Dietrich Mateschitz is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our age, a man who single-handedly changed the landscape of the beverage industry by creating not just a new brand, but a whole new category the energy drink.
He is the visionary who brought the world Red Bull.
In return for his innovation, the world has made him very, very rich.
Over the last few years he was taking anywhere from 500 million to 800 million a year in annual dividends and he had a net worth somewhere between 20 and 30 billion.
Machitz also runs an efficient enterprise.
In 2010, Red Bull employed just 7758 people, which works out to more than 667000 in revenue per person.
This success is the realization of a business plan that eschews conventional advertising in favor of marketing through its own events shows, sports teams and publications.
Red Bull has produced its own TV programs films magazines, websites and a steady diet of videos online featuring snowboarders, rally cars surfers, cliff divers and concerts, and a guy jumping from space.
Mattress Hits calls the multimedia assault one of the most important line extensions so far.
As a major content provider, it is our goal to communicate and distribute the world of Red Bull online in all major media segments, from TV to print to new media.
Red Bull also owns four soccer teams.
They have a NASCAR team and two Formula One racing teams.
He finances the annual 200 million cost of his F1 teams out of the company's healthy operating income.
And this is what he said about that.
In literal financial terms, our sports teams are not yet profitable, but in value terms, they are.
The total editorial media value plus the media assets created around the teams.
That's such a good insight.
Plus, the media assets created around the teams are superior to pure advertising expenditures.
He then launches into a spiel that he's been delivering for the past 25 years.
He explains that Red Bull is not just a drink.
Instead, it's a philosophy, one seemingly derived from his own outlook on life, and a functional product used to improve strength and performance and to revitalize the body and mind.
Those are his words.
He is also quite serious, prone to beginning sentences with the phrase it is a must, as in it is a must to believe in one's product.
If this was just a marketing gimmick, it would never work.
And it is something that he believed on because he worked on Red Bull for over the last 40 years of his life.
He just recently passed away.
That's why I wanted to do this episode now.
This is a little bit about the beginnings of how he discovered this idea.
He was on a chance trip to Thailand in 1982, which would prove to be a turning point in his life.
He was curious to know what attracted the locals there to an uncarbonated tonic, which they called a word in Thai I'm not going to try to pronounce which literally translates to Red Bull.
He tried some of this himself and found that it instantly cured his jet lag.
Not long after that, He was sitting at the bar at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong and he was reading a magazine.
In the magazine it mentioned that the top corporate taxpayer in Japan that year was the maker of such tonics.
Suddenly, the idea hit him.
He would sell that stuff in the West.
He then approached a Thai businessman who was selling the tonic in Southeast Asia and suggested that the two introduce the drink to the rest of the world.
With one crucial change, it would be carbonated.
This is going to be his partner.
His last name...
I'm going to guess is Yuvedaha.
And he liked the idea.
And so the two agreed to invest 500000 a piece to establish a 49-49 partnership, with the remaining 2 going to Yuvedaha's son.
So when I said earlier that he was paying dividends you know somewhere between 500 800 million to himself a year and his net worth was, you know, somewhere between 20 and 30 billion.
That is from this 49% that he owned of Red Bull.
In addition to adding carbonation, he also positioned it differently.
This would allow for his product positioning masterstroke.
He would sell Red Bull as an ultra-premium drink in a category all of its own.
At $2 a can, it was far and away the most expensive carbonated drink on the shelves.
This is what he said about that.
If we only had a 15 price premium, we'd merely be a premium brand among soft drinks and not a different category altogether.
At this point, most histories of Red Bull tend to depart and focus on Red Bull itself, which is exactly how he wants it.
A curious hybrid of a mogul.
Matashits has a zest for life that rivals Richard Branson's, but his obsession with controlling information puts him closer to Steve Jobs.
Like the Apple founder, Matashits pulls the strings behind a consumer cult, and cults rely on message control, and cults rely on message control.
Mateschitz is notoriously secretive.
He is close to some of Austria's most prominent people.
This part made me laugh.
He is close to some of Austria's most prominent people, though Mateschitz says he doesn't place a premium on collecting friends or socializing.
I don't believe in 50 friends.
I believe in a smaller number.
Nor do I care about society events.
It is the most useless use of time.
When I go out from time to time, it's just to convince myself that I'm not missing out on a lot.
And so the little that he does speak, he says very interesting things.
This is another thing that I thought was very interesting.
The success of Red Bull defies logic in one important regard.
It doesn't taste very good.
Mateschitz says he doesn't care about the taste issue then.
He didn't care about the taste issue then, and he doesn't care about it now.
This is what he says.
It's not just another flavored sugar water differentiated by color or taste or flavor.
It is an efficiency product.
I'm talking about improving endurance concentration, reaction time speed, vigilance and emotional status.
Taste is of no importance whatsoever.
That part actually shocked me.
And Red Bull, I mean, I wouldn't say it tastes great, but it certainly doesn't taste bad.
I think maybe the author is exaggerating a little bit here.
Masters has proved his marketing genius, especially in the era of crisis management.
With his early decision to foster rumors about Red Bull's content Instead of trying to squash them.
I'm going to go into a lot more detail later on about this, but I want to give you an overview.
This is what I'm trying to do.
I'm just going to give you an overview of who he was and his approach to company building, which I found fascinating, by the way.
I've been texting friends nonstop.
I was like, I cannot believe all this stuff.
This is an example of that.
Again, he wants to foster rumors.
That is just free.
We're going to go into Christian Dior's comment on this, which I just covered a few weeks ago.
He's just like, oh, this is just free propaganda.
Don't try to squash them.
Foster them.
And so in the early days of Red Bull, you have all this, like, why is Red Bull so effective?
Why is it giving me so much energy?
Why is it letting me at a party all night?
Because I was, like, really spreading clubs to begin with.
And so he says his early decision to foster rumors about Red Bull's content instead of trying to squash them.
Tales begin to circulate that taurine, which is one of the main ingredients of Red Bull, was derived from bull testicles, or even that it was bull semen.
Oh, the company let the gossip travel unchecked and even set up a page devoted to the rumors on its website.
He has an incredible, incredible quote about this.
He says, the most dangerous thing for a branded product is low interest.
That reminds me of Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid, Steve Jobs hero and the patron saint of Founders Podcast.
He said something that was fascinating.
And he says the test of invention is the power of an inventor to push your invention through, not in the face of staunch opposition, which most people think right.
But staunch indifference.
Edwin Land, like MasterSys, would tell you that indifference is your enemy.
If they're talking about your product, that is a good thing, even if they think that it's coming from.
The secret ingredient is bull testicles.
Was this all by design?
Did he really anticipate that a combination of rumors and public outcry would play such a big part in driving early sales?
Even think about that.
I'm going to pause real quick.
I was like, Think about if he said OK well, you know, I have a new drink and there's like some caffeine in it, some sugar, you know, maybe some B12 or some other vitamins.
I've already forgot what he said.
But if somebody whispers like hey, there's this new energy drink and the energy comes from bull testicles even if one, I wouldn't drink it because of that.
But I won't forget it.
That's actually a really powerful insight that he that he had there.
So was it all by design?
Did he really anticipate that a combination of rumor and public outcry would play such a big part in driving early sales?
They're talking about the fact that Red Bull was forbidden to be sold in several European countries that he initially tried to launch in.
Matches is emphatic.
Yes, we expected it.
It was part of the strategy from the beginning.
We would make the brand interesting enough that people wanted to get their hands on it.
Red Bull's marketing campaign has always been its claim that it can improve athletic performance.
To prove it, the company took a page out of Gatorade's book and targeted athletes.
Except with a twist, mattresses zeroed in on the extreme sports crowd.
Okay.
So that idea is not new.
I've done multiple podcasts and read multiple biographies of the founders of companies like Adidas, Nike and then Vans shoe.
If you realize like Adidas started getting a lot of traction by sponsoring the They're making athletic shoes, so they sponsor athletes.
Nike sees the success that they're doing, and so they do the same thing.
There's a lot of stories about them competing in the early days of Nike.
But what was fascinating is Paul Van Duren, who I did a podcast on a long time ago.
He's the founder of Vans.
What he did he's like.
Well, I'm not making athletic shoes, but I like the idea that Adidas and Nike used to gain traction, initial sales traction.
And so he copied, he didn't copy the what, he copied the how.
And so, instead of going to you know Olympians or basketball players, whatever he found an underserved niche, which was skateboarders.
And so he went out and tried to sign in the early skateboarding industry.
And that was a huge influence on the early success of Vans.
And so you see Massachusetts using a very similar playbook from Gatorade and then other products that also were very successful, targeting athletes.
Today, Red Bull underwrites more than 500 athletes in 97 sports.
This state is about... What I'm working off of is like...
About 15 years old, so it's probably much higher than that.
Like everything else at Red Bull, the negotiations that lead to these sponsorship deals are unorthodox as well.
Wind surfer Robby Nash recalls the first time he met Mattis almost 20 years ago.
We talked in the courtyard of his office and pretty soon we realized that we were both really into cars.
That was the end of our business meeting because he wanted to show me his Ferrari GTO.
So we went driving off into the mountains and after 15 minutes he pulled over, got out and told me to drive back.
I didn't want to.
That's a million-dollar car.
But he said, I was either going to drive the Ferrari back or walk back.
I was so scared that I drove it like my grandmother.
The lines between Red Bull, Red Bull athletes, and Red Bull events are blurry on purpose.
Another great idea.
This is why I kept texting people about this guy.
To Mattis, it's just one big image campaign with many manifestations.
Let me read that again.
The lines between Red Bull, Red Bull athletes, and Red Bull events are blurry on purpose.
To Mateschitz, it's just one big image campaign with many manifestations.
Potential customers might actually attend one of the dozens of global events that Red Bull puts on.
It could be a Red Bull soapbox race in Los Angeles or a motocross spectacular in Brazil the week after.
This is what they said about that.
This is fun stuff and it's a lot more interesting than writing a check to buy 30 seconds during the Super Bowl.
Despite the fact that he's approaching 70... he maintains quite a clip.
He still moves like an athlete.
He rides horses, rides a motorcycle, pilots his planes and last year competed in an off-road motorcycle race.
He has long insisted that he has no plans to sell or take Red Bull public.
It's not a question of money, he said.
It's a question of fun.
Can you imagine me at a shareholders meeting?
Mattis has certainly created some enviable havens for himself, like Richard Branson.
He has his own private island in Fiji.
He bought it off of Malcolm Forbes.
When I asked him what motivated him to buy a vacation home so far away, he resorts to quoting Malcolm Forbes himself.
He gave a nice answer, which was, doesn't everybody want their own South Pacific island?
Well, in my case, he was right.
I did.
Mattis just also says that he's always been attracted to the idea of having his own independent state, the country of Red Bull, which would have the shortest set of laws in the world.
The rules would be simple.
Nobody tells you what you have to do, only what you don't have to do.
Okay, so that was an excerpt not from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today.
That's an excerpt from this long form piece in Bloomberg called Red Bull's Billionaire Maniac.
Before we get into the book, I want to tell you about a conversation I just had with one of the greatest living entrepreneurs.
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Now let's get back into the book.
The book that I am going to talk to you about today, as far as I know, is the only biography ever written about the founder of Red Bull, and it is only available in German.
My friend Cameron Priest, who's been a longtime listener of Founders and he's probably, over the years, sent me no exaggeration at least 40 great biography recommendations.
Actually helped me translate it into English.
The translation's not the greatest.
Spending several hours reading what is technically English, but in a way, the words were organized.
It's almost like you're reading a different language.
So what I did is I just pulled out a bunch of highlights and tried to rewrite them into explaining the main ideas that Mattis just used to build, you know, one of the most valuable private companies on earth.
And I think the story is incredibly important because, Even though he's not American, he's Austrian he lived something like the American dream, from employee to billionaire, and did that with just one brilliant idea.
And as we go through this, you'll see a lot of his ideas actually interact well together.
So he has this really unique but I would say, cohesive company building philosophy that is completely unique to his personality and the way he wants to live his life.
Like you said, he could have taken it public.
He could have sold out.
He's just like, I just want to have fun.
I'm making plenty of money.
Somehow I think I'll survive making 800 million a year and I never want to stop because I'm having fun.
And so he was working on Red Bull up until he died.
So before I jump into how he views Red Bull, as he calls it a marketing conglomerate, I want to go over what they talked about.
They hinted at in that article just how private and secretive and how he was just obsessed with controlling the message.
He's just a very private person.
He was always, always promoting Red Bull and never promoting himself.
And so the author of this book, and I apologize I'm butchering all these names.
I've already mispronounced that.
I don't know, like half a dozen things.
His name is Wolfgang Verweger.
I'm just going to call him Wolfgang.
So he actually runs into.
As he's writing the book, he actually has a chance encounter with Dietrich.
And he tells him that he's writing a biography on him.
And Dietrich does not like that.
And there's going to be some wild stuff here.
He is neither interested in an authorized biography or in a case history about Red Bull.
I was able to have a brief personal conversation with him, and when he found out that he wanted to write a book on him, he described the publication of a book that he had not authorized as quote a disaster.
So you and I have talked about this maxim over and over again.
Very common in the history of entrepreneurship.
Bad boys move in silence.
They find an advantage.
They don't like broadcasting how successful they are, and they certainly don't want to tell you what their next move is.
And so this entire book, right, it says there's a strict prohibition of discussing internal matters.
So if you are an employee of Red Bull, you can't say anything about what's going on.
So most of the people interviewed in the book are actually former employees of Red Bull.
But this is fascinating.
They unanimously, these people have left the company, right?
But they unanimously express positive opinions about their former employer.
He is universally described as a person with great charisma.
So the way he is with employees and people he knows is very different than the way he is with journalists.
With journalists, he's extremely shy and reserved.
And the few times he's done interviews, he's done some with like these European publications.
He did one with The Economist, with Bloomberg.
This is what he says about that.
My philosophy is very simple.
Since it's not me on the shelf for sale but Red Bull, it's perfectly logical that Red Bull is at the center of our marketing activities and not the person.
Naturally, I also have a pronounced desire for privacy.
And then we see he utilizes an idea that you and I talked about on episode 292.
I did this episode on this guy named Daniel Ludwig.
The name of that book is called The Invisible Billionaire.
When Daniel was alive in the 80s, he was the richest American and no one knew who he was.
I think there was only like one picture of him.
And Daniel actually Ludwig actually paid his PR team to keep his name out of the press.
Mattis does the same thing.
The press office of the Red Bull headquarters is a press prevention office whose task is to say nothing and find a justification for why their boss is unavailable.
And so, even though Mattis was one of the greatest promoters that we've probably seen in the last half a century, public relations was not a part of the company's marketing strategy.
And the interviews that they do do.
They're only granted to select publications and select journalists.
And I really need to hammer home this point about how extreme he was in doing this there.
He's in Australia.
He's the richest man in Austria.
Right.
And there's a society magazine.
So, like you know I don't, I guess we call it like kind of like a tabloid or like a gossip magazine in the States.
But he actually buys it.
He buys this magazine just so he will not appear in it.
And he was actually asked about this and he actually confirmed.
He's like, well, the best way to prevent me from appearing in it is to own it.
And so this is tied to his very strong desire.
He wants to control the message.
He wants to tell his own story.
That's why he's so heavy in them being available in all forms of media.
But he's also a perfectionist who has to control his projects, the product that he's making and the environment 100.
And so extreme success usually comes from extreme characters, extreme personality traits.
He actually threatened to have.
This is way before this book was actually written about him.
But there was another potential biographer, this Russian author that tried to to start writing a biography an unauthorized biography on Matashits.
And Matashits threatened to have his kneecaps broken.
He didn't like that the author was going to like his hometown.
I think he was like knocking on the door of his elderly mother.
And it says, this aroused the wrath of the otherwise charming Matashits.
You've harassed my mother and I will not tolerate this.
As long as a perforated kneecap in Moscow costs $500, you will not be safe.
And so let's go into what he was doing before he started Red Bull.
This is one of the most fascinating things because, as far as I know, it's his first business that he started and he was 41 years old.
He was an employee for Unilever.
But way before that, and what's fascinating, he calls himself like a very lazy student.
So he actually chose marketing as his major.
And it was perfect because he's one of the greatest marketers I've ever seen.
But he had to work his way through college.
He was actually working at like a steelworks company.
And he'd also take jobs as a ski instructor and a tour guide.
But he didn't think he was that good at school.
He called himself a lazy student.
Because he took 20 semesters to graduate.
And he says normally you finish the University of Economics at the age of 22 and not 28 years old like he did.
Which was interesting because that he was a bad student because both of his parents he didn't come from money.
Both of his parents were schoolteachers.
So after college he starts working for one of the largest consumer packaged goods companies in the world Unilever.
He works all the way up and becomes a marketing director there for the international division of a Unilever subsidiary called Blendex.
It's toothpaste.
He's marketing toothpaste.
And he did this for a very long time.
He wound up traveling all the time for work.
And this is how he's going to discover Red Bull, which I mentioned earlier.
So he's on the road three to four months per year.
Often they're sending him all the way out to the Far East.
He's all over Asia.
And it might've been fun as a younger man, but as he ages he did not want to live that life of this frequent flyer never home.
And he has this realization where he said in an interview one time all I could see were the same gray planes, the same gray suits and the same gray faces.
I wondered if I wanted to spend the next decade like this.
And so he's around 38 years old when he's having this thought.
I don't want to be 48 and still in the same position.
And really what motivated him, this is something he was going to repeat over and over again.
He desperately, desperately wanted independence.
He wanted financial independence and he wanted independence and control over how he spent his time.
And so it's at the same time that he's having these thoughts that he finds that Thai version, the uncarbonated version, of Red Bull gives him a lot of energy and cures his jet lag.
And then reads the article.
It's like wait a minute.
The people that make drinks like this pay the most.
They make the most money.
They pay the most taxes in this entire country.
And so he immediately starts to study the existing products in this very nation energy drink market.
And he would literally grab every single samples of every single kind of drink that's very similar.
He would get together with other people that he works with and he called them.
He organized them what he would call energy drink parties.
And at the time they were calling them stimulating juices.
So these stimulating juices were all essentially taste tested.
And there was like this giant, like self experiment, to see not only how it tastes, but also the effects that it had on them.
And so one relationship that he's going to make right now actually changes his life, because he realizes that there is a Thai franchise partner of a Unilever group.
Right.
They're making toothpaste, but they also produce and bottle that, that tonic drink, the uncarbonated version of what will become Red Bull.
And he pitches him on the idea of them giving him the license to distribute that drink and then add carbonation outside of Asia.
And this is when they do that partnership where they both agree to put in 500000 and then carbonate and then sell this drink in the West.
And one main theme that runs through this entire story.
That's very obvious when you read about him.
Whether you read articles, a book, anything you come across he has profound, profound self-belief.
Because when he's 41 he quits his job and starts his first company and puts all of the money that he has in it.
He doesn't have this large buffer.
He doesn't have a lot of money.
And even from the very beginning.
And the reason I say you have to have a profound self-belief because you can see brochures that he was pitching people on about the business.
I think he might have been using this to try to raise money.
But he says, there is no market for Red Bull.
We will create one.
And there's this great line in the English translation of this German biography where it says rarely in the world of business has such a bold announcement been implemented into reality like this one.
And so creating your own market is also.
Not only do you have to educate, you know the potential customers, but then you have to deal with all the regulators.
And so he tries to set up shop in Germany and they didn't even know what the hell energy drink was.
And so he had to.
He applied for what was going to be the first ever Europe wide approval of a new type of indulgence, which is the energy drink.
Right.
As you might imagine, European bureaucracy is not known for for fast approval time.
So he's waiting over a year to try to launch just in Germany.
He gets extremely frustrated.
So then he winds up packing his bags and going to Austria and he's like I'm just going to launch in Austria.
There's a lot of benefits from that.
But also one of the main benefits is he launched in a single small market and for nearly five years he was able to run experiments and really improve the product, but also figure out the marketing and the messaging, because he's only in a single small market.
So I think he launches in 1987 in Austria and doesn't launch to his second market until 1992.
So they're launching in just one small market.
They don't have a lot of money.
They just put up, you know, $500,000 each.
It's not like Massachusetts has any other money.
And so when sales didn't take off, he did something that was really smart.
He invested some of that money instead of in advertising at the very beginning.
He actually made more of his product and he would bring it and deliver it to places by pallet and let people try it and drink it free of charge.
This is very similar to one of my favorite entrepreneurs of all time is Estee Lauder.
And in the early days of her company, which she also started when she was 40.
I just realized that now she actually took money out of her advertising budget and instead made more of her product to give away.
And this is what she said about that.
You give people a product to try.
If they like its quality, then they buy it.
They haven't been lured in by an advertisement, but convinced by the product itself.
We took the money we had planned to use on advertising and invested it instead in enough material to give away large quantities of our product.
It was so simple that our competitors sneered when they heard what they were doing.
Today, they're all copying us.
And so Mattisitz knew he needed more money.
He went to a bunch of banks.
They all said no.
Only one.
There was a small private bank.
Oh, my goodness.
Spangler.
I'm butchering these words.
But this bank called I'm going to call it Spangler, was the only one to actually believe in the product and the concept behind it.
And so they actually lent him money.
Now, this is another main theme that's repeated over and over again.
Mattisitz is excessively loyal.
And so to this day, that is the only banking house that Red Bull used in that country.
This is where they get the early start.
Red Bull started to flourish when bartenders and nightclub operators were convinced that it was a suitable new component for mixed drinks.
The energy drink was sometimes referred to as poor man's cocaine.
So this spreading in nightclubs and bars actually gives them their initial traction.
The first year, they sell about several hundred thousand cans were sold in the first year.
The next year, that number goes to 1.2 million.
And then the year after, so year three, they're at 1.7 million.
So they're growing, but they're not growing crazy fast.
They're also spending a ton.
This is when they really start putting a lot of their money.
I think it's something like over 30% of their gross revenue they spend on advertising.
At the beginning, it was even more than that.
But the remarkable thing is they hit their break-even point in year three and they've been profitable every single year since then.
And so there's three ideas that he's going to go into here.
One that he was all in, he had that burn the boats mentality.
He wanted to go high end from the start and he knew that there was no market for this, so he had to create one.
And so he talked about the great personal risk that he did in starting the company.
He says, if things had gone wrong, I'd be sleeping under a bridge today.
And so he talks about his decision to have a high-priced product plus use a lot of that revenue from people spending more money on it to actually reinvest into advertising.
Red Bull was to become very expensive, and it was a new product for which there was not even a market yet.
So it was necessary to create demand first.
Potential customers had to be explained why they now desperately needed Red Bull, which they had not even known existed before.
And so one of the things that he does that's very unique, that I don't know if I've heard before, is is he hires an advertising firm from the very beginning.
It calls him his former study buddy.
So I'm assuming that this is his friend from college.
This guy named Kastner.
At this time, Kastner was already a founder of an advertising agency called Kastner and Partners.
So Kastner is going to play a very important role, because he's the guy that comes up with the slogan Red Bull gives you wings.
Now here's, I think, a testament to how unique Masterships is.
He doesn't have any money, but he's also a perfectionist.
And so he keeps turning down, over and over and over again, all the different marketing and advertising campaigns that they're trying to come up with.
And you're like, well, how could he be doing that, David?
Like he has no money.
All this time is going by.
I think it's like a year and a half that they're working on this.
So they finally figure out the positioning and the actual initial launch of the marketing and advertising.
And so he actually paid for this initial work with labor.
He had no money so he actually helps out in the agency as a freelance employee just to pay for that marketing advertising that the advertising agency that his friend started is doing on behalf of Red Bull.
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Another important point.
Everybody's telling him this is a bad idea.
His friend immediately recognized its potential.
And he said, if this is pursued consistently, this idea will lead to success.
So again, Mashes is very self-confident, has a ton of, as you can imagine, has a ton of self-confidence in himself and the idea that he's doing, but it is very helpful for other people, especially people that you trust and admire.
Because he said.
He says that Kastner was a very clever fellow and He knew that he was a perfectionist like me.
And so you have somebody like that that you know is smart, that you admire.
You trust their judgment.
They're like no.
Everybody else might be telling you this is a bad idea, but if you pursue this consistently, it will lead to success.
And so Kastner was talking about this time.
He's like listen.
The birth of this campaign was not easy, because for a year and a half he's just rejecting every single suggestion that I have.
I think they went through 50 different ways to either slogans or ways to market it.
Mashes rejects every single one of them.
But Kastner understood his friend.
He says he wants the absolute best.
He believed in his product to the end of his days.
And so, even after 50 failed attempts, they're having this conversation where they're like well, anybody that drinks Red Bull becomes damn strong.
So that's the conversation they're having.
That's how they were thinking about it.
It's like, well, you drink it and you become strong.
What's the right tagline or motto for that?
And in the middle of the night, Kastner has the idea that Red Bull gives you wings.
And so he calls matches in the middle of the night and immediately matches like, yep, that's it.
So it was it was a the fact that that was a good idea was immediately obvious to both of them.
The thing about how crazy that is, you're fighting for a year and a half going through 50 things.
He calls you.
You hear it.
You're like, yep, that's it.
Let's go.
And so now they had the branding and the tagline.
They wanted the advertising to be.
This is the traits that they were looking for.
They wanted to be self-ironic non-conformist, smart and rebellious, and their point was that they that's how they viewed their own personality, and so they're like we're going to put a lot of our own personality into this.
And so now they're up and running five years they're still in just in that small single market in Austria.
Five years in.
Then they they expand to Hungary.
That's the second market that they open up, and then they start adding market after market after market in Europe.
Now, this part was a bit confusing to me, But it seems that the formation of the European Union was one of the waves he surfed.
If you listen to episode 329 on Port Charlie's Almanac, there's something fascinating that Charlie Munger would talk about that, because several times in the book he will analyze like outside success.
And he's trying to teach people like.
Well, what would account for the success of like a Les Schwab or Sam Walton?
And he goes through and one of the ideas that he has, he says surfing is a very important model to understand.
And so it seems like this brand new formation of the European Union was one of the waves that Massachusetts surfed, because if a product is approved to be sold in one European Union country, it is automatically approved in another one.
So it says Berlin remember he's trying to get into Germany finally allowed Red Bull for the German market as well.
This made Massachusetts one of the first big EU beneficiaries.
The approval was only possible through a detour.
Red Bull managed to get approved in Great Britain.
Great Britain was not in their sights at that time, but an EU law laid tracks for approval in Germany.
And so, practically the next day, Red Bull set out to conquer the market in which it actually wanted to settle down.
So it's talking about Germany.
Now, here's the crazy thing.
Way before they launched in Germany, there was a black market.
People were selling cans of Red Bull on the black market.
So let's go back to this idea that I've seen a bunch of times, but the one that comes to mind most often is most top of mind right now, because I just covered Christian Dior's autobiography and he talks about this.
Is that rumors and innuendo?
You have to think about them as great free propaganda.
And so Christian Dior says, the relative secrecy in which I chose to work sounds a lot like Massachusetts, right?
The relative secrecy in which I chose to work aroused a positive whispering campaign which was excellent.
Free propaganda.
Gossip, malicious rumors are worth more than the most expensive publicity campaign in the world.
That is the end of Christian Dior's quote.
This is what this book says about it.
And again, I have to like rewrite this because the translation is kind of funny.
But there was a thriving black market for Red Bull in Germany long before it was approved.
Remember it's banned and people are flocking to it.
So they're actually, people are making money by smuggling it in from Austria into Germany.
And so all that does is increase the desire for it, because now you're drinking something that's oh my God, this is illegal.
And it actually made it more charming because it's more forbidden.
So this is the foundation of this cult-like following that Red Bull had at the very beginning.
And it is in Germany where they're spreading these rumors that the drink contains an extract from bull testicles.
There was also a rumor that it was secretly enriched with amphetamines.
Remember, this is spreading in clubs and bars and stuff like that.
And it says the company did nothing to counter these bizarre rumors.
And again, I want to repeat that excellent quote that he had.
As Mastersitz once lectured, the most dangerous thing for a branded product is low interest.
Then they get approved, right?
In the first three months of a legal market presence, they sell 33 million cans in Germany alone.
This idea is not new to you and I, right?
This idea is like if something's banned, all it is is free propaganda.
It's free advertising.
It's going to drastically increase the amount of demand.
If you remember, on the Michael Jordan episodes and also on the Nike episodes when the NBA – banned the original Jordan shoe at the very beginning.
Nike's like Oh, hopefully we're going to sell like.
I think it was like 4 million or no, I think it's 3 million by the fourth year.
And then the NBA bans the shoe and they make a smart decision.
Like just keep wearing it.
Michael will pay the fine.
And so instead of hitting, I think, 3 million by the fourth year, they did 125 or 126 million the first year.
And so mattresses does something that he does for his entire career.
He really pushes the pace and, They launch in Germany and his marketing budget, right?
So right now, the entire revenue of the company at this time where we are in the story, they're doing 70 million euros at that time.
They're in a few different markets.
He sets the marketing budget for Germany at 10.
Just that one market more than 10 to 75 million euros for that year.
And then I learned something that was actually surprising, because you go look like Red Bull essentially just has Red Bull.
They might have like different versions of But they essentially sell one thing.
In the book, there's all kinds of examples.
They have this coffee and this cola line.
But in the early days you could tell that he's learning from his mistakes and eventually goes and really puts all of his energy behind one arrow.
Because, let's see, he's a couple years into the company.
It's in 1989.
He comes out with this drink.
It's a lemonade drink called the Red Rooster. which is like maple and lemon syrup.
It sounds disgusting, by the way.
But they launch it, and it's just a complete flop.
And I went and searched all the other drinks that are mentioned in the book that were still in operation, and none of them seem to be in operation today.
So I think he obviously learned from his mistake.
He's like, well, Red Bull has this power law outcome.
It's really silly for us to try to introduce anything else.
We should just stick with that and put all our energy and money behind the one thing that we know is a smashing success.
And so this is where they just start hitting new markets after new markets.
By 1997, they're opening new markets, which are new countries, nearly on a monthly basis.
And every time they hit a new market, sales just keeps, like now.
You just see this like huge spike in sales on the graph.
And then he also launches in America.
It was very fascinating.
So he actually launches in one state.
He serves, he's like, well, I think it's working in Europe.
It should work in America.
And so he just launched in California as a way to test a single market before expanding nationwide.
He'll mention multiple times the fact that he hates banks and is very afraid of debt.
And so most of the growth is just fueled from actual the profits the company's making.
And so he's able to do something that's very rare, which he's able to control costs and maintain financial discipline, even when they're making a lot of profits.
And he preaches that to his employees over and over again.
His employees have to argue and justify the expenditures of the smallest amounts, even at the same time that the company's annual record profits were being produced.
And so, as I was reading how he interacts with his employees, there's something.
If you listen to the Anna Wintour episode I did on episode 326, I said if Anna had a tagline it would be.
I have to make sure things are being done right.
I feel mattresses was the same exact way.
And sorry if I'm mispronouncing his name.
When he died, there was a bunch of different reports.
I went on YouTube to try to figure out how to pronounce his last name.
And they're all like European press reports.
So they all pronounce it differently.
But anyways, this idea, it's like well, the role he's making.
You know he talks about the fact that he's a control freak.
He's a perfectionist.
He's going to make sure things are being done right.
And so former employees are saying there's always a great deal of pressure to perform.
One can make a mistake, but you can only make the same mistake once.
So he expects a lot, but he also provides a lot.
He pays salaries that are above industry average.
And in addition this is wild every Red Bull employee, from the secretary to the board, has a company car.
Past employees repeat the same thing, that he is extremely loyal.
They describe him as a gentleman.
They say if you've helped him once, he will never forget it.
And there's also some bizarre things.
When I got to this part, this is the note I left myself when I read this part.
I go, because he's talking about, you know, it has a cult-like following outside.
And then you get the idea that there's a cult-like following inside.
And I wrote to myself, am I reading this right?
They drink special water only available internally.
And so at these internal company events, they drink this thing called Luna Aqua, which is mineral water that is allegedly only drawn at the full moon.
And they say it's advertised that it supposedly awakens the spirits of life.
And so they serve it to Red Bull employees and then a bunch of Red Bull athletes or anybody in like the Red Bull family.
And I think it might be served at Red Bull events as well.
And so there's this great quote in this section that I think applies to this.
Cult brands have their own laws.
Otherwise, they would not be cultish.
And again, to you and I, when we describe something as cult, that's not a pejorative.
This is a very positive thing.
A lot of the greatest companies in the world, a lot of greatest brands.
You could describe them as a cult-like following.
And Red Bull definitely has that.
A lot of the culture and the ideas of Red Bull.
It's just really the founder's personality writ large.
The accepted code of conduct for Red Bull people is set by Massachusetts himself.
He is a fine and elegant person who values a cultured tone of conversation and good manners.
You're supposed to hold doors open for the ladies and you do not get drunk in public.
Red Bull is Massachusetts and Massachusetts is Red Bull is a quote from a former employee.
And so let's go into this idea that he views Red Bull as a marketing conglomerate.
Again, marketing is our core competency.
We're going to outsource everything else.
Red Bull has no production facilities or warehouses.
Many large corporations outsource their marketing and advertising activity.
Red Bull consistently took the opposite approach.
It outsourced production and distribution and takes care of sales and advertising itself.
Basically, Red Bull is just a large marketing machine.
Production, bottling, and delivery, which require simple manual labor, are outsourced.
Now, this also speaks to being a gentleman, more like an old-school way of approaching things.
So when he's outsourcing all the bottling and the production, right?
His main bottler relationship was sealed with a handshake.
The bottler is this family business that has been around for over 100 years.
He meets with the head of that business. that company, right?
It's in German.
I'm not even gonna try to pronounce it.
They agreed to produce Red Bull on a handshake.
That was in 1987.
And they still have this collaboration.
This is what, 40 years?
How many?
Yeah, about 40 years.
He says, we are hopelessly loyal to each other.
Mastersitz once described his, that's how he described his relationship with his bottling partner.
For Dietrich Mastersitz, a handshake among men is still worth something.
So, Charlie Munger said something that was excellent.
There's actually two.
He said this in.
Charlie Munger said this in this interview that he did with the release of the republication of Poor Charlie's Almanac.
It's on the Invest Like the Best podcast feed.
If you haven't listened to it, I keep talking about this.
It's so important.
It was released December 5th, 2023.
It is Invest Like the Best episode 355.
It is John Collison, co-founder of Stripe, interviewing Charlie Munger.
In that podcast, which i've listened to, i think, four times already, charlie munger says something is fascinating.
He says trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth.
He is constantly trying to.
His whole life he maneuvered himself into a high a web.
I think he calls like a web of a seamless web of deserved trust, where it's like.
You know, in some cases we have just have a handshake or an agreement.
We don't even have a contract.
And there's another great invest, like the best episode on rolex.
It's on the founding of rolex, and the founder of rolex did this exact same thing one of his important suppliers.
I can't remember what part of the watch they produced for him, but they had a handshake deal, no paperwork at all, that lasted 70 years.
So again, I think this all ties to the great way that Charlie described, that that trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth.
This is the trust that Matashits had with his main bottler.
And if you really stop and analyze everything else, The way he set up his business, it's like well, why would he do that?
Well, this asset light approach frees up funds for marketing.
He was building a marketing conglomerate from the very beginning.
He understood that at the very beginning he's going to outsource anything.
That's not his core competency.
Something else you see that he thinks like a marketer.
So if you remember, James Dyson had this great realization from trial and error in his career.
And he says you should, if you're making a physical product, make your product look different from the start.
Talked about he had a huge advantage.
Right, he's distributing his vacuum cleaner in the same place.
Everyone else buys vacuum cleaners.
You go to a store he said you'd see like a line of like, let's say, five vacuum cleaners.
You see four that look like very similar and then a fifth one is like what the heck is.
That doesn't mean you're gonna buy it, but you're again.
Indifference is the enemy to the inventor.
Right, he's like you might not buy my vacuum cleaner, but you're sure as hell going to notice it.
And uh, matches to the same thing where he made the can of.
I think everybody's seen what a Red Bull can looks like.
No other can looked like that back then.
Now some have copied this, but he made that tall slim can with the intention of looking different and standing out from every single other thing that would be on the same shelf.
And one hilarious little story is Red Bull has its own private aircraft fleet.
It's called the Flying Bulls.
They use them for a bunch of events.
The can holders in those planes only hold cans the size of Red Bull.
I thought that was cool.
I also thought it was cool when asked, he was asked why he did that.
And Dietrich said, everything is marketing.
Let's go back to this focus that he has.
He puts all of his energy behind one arrow.
I sell Red Bull.
I sell energy drink called Red Bull in a can.
Might have a couple of different variations, but I don't do anything else but that.
And so, as the brand got more and more popular, he got assaulted with all these offers to like hey, let's license it.
We can make Red Bull gummy bears, and we can make Red Bull underwear and Red Bull perfume.
And he said no to every single one.
He does not want to use the Red Bull brand for anything else but to sell the actual energy drink, to sell cans of Red Bull.
All marketing is just made to sell more energy drinks.
And so I found this fact in a couple different places.
It's insane to me.
Like, I can't believe this is true.
So he talks about the fact, like, he hates banks.
He does not like debt.
He's aiming for fun and for durability over every single thing else.
And so his motto, it says absolutely no debts to a bank.
And he has stuck to that since the founding of the company.
Only in the second year of Red Bull did it accept minor bank financing, which we talked about earlier.
That he's still loyal to them.
But the company says that they only spend what they've already earned.
And so all the growth and expansion has been funded, self-funded.
And this is the crazy part.
To not go into debt, there were no dividend payouts of Red Bull until 1999.
So you're talking for the first what 15 years of the company.
He essentially just lived off of his own salary as the managing director of the corporation and that all the profits had flowed back into expansion.
And so how many people have been able to do that?
15 years you're just making.
I'm sure the salary is great, but nothing like i mean, why is it paying off?
Because then in the 2000s and the next, for like 20 years of his life, he's paying himself.
You know, i've seen all kinds of reports.
He made 100 million this year.
He made 165 this year, he made 400.
That year, made 700 this year.
His son inherited uh, after his dad died, his part of the of red bull and his son's dividend this year was 615 million dollars.
So that is a crazy, crazy dedication to no dividends for 15 years, living off your salary and then plowing everything back into expansion.
And then by that time the company is so valuable that you essentially just are living on unlimited money.
And when he talks about this, I think you get insights onto why that was so important to him.
If you really think about it, I think it was Warren Buffett said.
It was either Warren Buffett or Charles de Gaulle.
But to win you must first survive.
And so the way he's operating his company.
What he's saying here without saying is like we're never going to do anything that could potentially compromise our survival.
And here's a quote from him.
I have been raised on the motto that one does not incur debt.
We at Red Bull spend the money that we've earned, not that we might earn someday.
We never want to endanger the existence of the company, not even for a second.
And so this constant expansion is something, another theme that just flows through this entire story.
I love General George Patton's speech to the Third Army.
I listened to it to hype myself up.
I don't know.
I probably listened to it hundreds of times.
But there's something that he says, that Patton says to his soldiers in that speech, when they're fighting, they're about to fight the Germans.
That I think is very similar to how Massachusetts kept.
It says that he kept his empire constantly in motion, that he was constantly trying to grow and expand it.
And so Patton tells his army, or his soldiers, that I don't want to get any messages saying that I'm holding my position.
We're not holding a goddamn thing.
We are advancing constantly.
And when I'm getting to this section, about the fact that the Red Bull empire, you know, through the founder, he's constantly keeping that empire constantly in motion.
For some reason, that quote from Patton popped my mind goes back to this idea that Red Bull, as viewed from the founder's lens, is a marketing conglomerate.
His economic empire is a marketing conglomerate, and hence the entire activity of Red Bull is to be seen against the background of marketing.
All corporate projects like Formula One football, air races media, serve the core business, which is the sale of the energy drink.
And he was way, way ahead of his time on this.
Economics, especially in the consumer goods industry, he said, is essentially a battle for attention.
Red Bull throws more material into this battle than all of its competitors, focusing primarily on sports and increasingly on culture and recent history.
No other company wins spends nearly as much money on advertising and marketing, meaning other company in the same market.
And something that he picked up too was the importance of differentiation.
He says, you learn this in the first semester of marketing, that you have to differentiate yourself.
Consumers want the original, not the copy.
So he even applies that not only to his product, but also to the way he markets, like all these media events and these crazy things.
So these outrageous and unique events, like the guy jumping from space.
If you think about like why that's so smart.
An outrageous and unique event will get covered for free in other media.
So essentially, this is multiplying his advertising and marketing spend for free.
And so some of the things that they spend money on.
It says about half of the marketing budget is spent on unusual, unusual sports as running in the Himalayas, skydiving over the English Channel, surfing on the Amazon or mountain biking in a mine.
That's crazy.
These events may not attract too many spectators, since they don't take place around the corner, meaning in person, but due to their extravagance they attract interest from numerous media outlets and thus reach a larger audience.
And so even his approach to like sports sponsorship, right?
You would think okay, you can go to any sports event.
You see, you know this beer's advertising and this company's advertising.
He buys, so he has bought his Formula One teams, his football teams.
The crazy thing is when he starts, essentially what he's saying is like hey, I don't want to just sponsor, I want to own.
And then I want to rename it to the company.
So his soccer team's They renamed the teams the Red Bulls.
So that is their actual name.
And then the logo on the jerseys is the Red Bull logo.
And this is what he says about it.
Our philosophy in sports sponsorship is not to run around with a suitcase full of money and buy advertising space.
We don't want to be like Marlboro on the Ferrari, but we want to be integrated into the sport.
That's why we own an F1 team.
We want overall responsibility and to make our own difference.
He calls F1 a very important marketing tool.
And then he makes sure that all of his marketing and all the events and all the stuff that he's investing in.
He has a very symbiotic relationship with other media, like other larger distribution forms of media.
So what they'll do is they control everything, right?
They put up the money for the event.
They make the event.
Then they make sure that they never relinquish media rights to every event.
So as a result, they've produced hundreds and hundreds of hours of content material every year from like TV shows, radio stations print, and then they'll go to other TV broadcasters, other radio stations, other newspapers and magazines and they will give them their content for free.
And so when they put on the Red Bull Air Race, the Red Bull Air Race World Series, that content that Red Bull made and owned, they gave it to over 70 different television stations all over the world and said hey,
We put all this money into this.
Here's something that you can't get anywhere else, that your customers will find, your watchers or listeners or whatever, your audience will find interesting.
Here, we don't want anything for it.
You just play it for free.
And because the media outlets don't have to pay to produce that material, they jump all over it.
So again, a very clever way to just multiply his advertising and marketing spend.
And so I mentioned earlier that he has developed his own company building philosophy, one that is very unique to him.
And so he talks about the fact that, even though he went to school for business, he just doesn't really believe a lot of the stuff that he was taught.
And so it says, Massachusetts has amassed his wealth despite, or perhaps precisely because he's at odds with some basic business principles.
If someone says to him that the primary goal of a company is to maximize profit, he simply declares that to be incorrect.
He thinks longer term and more broadly than his competitors.
I just don't believe everything I learned at business school, he has repeatedly said.
He never tires of emphasizing that money was never his main motivation for starting his own company.
Rather, the driving forces were longing for freedom and independence, as well as finding joy in the work.
This is why you don't retire, right?
If you love what you do, you're obviously making a bunch of money in it.
You're free and you have complete independence to control What you work on who's around you.
There's nothing better than that.
Our motto, going back to a quote from him, our motto is the journey is the destination.
I don't want to go to the summit to stand at the top, but to do the climb up.
One of the great one, of this maximum I have saved on my phone.
This great line I think about all the time and I try to apply it to my work.
I love the climb.
I don't care where the summit is.
You don't last 40 years into the same business if that's not true for you.
It is true for Mashes.
He's like, I don't care.
I'm having fun.
I'm free.
I'm independent.
And I get joy from the work.
And I think, in addition to all that, I think one thing that helped the longevity is the fact that he decided to move.
Originally, the company was headquarters in a bigger city called Salzburg.
And he winds up moving the headquarters to this tiny village that I can't even pronounce.
And it only has 1,500 inhabitants.
It's like almost all Red Bull.
The local like governing.
Like the local politician said that if it wasn't for Red Bull, the place would be impoverished.
And I think it's like one of the richest communities in Austria.
And so he actually moves the company headquarters to this little tiny village.
This is very similar to the idea.
Like if you listen to the podcast I did on the founder of Bugatti, he did this exact same thing.
That's episode 316 Brunello Cuccinelli.
You know, it was a huge again.
Bugatti did his business for till he died.
You know Bruno Cucinelli is still alive, but he's been doing his business for like 45 years.
That's episode 289.
This idea is like, okay, you're controlling the product that you work on.
You're controlling who's like who works in the company, but you should also put a lot of time and emphasis like where you're actually doing your work.
And I'm fascinated by these people that actually build like physical manifestations, almost like their entire, like building, building their own, like miniature world inside of the world.
I guess George Lucas did the same thing with Skywalker Ranch, but we see this idea again with Matt Schitts.
This little community is on this picturesque lake in some word I can't pronounce.
And he said they asked why he moved it there.
And his answer was simple.
The aim was to create a more pleasant working atmosphere.
Now, there was one funny thing.
I have to add though, because people are having these rumors about why he did this.
And it goes back to the fact that he's secretive and likes to control his environment.
It also said that he wanted to build a network of underground people tunnels so he can move from building to building without being seen.
And then more about the fact that his business is kind of like his personality writ large.
He stays incredibly fit.
He loves extreme sports, aviation, riding his motorcycle.
And he constantly talks about he refuses to ever get married.
I'll tell you this funny sentence on that.
They call him the top bull, which is hilarious.
I don't know if that's just it's the German translation in English.
I hope not.
I hope they actually call him the top bull because I thought it was funny.
The top bull takes care of his body, keeps fit and is in amazingly good shape for someone almost 70 years old.
He says everything that gives me pleasure in life is connected with a certain physical fitness and a physical well-being.
And so it is pure selfishness that I do something for my fitness.
I like going to the mountain.
I like skiing.
I like sailing.
I like riding my motorbike.
Everything I do is connected with physical agility, motor skills, dexterity, strength, and stamina.
In order to enjoy it outdoors, I need the indoor program.
So he's saying his dedication to physical fitness.
To be able to perform well in the outdoors, he has to be dedicated to his gym routine, his workout routine.
And it says he is a declared opponent to the marital state.
He was never married his entire life, just has his one son.
And what I love most about him is that he was true to his authentic self to the very, very end.
One thing he's categorically ruled out again and again exiting the company in the form of selling his shares.
I hardly even allow this question, he said.
We could have done it a dozen times already.
Our view on this has not changed.
We neither have the desire to do so, nor is there a need.
And this is the one exception.
Of course, one can never say never for a strategic minority stakes.
Sometimes they can be helpful and indeed make sense.
Mattis has also consistently and categorically ruled out a stock market listing.
A sale or an IPO is not even remotely tempting.
And when asked if he's going to retire, he answered, I'm having more fun than ever.
