Founders

What I learned from reading Tycoon's War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America's Most Famous Military Adventurer by Stephen Dando-Collins

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Unlike Vanderbilt's other adversaries William Walker was not afraid of Cornelius when he should have been [0:01]

Setting up the war between Cornelius Vanderbilt and William Walker [7:32]

William Walker's impressive resume [16:44]

Betrayal: "Gentlemen, You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you." [27:04]

Walker takes Vanderbilt's property. Walker thinks the law protects him. Vanderbilt doesn't care about the law [39:27]

Garrison's counter move against Cornelius Vanderbilt [44:36]

Vanderbilt funds several Central American governments to destroy William Walker [52:51]

The power of having a singular focus on a goal but remaining flexible on the tactics to get there [1:02:10]

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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 by reading The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by TJ Stiles. 

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His life spanned from the days of George Washington to John D. Rockefeller [0:01]

$1 out of $20 in circulation [4:35]

an overview of his life [5:35] 

the environment Vanderbilt was raised in [14:10] 

love of competition / dislike of school / first jobs [18:00] 

action for actions sake [22:00]

an entrepreneur from the beginning [23:06] 

expansion fueled by aggressiveness, action, and constraints [30:00] 

partnering with the rich and powerful Thomas Gibbons [35:00]

the solo founder [46:34]

starting up with an eye on getting acquired [50:00] 

frugality wins [56:20]

entrepreneurs vs large companies [1:03:45] 

more frugality and decentralized company structure [1:12:00] 

the size of his ambition was difficult for others to comprehend [1:19:25]

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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 Who Is Michael Ovitz? by Michael Ovitz. 

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Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first give a gift [0:01]

Michael's first jobs + finding his first love [7:02]

the foul-mouthed magnates [19:49]

starting at the bottom / being hungry for knowledge [24:50]

I don't want to be standard in any way [32:30]

the revolt begins and the founding of CAA [36:05]

know the history of the industry you are in [46:30]

a warning for all entrepreneurs [53:44]

what influenced CAA's culture [59:27]

becoming the thing you hate [1:02:10]

a typical day's schedule [1:07:00]

problems with co-founders [1:11:30]

the fastest animal on the field [1:15:13]

I was tired / The end of Michael Ovitz's time at CAA [1:19:15]

Ron is gone [1:25:07]

a new beginning / meeting Marc Andreessen [1:32:00]

reconciliation [1:38:00]

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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 Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders.

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A business is born (0:01)

don't start a business unless you are the first customer (22:49)

what it is like to fall in love with an idea (25:31)

starting a business is like making a movie (27:15)

on slowing down (32:32)

the problem with being able to argue both sides of an idea (37:00)

editing & narrowing your focus (46:51)

ideas in the form of action (51:39)

history doesn't repeat, human nature does (57:00)

the doubts of nascent entrepreneurship (59:51)

Steve Jobs had one speed: Go (1:07:39)

be the customer, not the seller (1:16:21)

Bill finally gets it (1:22:00)

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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 Wild Company: The Untold Story of Banana Republic by Mel and Patricia Ziegler

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For every business, there is an appropriate scale [0:01]

Fundamentally Unemployable [5:18]

the prehistory of Banana Republic [10:02]

"We didn't have any money, we didn't have any technology, and we didn't have a plan." –Jack Ma [14:30]

A republic is born [18:13]

when something is not selling, increase the price [20:45]

relentlessly resourceful [25:45]

finding assets hiding in liabilities [28:30]

the catalog! [30:33]

Eddie Murphy on why you shouldn't have a backup plan [36:40]

media was the initial distribution strategy [42:15]

Understanding the internet before the internet existed. A lesson on publicity/attention [45:22]

when all else fails, expand [51:05]

selling the company [56:24]

the end of freedom [1:04:40]

Misfits, quotes from Steve Jobs and what this has to do with the podcast industry [1:08:00]

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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 Pmarca Blog Archive Ebook by Marc Andreessen.

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[0:01] In this series of posts I will walk through some of my accumulated knowledge and experience in building high-tech startups.  

[3:15] Great things about doing a startups: 

Most fundamentally, the opportunity to be in control of your own destiny — you get to succeed or fail on your own, and you don’t have some bozo telling you what to do. For a certain kind of personality, this alone is reason enough to do a startup.

The opportunity to create something new — the proverbial blank sheet of paper. You have the ability — actually, the obligation— to imagine a product that does not yet exist and bring it into existence, without any of the constraints normally faced by larger companies.

The opportunity to have an impact on the world — to give people a new way to communicate, a new way to share information, a new way to work  together, or anything else you can think of that would make the world a better place. 

The ability to create your ideal culture and work with a dream team of people you get to assemble yourself. Want your culture to be based on people who have fun every day and enjoy working together? Or, are hyper-competitive both in work and play? Or, are super-focused on creating innovative new rocket science.

And finally, money —startups done right can of course be highly lucrative. This is not just an issue of personal greed — when things go right, your team and employees will themselves do very well and will be able to support their families, send their kids to college, and realize their dreams, and that’s really cool. And if you’re really lucky, you as the entrepreneur can ultimately make profound philanthropic gifts that change society for the better.  

[5:15] However, there are many more reasons to not do a startup. 

[5:28] First, and most importantly, realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced. You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.Over and over and over. 

[6:04] Some days things will go really well and some things will go really poorly. And the level of stress that you’re under generally will magnify those transient data points into incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash speed and huge magnitude.  

[6:42] The best thing about startups: you only ever experience two emotions, euphoria and terror, and I find that a lack of sleep enhances them both. 

[7:09] In a startup, absolutely nothing happens unless you make it happen. 

[8:19] As a founder of a startup trying to hire your team, you’ll run into this again and again: When Jim Clark decided to start a new company in 1994, I was one of about a dozen people at various Silicon Valley companies he was talking to about joining him in what became Netscape. I was the only one who went all the way to saying “yes” (largely because I was 22 and had no reason not to do it). The rest flinched and didn’t do it. And this was Jim Clark, a legend in the industry who was coming off of the most successful company in Silicon Valley in 1994 —Silicon Graphics Inc. How easy do you think it’s going to be for you?  

[10:50] The fact is that startups are incredibly intense experiences and take a lot out of people in the best of circumstances. 

[14:03]  And so you start to wonder—what correlates the most to success— team, product, or market? Or, more bluntly, what causes success? And, for those of us who are students of startup failure—what’s most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?

[15:16] If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team. This is the obvious answer, in part because in the beginning of a startup, you know a lot more about the team than you do the product, which hasn’t been built yet, or the market, which hasn’t been explored.  

[16:32] Personally, I’ll take the third position — I’ll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup’s success or failure. Why? In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers— the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along.  

[17:33] Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn’t matter—you’re going to fail.  

[18:53] You can obviously screw up a great market — and that has been done, and not infrequently—but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. Market matters most.  

[19:32]  Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are. 

[20:15] The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.  

[21:00] Lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens. My contention, in fact, is that they fail because they never get to product/market fit. 

[22:59] The most important thing you need to know going into any discussion or interaction with a big company is that you’re Captain Ahab, and the big company is Moby Dick. When Captain Ahab went in search of the great white whale Moby Dick, he had absolutely no idea whether he would find Moby Dick. What happened was entirely up to Moby Dick. And Captain Ahab would never be able explain to himself —or anyone else— why Moby Dick would do whatever it was he’d do. You’re Captain Ahab, and the big company is Moby Dick.  

[29:30] A startup’s initial business plan doesn’t matter that much, because it is very hard to determine up front exactly what combination of product and market will result in success. By definition you will be doing something new, in a world that is a very uncertain place. You are simply not going to know whether your initial idea will work as a product and a business, or not. And you will probably have to rapidly evolve your plan —possibly every aspect of it — as you go.  

[30:03] It is therefore much more important for a startup to aggressively seek out a big market, and product/market fit within that market, once the startup is up and running, than it is to try to plan out what you are going to do in great detail ahead of time. The history of successful startups is quite clear on this topic. 

[38:38] The point is this: If Thomas Edison didn’t know what he had when he invented the photograph while he thought he was trying to create better industrial equipment for telegraph operators. . .what are the odds that you—or any entrepreneur— is going to have it all figured out up front?  

[40:00] The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career. The world is an incredibly complex place and everything is changing all the time. You can’t plan your career because you have no idea what’s going to happen in the future. Career planning = career limiting. 

[40:46] The second rule of career planning: Instead of planning your career, focus on pursuing opportunities.  

[41:06] Opportunities that present themselves to you are the consequence— at least partially — of being in the right place at the right time. They tend to present themselves when you’re not expecting it —and often when you are engaged in other activities that would seem to preclude you from pursuing them. And they come and go quickly — if you don’t jump all over an opportunity, someone else generally will and it will vanish.

[42:40] I am continually amazed at the number of people who are presented with an opportunity and pass. There’s your basic dividing line between the people who shoot up in their careers like a rocket ship, and those who don’t — right there.  

[42:58] I am also continually amazed at the number of people who coast through life and don’t go and seek out opportunities even when they know in their gut what they’d really like to do. Don’t be one of those people. Life is way too short.  

[43:17] The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.  

[50:44] There may be times when you realize that you are dissatisfied with your field — you are working in enterprise software, for example, but you’d really rather be working on green tech or in a consumer Internet company. Jumping from one field into another is always risky because your specific skills and contacts are in your old field, so you’ll have less certainty of success in the new field. This is almost always a risk worth taking– standing pat and being unhappy about it has risks of its own, particularly to your happiness. And it is awfully hard to be highly successful in a job or field in which one is unhappy.  

[52:52] Finally, pay attention to opportunity cost at all times. Doing one thing means not doing other things. This is a form of risk that is very easy to ignore, to your detriment. 

[53:33] Marc’s final takeaway for thinking about opportunities: If you really are high-potential, you’re naturally going to be seeking out risks in your career in order to maximize your level of achievement.  

[55:46] Graduating with a technical degree is like heading out into the real world armed with an assault rifle instead of a dull knife.  

[56:19] Don’t worry about being a small fish in a big pond—you want to always be in the best pond possible, because that is how you will get exposed to the best people and the best opportunities in your field. 

[58:26] Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. 

[56:52] Seek to be a double/triple/quadruple threat. . .The fact is, this is even the secret formula to becoming a CEO. All successful CEO’s are like this. They are almost never the best product visionaries, or the best salespeople, or the best marketing people, or the best finance people, or even the best managers, but they are top 25% in some set of those skills, and then all of a sudden they’re qualified to actually run something important.  

[1:00:50] Learn how to sell. I don’t mean, learn how to sell someone a set of steak knives they don’t need — although I hear that can be quite an education by itself. I mean, learn how to convince people that something is in their best interest to do, even when they don’t realize it up front.  

[1:06:06] In my opinion, it’s now critically important to get into the real world and really challenge yourself — expose yourself to risk— put yourself in situations where you will succeed or fail by your own decisions and actions, and where that success or failure will be highly visible. Why? If you’re going to be a high achiever, you’re going to be in lots of situations where you’re going to be quickly making decisions in the presence of incomplete or incorrect information, under intense time pressure, and often under intense political pressure. You’re going to screw up — frequently — and the screwups will have serious consequences, and you’ll feel incredibly stupid every time. It can’t faze you — you have to be able to just get right back up and keep on going. That may be the most valuable skill you can ever learn. Make sure you start learning it early.  

[1:07:20] When picking an industry to enter, my favorite rule of thumb is this: Pick an industry where the founders of the industry—the founders of the important companies in the industry—are still alive and actively involved.  

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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 Screw It, Let's Do It: Lessons in Life by Richard Branson.

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Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes and every bonus episode. 

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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

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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 Finding My Virginity: The New Autobiography by Richard Branson.

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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 Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Wayby Richard Branson

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Business is a fluid, changing substance. A mutating, indefinable thing [0:45]

I just pick up the phone and get on with it [7:50]

smart ways to get initial traction [9:51]

to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent [14:19]

Richard Branson's early business philosophy [14:49]

the beginning of Virgin [19:00]

what he learned from going to jail [23:01]

the scope of Richard's ambition at 21 [24:44]

a model of compatible businesses [27:00]

how Richard Branson made his first fortune [29:00]

how Richard Branson gets Necker Island and the idea for Virgin Airways [34:45]

protecting the downside risk [38:40]

Richard Branson's view on public companies [46:12]

taking Virgin private, funding secured [52:00]

questioning the direction of his life at 40 years old [59:54]

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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 I Love Capitalism: An American Story by Ken Langone. 

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His early life: there was never much money (3:30)

Ken's first jobs (5:35)

[At school] I didn't apply myself at all . I did the absolute minimum . I was too busy having fun and working at all my various jobs (12:05) 

further adventures in entrepreneurship (13:24)

Looking for work / finding excitement (17:00)

stepping out into the void / getting creative to get a job (23:50)

how he starts growing a business within the firm (26:33)

his first big break (28:50)

You treat a customer right and you never have to worry (32:00)

A lesson about human nature and developing trust (34:45)

Getting rich is one skill. Staying rich is a different skill altogether(43:10)

moral of the story: who wants it the most? (48:25)

Hubris and Redemption: Starting over (50:25)

how he started his own business (54:00)

learning about the opportunity for home depot from other founders and some early tactics to get traction for their stores (59:00)

 leave more on the table for the other guy than he thinks he should get (1:03:32)

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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. 

----

“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