David Senra, host of the Founders podcast, joins Sam and Shaan to break down the five traits shared by what he calls “anti-business billionaires” — founders like Steve Jobs, James Dyson, and Yvon Chouinard who built massive companies while being indifferent to, or even contemptuous of, conventional business wisdom. The conversation covers disagreeableness, extreme self-confidence, product obsession, retention of total control, and a refusal to sell at any price — illustrated throughout with specific stories from Dyson, Patagonia, Dell, Sam Walton, and Raising Cane’s.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, My First Million), Shaan Puri (host, My First Million), David Senra (guest, Founders podcast)
Introduction: The Anti-Business Billionaire [00:00:00]
David: They’re like, “Would you be interested in selling your company?” The response was, “Fuck you. This is a family heirloom.”
Sam: Okay. So what we’re talking about today — yeah, basically I don’t listen to any business podcast other than Founders. It’s the only business podcast I listen to. I listen to Founders, MMA, and true crime. That’s pretty much it. And I view you as my friend, but I’m also a fan of yours. You tweeted out this amazing thing about the anti-business person, the anti-businessman billionaire.
David: So the first trait of these anti-business billionaires is they have high levels of disagreeableness. This is very important because everybody around you — I’ll use Michael Dell as a reference. Michael Dell could be on this list too. I’m reading his autobiography, and I got to the point where he’s taking the company private and it’s so difficult what he’s trying to do. Everybody’s just like, “Why don’t you just give up, Michael? You’re already rich. You could start another company.” And he’s like, “I don’t want to start another company. I want this. This is my first and last company.”
In his case, that’s very rare — to have your first company be your last company. But then he has a line: “I’m going to care about this company after I’m dead.” I was like, 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 hellbent. They don’t bend to the world, right? They make the world bend to them. They refuse to compromise on product quality even when it seems absurd.
James Dyson’s Hidden Fortune [00:03:30]
David: James Dyson — I got to tell you a crazy story. You know, everybody’s like, “Oh yeah, Dyson — the hand dryer in the bathroom, the cyclonic vacuum cleaner.” No, no. The guy has built one of the most successful companies of all time. I think it’s one of the largest privately owned companies in the world.
There are always rumors, right? And he’s privately held, so he doesn’t have to tell anybody. Everybody’s like, “Oh yeah, he’s probably worth 10 or 20 billion.” I was like, you’re off by a lot.
A friend of mine knows somebody that works for his family office. And they’re like, “Man, we have a big problem — we have to deploy four to five billion dollars every year.” You look and James Dyson is now the largest producer of green peas in Europe. He owns the most sheep in the entire world. You see all these crazy things. So where’s the four or five billion coming from? The rumor is he’s been taking out four, five, six, seven billion a year in dividends — retaining the enterprise value, obviously, because he’s never sold any part of the company.
So I was at this super fancy private investor-only conference. Only a handful of people there. One guy controls a ton of capital, and he listens to the podcast. We were talking, and he has a problem — the more assets under management, the bigger the opportunity has to be. Buffett talks about this over and over. They were buying smaller family companies in the one to two billion range, but now he’s like, “I have too many assets under management. I have to swing bigger.” So they go to approach Dyson.
I’m going to paraphrase. The response back from Dyson is going to answer your question about high levels of disagreeableness: “Fuck you. This is a family heirloom.”
Sam: Wow.
David: He’s not doing it for money. He’s run out of the money he will ever spend. He’s doing it because he loves it. He wants — you just talked about kids working in the business. They’re doing it because they want to pass it on to the next generation. They want to die still owning this thing.
You can’t go to him and say, “I’ll give you two trillion.” It doesn’t matter. There’s no amount of money you could give James Dyson to stop working on Dyson. Just like there would have been no amount of money you could have given Steve Jobs to stop.
Imagine going to Steve Jobs: “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 you could spit out that he’d be like, “Okay, yeah, I’ll retire.” He’s like, I just — this is what I like to do.
Who Is the Most Disagreeable Person You’ve Studied? [00:08:00]
Sam: Who’s the most disagreeable person you’ve ever studied?
David: Ooh, that’s a good question. James Dyson’s got to be up there. If you see the bookshelf behind me, it’s in order by episode number starting in the upper left corner. I’m going to hit around 400 biographies read of history’s greatest entrepreneurs this year. And my number one recommendation is still his first autobiography. He wrote one when he was 45 and another 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. Ninety percent of the book is just him failing over and over again and refusing to give up.
And what’s he obsessed with? Because obsessing over vacuums is strange. He would describe himself as an inventor and an engineer — definitely as an inventor. What he’s obsessed with is making the world bend to what he wants to happen.
If you look at his early career, he was inventing a bunch of other successful things and they were taken from him because he didn’t keep control of the company. There are all these little things happening to him that caused him a lot of emotional pain, which he then fixes in the new company.
And similar to Steve Jobs and Yvon Chouinard — they’re offended at the mediocrity of most of everything around them. They always talk about why every product we use sucks. His thought was: 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 from that thought, it’s 14 years and 5,127 prototypes until he has the world’s first cyclonic vacuum — up to his incredibly difficult standards, and he owns 100% of it.
Disagreeableness and Family Life [00:12:00]
Sam: When does having that trait of high disagreeableness go too far?
David: I don’t know. Does his family love him? Like, does he have a good relationship with his children? Because Steve Jobs did not. Can you be highly disagreeable and still be loved by your children? Can you be highly disagreeable and still be proud of how you treat people?
There’s a devastating line in the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. Walter was collaborating with him as Steve was dying, and Steve told him one of the reasons he wanted to do the biography was because he had 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 his kids. Some of them work inside the company, some don’t. He’s still married to the same wife.
I spent a lot of time, as you know from listening to the podcast, talking about these founders’ childhoods, their relationships with their fathers. Dyson’s dad passed away when he was about nine. He’s writing a biography when he’s 75 and he still gets sad about it — that his dad didn’t get to see him grow up, see his success, meet his grandchildren. I think having that experience was like, I want to make sure my kids don’t have that massive hole I had in my life. Not any fault of his own — his dad died of cancer at a young age.
So no, I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. But you do see a lot of these highly disagreeable people struggle with it. James Cameron is probably the best podcast episode I’ve ever done in terms of craft, and I’m really proud of it. I start that episode giving you a hint of the highly disagreeable personality — I’m reading from a GQ article and it says James Cameron has moved to New Zealand with his fifth wife. Nobody could have a fifth wife without — that should tell you, if you’re reading between the lines, this is a difficult person to deal with.
Trait Two: Extreme Self-Confidence [00:17:30]
Sam: All right. Number two — they have extreme self-confidence and they do what works for them. What’s an example of that?
David: That line, “they do what works for them” — there’s this guy named Tim Grover who was the trainer of both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. He wrote a book comparing and contrasting them. He said what they had in common was that they do what works for them regardless of what other people do. They were indifferent.
There’s another great line in that book that I think a lot of the people we’re going to talk about have in common: everyone wanted to be like Mike. Mike didn’t want to be like anybody else.
In Dyson’s book, he calls his method of invention, his method of company building, the Edisonian principle of design. He’s not a “I have a master plan” guy. He’s like, I’m going to do an experiment, get immediate feedback, and do a constant set of iterations.
There’s a book I’ve read three times that I think every entrepreneur on the planet should read. It’s called Creative Selection, written by Ken Kocienda. He was a programmer who demoed to Jobs. He helped program the initial Safari browser and then created the keyboard for the first iPhone. What he shows is that all the great products that came out of Apple were just a series of iterative demos to Steve, with Steve applying his personal taste.
This is why when I talk to investors, I’m like, man, you think about business way too academically — as if you could sit at a whiteboard and master-plan everything out. I don’t see that in the books I read. It’s a series of small decisions every day, getting feedback, changing course slightly, doing that over a long period of time, constantly improving. That’s how you get to amazing products and amazing businesses.
Sam: Were the people who have extreme self-confidence self-confident at a young age, or did something happen? Born versus becoming?
David: All three of those — Yvon Chouinard, Steve Jobs, and James Dyson — excessively self-confident at a young age. And I think part of it — speaking from my own personal experience — is you grow up almost like you’re seeking revenge for the circumstances in which you were born. Steve Jobs was adopted. Yvon Chouinard’s family didn’t have any money. James Dyson doesn’t have a dad. And everybody 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.”
I always say belief comes before ability. People are like, “You shouldn’t be confident — generate evidence first.” No, you have that completely backwards. They believe they can do great things way before there’s any proof in the physical world.
In the Michael Dell book, he hits the Fortune 500 when he’s about 26. Michael Dell started selling computer parts out of his college dorm at the University of Texas — the prehistory of Dell really started when he was 16 or 17. The Fortune 500 thing is important because he says: “Could the kid that grew up reading Fortune magazine have predicted he’d start a company that broke into the Fortune 500?” He goes, “Yeah, I always thought big. I knew I could do this. I believed I could do this.” Did he think he’d hit it at 26? Probably not. But he got there even faster. He had the belief first, and then he demonstrated the ability.
Trait Three: Obsession with Product Quality [00:23:30]
Sam: The third principle is they’re obsessed with product quality. I’ve never had a job, so I’ve never been able to intern or apprentice with someone obsessed with product. I’ve never seen firsthand what they’re like day to day. What do they actually do each day?
David: I love that you frame it that way — what do they do each day? I was thinking about this this morning.
What all the entrepreneurs I admire have in common is how they want to spend their time: working on their company. I get invited to a lot of things and I say no to most of them, because everything that’s not working on the podcast is a giant distraction.
Tim Cook said this after Steve Jobs died: if you took an inventory of how Steve spent his time, he was at Apple, and when he wasn’t 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’s he doing? He’s working on product and testing the product. James Dyson at 75, probably worth a hundred billion dollars if we’re being honest, where is he? He’s on the factory floor and then he’s with the design team.
The problem with the modern entrepreneurship world is they like everything except what their company actually does. If you can find love in the activity itself, you’re able to do it for a long time.
I had lunch with Sam — we could talk about him too. That two-hour lunch changed my life. His main advice to me was: never relinquish the freedom over what you work on. He said, the more successful you become, people are going to constantly dangle distractions in front of you for two reasons — more money and more status. “Retain your freedom.” And then he said something brilliant: “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.”
All of the people I admire — they’re not trying to go fundraising, they’re not trying to party all the time. They’re literally just obsessed with what they’re doing. If you take an inventory of their time, it’s just spent on the company.
The Founders Podcast Origin Story [00:28:30]
David: Let me give you my own example. You know this because you have a podcast — you can log into your podcast host right now and change the name of My First Million to Sam’s Club, right? You can change whatever you want. I can change Founders to whatever I want. The thing you cannot change is the RSS URL slug from the first time you set up your feed, and that URL slug will have the first name of your podcast. My podcast went through multiple names. The first one was Autotellic. The definition of autotellic is an activity done for the sake of itself. I was telling you right from the jump — 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 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: I love hearing you talk about this. Do you think you’ve gotten more crazy and more obsessed reading about these people?
David: For sure. For sure. You know this because we’ve talked about podcasting a lot, and people try to part-time it. Podcasting is a miracle. The idea that anything you want to learn — you and I grew up similarly, we didn’t have access to a lot of money, we didn’t go to Ivy League schools —
Sam: I couldn’t go to an Ivy League school at all. My wife went to Penn, and when I met her, I was like, “Is that where that football rapist coach guy goes?” And she’s like, “No, it’s like a big shot school — it’s Ivy League.” I was like, “What the fuck is Ivy League? Is that Hogwarts?”
David: Dude, not only did my parents never graduate college, they never graduated high school. The entire time I was growing up, they never mentioned the word college to me once. I remember being in high school and they’re like, “What colleges are you applying to?” I’m like, “What? The one I can drive to, because I have to go to school at night because I’m working full-time during the day.”
I went to student housing and my roommate was from Colorado somewhere. That was the first time I ever knew — this is really embarrassing — that people didn’t work and go to school. Like he just went to classes. That’s all he did. I couldn’t even fathom that.
So the reason I’m obsessed with podcasting is: you have any subject you want to learn about, and someone who’s usually spent 10-plus years studying it, and you can learn from them for free, on demand, anytime you want. How could you not be absolutely obsessed with that?
David: To answer your question about why I started reading — a friend of mine visited me in Miami about two years ago and said, “It’s pretty obvious what you’re doing.” I go, “What?” He goes, “You didn’t have any mentors or any good examples. So you just started reading and trying to find good examples for yourself.”
There’s this guy who built a multi-billion dollar art business that he controls 100%. In the profile I read for the episode, there’s a line about him: 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. The reason I’m doing this is I’m trying to build the best product for the best people in the world. I take a lot of the ideas from the podcast and just apply them to my own business, which happens to be the podcast where I derived the insights from to begin with.
Trait Four: Retention of Total Control [00:35:00]
Sam: The next one is retention of total control. What are the trade-offs of owning everything and being maniacal about details versus delegation? My favorite business author is Felix Dennis — he wrote How to Get Rich. He’s like an MC Jagger and Richard Branson combined, a rock and roll partier who became a billionaire. He says delegation is the reason he’s anything — he’s a master delegator. Whereas you have Elon Musk, Coco Chanel, Estee Lauder — people in total control, maniacal about details. What are the pros and cons, and which do you prefer?
David: I love that you asked this because the great thing about entrepreneurship is you get to decide what’s best for you. There is not one right way. I can give you examples of people I’ve covered that delegated everything and people that delegated nothing.
I just did Todd Graves. Have you ever been to Raising Cane’s?
Sam: I saw him talk on Theo 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’s definitely a need for it. He was like, we only do these fries, we only do chicken — it’s the simplest thing. How hard could this possibly be that you need 30 years to master? Let’s figure it out.
David: I just did an episode on him and I think it’s going to be one of the most popular episodes ever. When people would ask me about living entrepreneurs I like, I would bring up Todd Graves. The chicken finger guy. And he’s got a really relatable demeanor. But even if he was a jerk, the way he built his business — he owns over 90% of a business worth at least 10 billion dollars, growing 30% year-over-year for 30 years. I’m obsessed with simplicity and I just love everything about him.
The funny thing is in one of the interviews I found with him, people told him when he was younger, “You’re a micromanager. You have to delegate. You can’t possibly do what you’re doing.” And he has a great line: “Delegate? What kind of word is that? That doesn’t even make sense to me.” And all the experts who gave him that advice, he’s bigger than they are now.
In that interview, they interrupt it because they had some event, and his social media team was showing him a video reel about to go out. This guy has 50,000 employees and 800 stores — unbelievable responsibility. And he’s like, it doesn’t go out until I approve it.
Steve Jobs did the exact same thing. He wouldn’t let Apple ads go out without approving every single one. Every single new location — he approved it. Early days of SpaceX, Elon personally interviewed the first 3,000 employees. Sam Walton picked out the first few thousand Walmart locations himself.
So a lot of them are what I would consider micromanagers. There are some that delegate widely. But what’s more important is your personality type. For me, I’m a complete micromanager. I’m one of the only podcasters still making a podcast who edits his own podcast. Every other podcaster tells me, “You’re a fucking idiot, why are you doing that?” And it’s just — I’m completely obsessed with it. I hate it, but I love it at the same time. It’s the part about podcasting I like the least, but it’s so important for me to completely control the final product.
So again, there’s not one right way. You really have to think about how you want to run your business.
Trait Five: Refusing to Make Me-Too Products [00:41:00]
Sam: Another thing you mentioned was they refused to make me-too products. Is there a story where standing out by having a different product was key to them winning?
David: Let’s use the prehistory of Patagonia, right — worth a couple billion dollars, privately held. As you know from the episode, he didn’t even want to start a business. He was kind of a communist. He called himself a dirt bag. “I was a dirt bag climber. I lived in a van. I traveled around just trying to climb mountains.”
And there’s a dichotomy there — if you’re a communist, why do you fully own your company versus giving out equity?
Sam: Because he’s obsessed with control.
David: Exactly. It’s almost like a paradox. He’s obsessed with control. And sometimes you can maintain control with a public company — Zuckerberg has complete control of Facebook, Steve Jobs had complete control of Apple. Dyson, Bloomberg, Patagonia — all private.
His whole thing was: my life literally hangs in the balance of these clips that people use for mountain climbing. They’re made of plastic. They suck. They break. And they optimize for cost because most dirt bag climbers have no money — so it would be like 75 cents each. What did he do? You ask him his profession, he says, “I’m a blacksmith.” That was his trade. He says, “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 four dollars. More than four times what the market was used to paying. And he ends up with 80 to 90% market share because his was so much better.
They’re not starting companies just to start companies. They’re starting companies to make products. So they’re not going to make a product if somebody else is already doing it well. No one made the products that Steve Jobs made. No one made the products that James Dyson made. No one made the products Yvon Chouinard made.
I talk to founders and podcasters and I’m like, why aren’t you thinking more about differentiation? When I started my podcast in 2016, I thought it was too late. But I looked around: what is everybody doing? Everybody’s doing the same thing — 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 I’d listened to over 100 hours of it because it was truly differentiated. Two guys with great chemistry, they’re funny, they’re both entrepreneurs, sometimes they’re going to shoot the shit and brainstorm ideas, sometimes they’ll bring people in. A very unique format.
And you’ve seen what happens since — because of the success of the show, a bunch of people try to do it and none of them achieve the same success, because they’re the copiers. They didn’t come up with the format.
If the product already exists, I would only make it if you see 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. You can go on Amazon right now and buy a vacuum cleaner for 40 bucks. I have a Dyson. It was 600 dollars. It’s the best.
High Margins vs. Low Margins — Does It Matter? [00:47:00]
Sam: Do you think there’s a common theme that most of the people you cover are creating higher-end products where the margins are higher? I have a $600 Dyson, Patagonia is maybe mid-tier now, and you’ve covered a lot of luxury brands. LVMH, luxury brands tend to be the biggest and best businesses it seems. Is there a commonality — being different and thus being able to charge more and profit more?
David: I don’t think it’s required. My personal Mount Rushmore of history’s greatest entrepreneurs — some of them have big margins, like Apple obviously. But think of Sam Walton. Sam Walton had the tiniest margins, because his idea was: I’m going to be totally committed to this one simple idea — everyday low price. And Raising Cane’s margins are less than 10%.
I don’t think it’s necessary. It really just depends on the industry and the business. The same personality type shows up over and over again whether it’s a high-margin business, a low-margin business, physical goods, luxury goods, or software.
Trait Five (Cont.): Exit Strategy Is Death [00:49:30]
Sam: I’m going to combine the last two. The first is they wouldn’t sell at any price. And the second is their exit strategy is death — which I love. Especially with AI, there’s this thing called vibe coding — have you seen it?
David: Yes.
Sam: It’s basically — we’ve had a few people who go from zero to a million a month in revenue because it’s so fast and easy to make apps. Do you think people today are thinking shorter term than before, or has there always been a gap where very few are willing to think long term?
David: I think both. More of humanity is undoubtedly thinking shorter term, and we’ve always as a species been wired for short-term. Jeff Bezos has a great idea on this. His point was: if you’re investing in a product that may not pay off for a year, you have a lot of competition. Five years, less competition. Ten years, no competition. Nobody is thinking that long term. He calls it long-term orientation. If I have a long-term orientation, I have by default fewer competitors.
Now — I need to back up. I am only interested in people’s last business. Not their startup, not their first business. What I’m interested in is the thing that they’re going to do forever. The reason I became close with the founders of Ramp is that Karim — who I’m actually seeing tonight, the co-founder and CTO, one of the most brilliant technical minds I know — way before we became friends, way before we became partners, he said: “Ramp is my last business. I have 99% of my net worth in it. I spend all my days on it. I’m not thinking about anything else.” That’s what I’m interested in.
And in many cases, to get to that last business, you usually have to have served — Karim had already started and sold a company. It’s very rare for a Mark Zuckerberg or Michael Dell to have their first company be their last company. I think the people I admire had a hit in their 20s or 30s that allowed them to think longer term.
Sam: That is key, right? I think it’s a mistake if you ever sell your best idea, whether you have money or not. But in the case you’re describing — if you can relieve financial pressure — and it’s real, it destroys you, you can’t sleep — there are people who can overcome it and go all in at a young age, but in general it’s easier when you have a wealthy parent or when you don’t need to worry about rent for three or four years. It is easier that way.
And a lot of this is just self-exploration. I know myself so much better now than I did. Think about when you’re supposed to be picking your career — you’re in high school, then you’ve got to figure out what to major in. That’s the stupidest thing ever. Nobody’s the same person they were at 18. Part of picking a successful company and a successful career you can do for a long time is going through exploration of who you are as a person and what your true interests are.
The problem is, humans think — oh, vibe coding is really cool, these kids are making money — but eventually through all these experiments they might discover what they actually want to dedicate their lives to. So I think it’s an overall good thing.
David: The advantage as an entrepreneur, podcaster, writer, athlete — whatever the case — if you can think long term, you have a massive advantage. And this is the important thing: when I’m able to choose what I work on, I’m not worried about my downloads today or my audience size today. As long as I do this forever, keep focusing on adding value to other people’s lives, read a biography of history’s greatest entrepreneurs, sit down once a week and talk about what I learned, and do that forever — I’ll let the score take care of itself. I will get everything I actually deserve.
Sam: I don’t want the listener to think long-term means it’s okay if I don’t kick ass today. A lot of people will justify this and say, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” And to them I say: have you ever run a 100 meters at world record marathon pace? It’s going to feel like a sprint to you. You have to be able to run fast for a long period of time. 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.
David: I agree completely. Jeff Bezos — his line about this was, “Yeah, we have long term, but we’re going to take step by step, ferociously.” Not, “Oh, we’re going to lollygag.” He’s like, “I’m fine being the company we want to be 10, 15 years from now — but every day for the next 10 to 15 years, we’re pushing the pace and doing as much as we can.”
Were These Founders Ever Broke? [00:58:00]
Sam: Can you give me examples — the people who thought long term, were they broke five or ten years into starting their company, or did they always have traction?
David: James Dyson for sure. He was going to sleep covered in dirt, trying to build a vacuum cleaner, crying himself to sleep as his kids were small. He was in massive amounts of debt. He couldn’t find anyone. The reason he owns 100% of his company is because no one wanted the equity — which is hilarious considering how valuable it is now. He had a second mortgage on his home. He was nearly bankrupt.
Sam: Oh yeah.
David: For a good chunk of those 14 years — he had some small wins where he could pay his bills, but he was not a wealthy man.
Steve Jobs, on the other hand — he builds the first Apple in his garage. Four years later he’s worth $100 million and the company’s public. Pretty crazy.
Yvon Chouinard was broke for an excessively long period of time. Jeff Bezos — already wealthy. He worked for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in New York, quit and gave up a huge bonus to move to Seattle, but he was already able to live in Manhattan. Amazon had something like a hundred million in sales within four years. Super fast. He starts the company at 32, and I think by 35 he’s a billionaire.
I actually had a spreadsheet where I tracked around 300 people — timelines for each: when they were born, when they started the thing that made them financially free, when that period ended, and when they started the thing that made them huge. Between graduating college and starting Amazon at 32, he was presumably making the equivalent of $250 to $500,000 a year today.
Go Slow Now to Go Fast Later — Sam Walton [01:03:00]
David: Sam Walton — greatest retailer of all time, undoubtedly — had one store for five years. He was obsessively learning everything he possibly could about retail, doing all these experiments. Then you fast forward 25 years into his career. He already has Walmart, but he meets this guy named Sol Price — who I’ve done episodes on — who came up with the warehouse club idea. The founder of Costco, Jim Sinegal, was Sol Price’s mentee when he was about 18 working for Price. That’s where he got the idea for Costco.
Sam Walton sees it and says, “Oh, this is a great idea. I’m going to do it immediately.” So 25 years into his career, when he launches Sam’s Club, within the first five years he gets to like 105 stores and about seven billion in revenue. When he started out, he could only master one tiny little store in Arkansas.
The point is your skill set and your resources and everything compounds. Todd Graves — 10 to 12 years into his career, he’s got 28 stores. Sounds like a lot, right? He opens between 100 and 150 stores a year right now. Go slow at the beginning to go fast later. He’s learning, and he’s going to apply it. This is the important thing about not jumping from business to business, because if you do, all you’re doing is interrupting the compounding.
Did They Know the TAM Was Big Enough? [01:07:00]
Sam: Was it clear that the TAM was big enough to achieve their ambitions?
David: No. Absolutely not. You’d look at Todd Graves and think — okay, chicken fingers, that’s maybe a little silly, but I guess McDonald’s is huge. I think if he thought of anything, he thought of In-N-Out. In-N-Out was founded in 1948. Look at In-N-Out’s menu — it looks like Raising Cane’s. Todd Graves to me is just Harry Snyder reincarnated, but instead of burgers he does chicken fingers.
And Michael Dell — there’s just no way. Most people hadn’t even seen a computer. He started Dell with $1,000, no venture capital. His main competitor was Compaq, who started with like $25 million of venture capital. And Michael Dell is super competitive but nice. The book is called Play Nice But Win. He’s constantly contrasting — “I started with a thousand dollars. They started with 25 million. I’m kicking their ass.” It’s really funny.
Dell would tell you that having the constraints of limited capital was really good at the beginning because it forced him to innovate in ways you wouldn’t if you had money.
So I pull my highlights from Sam Walton — Sam Walton said the same thing. Kmart existed before Walmart. Kmart was dominating the big cities. If you’re going to start in retail, where are you going? Chicago? New York? He’s like, “Well, I can’t go there. I don’t have any money.” So he starts going into these little towns in rural Arkansas. And he said, “Constraints are your friend. If we were better capitalized, I would have never gone out into these tiny little communities. And what I discovered is in these tiny little communities, there’s far more business than we could have ever predicted.”
Closing [01:12:30]
Sam: You’re the man, David. I appreciate you doing this.
David: I could — I think the listener will notice this is probably the podcast where I’ve spoken the least of all 700 episodes I’ve ever done.
Sam: I’ve listened to hundreds of your episodes. I think you’re at like 400? I think I’ve listened to half of them now.
David: I appreciate that. I appreciate you. That’s it — that’s the pod.