Founders

What I learned from reading Copy This!: How I turned Dyslexia, ADHD, and 100 square feet into a company called Kinkos by Paul Orfalea.

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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[4:23] I've never met a more circular, out-of-the-box thinker. It's often exhausting trying to keep up with him.

[5:21] I graduated from high school eighth from the bottom of my class of 1,200. Frankly, I still have no idea how those seven kids managed to do worse than I did.

[8:29] I also have no mechanical ability to speak of. There isn't a machine at Kinko's I can operate. I could barely run the first copier we leased back in 1970. It didn't matter. All I knew was that was I could sell what came out of it.

[10:24] Building an entirely new sort of business from a single Xerox copy machine gave me the life the world seemed determined to deny me when I was younger.

[13:04] The A students work for the B students, the C students run the companies, and the D students dedicate the buildings.

[23:02] I learned to turn a lot of busywork over to other people. That's an important skill. If you don't develop it, you'll be so busy, busy, busy that you can't get a free hour, not to mention a free week or month, to sit back and think creatively about where you want to be heading and how you are going to get there.

[24:07] There's no better way to stay "on" your business than to think creatively and constantly about your marketing: how you are marketing, who you are marketing to, and, always, how you could be doing a better job at it. You'd be amazed what kind of business you can generate by a seemingly simple thing like handing out flyers.

[26:18] The phone rang. It was one of our store managers calling to ask me how to handle a bounced check. I held the receiver away from my face and looked at it, flabbergasted. If every store manager needed my help to deal with a bounced check, then we really had problems.

[39:55] I never walked in the back door used by coworkers. I walked in the front door so I could see things from the customer's perspective.

[48:06] You had to remember he'd been picking up the best ideas from all around the country. (Founders is doing the same thing from the history of entrepreneurship) 

[54:14] I believe in getting out of as much work as I possibly can.

[54:45] By now, you’d have to be as bad a reader as I am not to figure out that I have a dark side. You rarely hear people talk about their dark sides, especially business leaders, which is a shame because successful businesses aren't usually started by laid-back personalities. I don't hide the fact that I have a problem with anger.

[1:03:37] I'll give you an example of a corporate view of money. We used to sell passport photos at Kinko's and we advertised the service in the local Yellow Pages. It would cost us 75 cents to make a passport photo. I calculated that price jumped by $1 to $1.75 when you added in the cost of the Yellow Pages ads. We'd sell those photos for $13 a piece. You think this is a nice business? Shortly after we sold a controlling stake in Kinko's, the new budget people came in and, to make their numbers, they got rid of the Yellow Pages ads. They saw it as an advertising expense and didn't take into account how it affected the rest of our business. I used to go to the office and think, "Are they deliberately trying to be idiots?" These straight-A types drove me nuts. Then, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, we abandoned our passport business. That is corporate dyslexia. There is a lot of corporate dyslexia going on out there.

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from reading Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone.

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[1:47] Every interesting thing I've ever done, every important thing I've ever done, every beneficial thing I've ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures. I'm covered in scar tissues as a result of this.

[6:19] I absolutely know it's hard, but we'll learn how to do it.

[8:30] Thinking small is a self fulfilling prophecy.

[12:13] Begin any conversation about a new product in terms of the benefit it creates for customers.

[19:08] Bezos deployed his playbook for experiments that produced promising sparks: he poured gasoline on them.

[22:41] You can regulate yourself quite easily or think about what you're going to do with your existing resources. Sometimes, you don't know what the boundaries are. Jeff just wanted us to be unbounded.

[25:48] If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time. It always yields a better result.

[27:19] Don't come to me with a plan that assumes I will only make a certain level of investment. Tell me how to win.

[35:50] He preached the wholesale embrace of technology, rapid experimentation, and optimism about the opportunities of the internet instead of despair.

[45:17] Bezos’ one constant edict: Go faster.

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by  Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.

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[3:58] What is best for the customer? Do that: "Amazon believes that long-term growth is best produced by putting the customer first. If you held this conviction, what kind of company would you build?"

[7:05] Jeff skips the conferences and dinners: "95 percent of the time I spent with Jeff was focused on internal work issues rather than external events like conferences, public speeches, and sports matches."

[25:08] Don't encourage communication—eliminate it: "Jeff said many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it. When you view effective communication across groups as a "defect," the solutions to your problems start to look quite different from traditional ones." (There is nothing conventional about Jeff) 

[27:29] Why companies must run experiments: "Time and time again, we learned that  consumers would behave in ways we hadn't imagined especially for brand-new features or products."

[30:16] Jeff on the importance of making decisions quickly: "Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure."

[30:48] Great anything is rare: "Great Two-Pizza team leaders proved to be rarities. Although we did identify a few such brilliant managers, they turned out to be notoriously difficult to find in sufficient numbers, even at Amazon." 

[34:30] A simple tip from Jeff on how to produce unique insights: "Jeff has an uncanny ability to read a narrative and consistently arrive at insights that no one else did, even though we were all reading the same narrative. After one meeting, I asked him how he was able to do that. He responded with a simple and useful tip that I have not forgotten: he assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove otherwise. He's challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer.”

[35:12] Why Amazon works backwards: "Working Backwards is a systematic way to vet ideas and create new products. Its key tenet is to start by defining the customer experience, then iteratively work backwards from that point until the team achieves clarity of thought around what to build."

[40:00] Working backwards on Kindle: "We were working forward, trying to invent a product that would be good for Amazon, the company, not the customer. When we wrote a Kindle press release and started working backwards, everything changed. We focused instead on what would be great for customers. An excellent screen for a great reading experience. An ordering process that would make buying and downloading books easy. A huge selection of titles. Low prices. We would never have had the breakthroughs necessary to achieve that customer experience were it not for the press release process, which forced the team to invent multiple solutions to customer problems."

[43:58] Patience. Then bet big: Our approach permits us to work patiently for multiple years to deliver a solution. Once we had a clear vision for how these products could become businesses that would delight customers, we invested big. Patience and carefully managed investment over many years can pay off greatly. 

[46:03] Have Steve Jobs level of belief in your products: "Jobs calmly and confidently told us that even though it was Apple's first attempt to build for Windows, he thought it was the best Windows application anyone had ever built."

[54:48] Amazon's Kindle strategy was influenced by Apple: "In digital, that meant focusing on applications and devices consumers used to read, watch, or listen to content, as Apple had already done with iTunes and the iPod. We all took note of what Apple had achieved in digital music in a short period of time and sought to apply those learnings to our long-term product vision."

[56:48] Good ideas are rare. When you find one bet heavily: "At some point in the debate, someone asked Jeff point blank: "How much more money are you willing to invest in Kindle?" Jeff calmly turned to our CFO, Tom Szkutak, smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and asked the rhetorical question, "How much money do we have?"

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone.

This is part one of a three part series on Jeff Bezos. The next two books are Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon and Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire.

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(0:54) It may very well be that the absolute intensity of drive and focus is essential and incompatible with all of the nice management thought about consensus and gentle demeanor.

(2:07) Jeff’s clarity, intensity of focus, and ability to prioritize is unusual.

(4:05) As I read the Steve Jobs biography I even had an insight and question about myself, that maybe I haven’t begun to really find my own limits.

(10:49) You have to be able to think what you're doing for yourself. 

(11:42) There is probably no limit to what he can do. 

(12:34) People forget that most people believed Amazon was doomed because it would not scale at a cost structure that would work. It kept piling up losses. It lost hundreds of millions of dollars. But Jeff was very smart. He’s a classic technical founder of a business, who understands every detail and cares about it more than anyone.

(13:45) Bezos has proved quite indifferent to the opinions of others. 

(13:58) Bezos is extremely difficult to work for. 

(15:58) Amazon's internal customs are deeply idiosyncratic. 

(16:15) He is highly circumspect about deviating from well established, very abstract talking points. 

(18:08) The financial community knew very little about D. E. Shaw, and its polymath founder wanted to keep it that way. 

(20:15) Jeff was not concerned about what other people were thinking. 

(20:26) Bezos had closely studied several wealthy  businessmen. 

(21:13) Bezos was disciplined and precise. 

(22:14) Bezos seemed to love the idea of the nonstop workday. 

(22:23) The rest of Wall Street saw D. E. Shaw as a highly secretive hedged fund. David Shaw didn't view the company as a hedge fund but as a versatile technology laboratory who could apply computer science to different problems. 

(25:51) Web activity had grown that year by 230,000%. Things just don't grow that fast Bezos said. It's highly unusual and that started me thinking what kind of business might make sense in the context of that growth? 

(31:59) He swept me off my feet. He was so convinced that what he was doing was basically the work of God and that somehow the money would materialize. The real wild card was, could he really run a business? That wasn’t a gimme. Of course, about two years later I was going, Holy shit, did we back the right horse!

(34:05) Bezos plowed through them at a rapid clip, looking for someone with the same low regard for the usual way of doing things that Bezos himself had.

(34:46) Bezos looked right at Schultz and told him We are going to take this thing to the moon!

(35:16) Jeff was always a big believer that disruptive small companies could triumph. 

(35:55) I think you are underestimating the degree to which established companies will find it hard to be nimble or to focus attention on a new channel. 

(36:45) I brought him very bad news about our business and he got excited. 

(37:28) I think our company is undervalued. The world just doesn't understand what Amazon is going to be. 

(39:30) Bezos had imbibed Walton's book thoroughly and wove Walmart's founder's credo about frugality and a bias for action into the cultural fabric of Amazon. 

(44:54) We were all running around the halls with our hair on fire thinking What are we going to do? But not Jeff. I have never seen anyone so calm in the eye of a storm. Ice water runs through his veins. 

(53:20) Bezos met Jim Sinegal, the founder of Costco. Sinegal explained the Costco model to Bezos. It was all about customer loyalty. I think Jeff looked at it and thought that was something that would apply to his business as well. Sinegal doesn’t regret educating an entrepreneur who would evolve into a ferocious competitor. I’ve always had the opinion that we have shamelessly stolen any good ideas. 

(57:45) Perhaps Amazon’s founder realized he owed Sinegal a debt of gratitude, because he took the lessons he learned during that coffee in 2001 and applied them with a vengeance.

(59:37) He just never stopped believing. He never blinked once. 

(1:00:09) Slow steady progress can erode any challenge over time.

(1:01:40) Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.

(1:04:43) Like a warlord leaving the decapitated heads of his enemies on stakes outside his village walls, he was using the mounts as a symbol, and as an admonition to employees about how not to behave.

(1:06:29) I want you to understand that from this day forward, you are not bound by the old rules.

(1:12:46) I think the thing that blindsided Jeff and helped with the Kindle was the iPod, which overturned the music business faster than he thought.

(1:14:27) Bezos is not tethered by conventional thinking. What is amazing to me is that he is bound only by the laws of physics. He can’t change those. Everything else he views as open to discussion.

(1:15:01) Bezos learned that Zappos was advertising on the bottoms of the plastic bins at airport-security checkpoints. They are outthinking us! he snapped at a meeting.

(1:16:15) Companies that make things and companies that sell them have waged versions of this battle for centuries.

(1:19:04) Every anecdote from a customer matters. We research each of them because they tell us something about our metrics and processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of information.

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from reading Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney.

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[4:43] Mike Ive influence on his son’s talent was purely nurturing. They were constantly keeping up a conversation about made-objects and hw they could be made better.

[6:39] I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product.

[9:24] Take big chances. Pursue a passion. Respect the work.

[11:47] His designs were incredibly simple and elegant. They were usually rather surprising but made complete sense once you saw them. You wondered why we had never seen such a product like that before.

[15:52] Grind it out. You can make something look like magic by going further than most reasonable people would go.

[17:34] The more I learned about this cheeky, almost rebellious company (Apple) the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money.

[24:06] He was completely interested in humanizing technology. What something should be was always the starting point for his designs.

[33:29] Jony was very serious about his work. He had a ferocious intensity about it.

[41:52] It is very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.

[51:38] Jobs didn't want to compete in the broader market for personal computers. These companies competed on price, not features or ease of use. Jobs figured theirs was a race to the bottom. Instead, he argued, there was no reason that well-designed, well-made computers couldn’t command the same market share ad margins as a luxury automobile. A BMW might get you to where you are going in the same way a Chevy that costs half the price, but there will always be those who will pay for the better ride in the sexier car. Why not make only first class-products with high margins so that Apple could continue to develop even better first-class products?

[1:19:25] A great prompt for your thinking: What is your product better than? Are you just making a cheap laptop? Or are you making an iPad? Netbooks accounted for 20% of the laptop market. But Apple never seriously considered making one. “Netbooks aren’t better than anything,” Steve Jobs said at the time. “They’re just cheap laptops.” Jony proposed that the tablets in his lab could be Apple’s answer to the netbook.

[1:20:32] It’s great if you can find what you love to do. Finding it is one thing but then to be able to practice that and be preoccupied with it is another.

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from reading Going for Broke: How Robert Campeau Bankrupted the Retail Industry, Jolted the Junk Bond Market, and Brought the Booming Eighties to a Crashing Halt by John Rothchild.

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[0:01] A stranger comes to Wall Street, borrows nearly $4 billion to acquire a company that six months earlier he'd never even heard of. This transaction is scarcely settled before he's allowed to borrow $7 billion more to acquire a bigger company, making him a major force in retailing, an industry he knows nothing about. 

[11:16] Just a few weeks back, Randall had figured that Bob might be interested in attracting a single Brooks Brothers store into one of his malls. Now in a great imaginary leap, Bob had vaulted himself into the ownership of all forty-five Brooks Brothers stores. 

[15:01 Neither Bob nor his advisers really knew one investment bank from another. "It was basically a matter of looking up names in the Yellow Pages." 

[19:42] Lehman Brothers was impressed by two things: the man's obvious, if naive, enthusiasm; and the absurdity of his proposition. Those who doubted Bob could acquire Allied had grown into a large crowd that included Bob's brain trust, his advisers in Toronto, his Toronto bankers, his advisers from Paine Webber and his lawyer. 

[21:45] This was Citicorp's first clue they were dealing with a volatile character, who soon acquired the in-house nickname Mad Bomber. 

[29:26] The M&A department they established at First Boston helped the firm to a record $125 million in earnings in 1985, a long way from the $1 million it had earned in 1978. 

[33:45] He think's he's destined to take over Allied. His fortune-teller says so. 

[41:28] Bob understood that Citicorp and First Boston, who together had invested in $1.8 billion in the Street Sweep and who were going to make hundreds of millions in fees if this deal closed, were not about to let the deal fall apart because he didn't pony up his equity. They had more of a vested interest in this deal than he did. 

[42:53] His $4.1 billion acquisition included a whopping $612 million in fees, expenses, and financing charges. 

[50:00] The purpose of business is profit, not a platform for your ego. 

[53:24] Bob said, "Don't worry. If somebody lends a dollar, you take it. The ramifications can be handled later. There's always some way out." He goes bankrupt shortly thereafter. 

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from reading Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond.

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[0:01] From a party of one it now counted millions of users on every continent, including Antartica, and even outer space, if you count NASA outposts. Not only was it the most common operating system, but its very development model—an intricate web of its own, encompassing hundreds of thousands of volunteer computer programmers—had grown to become the largest collaborative project in the history of the world. 

[1:08] Revolutionaries aren’t born. Revolutions can’t be planned. Revolutions can’t be managed. Revolutions happen. And sometimes, revolutionaries just get stuck with it. 

[9:05] The Swedish language has no equivalent to the term “dysfunctional family.” As a result of the divorce, we didn’t have a lot of money. Mom would have to pawn her only investment—the single share of stock in the Helsinki telephone company. I remember going with her once and feeling embarrassed about it. Now I’m on the board of directors of the same company.

[10:13] Linus has no handlers, doesn’t listen to voice mail, and rarely responds to email. 

[10:40] I found Linus to be unexpectedly knowledgable about American business history. 

[13:19] Some of the smartest programmers out there are fifteen-year-old kids playing around in their rooms. It’s what I thought sixteen years ago, and I still suspect it’s true. 

[13:46] Everybody has a book that has changed his or her life. As I read the book I started to understand. I got a big enthusiastic jolt. Frankly, it never subsided. I hope you can say the same about something. 

[16:01] An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That’s what having a clean design is all about. It’s the same with languages. The English language has twenty-six letters and you can build up everything from those letters. Unix comes with a small-is-beautiful philosophy. It has a small set of simple basic building blocks that can be combined into something that allows for infinite complexity of expression. 

[17:39] You should absolutely not dismiss simplicity for something easy. It takes design and good taste to be simple. 

[27:42] You can do something the brute force way, the stupid, grind-the-problem-down-until-it’s-not-a-problem-anymore way, or you can find the right approach and suddenly the problem just goes away. You look at the problem another way, and you have this epiphany: It was only a problem because you were looking at it the wrong way. 

[29:00] That was the point where I almost gave up, thinking it would be too much work and not worth it. 

[50:52] It’s been well established that folks do their best work when they are driven by a passion. When they are having fun. This is as true for playwrights and sculptors and entrepreneurs as it is for software engineers. 

[51:48] Survive. Socialize. Have fun. That’s the progression. And that’s also why we chose “Just For Fun” as the title of this book. Because everything we ever do seems to eventually end up being for our own entertainment. 

[52:02] My theory of the meaning of life doesn’t actually guide you in what you should be doing. At most, it says “Yes, you can fight it, but in the end the ultimate goal of life is to have fun.” 

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from reading The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from reading Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace.

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There would be an industry breakthrough unimagined at the time, and it would be made by a company that didn’t yet exist. [7:55]

Another corollary to Joys Law of Innovation was that the number of bright people in any company went down as the size went up. [10:47]

As Apple founder Steve Jobs liked to say: When you are at simplicity, there ain’t no complexity. [12:49]

Gates looks at everything as something that should be his. He acts in any way he can to make it his. It can be an idea, market share, or a contract. There is not an ounce of conscientiousness or compassion in him. The notion of fairness means nothing to him. The only thing he understands is leverage. [17:21]

I became convinced that Microsoft was building the last minicomputer. That the Microsoft Network was based on the notion that your competitors were the model — proprietary online services like America Online — and that the reality was that the Internet was going to be such a fundamental paradigm shift, that you needed to think about your strategies fundamentally differently. [28:08]

The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. — Zero to One [29:25]

Most college kids knew much more than we did because they were exposed to it. If I had wanted to connect to the Internet, it would have been easier for me to get into my car and drive over to the University of Washington than to try and get on the Internet at Microsoft. [31:12]

For years , Gates had Kahn in his sights. Kahn recalled that he once had found Gates at an industry conference in the late 1980s sitting alone in a corner, looking at a photograph in his hands. “It was a picture of me,” said Kahn. [41:16]

It’s not in Microsoft’s bones to cooperate with other companies. [42:47]

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from reading Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer by Bosley Crowther. 

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The reason so many people showed up at his funeral was because they wanted to make sure he was dead. [0:50]

He is in that phalanx of men of aggressive bent who seized on the opportunities that an expanding civilization exposed. With them, he ascended to high places along an upwardly spiraling route that was there to be ascended by those who had the necessary stamina and drive. And, with some of them , he was unsettled and rendered dizzy by the heights, so that he could not control his footing when the road itself began to narrow and fall. [2:07] 

His own recollections of his early childhood were mercifully meager and dim. They were mainly recollections of being hungry. That was the only memory Mayer had of himself as a little boy. [7:01] 

How powerful and violent were the urges in the depths of the growing boy to break out of his immigrant encasement. [10:27] 

One of his favorite maxims had to do with behavior in adversity. “When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on." [11:55] 

He wanted to be a film producer. He wanted to get into that realm of fabrication and creation where glamour and excitement were. [27:00] 

My unchanging policy will be great star, great director, great play, great cast. You are authorized to get these without stint or limit. Spare nothing, neither expense, time, nor effort. Results only are what I am after. [33:00]

It was not all sunshine and profits with Mayer’s company during these embryonic days. Mayer was far from being one of the top producers of Hollywood. He was a small, enterprising operator. There were many others like him, clawing to get minor stars and unattached directors to make their pictures and help them to get ahead. On some films they picked up profits, on others they definitely did not. The business was always a gamble for them, as it was for Mayer. [39:13] 

The radical and profound transition (sound in movies) was spread over two or three years. Compulsion more than planning impelled it, against resistance within the industry. [49:57] 

The system (sound) was not regarded as anything more than a novelty by the remainder of the industry. [54:45] 

Mayer was no doubt a brilliant man, with vision and understanding in the business of manufacturing films as well as a fervor for investing in talent in every phase of production, to the point of extravagance, he was also a careless manager, a favorer with stubborn likes and dislikes, and a braggart who wasted his time and the time of others telling them what a great man he was. [1:01:33] 

 Mayer had a psychopathic need for power. [1:07:40] 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

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