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David Senra

Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work.

This quote explains why: "There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, new ways to manage etc. They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book. For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize. You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before and you learn every time." —Marc Andreessen

Founders

What I learned from reading Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man by Vance Trimble. 

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0:00 — "To him, making money was only a game, a test of his imagination and expertise to see how far he could drive a business concept."

1:35 — "Sam's idea was absurdly simple: buy cheap, sell low, every day, and while doing it with a smile."

2:15 — "If he adopts a business course that doesn't work out, he's neither too vain nor too blind to see his mistake, to say so, and to change his heading one hundred and eighty degrees."

3:34 — "The secret is work, work, work. I taught the boys how to do it." — Sam's father

4:34 — "Sam Walton plunged into this new world of merchandising with the keen and furious dedication of a quarterback who was one touchdown behind with two minutes to go."

5:55 — "Boys, you know we don't make a dime out of the merchandise we sell. We only make our profit out of the paper and string that we save." — J.C. Penney

11:10 — "No, I'm not whipped. I found Newport, and I found the store. I can find another good town and another Ben Franklin. Just wait and see." — Sam Walton, after losing his first store

11:35 — "I insist on buying the building that the store is in. I need control over my own destiny." — Sam Walton, arriving in Bentonville

11:45 — "My store will be number one. It's important for me to be the best. Not one of the best. I must be the best. I want to be the leader in the category I compete in." — Sam Walton

13:05 — "Sometimes hardship can enlighten and inspire."

13:15 — "That same boredom and frustration triggered ideas that eventually bought him billions of dollars."

18:55 — "Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity, the things that we were forced to learn and do because we started out under financed and under capitalized." — Sam Walton

19:30 — "If they had something good, we copied it." — Sam Walton

24:35 — "This is just part of the education process. I'm still learning." — Sam Walton, on his hands and knees examining a competitor's display

25:00 — "You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient." — Sam Walton

30:55 — "Remember Walmart's golden rule. Number one, the customer is always right. Number two, if the customer isn't right, refer to rule number one." — Sam Walton

31:35 — "Move from Bentonville? That would be the last thing we'd do unless they run us out of here. The best thing we ever did was to hide back there in the hills and eventually build a company that makes folks want to find us." — Sam Walton

32:05 — "I had no vision of the scope of what I would start, but I always had confidence that as long as we did our work well and were good to our customers, there would be no limit to us." — Sam Walton

32:55 — "He also had a very interesting competitive strategy in the early days. He was like a prizefighter who wanted a great record so he could be in the finals. So what did he do? He went out and fought 42 palookas. And the result was knockout, knockout, knockout—42 times. Walton, being as shrewd as he was, basically broke other small-town merchants in the early days. With his more efficient system, he might not have been able to tackle some titan head-on at the time. But with his better system, he could sure as hell destroy those small-town merchants. And he went around doing it time after time after time. Then, as he got bigger, he started destroying the big boys. Well, that was a very, very shrewd strategy. It’s an interesting model of how the scale of things and fanaticism combine to be very powerful." — Charlie Munger on Sam Walton's strategy

37:30 — "We have a low resistance to change. We call it our RC factor." — Sam Walton

39:45 — "Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find your competitive advantage. We rank number one in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales." — Sam Walton

48:20 — The day the market dropped 500 points and knocked a billion dollars off the value of his stock holdings in Walmart, reporters asked Sam what his reaction to the disaster on Wall Street was. He hadn't heard about it.

#434 Sam Walton

What I learned from reading Bloomberg by Michael Bloomberg. 

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Sage: ⁠https://founderspodcast.com/sage

#433 How Michael Bloomberg Works

What I learned from reading The Mind of Napoleon by Napoleon. 

Made possible by:

Ramp: ⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠

AppLovin: ⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com

Vanta: ⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders

Sage: https://founderspodcast.com/sage

Some of my favorite quotes:

0:00 — " The book gives you insight into the mind of a man who combined energy of thought and energy of action to an exceptional degree." 

0:30 — "Work is my element. I am born and built for work. I have known the limitations of my legs, I have known the limitations of my eyes; I have never been able to know the limitations of my working capacity."

0:52 — "He knows that men have always been the same, that nothing can change their nature. It is from the past that he will draw his lessons in order to shape the present."

1:33 — "All my life I have sacrificed everything: comfort, self-interest, happiness, to my destiny. Destiny must be fulfilled that is my chief doctrine."

2:33 — "A consecutive series of great actions never is the result of chance and luck; it always is a product of planning and genius. Is it because they are lucky that [great men] become great? No, but being great, they have been able to master luck. What is luck? The ability to exploit accidents: The vulgar would call this luck, but in fact it is the characteristic of genius."

3:30 — "Hesitation is fatal; once an action is begun, it must be followed through with the utmost exertion of the will."

3:44 — "If I have any ambition, it is so natural to me, so innate, so intimately linked with my existence, that it is like the blood that circulates in my veins, like the air that I breathe."

4:14 — "To have lived without glory, without leaving a trace of one's existence, is to have not lived at all."

6:25 — "Without great men, we have only mediocre men, and if there had never been anything but mediocre men, we would still be half apes."

7:20 — "The great majority of men attend to what is necessary only when they feel a need for it-the precise time when it is too late."

7:30 — "True character always pierces through in moments of crisis. There are sleepers whose awakening is terrifying."

9:11 — "Be successful! I judge men only by the results of their actions."

11:15 — "The truth is that everything around us is miracle."

15:18 — "Men of genius are meteors destined to be consumed in lighting up their century."

16:13 — "A man must know himself. Until then, all endeavors are in vain and all schemes collapse." 

17:53 — "All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity; the less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything."

18:12 — "What I am, I owe to strength of will, character, application, and daring." 

19:27 — "Imagination rules the world."

20:58 — " History I conquered rather than studied. That is to say, I wanted from it, and retained of it, only what could add to my ideas. I spurned what was of no use, and I seized upon certain conclusions that pleased me." 

26:01 — " It is better to eat than be eaten." 

26:08 — "Appetite comes with eating." 

 27:43 — "It may be possible to arrest the surge of progress or to throttle it, but not to destroy it."

29:01 — " I have read your letter. It is utterly worthless. There are too many words and not enough ideas." 

31:08 — "Without talent, without knowledge, there is no equality but the equality of misery and servitude." 

33:46 — Napoleon to someone who hasn't studied history: " Speak as little as possible. Your knowledge is too limited, and your education has been too neglected for you to engage freely in discussions."

36:08 — "The corpse of an enemy always smells sweet.”

36:44 — "If you wage war, do it energetically and with severity. This is the only way to make it shorter and consequently less inhuman."

39:30 — ""In war, men are nothing. One man is everything."

40:20 — "Death is nothing, but to live defeated and without glory is to die every day."

46:23 — "Conquest made me what I am. Conquest alone can keep me there."

46:34 — "Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me."

47:13 — "My soul is made of marble. Lightning has found no grip on it and had to slide off of it. I have no fear of becoming their victim. They will be biting into granite."

#432 The Mind of Napoleon

What I learned from reading Distant Force: A Memoir of the Teledyne Corporation and The Man Who Created It by George Roberts and The Outsiders by William Thorndike. 

Made possible by: 

Ramp: ⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠ 

Applovin: ⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com 

Vanta: ⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders

Some of my favorite quotes:

0:00 — "He aggressively repurchased his stock, eventually buying over ninety percent of Teledyne's shares."

0:45 — "He was known as The Sphinx for his reluctance to speak with either analysts or journalists."

1:25 — Charlie Munger: "Singleton's financial returns were a mile higher than anyone else's, that they were utterly ridiculous."

2:00 — Buffett: "The heads of many companies are not skilled in capital allocation. Their inadequacy is not surprising. Most bosses rise to the top because they've excelled in an area such as marketing, production, engineering, administration, or sometimes institutional politics."

4:10 — Singleton: "Our conclusion was that the key was cash flow. Our attitude towards cash generation and asset management came out of our own thinking. It is not copied."

4:30 — Buffett: "Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the hundred top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton's."

9:40 — Singleton: "If anyone wants to follow Teledyne, they should get used to the fact that our quarterly earnings will jiggle. Our accounting is set to maximize cash flow, not reported earnings."

10:50 — Singleton believed buying stock at attractive prices was self-catalyzing, analogous to coiling a spring that at some future point would surge forward to realize full value."

11:50 — Singleton: "I don't reserve any day-to-day responsibilities for myself, so I don't get into any particular rut. I do not define my job in any rigid terms, but in terms of having the freedom to do whatever seems to be in the best interest of the company at any time."

14:35 — Singleton: "If everyone's doing them, there must be something wrong with them." (on share repurchases by Fortune 500 companies)

26:30 — Singleton: "Teledyne is like a living plant, with our companies as the different branches and each putting out new branches and growing so that no one business is too significant."

28:35 — Singleton: "We work our heads off to increase our own capability at collecting and promoting the right people. To the extent that we succeed, the whole company will succeed."

32:30 — "What's unique about him is that I'll ask him a question about one of these companies that I've asked him to supervise, and he always knows the exact numerical answer. That's the kind of fellow that you pick who runs a company and does it well."

35:00 — Singleton: "There are tremendous values in the stock market, but in buying stocks, not entire companies. Buying companies tends to raise the purchase price too high."

41:35 — Claude Shannon on Singleton: "He always tries to work out the best moves, and maybe he doesn't like to talk too much because when you're playing a game, you don't tell anyone else what your strategy is."

42:00 — Singleton: "We are not particularly persuaded by quick, temporary gains. We'd rather get something permanent, and that takes time."

44:40 — Munger: "Henry Singleton was the smartest single human being I've ever known in my entire life."

45:00 — Munger: "Henry was a lot smarter, but Warren had thought about investments a lot longer." (distinguishing raw intelligence from accumulated experience)

#431 How Henry Singleton Worked

Claude Hopkins was the greatest copywriter of all time. His ideas were so valuable that when he wrote them down in a book the founder of his advertising firm locked the manuscript in a safe for 20 years. 

When the book was finally published it sold over 8 million copies. David Ogilvy said that nobody should work in advertising until they had read the book seven times. 

This episode is what I learned by reading Claude Hopkins' autobiography My Life In Advertising and his legendary book Scientific Advertising.

Made possible by: 

Ramp: ⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠ 

Applovin: ⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com 

Vanta: ⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders

Some of my favorite quotes: 

0:00 — "Any man who by a lifetime of excessive application learns more about anything than others owes a statement to his successors."

5:12 — "The man who works twice as long as his fellows is bound to go twice as far, especially in advertising."

5:30 — "If I have gone higher than others in advertising or done more, the fact is not due to exceptional ability but to exceptional hours."

6:48 — "To poverty I owe the fact that I never went to college. I spent those four years in the school of experience instead of the school of theory."

9:08 — "Which is work and which is play? If a thing is useful, they call it work. If it's useless, they call it play. But one is hard as the other. All the difference I see lies in the attitude of the mind."

9:32 — "I came to love work as other men love golf. I love it still. The love of work can be cultivated just like the love of play."

9:58 — "We do best what we like best."

13:05 — "A good product is its own best salesman. It is uphill work to sell goods without samples."

15:00 — "We must never judge humanity by ourselves. The things we want, the things we like may appeal to a small minority."

15:23 — "We must submit all things in advertising to the court of public opinion."

17:48 — "Some of the greatest successes I have ever known in advertising were ignorant men. One wrote copy which would induce a farmer to mortgage his barn to respond, but every sentence had to be edited for grammar."

20:23 — "John Powers created a new concept of advertising. He told the truth, but told it in a rugged and fascinating way."

25:47 — "Study salesmen, canvassers, and fakers if you want to know how to sell goods. No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration."

26:35 — "The average salesman seeks favors. He seeks profit for himself. His plea is, 'Buy my goods.' He makes a selfish appeal to selfish people, and of course, he meets resistance. I was selling service."

28:45 — "We must treat people in advertising as we treat them in person."

31:23 — "Others have never told this story. It will startle everyone in print. I gave purity a meaning." (On Schlitz Beer jumping from 5th to 1st.)

32:03 — "Tell the pains that you take to excel. The maker is too close to his product. He sees in his methods only the ordinary."

34:08 — "The greatest two faults in advertising lie in boasts and in selfishness. People will listen if you talk service to them. They will turn their backs when you seek to impress an advantage for yourself."

41:23 — "People will do anything to cure a trouble, but little to prevent it. Prevention offers slight appeal to humanity in general. They want to be told of rewards."

1:01:30 — "Genius is the art of taking pains. The advertising man who spares the midnight oil will never get very far. This is no lazy man's field."

#430 How to Write Ads That Sell

What I learned from rereading Bob Dylan's autobiography. 

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#429 Bob Dylan's Autobiography

Claude Shannon changed your life and you probably don't even know it. Claude is the father of information theory. He transformed information into bits and created the intellectual foundation for computers, the Internet, digital media, high-speed communication, and Artificial Intelligence. 

The way Claude Shannon worked is what interested me the most. He combined extraordinary abstract reasoning with an engineer’s instinct to build. He reduced complex problems to their essential structure. He connected ideas across mathematics, engineering, cryptography, artificial intelligence, investing, chess, juggling, and robotics. He treated every experience as material that he might later combine into a new insight. 

He was also relentlessly independent, guided more by curiosity and freedom than recognition, money, or usefulness. 

This episode is what I learned from rereading A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.

Made possible by:

Ramp: ⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠ 

AppLovin: ⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com

Vanta: ⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders

0:00 — "The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone, but from dissatisfaction... A genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated."

1:36 — "It seems to be much easier to make two small jumps than one big jump in any kind of mental thinking." — Shannon

4:41 — "He was a man almost entirely written out of a history that's defined by self-promoters. His was a life spent in the pursuit of curious, serious play."

5:20 — "He worked with levity and played with gravity. He never acknowledged a distinction between the two."

6:00 — "Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they do is the same as what they most want to do."

6:59 — "I do what comes naturally, and usefulness is not my main goal. I keep asking myself, 'How would you do this? Is it possible to make a machine to do this? Can I prove this theorem?'" — Shannon

11:50 — "Chemistry always seemed dull to me. There's too many isolated facts and too few general principles for my taste." — Shannon

19:09 — "Specialization is the death of genius." — Vannevar Bush

19:18 — "The possibilities of being at once both broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin." — Vannevar Bush

25:13 — "I had the freedom to do anything I wanted from almost the day I started. They never told me what to work on." — Shannon on Bell Labs

26:41 — "I've been working on three different ideas simultaneously, and strangely enough, it seems a more productive method than sticking to one problem." — Shannon

32:55 — "My fondest dream is to someday build a machine that thinks, learns, communicates, and manipulates its environment in a fairly sophisticated way." — Shannon

35:05 — "Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits."

38:04 — "After the effort of discovery, the effort of communication was secondary by far. He had solved a problem to his own satisfaction, and that, as far as he was concerned, was enough."

40:55 — "I've spent lots of time on totally useless things... He made no distinction between his interest in information and his interest in unicycles. They were all moves in the same game." 

46:54 — "Shannon seemed to think with ideas more than with words or formulas. A new problem was like a sculptor's block of stone, and Shannon's ideas chiseled away the obstacles until an approximate solution emerged." — Ed Thorp

47:19 — "I simply removed everything that was not David." — Michelangelo

47:25 — "I don't think I was ever motivated by the notions of winning prizes. I was more motivated by curiosity, never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together." — Shannon

47:49 — "I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity." — Shannon

48:37 — "The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, the Newtons, the Beethovens, whose work continues to grow influence in a positive fashion." — Shannon

#428 How Claude Shannon Worked

Raymond Plank founded Apache Corporation with just $250,000 in 1954. 50 years later his company was worth $50 billion. 

This episode examines the life and entrepreneurial philosophy of Raymond Plank through his memoir A Small Difference 

Rather than presenting a conventional history of Apache, this episode focuses on the lessons, maxims, and beliefs Plank accumulated over seven decades in business. Written when he was nearly 90, the memoir reads like a lifelong diary of how to think about opportunity, courage, cost control, resourcefulness, and adaptation. 

Lots of wild stories in this one. 

Made possible by:

Ramp: ⁠⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠⁠ 

Applovin: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com⁠

Vanta: ⁠⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders⁠

⁠Add your email here⁠ and I will send you my top 10 quotes from every episode: https://davidsenra.substack.com

#427 How Raymond Plank Built a $50 Billion Oil Company

Obsession is the engine of Nolan’s career. This episode examines Christopher Nolan’s life, working methods, and philosophy through The Nolan Variations by Tom Shone. 

Made possible by:

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Applovin: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com⁠

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⁠Add your email here⁠ and I will send you my top 10 quotes from every episode: https://davidsenra.substack.com

#426 How Obsession Built Christopher Nolan

This episode discusses Joseph Wechsberg’s 1966 book, The Merchant Bankers. Rather than recounting the histories of families like the Rothschilds, Barings, Hambros, Warburgs, and Lehman Brothers, I wanted to extract the principles they shared. 

Merchant banking is fascinating. It's a very distinctive form of entrepreneurship. There is an old-school way of doing business that appeals to me. 

The merchant bankers’ profiled in this book have a combination of:

 personal honor

 speed of action

 clear thinking

 independent judgment

 seamless webs of deserved trust 

 discretion

 and willingness to make unconventional decisions.

The founder of every merchant banking dynasty was a merchant before he was merchant banker. Once they discovered financing transactions was more profitable than physically trading goods, their real products became credit, judgment, information, advice, access, and—above all—trust.

Their greatest asset was not money. Their greatest asset was their reputation. 

Made possible by:

Ramp: ⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠ 

Applovin: ⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com

Vanta: ⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders

Add your email here and I will send you my top 10 quotes from every episode.

#425 The Merchant Bankers

The Life of Jesus as told in the book Jesus: A Biography of a Believer by Paul Johnson. 

This episode was originally published on Christmas Eve 2023.

The Life of Jesus

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