was pretty crazy. Yvon Chouinard broke for an excessively long period of time. Like, there isn't like a, you know, it's a case-by-case basis. Jeff Bezos, already wealthy. He worked for this hedge fund in New York called D.E. 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. He was working for a billionaire. Sam Walton. Sam Parr: By the way, I think Amazon had like a hundred million in sales like four years in or something. Speaker 1: Super fast, super fast. He was like by the time he was 30, so he starts the company at 30, I think by 35 he's a billionaire. Sam Parr: I tracked him on this when I like had my, I had this sheet where I tracked probably 300 people. And I had timelines for each of them of when they were born, when they started the 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. And he started Amazon at 32 and between the ages of like 24 or whenever you graduate college to 32, presumably he was making some amount of money like the equivalent of $250,000 to $500,000 a year today. Speaker 1: For sure, for sure. Sam Walton had 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, 25 years into his career. He has the idea. He already has Walmart, but he's like, hey, he meets this guy named Sol Price, who I've done episodes on as well. Sam Parr: How many years? Did you say 25? Speaker 1: Let's say 25 years into his career, right? So the first five years of his career, it's one store. 25 years in, let's say, around there, he's got Walmart, but then he has this idea for Sam's Club, which he got, he took from other people. He took from this guy named Sol Price, who came up with the warehouse club idea. The founder of Costco was Sol Price's mentee. When he was like, Jim Sinegal was like 18 working for Sol Price. That's where he got the idea for Costco. Sam Walton sees that, he's like, oh, this is a great idea. I'm going to do it immediately. So 25 years into his 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 105 stores and like $7 billion in revenue. Same period, when he started out, he could only master one tiny little store in Arkansas, but your skill set and your resources and everything compounds. That's the point. Todd Graves talks about, you know, I think by the time he gets like He's 10, the Raising Cane's guy, I think he's 10 to 12 years into his career, he's got 28 stores. Sounds like a lot, right? He opens like 150 stores a year right now, or 100, between 100 and 150 stores a year. Goes slow at the beginning to go faster later. He's learning, and he's going to apply that. This is the important thing about not jumping from business to business to business, because if you jump from business to business to business, all you're doing is interrupting and compounding. Sam Parr: 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 ambitions? Speaker 1: No, absolutely not. No. Sam Parr: Like, for example, you'd be like, look, this chicken finger thing, that's maybe silly, but I guess McDonald's is huge. I guess you could be kind of like McDonald's. Speaker 1: I think if he did think of anything, he thought of In-N-Out. In-N-Out was founded in 1948. If you look at In-N-Out's menu, it looks like Todd Graves. There's other people before him. To me, Todd Graves is just Harry Snyder, reincarnated, who was the founder of In-N-Out. But instead of doing burgers, he does chicken fingers. But no, I just went over this because I'm going through the Michael Dell episode right now. There's just no way. You knew computers were... Most people hadn't even seen a computer. And he was just completely obsessed with it. So there's no way he could have predicted the financial success he was going to have and how big the market could actually get. You know how he started with Dell with $1,000? No venture capital, $1,000. And his main competitor was Compaq, who started with like $25 million of venture capital. And Michael Dell's super competitive, but nice. The book's called Play Nice and Win. Play Nice, But Win. But he's constantly contrasting. He's like, I started with $1,000. They started with $25 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 forced him to innovate in a way that you wouldn't if you had money. And I was like, oh, wow, that's interesting. So I go and pull my highlights from Sam Walton. Sam Walton says the same thing. Kmart existed before Walmart. Kmart was dominating the big cities. Because if you're going to start retail, where are you going to go? You're going to go to Chicago, you're going to New York and go to all those other places. So he's like, well, I can't go there. I don't have any money. So he starts going to these little towns in rural Arkansas. And what he learned, he Oh, constraints are your friend, because if we were better capitalized, I would have never went out into these tiny little communities. And what I discovered is in these tiny little communities, there's far, far more business than we could have ever predicted. Perfect example to your question. Sam Parr: 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 700. I've listened to hundreds of your episodes. I think you're at like, what, 400? I think I've listened to half of them now. Speaker 1: I appreciate that. Sam Parr: I appreciate you. That's it. That's the pod. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.