Founders

(I fixed the audio and uploaded a new episode!)  "To read Jeff Bezos’s shareholder letters is to get a crash course in running a high-growth internet business from someone who mastered it before any of the playbooks were written." That is the best description of Bezos's letters I have ever read. I just finished rereading these letters for the 4th or 5th time. With clear thinking and ferocious intelligence, Bezos provides a masterclass in building a customer-obsessed, enduring franchise. With relentless repetition Bezos teaches us about the importance of invention, risk-taking, wandering, differentiation, technology, judgement, high-standards, customer obsession, long-term orientation, and why value trumps everything.  Read the letters on Amazon's website here [https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/tag/shareholder-letter]. Or in the book Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos [https://amzn.to/42XXaCy] Register for the live event in New York at Ramp [https://events.ramp.com/foundersatrampdavidsenrapatric?utm_source=linkedin-post&utm_campaign=event-foundersatramp-Q2FY25&utm_medium=organic-social&utm_content=speaker-outreach]!  Ramp [https://ramp.com/] gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money. [https://ramp.com/] Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book [https://davidsenra.com/] ( 15:00 ) Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon success. It's not easy to work here but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about. Such things aren't meant to be easy. ( 24:00 ) We believe we have reached a "tipping point," where this platform allows us to launch new ecommerce businesses faster, with a higher quality of customer experience, a lower incremental cost, a higher chance of success, and a faster path to scale and profitability than any other company. ( 27:00 ) We will continue to invest heavily in introductions to new customers. Though it's sometimes hard to imagine with all that has happened in the last five years, this remains Day 1 for ecommerce, and these are the early days of category formation where many customers are forming relationships for the first time. We must work hard to grow the number of customers who shop with us. ( 37:00 ) Focus on cost improvement makes it possible for us to afford to lower prices, which drives growth. Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions. Customers like this, and it's good for shareholders. Please expect us to repeat this loop. ( 47:00 ) Our quantitative understanding of elasticity is short-term. We can estimate what a price reduction will do this week and this quarter. But we cannot numerically estimate the effect that consistently lowering prices will have on our business over five years or ten years or more. Our judgment is that relentlessly returning efficiency improvements and scale economies to customers in the form of lower prices creates a virtuous cycle that leads over the long term to a much larger dollar amount of free cash flow, and thereby to a much more valuable Amazon. ( 55:00 ) Our fundamental approach remains the same. Stay heads down, focused on the long term and obsessed over customers. Long-term thinking levers our existing abilities and lets us do new things we couldn't otherwise contemplate. Seek instant gratification and chances are you'll find a crowd there ahead of you.  ( 56:00 ) Long-term orientation interacts well with customer obsession. If we can identify a customer need and if we can further develop conviction that that need is meaningful and durable, our approach permits us to work patiently for multiple years to deliver a solution. ( 59:00 ) Invention is in our DNA and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers. ( 1:00:00 ) A dreamy business offering has at least four characteristics. Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it's durable in time-with the potential to endure for decades. When you find one of these get married. ( 1:02:00 ) We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score one thousand runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments. ( 1:10:00) When a memo isn't great, it's not the writer's inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They're trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we're not coaching them right. The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can't be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope-that a great memo probably should take a week or more. ( 1:12:00 ) Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you're going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient-but it's also not random. It's guided-by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it's worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries-the "nonlinear" ones-are highly likely to require wandering. ---- 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 [https://www.foundersnotes.com/].  ---- “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 [https://www.amazon.com/shop/founderspodcast]

"To read Jeff Bezos’s shareholder letters is to get a crash course in running a high-growth internet business from someone who mastered it before any of the playbooks were written." That is the best description of Bezos's letters I have ever read. I just finished rereading these letters for the 4th or 5th time. With clear thinking and ferocious intelligence, Bezos provides a masterclass in building a customer-obsessed, enduring franchise. With relentless repetition Bezos teaches us about the importance of invention, risk-taking, wandering, differentiation, technology, judgement, high-standards, customer obsession, long-term orientation, and why value trumps everything.  Read the letters on Amazon's website here [https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/tag/shareholder-letter]. Or in the book Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos [https://amzn.to/42XXaCy] Register for the live event in New York at Ramp [https://events.ramp.com/foundersatrampdavidsenrapatric?utm_source=linkedin-post&utm_campaign=event-foundersatramp-Q2FY25&utm_medium=organic-social&utm_content=speaker-outreach]!  Ramp [https://ramp.com/] gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money. [https://ramp.com/] Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book [https://davidsenra.com/] ---- 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 [https://www.foundersnotes.com/].  ---- “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 [https://www.amazon.com/shop/founderspodcast]

My friend Patrick O’Shaughnessy asked me to come to New York and record a conversation. Patrick had just finished listening to episode #383 "Todd Graves and his $10 Billion Chicken Finger Dream" and he believed there was an important conversation to have on focus and finding your life's work. This conversation was off-the-cuff and from the soul. I hope you find it useful.  If you'd prefer to watch the episode you can do that on Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/episode/2IWKzz6gCJTkZ2sdsLNEoK?si=ioBtv0UTR9GfbyA2Vj_4dQ] and YouTube [https://youtu.be/Ak7oLVMlhfM?si=1kC6ewAKLB_qbOhM].  Patrick and I are doing a live show on May 27th in New York. Event details and registration here [https://events.ramp.com/foundersatrampdavidsenrapatric?utm_source=linkedin-post&utm_campaign=event-foundersatramp-Q2FY25&utm_medium=organic-social&utm_content=speaker-outreach]! ---- Ramp [https://ramp.com/] gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save more [https://ramp.com/].  ---- ---- 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 [https://www.foundersnotes.com/].  ---- “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 [https://www.amazon.com/shop/founderspodcast]

Jim Simons never took a single class on finance, wasn’t interested in business, and didn’t start trading full time until he was 40. The company he founded —  Renaissance Technologies — has made over $100 billion in profits. Starting out with the heretical belief that there was a hidden structure in financial markets, Jim decided to staff his “crazy hedge fund” with mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists. He went to great lengths to collect more historic financial data than anyone else, spent a lot of time recruiting “killers” (people with single minded focus that wouldn’t quit), invested heavily in computers (and the people who ran them), and designed the most collaborative work environment. Jim was a world-class mathematician, code breaker, exceptional manager of people with exceptional minds, a genius in system design, and deeply understood the power of incentives. He was also incapable of giving up, willing to endure a decade of struggle and pain, and hell-bent on doing something “historic” with his life. Jim Simons lived a life defined by persistence, unconventional thinking, and an unwavering pursuit of excellence. Studying his life and work is time well spent. This episode is what I learned from rereading The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution [https://amzn.to/3EJGLZ2] by Gregory Zuckerman.  ---- Ramp [https://ramp.com/] gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save more [https://ramp.com/].  ---- 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 [https://www.foundersnotes.com/].  ---- Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book [https://davidsenra.com/] ---- 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 [https://www.foundersnotes.com/].  ---- “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 [https://www.amazon.com/shop/founderspodcast]

Akio Morita was a visionary entrepreneur and co-founder of Sony. Born as the first son and fifteenth-generation heir to a 300-year-old sake-brewing family in Japan, Akio eschewed the traditional path to forge his own legacy in electronics. In post-war Japan, Akio joined forces with Masaru Ibuka to found Sony. They started in a burned-out department store with limited resources—to build their first product they had to buy supplies on the black market. Akio was determined to change the global perception of Japanese goods as poor quality. From day one he set out to build high-quality, differentiated products, targeted at affluent markets.  Akio believed in long-term vision over short-term profits, product innovation without market research, and brand building over immediate profits. Against all opposition, including inside of his own company, Akio invented one of the most successful consumer products of all time: The Walkman. It sold over 400 million units and inspired countless other entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, James Dyson, and Phil Knight.  This episode is what I learned from rereading Akio's classic 1986 autobiography Made In Japan [https://amzn.to/3Gk7PhY].  ---- Ramp [https://ramp.com/] gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save more [https://ramp.com/].  ---- 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 [https://www.foundersnotes.com/].  ---- Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book [https://davidsenra.com/] ---- 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 [https://www.foundersnotes.com/].  ---- “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 [https://www.amazon.com/shop/founderspodcast]