You and I always talk about this phenomenon that reoccurrester out the history of entrepreneurship, that you can always understand the sun by the story of his father, the story of the father is embedded in the sun.
The story you're about to hear is one of the most remarkable industrial Odysseys ever told, and at the center is this relationship between a father and his two sons.
The founder of this family dynasty was a great inventor, but he wasn't a great entrepreneur.
He knew how to build great products, but he didn't pay enough attention to the financial side of his business, and as a result he goes bankrupt.
That is a mistake that his two sons actually learn from and successfully avoided.
His sons, Ludwig and Alfred were both world-class entrepreneurs and some of the wealthiest people on earth when they were alive.
They both built their businesses too last.
They never went bankrupt like their father, and they were both obsessed with watching their costs.
They both knew that it's not enough to build a great product.
You have to build a great business, and people that built great businesses.
Businesses that last is who we study on this podcast, and every single one of them was obsessed with controlling their expenses.
Just like Ludwig and Alfred were.
In fact, this book talks about the fact that Ludwig and Alfred were both born in the 1830s, and there's all these great founders are also born in that decade, and the book talks about what some of these great founders, all born in 1830s had in common.
One of the people that is mentioned in the book is Andrew Carnegie, and Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again.
Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces on the marketplace.
Cost, however, could be strictly controlled, and in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in the cost were permanent.
This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp.
Ramp is now a partner of this podcast.
I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp and have spent a bunch of time with them over the last year or two.
They all listen to the podcast and have picked up on the fact that the main theme from the podcast is the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend and how doing so gives you a massive competitive advantage.
That is the main theme for Ramp.
The reason that Ramp exists is to give you everything that you need to control your spend.
Ramp helps you watch your costs.
If Ramp existed in the 1800s, the founder of this family dynasty's last years of life would have been a lot more pleasant, and one thing is for sure, Alfred and Ludwig Nobel would have definitely used Ramp.
They would have jumped all over a tool that gives you everything you need to control spend and optimize your financial operations all in a single platform.
Ramp's landing page is incredible.
Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business control costs.
That is ramp.com. The name of Nobel usually calls to mind Alfred Nobel.
The inventor of Dynamite and the Nobel Prizes which he endowed.
But other members of the Nobel family were no less creative and innovative.
In fact, the range of their achievements in building an industrial empire truly qualifies them to be known as the Russian Rockefellers.
The founder of this Russian industrial dynasty was an immigrant from Sweden.
Immanuel Nobel was an architect, a pioneer producer of steam engines, and a weapons maker.
Decades before his son Alfred's Dynamite began to alter the character of modern warfare, Immanuel designed, invented, and produced underwater mines.
Immanuel's other sons included Robert, who directed the family's activities in the Caspian oil fields.
And as you and I will talk about a spur of the moment decision by Robert actually changes the entire trajectory of the Nobel family from weapon makers into developing the entire Russian oil industry.
And Ludwig, who is going to be the majority of what I want to talk about today, this is my favorite Nobel.
And Ludwig, an engineering genius and manufacturing magnet whose boundless energy and fierce determination created the Russian petroleum industry.
Ludwig's son Immanuel was not only one of the wealthiest men in Europe, but the peer and occasional adversary of some of the most powerful figures in international business circles.
He shrewdly bargain with the rosh child for control of the Russian markets and did not shrink from head-on competition with standard oil and royal Dutch shell for lucrative world markets.
Immanuel not only helped modernize the Russian Navy, he also expanded the Russian oil industry was a pioneer user of the diesel engine, official of the state bank, and a commander of a fleet of 300 ships.
Perhaps no family in history has played so decisive a role in building an industrial empire in an undeveloped but resource rich nation.
Yet the achievements of the Nobel family are almost entirely unknown.
Why? The answer can be found in the official Soviet myth that when the Bolshevik seized power in November 1917, they inherited an empty cupboard which they transformed into a corner copia.
The truth was the exact opposite.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, Immanuel had to flee the country disguised as a peasant.
A reminder of how fast things can change.
He was one of the richest people in the country.
As to flee the country disguised as a peasant and two of his brothers were thrown in jail.
The family's holdings were confiscated.
The Nobel Empire with its 50,000 workers lay in ruins.
Its fleet of oil tankers were idled.
The fires in its foundries were banked.
The oil refineries seized operations.
Their oil wells were flooded and Russia's largest engine factory shut down.
An empire which had taken the family 80 years to design and build was destroyed, bringing to a sudden and bitter end one of the most remarkable industrial otices in world history.
That is an excerpt from the inside flap of this remarkable book that I'm going to talk to you about today.
First published all the way back in 1976.
It is called the Russian Rockefellers, the saga of the Nobel family and the Russian oil industry and is written by Robert Talf.
I found this book through my friend Cameron Priest who continues to be one of the most prolific readers of entrepreneur history that I've ever come across.
He's recommended I don't know 40, 50, 60 of these books to me.
I spent the last few days rereading my highlights and going through all my notes on the book to try to figure out what I want to focus on.
I want to focus on Ludwig Nobel, but to tell the story of Ludwig Nobel I have to tell you the story of his father, a few of his brothers and then his son.
I want to start in the introduction of the book to give you an overview of what has to be one of the most remarkable families in human history.
We start with Alfred Nobel.
Everybody knows him because he's the one he dies in his will.
He endows to Nobel prize and then other people knew him as the inventor of dynamite.
Alfred Nobel was only one member of history's most inventive family and the story has never been told of his father Emmanuel and his brothers Ludwig and Robert and his nephew Emmanuel and their own individual entrepreneurial technological and financial achievements in the weapons, petroleum, chemical and transportation industry.
So Ludwig Nobel, and reason the book is called the Russian Rockefeller is because Ludwig Nobel Alfred's brother literally created the Russian oil industry.
This is nuts. So I've been going around talking about this book to all my friends and really anybody who will listen this week has been reading it because at the time to give you an overview at the time that the book takes place.
Okay. Russia at this point in history is going to wind up producing over half of all the world's oil.
The Nobel family produces 30% of that half one company and that company is founded and created by Ludwig and so here's just a brief overview of some of his achievements.
He designed the world's first oil tanker.
He installed Europe's first pipelines.
He built the world's first full-scale, continuous distillation refinery.
He forged gigantic infrastructure on water and land.
He built a network of storage depots and tank farms, harbors, franque yard, freight yards and marketing outlets from one end of the vast Russian empire to the other and then across the European continent.
Ludwig's father before him pioneered development of underwater mines, designed steam engines to power Russian ships and installed the first central heating systems to warm Russian homes.
Ludwig's son after him launched the world's first diesel driven tugboats and tankers while bargaining with the rostrials and struggling against a royal Dutch shell company and bartering with standard oil.
Okay. So keep that in mind.
This entire conversation is going to center around Ludwig.
I got to tell you about his father and the fact that they grew up in poverty.
I read Alfred Nobel's biography a long time ago.
It's probably three, four years ago.
It's episode 163. There's a line in there because you're going to understand that in manual Nobel, the founder of this dynasty, the patriarch of the family spent essentially decades in poverty.
In fact, there's a lot. The reason I bring this up is because in Alfred Nobel's biography, it says that he never forgot poverty and he never forgot poverty even after he was one of the wealthiest people on the planet.
Keep it on. This guy lived in the 1800s.
And so there's a line in his biography that's that's not where he asked somebody what they wish is a wedding present and the young woman replied, I want as my wedding gift should be what you earn in one day.
And Nobel, who's usually tight with money, actually agreed and he wrote her check.
His daily earning for himself was $110,000 a day in the 1800s.
And so this poverty that his his dad's really an inventor.
We're going to talk a lot about this today.
It's like it's not enough to just be an inventor.
You also have to be a skilled entrepreneur, which his dad wasn't, but his sons definitely were.
And so this is we're going to go right into a manual's life.
It says only his marriage brought him some measure of success.
And it talks about the role that his wife and then the mother of Ludwig and Alfred, just how important she was to the family's success.
Her patients endurance, even her faith in her husband, were sorely tested during those first years of marriage as one after another of a manual's dreams turned into nightmares.
They move from house to house on the outskirts of Stockholm, needing, but not being able to afford larger quarters for their growing family.
Alfred was born just 10 months after his father had declared bankruptcy.
Nobelle's wife was the strong support of pillar upon which he's going to build his business.
This reminded me of when I read the the autobiography of the founder of Four Seasons, Isador Sharp.
There is a bunch of times where his wife is kind of common, adding commentary to the book about what it was like.
Not four seasons now, but when four seasons was just an idea in her husband's brain, which talks about the fact that she saw him stressed.
She saw him lying awake in the middle of the night and she said that something was very, very, I think profound.
She says, my most valuable contribution to his success has been my silence.
What does that mean? This is what she says in his autobiography.
Early on, he made some audacious statements that sounded like pipe dreams.
He told me once that his aim was to make the name Four Seasons a worldwide brand, synonymous with luxury like Rolls Royce.
Sure, I thought with only about 10 hotels hardly likely, but I didn't let on.
My most valuable contribution to his success has been my silence.
And I think she's picking up on a very important idea.
Entrepreneurs are going to get enough doubt from the external world.
They can't have it when they come home.
They can't have it with the most important relationship they have in their life.
And you see that just like Isador Sharp's wife understood that, Emmanuel Nobel's wife also understood that.
The previous year, a fire had destroyed most of their home and possessions.
Emmanuel still faced with debts from his abandoned building projects, so no alternative to the humiliation of declaring himself bankrupt.
But he refused to be discourage or defeated.
He was determined to find practical applications for some of those ideas that never stopped swirling in his head.
And so now he's inventive, but he's also very persuasive.
So he's able to raise money multiple times, even after multiple failures.
And so he starts setting up and he does these experiments with sub surface charges of gunpowder to destroy an enemy under on land or on sea.
What he is thinking about becomes underwater and underground mines.
This is really important because it's going to lead directly to some experiments that his son does, which builds the empire in the monopoly that he built around dynamite.
It says it was the beginning of the Nobel family's fascination with explosives.
So Emmanuel is Swedish.
He's trying to sell his invention to the Swedish military.
A main theme of the book is the fact that for a very long time, there's been a huge number of Swedish immigrants into Russia.
And it is during this next generation of the Nobel family that the Swedish actually build the Russian oil industry.
And so here's a little bit about the trouble that he's having.
In Sweden of the 1830s, Emmanuel was alone in recognizing the value of this new weapon.
Financial security continued to elude him.
Creditors continued to hound him.
Now they're going to describe Sweden at this time in an agricultural country in which poverty was thought to be a national characteristic.
Emmanuel was beginning to believe that he would not have the chance to make the kinds of success he felt he could with the proper opportunities.
His frustration was not a unique phenomenon in Stockholm at the time.
But Emmanuel was never one to let frustration block his path or force him to resign and accept his fate.
When he met a visiting Russian emissary at a party in Stockholm, he was suddenly confronted by a crossroads, another new arena to seek fame and fortune.
Now remember that line Alfred Nobel never forgot poverty.
The decision was as difficult as any Emmanuel would ever make for he had to leave Andrietta that's his wife and their three sons behind.
Can you imagine put yourself in his shoes?
You are 36 years old. You have a wife, you have three sons, you are bankrupt, you are in debt, you have no track record that to indicate that you are capable of having to bring in a successful, well, you're invent a lot, but you have no track record to show that you can actually bring successfully one of your inventions to market.
And you get on a boat and you wave goodbye to your family, not sure when you're going to see them again.
So he first goes to Finland, then he goes to Russia.
And so this idea of Swedes seeking fortune in Russia was not new.
This is a great paragraph I got to read to you about the stuff going on during Peter the Great says from the time of the Vikings to the time of the nobels, there were thousands of Swedes who in an endless repetition of war and commerce fought, plundered, traded, and settled in Russia.
Swedish technicians were employed by the Zars.
Swedish metal workers and gunsmiths laid the foundations of a weapons industry.
A Swedes established the first glassworks.
Swedish prisoners of war were used by Peter the Great to cut a three mile path to the forest for his great boulevard in the heart of his new city.
Swedes seeking fortune in Russia was not new.
And this massive risk that Emmanuel took, which is going to change the trajectory of his descendants lives forever, wind up working out because the Swedish military was not interested in Emmanuel's underseen minds, but the Russians were enthusiastic.
So I'm going to skip over a big part here.
He does a demonstration and this is what I mean about how enthusiastic the Russian military was.
The mine exploded when it was struck by a small boat.
The general was a static.
He rushed over to Nobel and kissed him and then started to dance.
The general had been under considerable pressure to find a successful underwater mine, which Nobel is the first person to invent.
This is September 1840.
He is 39 years old. This is a remarkable description.
It was the first sizable subsidy Emmanuel had ever received and he uses that money to establish a factory.
Two years later, he's making enough money to actually send for his family.
Can you imagine? I could not imagine being away from my kids and my wife this song.
It's incredible. For the first time in his life, he enjoyed a certain prosperity comforting and encouraging feeling of success.
In the summer of 1842, he sent for his family.
Now, this is wild. He was gone for five years.
During his five year absence, his wife and his three sons had scraped out a simple existence that at times bordered on poverty.
Their only source of income came from a little milk and vegetable store that she operated.
The boys now check this out.
This is wild. The boys Robert and Ludwig.
So Robert's the older brother Ludwig's the middle and Alfred's the youngest.
Robert and Ludwig to survive had to sell matches on the streets of Stockholm.
Now, how crazy is that? A couple episodes ago on episode 348.
I covered the book The Match King, which is about the founder of the Swedish Match Company, which still exists to this day, by the way.
We see in this story, the early days of what's going to turn into the Nobel family dynasty sustained by the young kid.
These are young kids. They're probably seven, eight years old at the time selling matches on street corners in Stockholm.
And so once he has his family back together and he has all of his sons in Russia, he does a brilliant thing.
This is the phenomenal education that he sets up for his sons.
He says they were instructed solely by tutors.
Robert and Ludwig primarily in engineering Alfred in chemistry, which is hilarious because you could think of Ludwig as an engineer and Alfred's empire is going to be in chemistry.
And all three in Swedish, Russian, German, French and English, they were also put to work in the factory, moving from one position to another, learning the business of running a business as a great line, learning the business of running a business, acquiring from direct on the job exposure, practical lessons and the problems and challenges of management, execution and administration.
Now, Emmanuel is going to have about a 20 year period of relative prosperity before he goes bankrupt again.
How could that possibly happen?
There's two issues here.
He's much more of an inventor, not an entrepreneur.
He has two really big mistakes.
One, he's got one customer, which will get into a minute.
And two, he doesn't have the financial discipline that his son Alfred will have.
He expands too fast, he's not conservative, he's not really paying attention to his costs.
Alfred was probably the most gifted entrepreneur of the family.
And so his dad didn't have that.
But his dad did have a lot of success inventing and producing.
And so in addition to the success of his underwater minds, he's also manufacturing marine engines.
And then he steadily expanding the factory until had about a thousand employees.
His reputation as an inventor in one of Russia's leading engineers in a dust risk, were all striking indications of Emmanuel's success.
The Oldman rewards for his diligence, his persistence and his genius despite the achievements and the recognition Emmanuel was not in a secure financial position.
His entire business depended on the contracts that he was getting from Nicholas, the czar at the time.
Nicholas is going to die.
The news are takes over.
This is Alexander the second.
And suddenly those contracts, those promises mean nothing.
There's a, I think it was the Navy sales, I said, two is one, one is none.
You cannot only have one customer.
Your business cannot depend on a single customer.
The many pledges of contracts made to Emmanuel by the ministers of Nicholas were ignored by the ministers of Alexander.
His pleas and protests that he had expanded his payroll and factory in order to honor those contracts went unheeded by 1857.
He had a surplus of labor, a surplus of supplies and no orders for Emmanuel.
The decline was a disaster without his government contract.
He could not keep the factory running.
There was also the problem of Emmanuel himself.
This is what I mentioned earlier.
He's less of a businessman and factory director than he was an inventor.
He was simply not the man to manage an enterprise that had grown to the size.
And his tremendous talents lay in fields other than management.
He was more inventor than entrepreneur.
His two sons will be both.
And this had to happen. I think this leads directly to their success because they are capable of learning from their father's mistake.
Robert Ludwig and Alfred would never forget the bitter lessons of their father's failure.
For Emmanuel, then 58, there would not be another chance.
It was all over 22 years after he had sailed from Stockholm.
As a bankrupt man, he returned again bankrupt.
But what I love about him is he's relentlessly optimistic and he has faith in his sons.
So he says his dreams are going to have to be realized by the next generation of no bells.
And he was not pessimistic about that next generation.
This is what he said. If my sons work harmoniously and carry on the work that I have begun, I believe that they will never want for their daily bread for there is still much to be done here in Russia.
So it is shortly after this where Ludwig opens his own factory.
And so something that's been implanted or I guess a habit that's implanted in my mind from Charlie Munger is like when you're analyzing somebody's business success, you try to look for waves that they were able to surf.
And so Ludwig is actually going to surf.
This idea of surfing is in Port Charlie's Omnack.
I think I covered it back on episode 329.
But Ludwig is going to surf a change and there are going to be beneficial government policies from the government of Russia.
And then this explosion in population growth and new industry development, essentially an industrial revolution comes to Russia at the time.
And so it says Ludwig took full advantage of the recent reversals in government policy.
In contrast to Emmanuel's last years in Russia, the ministries, the war ministries that is, it's insane.
I think we're going to get to it.
But I think more than a third of Russia's budget at the time went to military.
The ministries once again beginning to encourage domestic manufacturing.
The greatest stimulant to this new industrial initiative was the Emancipation Act of 1861, which was the liberation of 40 million Russian peasants that are now flocking from the countryside into these news, like city centers and then the areas that are springing up against these giant factories.
All these people are coming into the cities and they need jobs.
And so within 20 years, there's going to be 250 new factories that pop up.
They said they call this a belated awakening to the opportunities of the industrial revolution.
So he's going to start making weapons and things to support weapons.
So he's start making making cast iron artillery shells and then gun carriages, which he gets, I think he builds the best gun carriage in the world.
So a gun carriage plays the same role that like a carriage just for human.
The carriage carries a human.
This is a carriage that covers this giant piece of artillery.
The thing that would pop to mind is if you think about like a civil war cannon, they're usually on like two big wheels and you kind of pick it up and move it to a different spot.
That what what allows that cannon to move is a gun carriage.
That is what what Ludwig's making.
He's also going to make rifles and rifle stocks for the Russian military, which inadvertently or accidentally leads to his discovery of this giant and brand new indigest oil industry inside of Russia.
We'll get there in one second.
But this is the important thing.
I always say learning is not just memorizing information, learnings changing your behavior.
He is changing. He's actually learned from his father.
He is changing his behavior more than a third of the state budget went to the military.
But Ludwig was careful to avoid total dependence on such contracts and to are to rely on the spoken or even written word of government ministries.
He had no intention of repeating his father's costly mistake.
So Ludwig's factory becomes the country's largest manufacturer of gun carriages, rifles and here's what happened.
He's expanding so rapidly.
He cannot find the talent.
So this idea that he keeps having to import Swedish talent to build a Russian manufacturing and weapons industry and then he's going to do the same to build the oil industry.
It's something that pops up over and over again in the book.
So it says the task of finding talent was just as difficult for Ludwig as it had been for his father.
And the solution for both men was to recruit as many Swedes and Finns as we're willing to work in Petersburg as factory orders increased.
So did the size of the factory and the number of workers.
This meant additional Swedes, Finns and an occasional region on the payroll.
And another phenomenon that he is surfing is the fact that the entire continent and the entire European continent was engaged in a giant arms race.
So keep in mind, this is two years after the American Civil War.
So he's got this very successful and expanding manufacturing business and he's got all these factories.
Where did he get the money to do this?
His dad was bankrupt. They were not a rich family yet.
And this is another example of this maximum that I just see over and over again in the boggings that relationships run the world.
So not only a contract are coming from relationships city had and friendship city had, but also the financing.
So there's a captain in the artillery this guy named Buildering.
He had been a close friend of Ludwig's.
He needs 200,000 rifles.
And so he goes to the war ministry and he says, hey, Ludwig should be the one that makes us for us.
Another one of his friends and this guy was also friends with his dad was one of the people that made this was influential making this actual decision like being an actual decision maker for this.
This guy's name is Carl.
I'm not going to try to pronounce his last name.
So says his undoubtedly to Ludwig's benefit that one of his best oldest and truest friends was in a key position to influence the decision.
Carl was the liaison officer once assigned to a manual his father.
He was also the chief inspector for the rifle and ammunition factories.
He had previously had served as the head of armories and lieutenant general.
Carl is also the person that arranged the financing for Ludwig.
So it says in the early 1870s Carl had loan Ludwig his securities, his Carl securities to use as collateral for bank loans to expand the factory.
Ludwig had to pay 5% interest for the securities and 6% on the borrowed cash.
But these were bargain rates in a country where bank loans were not easily procured.
Such support, relationship and encouragement was a most valuable asset for Ludwig's industrial enterprises.
So I already said Ludwig is the most fascinating character this entire book and there's a ton of interesting characters in the book.
And Nally is, you know, he's a great manufacturer genius.
He's a great entrepreneur.
But he also, it always is capable of like thinking for himself and making his own decisions.
And he was one of the, they had the best reputation and I think in all of Russia for actually giving a shit about the well-being of his employees.
At a time when that was just unheard of, in many cases I'm going to get to this.
They talked about, well, I guess Ludwig is the first person or one of the first people to realize increased care of your employees actually leads to increased productivity.
And it's describing like the, you know, all these people are coming in from the countryside.
Sometimes they're emigrating from other countries.
They're working in, you know, inhospitable factory environments.
And they said that cattle in many cases would have resisted the cramped quarters that they put humans in.
And so Ludwig innovates in every single aspect of his business.
I don't think I've brought this up yet.
And I should have from the very beginning.
So I apologize. What's fascinating to me is, is Ludwig and Alfred, they're going to have this dual success at almost the exact same time different industries.
They have wildly different approaches.
Alfred is like a delegator.
He has essentially a monopoly.
Ludwig is operating in an intense, uh, intensely competitive industry and he does everything himself.
But again, I think this is just one of the greatest things that you learn from reading all these biographies of entrepreneurs is like, there's not one path.
And now reading about both of them and their personalities is like, it's very obvious that they built businesses authentic to their true selves.
So I should have said at the beginning, but keep that in mind.
I'm going to go into what he did for his employees.
And at this time, there's nobody was doing this.
Ludwig made certain that his workers accommodations were adequate and well maintained.
He built new housing. He encouraged them to save a portion of their wages and establish a savings banks for his employees.
He regularly added substantial sums from his own profits into the employee bank.
He refused to employ children.
He reduced the workday from the usual 14 hours to 10 and a half hours and instituted the first profit sharing plan in Russia.
He also started a series of free educational courses for his workers decades before the business world discovered that overall efficiency and productivity are promoted by generous and concerned attitude towards employees.
Ludwig Nobel was doing it.
And then the description of just this remarkable inventor in entrepreneur and genius that Ludwig was.
There's a million things that he's going to different things that he's going to work on.
But I want to go back to this idea.
It's really important.
Learning from mistakes is changing your behavior, right?
So he realizes we need a bunch of just consumer products.
We can't just rely on the military.
And so at the time you have carriage drivers.
You know, these are horse drawn carriages.
The roads in Russia shouldn't even be called roads.
It was a hilarious. They said that the coach, dude, the roads were so bad in this area with air that the coach drivers would sit sideways with their laying legs hanging off the carriage.
So they could jump off easily when they were get when they hit the inevitable like giant hole in the road in the road.
So Ludwig makes the Nobel wheel this carriage wheel that can actually withstand and not break.
And the result was a monopoly on the market.
This is also going to tie to this idea that the Nobel family had excessively high standards.
And as a result, over time, they're able to build this incredible brand based on quality.
The Nobel name meant something.
They're in fact, later on, as they dominate the Russian industry, you know, they talk about their employees were proud.
They wore the fact that they were Nobelites that they worked for the Nobel family as a badge of honor because I meant they were the best.
Now, I need to the reason I'm also telling you this is because one, he's learning from his father.
But two, this is like Ludwig's MO for everything.
He wants to control everything from the invention to the manufacturing to the sales to everything.
And so they invent the wheel, they manufacture it, then they set up all the sales organizations all over like all over Russia.
Recruitment of the Salesforce, establishment of the sales districts, the administrative and financial direction, all were planned and implemented in Ludwig's office.
This goes back to he's much more of like a micromanager involved in every single detail, like a more like a Steve Jobs and a Walt Disney than his brother Alfred Nobel, which I'll get to.
He was interested in these administrative details as he was in engineering design and processes of manufacturing, a fanatic for work.
He was constantly in the plant to check on the operation of some machine he had designed to supervise insulation to oversee repair.
There was no facet of production or distribution or direction that escaped his attention.
He had demonstrated that whatever was produced in the Nobel factory was worthy of comparison with any competing product from abroad.
So that is an overview and an introduction into Ludwig.
We will return to him in a second.
I need to get to Alfred because the brothers are constantly involved in each other's businesses.
There's so many letters between the brothers.
I wish there was some kind of book where you just see their correspondence back and forth, considering that the Bolsheviks invade and kind of take over everything.
I bet you a lot of that correspondence was destroyed, but it's just fascinating.
So let's get to Alfred. This is such a fascinating family.
There's twin success. The twin success of Ludwig and Alfred are happening at the exact same time.
So by the time that Ludwig is going to start building in the oil industry, by that time Alfred already had a dozen dynamite factories all over the globe and how that came to be was fascinating because he got the idea from his former chemistry tutor.
Remember, go back to what I said about what his father did that was so brilliant for his sons that he's like, we're going to hire tutors.
You know, you guys are going to start engineering, you're going to do chemistry, you're going to learn all these languages.
So his former chemistry tutor, tutor, had told Emmanuel, his father, okay, about these Italian experiments with nitroglycerine.
That's going to be the active ingredient in dynamite when Alfred tames this and had recommended it for use in making more powerful land and sea mines.
Emmanuel had no time for such research, but his son Alfred did.
And this is what I mean about how the families constantly supporting them.
When Alfred is doing his demonstrations, the first time he successfully detonates what's going to turn into dynamite, his brothers Robert and Ludwig are there observing.
And then this next sentence is something that's really important.
It's not the first person to invent something that gets rich.
It's the first person to match that invention and build a phenomenal business around that invention.
Alfred was not the first to experiment with nitroglycerine, but he was the first to combine successful experimentation with a genius for business organization and financial management.
I double underline financial management.
He is probably the shrewdest person in his entire family when it comes to managing the money, watching the costs of the business.
He was very conservative.
He did not want to expand faster if it meant putting the survival of his business at risk.
What did Steve Jobs tell us a few weeks ago?
Victory in our industry is spelled survival.
All the money is in the future.
Do not interrupt the compounding and the way to interrupt the compounding is if you over optimize for growth at the expense of durability.
The other book that I'm reading this week starts out.
I'll give you a little sneak peek.
1000 square foot store into a 40 billion dollar company.
It starts 60 years ago. They did like eight billion dollars revenue last year.
The inability to build a durable business would have foreclosed that opportunity that eight billion dollar a year opportunity that's 60 years into the future.
That opportunity that most humans are incapable of seizing.
Now I'm going to introduce the third brother, Robert.
Robert is the older brother.
He is in this family like the underachiever, yet a single spur of the moment decision changes the trajectory of the entire family.
It could have been easy to be the older brother because a standard set by he's got two younger brothers that are complete overachievers.
It says the standard set by two such overachieving brothers would be hard for anyone to match.
And so Robert is working for Ludwig.
Ludwig is making all these rifles and rifle stocks for the Russian military.
He's like, hey, can you travel to this section over here because they're known to have phenomenal supplies of like walnut wood.
And Ludwig gives Robert 25,000 rubles to buy up the whole stock of walnut wood.
Robert is going to travel to this place called Baku.
Baku is going to be where they build their giant oil company.
So we can call this section Robert's pivot.
In all his travels, he had never seen anything like Baku.
And in all his dreams for personal enrichment, he had never seen greater potential.
There were parcels of oil rich land in Baku along with a small refinery.
So he goes is like, I'm not buying your walnut wood.
I want your refinery. His offer was the walnut money.
All 25,000 rubles of it.
A sudden decision taken without consultation with either Ludwig, after all it was Ludwig's money, or Alfred, the family expert expert in matters of finance and investment.
When he returned to Petersburg, he would have to convince his brother that he had found a much better investment for the money than rifle stocks.
And this is the remarkable thing about business.
You only have to be right once.
Up until this point, Robert had failed repeatedly.
He just needed to wait until he found the right opportunity.
So it says his two brothers looked upon this scheme with as much enthusiasm as they had viewed Robert's other projects.
First, it was fireproof bricks, then kerosene, iron, glycerin, and now petroleum.
What next? But here is one of the most important things in this book.
Robert had an innate talent for this opportunity.
And they're going to target a market full of second rate talent, second rate competition.
And what he realized is like these refineries, these are your locals.
They don't know what they're doing.
And what they're very beginning of a giant oil industry.
So Robert is also a very good chemist.
In fact, Alfred, who hired some of the best chemists in the world, said that his brother was a very good chemist.
And so in a short time, Robert was able to suggest improved methods of refining the crude oil.
That's coming out of this Baku region in Russia.
To produce higher grade kerosene, then was the norm for his for the competitive refineries.
And they can combine the talents that the family had, the fact that they could build very sophisticated manufacturing facilities.
And so very very quickly, Robert's modernized refinery produced the highest quality kerosene that had ever come out of Russia, where the usual product was then known as Baku Sludge.
It was unquestionably one of the best of the 140 refineries crammed in this town of Baku.
Listen to this, going back to this main theme.
It was an all Swedish operation.
The main chemist was Swedish.
The engineer and production chief was Swedish.
The machine shop foreman was Swedish.
And in two short years, they were achieving what in later years would be expected of anyone associated with the Nobel company, producing the most reliable product, establishing new standards, setting a pace which others had to follow, providing goals and guidelines in all phases of a new industry.
So Ludwig is about to move his attention into this brand new oil industry that's springing up in Baku.
I need to tell you what Baku was like at the beginning and the contrast of what Ludwig's going to impose.
Very similar to Rockefeller.
There's a reason they're called the Russian Rockefellers.
He's, you know, he essentially found this very chaotic brand new industry and imposed order in his will and order on it.
So it says it was a raw, merciless and often barbaric society ruled by an adventurous frontier spirit, and dominated by greed in the insatiable search for riches, typical of a gold rush mentality.
There was a proverb among Russian businessmen that whoever lives a year among the oil owners of Baku can never again be civilized, which is the perfect opportunity for someone like Ludwig.
The time, the place, the setting were ideal for Ludwig's particular genius.
When Ludwig Nobel entered Baku in the spring of 1876, a man with vision had arrived.
It was the real beginning of the oil industry.
Every phase of the business would have to be examined.
Every area rationalized, improved and modernized.
So there's a ton of detail, but I just want to pull out to sentences because this is one of the best things if you can find yourself in a situation where you're attacking a market full of second rate competition and second rate talent, which is exactly what Ludwig is doing.
He has these ideas for other, he shares ideas with all the quote unquote competitors in his field.
Obviously you're going to have to have some kind of organization in the early oil.
He realized just like Rockefeller did.
And they're just like, no, they're at the very beginning.
They don't know what the hell they're doing.
They're lo, they're producing low quality product and they're just not interested in change.
Says others were simply not interested in any new idea.
They had a complete lack of enterprise.
So what he would do is obviously he's not looking around like, oh, one of this is a good idea.
No one is doing it. I guess I won't do it.
He's like, no, I believe the idea is rational.
It should happen. So he'll just go and build it.
And then people try to imitate him and they just not as talented as he is.
The competition then started to build their own pipelines frequently failing to match Nobel standards and erecting a maze of Jerry built leaking and ill fitting pipes.
And then one thing the Ludwig does is he's constantly inventing.
He's leading the way in his industry.
He's the first to think about how crazy.
How much, how many other fortunes after this are built off of oil tankers and super tankers like Daniel Ludwig like Aristotle and Asus.
Ludwig is the one that invented the oil tanker.
And it's it was just very common sense.
Listen to his approach.
If it could be transported in bulk, meaning oil carried from one harbor to another in large tank, Ludwig believed that the product would compete with more traditional sources of fuel.
There had to be a fast, reliable economic means of moving lakes of oil.
The size of this industry's nuts, which I'll get to that that that description lakes of oil is not hyperbolic.
This is Ludwig's thinking, right?
It's like there has to be a fast, reliable economic mean means of moving lakes of oil from the isolated regions where it's readily available to the heavily populated centers worse in demand.
This invention is going to be later described as the most important fact in the entire history of the petroleum industry.
That is nuts. When you think about it, the petroleum industry may be the world's most valuable industry that's ever been created.
So Ludwig argues the facts of his case, very rational person.
The standard oil barrel weighs 64 pounds.
That's 20% of the oil that it can hold, which means that a fifth of any cargo of a barrel of oil consisted of wood that could only be shipped one way because you're not shipping empty oil barrels back the other way.
Ludwig's arguments, whereas logical and persuasive as they seem to him, failed to sway the opposition.
This is what I mean. This is just second rate competition.
Why? Because they're just mimic, they're just copying.
They can they're incapable of independent thought.
There was absolutely no support for the scheme.
It was too great a risk because it had never been done before.
And then his personality, very different than Alfred's, who's going to essentially have a technical monopoly.
It says Ludwig made no effort to keep secret any part of his designs.
And he rejected the pleas of his associates and shareholders.
That he take out patents.
He did not wish to profit in that manner to restrict dissemination of ideas that could benefit the entire industry.
This is incredible. Okay, so you know, they're small when he starts doing this and then keep in mind this book is from 1976.
Okay, so it's even bigger and more developed now.
But the main theme of what I want to tell you is a good idea.
This is a note of myself.
A good idea, not abandoned, will always grow larger than expected.
And so they talk about the fact that, you know, he's first a world-tanker smaller.
And then he just realizes like, oh, we keep getting these bigger and bigger and bigger until the size of Tanger's increase to levels never dreamed of with captains of the ship having to use bicycles to move from one end of the ship to the other.
A good idea, not abandoned, will always grow larger than expected.
And so when I'm going to read this overview of this phenomenal business that Ludwig built and a description of Ludwig himself, you'll see why he was my favorite character in this entire book.
Ludwig Nobel's Tanger Fleet was the most dramatic innovation in the Russian petroleum industry of the 1870s.
But it was only part of the general transportation and distribution system which he conceived and organized.
Pipelines to carry the raw oil from field to refinery and the finished product to dockside.
Tankers to carry that product 600 miles north.
Smaller tank barges for transshipment.
Barges for moving the oil up the mighty river, railroad tank cars and barges carrying the oil from all corn or two all corners of the empire.
Retail distribution centers in every major area of population, a labor force of thousands from field to consumer drilling for oil, building barges, fitting pipe, refining kerosene, repairing tank cars and ships pedaling the products.
This was Ludwig Nobel's empire within the Russian empire.
He created it in 10 years from well to wick.
It was all Nobel. It was the achievement of an individual who thoroughly dominated all aspects of an industry which he was literally creating as he went along.
He was president, chief engineer, sales manager, an entire research and development department chairman of the board and market analyst and incomparable insatiable overachiever.
His deeds in Russia were without parallel.
He was absolutely incredible.
He was incredible. Human nature is funny to me.
Even after he's done all this, he tries to share ideas throughout his industry and he always receives, and not always, alarmingly number amount of times, negative responses.
He said the best thing. He's like, well, the only thing you do when you receive a negative response is you take out a pen and paper and you do it yourself.
This guy's optimism, this mentality, I've just absolutely loved it.
This is a great quote of his on struggle.
Opposition never really bothered Ludwig.
Never really impeded his progress or diminished his determination.
This is what he said. An industrial undertaking properly managed and well organized involves constant struggle.
Its success is dependent upon foresight, perseverance, industry, and economy.
Struggle is to be expected.
Ludwig was accustomed to making his own decisions, traveling his own road, and he was certainly used to opposition.
Okay, so now I want to go back to this idea I mentioned earlier that I think is really beneficial.
The idea that the twin successes of Ludwig and Alfred are happening at the same time.
They're operating different industries.
They have different personalities.
They have different ways of approaching their business yet at the time.
This is taking place. They're two of the most successful and richest entrepreneurs on the planet.
And so this goes on for a few pages.
I just want to compare and contrast them because I love this idea.
Again, there's no formula.
Let's do whatever's authentic to you.
Self-sufficient independent with the devotion to work and a reliance on its routine.
The Swedes demand a high level of order in that work.
So they both share this.
Okay. A sense of purpose and perspective in their own rational civilization.
For the nobels, their boyhood of poverty strengthened that motivation.
He who does not work need not eat declared Ludwig.
And so their father is going to weigh in on what he thought were the difference between his sons.
Emmanuel believed that if it's Alfred who demonstrated the greatest industry, but Ludwig the greatest genius for Alfred, his rule was never to do myself.
What another could do better are at any rate as well.
He wanted to delegate everything possible.
Alfred Nobel was certain that if you do everything yourself in a very large concern, which concern at this time in history, it's just a business.
Okay. In a very large business, the result will be that nothing will be done properly.
And whoever tries to do it all himself will be worn out in body and soul and ruined.
That is Alfred's perspective.
Let's go to Ludwig and Alfred.
Alfred was a very like morose man.
I don't know if you'd want to be like friends with him.
Ludwig drew people and he was very charismatic.
Ludwig was not a person easily forgotten even after the briefest encounter.
He was in the words of his closest collaborators, a personality in the fullest sense of the word.
He dominated every audience.
He revealed at once an inter clarity of purpose and deep concentration of power.
Alfred preferred to be a luf from his employees.
Ludwig's home was in front of his factory.
Ludwig spent many hours with his engineers and draftsmen, his factory foreman and his section chiefs.
I don't think Alfred ever had kids.
Ludwig had 18. 11 of the 18 survived infancy.
Ludwig was at heart an optimist and hopeful about mankind as hopeful about mankind as he was about his own capabilities in career.
Alfred more pessimistic and definitely had a cynical view of his fellow man.
What they had in common was that Ludwig and Alfred both pushed themselves as such a pace that physical exhaustion probably would have overcome far, hardier types.
Alfred is more interested in the financial aspects of business.
Ludwig regarded financial speculation as a refuge for those who were too lazy to work.
Ludwig competed in a heavily competitive market.
Alfred essentially had a monopoly.
These were alien considerations to the man whose own industrial empire was based on a product that he alone controlled.
He alone determined the quantity of dynamite to release onto the market.
He alone decided which plants in which country should charge what price.
Competition was of little to no concern to him and he could run his business from a hotel room in any country he chose.
Alfred delegated. Ludwig was an entrepreneur who was never content to delegate to merely invest but who always insisted on becoming personally and totally committed.
Ludwig is going to die relatively early.
He's going to die at 57. We're not there yet.
There is going to be this triarchy as the way I described it and maybe I've just been watching too much game of their own.
But the triarchy of the Russian oil industry at this time, once they see the success that the Nobel family had is standard oil comes in and then the Rothschilds are also financing and trying to break.
The Rothschilds actually finance and develop the second largest.
What's going to wind up being the second largest Russian oil company?
They're going to be a major headache for the Nobel's for the next two generations.
This war between them is going to be known as Europe's second 30 year war between standard.
It's going to be Dutch Royal Shell, the Rothschilds and then the Nobel family.
I do want to point out a very fascinating idea.
It's like well outside success attracts a lot of attention and in turn is going to attract a lot of competition.
The one place on the planet at which Rockefeller and Standard Oil are not dominating is in Russia.
They have, there's a series of tax, but this is a great description of what was happening because the Nobel family is producing just so much oil at this point.
In late November, standard oil cut prices.
Rockefeller already controlled more than 90% of all American oil exports and was a dominating force in all world markets except Russia.
But this is such a great line.
This is why I'm reading this section to you.
But the price of monopoly is eternal aggression.
The price of monopoly is eternal aggression and when the American saw Nobel sudden and successful invasion of their markets, they quickly counter-attacked.
And then once you understand the scale, this is mind-boggling, brain-breaking scale of the Russian oil industry at this time, it makes sense why Standard Oil Rockefeller were not going to ignore them and they were going to try to fight.
This is insane. Okay, one Nobel oil well.
A single one, gushed over 11,000 tons of oil a day.
That is more than the total oil flowing from all 25,000 wells in the United States at that time.
These gushers would come out sometimes so fast and unexpectedly that they would shoot a stream of oil that's 225 feet straight up into the sky.
That stream of oil would then be carried by a winds a mile and a half away you'd have entire towns which would be outside their houses would be drenched in oil from these gushers.
And just like you and I have talked about in the past of like the two, I've done a few episodes, I did this book called The Big Rich and another book called Wildcatters about the first and second oil revolutions in Texas.
And what I love about reading about oil is it just, it draws the craziest character.
So there's a guy, this six foot three inch giant of a peasant.
Okay, he worked as a servant in the back who office of one of the czar's local military representatives.
He saved some of his meager earnings from his paycheck.
He buys a small vineyard on the outskirts of town.
Under the grapes that he thought he was buying, just happened to be lakes of oil by the turn of the century.
That peasant, that giant peasant became a man of fabulous wealth and fabulous extravagances.
His son inherits the wealth.
And he becomes Russia's greatest gambler, a collector of paintings, racehorses and beautiful women.
He would throw parties that look like from out of the pages of Arabian nights.
He would swagger across Europe, keeping a large entourage and then growing a normally fat with his movable feast and his permanent luxuries.
One of these people that turned from peasant time to the rich, they spend their money on hilarious things and one of them built this giant palace and the beginning, it's shaped like a dragon and to get into the palace, you have to actually go through the entrances to dragons jaws.
I wish they had a picture of it because it sounded amazing, but Ludwig was very different from this.
They were obviously very wealthy, but they didn't waste their time, just throwing parties.
He liked to work, Ludwig liked to work and he was very proud that he was considered one of the very few.
They considered like the Baku oil industry completely dishonest.
And so it says Ludwig was proud of his own particular guaranteed and that of his company.
If you can find in Baku any man who can prove that we've been dishonest, that we cheat or refuse to address any substantial grievances, we will face inquiry in your presence and if guilty make amends.
From every report in this book, Ludwig was a great man and unfortunately he had severe health issues, he had issues with his lungs, he had heart disease and at the early age of 57 years old, his heart fails and he dies.
Now the business turns over to his son Immanuel a few years later, after Ludwig's death, both other brothers Robert and then Alfred Nobel also died.
Now Immanuel's life story is also incredible because he's going to be one of the wealthiest people in Russian.
He's the one that has a dress up as a peasant and leaf.
That's going to happen about 15 years since the future.
But he's also remarkable because if it wasn't for Immanuel, there'd be no Nobel prize.
He's the one Immanuel's the one, so this is Ludwig's son Alfred Nobel's nephew.
He is the one that saves the Nobel prize because other people in the Nobel family wanted Alfred Nobel's will overturned.
They wanted his gigantic fortune and so you have kids of the other brothers that are doing everything in their power to try to void Alfred's will and keep that fortune in the family.
And so one of the lines in here is kind of humorous because one side of the family does not have the financial security that the other Nobel's did.
These are Robert's kids.
And he says it could not have been easy to stand by and let all that money go to strange people in distance lands because they'd written books or devised some new formula.
So that obviously made me chuckle.
But it is a manual alone that is fighting the entire family.
He's like no, we have to honor what Alfred Nobel wanted.
And so he says he had made his position clear.
He would not fight the will.
He was interested in preservation of the family name and honor in strict adherence to the wishes of Alfred.
He told him that the other relatives of his let the last will and testament speak for the soul.
And it's also speaks to the ethics and the morals that was passed down in the family because not only his other family doing this, they're all sweet, right?
The sweetest king caused a manual before him.
He's like, hey, even the king opposed this idea.
And Emmanuel refused the back down even from the king.
This was the result. The will was validated and the Nobel Foundation was established.
It took courage to oppose popular sentiment to fight his own family and to brook arguments with the king.
And then I think we need to move on to one of the main lessons of the book.
I think I have understood this because the son of Cuban immigrants and I just cannot fathom how my grandfather who was 38 years old, uneducated, didn't have any money, didn't speak English, worked in a shoe factory, and at a butcher shop understood the danger that his family was in when Castro took over and moved to a country where he didn't know anybody and didn't
speak the language. And so growing up with these stories that you hear over and over again, this is something I talked about Sam Zalbal when I had lunch with them too because his family escaped the Holocaust.
They got out. I think they were on the last train in Poland.
As somebody that's grown up in America, I think you can have the assumption that the way things are now is the way things will be forever.
And history just shows is like how fast things can change.
And manual is the third generation of one of the wealthiest and most respected families in Russia and he escapes hidden as a peasant.
People come into the factories and murder their employees.
And so now we have an account of what it was like to experience the Bolshevik revolution not knowing what was going on.
And so there's an executive in the Nobel company that kept a diary.
And it goes, it remarkable how fast things change.
The diary lasts for less than two weeks and I just want to pull out a couple lines that are spread across several days there.
They are in order. So I start Thursday.
Street cars stop running.
Strikes and several factories.
The police clear the streets of demonstrators shouting bread.
Friday strikes are spreading.
Compertations between police and the people.
Streets cleared and closed off from crowds.
Saturday. Police often disguise as soldiers and co-sacks hold the crowd and check dead and wounded lying on the streets.
Sunday. Stores have boarded up their windows.
The police are shooting.
Cossacks are using whips.
In the evening a lot of shooting drivers who are carting off the corpses talk about hundreds.
Monday. All offices and workshops are closed.
We let anyone go home who wants to.
An employee's nephew was killed by stray bullet.
Hit him right in the forehead as he was standing in a window watching the activities on the street.
Tuesday as we were walking to the office we came under fire shooting at us from both sides of the street.
In the evening we do not use any rooms facing the street.
And this is why between nine and ten at night I opened the door to my study just slightly lighting the front window for a second machine gun fire sprayed the entire facade of the building.
Wednesday more house searches.
The person who lives on the floor below us is arrested and taken away.
And it was remarkable even after all that he ends the journal the worst is probably over.
The anarchy in Petersburg soon spread to other cities the collapse of the imperial government and the abdication of the czar.
The wise and children of nobel's Swedish employees move back to the safe shores of their neutral country.
Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power.
They wasted no time showing the nation the meaning of totalitarian revolution.
All newspapers but their own were suppressed.
Editors were imprisoned and the only printed or spoken word permitted was that of the Bolsheviks.
Their avalanche of decrees covered every phase of economic, political, spiritual, and intellectual life.
The workers and soldiers demanded great sums of money from the industrialists.
Nobel factories succumbed to the chaos and closed down.
Transport was nationalized.
Factories were nationalized.
Owners and managers dismissed.
Bank deposits seized. Prices skyrocketed.
The czar and his family were murdered.
The petroleum industry was nationalized.
This is the crazy sentence in the book.
A former insane asylum inmate was named Minister of War and promptly proposed the election of a donkey to the council to represent oppressed animals.
An illiterate sailor was placed in charge of the schools and a well-known pimp was given control of public welfare.
Discipline and routine were replaced by endless series of meetings, decrees, and denunciations.
None of the Nobel chiefs really believed that the danger was more than a passing phenomenon and that the Bolsheviks could continue very long in power.
This idea that this won't last, things will go back to normal is a very common reoccurring belief in history around both wars and revolution.
These are not stupid people and yet they couldn't have been more incorrect.
And they realized this is when they have to get out.
Are they going to be killed?
The last nobels had departed after three quarters of a century.
The Swedish saga of a family in Russia came to a bitter end.
All their assets are seized, all their factories, Emmanuel, the son of Ludwig, goes back to Sweden and this goes back to his grandfather.
And his father, this relentless optimism that they had in their blood.
Emmanuel had found great pleasure in life even in exile.
He refused to be consumed by anger and bitterness.
His few remaining years were not going to be wasted, worrying or falling victim to a paralyzing pestilence of hate and frustration.
In Baku, all visual proof of the nobel name was removed.
The pre-Soviet slate wiped clean, wrenched from a place in history, reduced to the category of non-person.
Emmanuel the father, Ludwig, Robert and Emmanuel the grandson and all those nobles who struggled and strained to build and create disappeared into the mist.
Their glory, power and honor obliterated by those who seized what they had created.
Their acts long forgotten by those secure from such a miserable fate.
This book is amazing. There's so many stories that I couldn't get to.
I could do a podcast on, you know, entire chapters, multiple podcasts because there's just so much detail in this book, but I really wanted to focus on Ludwig's.
That's the person that resonated with me the most.
So for the full story, highly recommend you buy the book.
If you buy the book using the links it's in the show notes on your podcast player, or by going to founderspodcast.com, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.
That is 300 and 59 books down 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.
One of the things I love most about the story that you just heard is the importance of passing on the knowledge from one generation to the other that undoubtedly, Ludwig and Alfred's lives were changed forever and the lives of their descendants because of what they were learning from their father from the mistakes he made in business to the really smart decisions
he made and the way he educated his sons.
That transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next has been going on for as long as we've had language, probably before we've had language.
And it's one of my obsessions with making this podcast.
I think the idea of all this reading and research I'm doing, this weird intense desire that I have to collect and distill the knowledge of history's gay son's printers and then record what I'm learning through that process, make that into the podcast and then push that to the new to the current and the next generation of entrepreneurs I think is really important
because what happens as a result of this is that we all get to benefit and learn from, you know, many cases four, five, six, seven decade long careers that these entrepreneurs have.
And so if you're going to spend a lot of time learning from history's gay son's printers and listening to this podcast, I've also made a tool to make sure that you never forget the lessons.
I actually made this tool for myself to make sure that I never forget the lessons so that I can pull them up on demand when I need them.
Now I made that tool that was once just my own available to everybody and that tools founders notes.
And even before with something that was public available, let me tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs because for the last six years, I've been putting all of my notes and highlights for everything that I read for this podcast into this giant searchable database.
That app that I was using to do this is called read wise.
And so I know the founders are read wise.
And so I talked to them and I was like, hey, I get a lot of requests that people actually want access to all my notes and highlights.
Can we team up and actually build a tool so we can externalize what I see to everybody else.
And so even if you didn't know about this tool, you've heard me use it over and over again on the podcast.
In this episode, you heard me pull up past things said in Alfred Nobel's biography.
I was using founders notes to do that anytime on the podcast.
When I'm referencing past ideas from past episodes from past books, when I talk about ideas from Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, Munger, Buffett, all of this, that's me searching to founders notes and pulling up those ideas.
And so that is a really important point to get across what you see.
If you wind up subscribing to founders notes, you see what I see.
It's the exact same tool that I use.
It is a tool that I made for myself.
And I was using for years before I thought anybody else would ever see it.
And so a bunch of subscribers to founders notes are using founders notes to help them think through issues that they're having inside their company.
Anything from hiring to recruiting to marketing to leadership to preparing for board meetings to preparing for sales presentations.
If you are already running a successful company, I think it's a no brainer to invest in the tool.
And I've added a new feature.
This feature is going to show you how I use founders notes and it's also going to push ideas from history skaters entrepreneurs directly into your brain quickly.
And that feature is called sage advice, which is a private podcast fee that is included with every single subscription to founders notes.
The last episode I made for that feed was on James Dyson.
So what I did is I read two about two autobiographies of James Dyson, you know, it's 50, 60, 70 hours reading.
I think countless hours of inputting the notes and all those highlights into founders notes.
And so what I do is I go back and reread every single note and highlight from every single book that I read on an individual in this case of as James Dyson.
And then there's also an AI assistant that lives inside of founders notes called sage.
And I asked sage questions about James Dyson.
Because sage will read all my notes and highlights and transcripts from every single episode.
And then use all that reading to give me like an outline of, you know, how did James Dyson think about what was his most important idea is how do you think about marketing things like that?
And then I took all that research and I composed it into a single document and distilled that down to what I think are the most powerful ideas from James Dyson's 50 year career.
So you take a 50 year career, 60 hours of reading.
And I distilled that down into an episode that you can listen to in 12 minutes.
All of the episodes I make on this feed are going to be, you know, around 10 minutes, the idea with these mini episodes is I want to create a tool that if you can condense the ideas, like the most important ideas, like 15, 20, 10, whatever the number is, the most important ideas over their entire career, ruthlessly edit down to 10 minutes, 12 minutes, whatever case cases,
as long as that is that link, you're going to be able to listen to that over and over again.
So it's ceases becoming real, a podcast.
And it really is just a tool to kind of be out of something you can let's do over and over again, that serves as this concert reminder.
And just an easy way for you to download those ideas into your brain.
And then once they're in your brain, then you can use them in your career.
So if you want access to that tool that'll give you the superpower to access the collective knowledge of history, based on entrepreneurs, when you need it on demand, make sure you subscribe at founders notes.com that is founders with an S just like the podcast founders notes.com.
Thank you for the support.
Thank you for listening and I'll talk to you again soon.
