Larry gagosian is not a household name for most Americans but among the famous and the wealthy and particularly among the very wealthy he is a figure of colossal repute he is dubious of art dealers who refer to themselves as gallerists which he regards as a pretentious euphemism that obscures the
Mercantile essence of the occupation he has always favored a certain Macho bluntness and calls himself a dealer without apology with n galleries that bear his name from New York to London to Athens to Hong Kong generating more than a billion dollars in annual revenue gagosian May well be
the biggest art dealer in the history of the world the business which he owns without a partner or a shareholder or really anyone to answer to controls more than 200,000 square feet of prime real estate gagosian has more exhibition space than most museums and he shuttles
among his outposts on his $60 million private jet he's been known to observe with the satisfaction of Alexander the Great that the Sun never sets on my gallery that was an excerpt from this profile written on Larry G goian that appeared in New Yorker magazine is what I'm going to talk to you about today it
is titled how Larry G goian reshaped the art world I loved the subtitle immediately drew me in it says the dealer has been so successful selling art to Masters of the Universe that he has become one of them okay so before I jump back into this incredible incredible profile on Larry G goian I
started reading it and I couldn't put it down I was like okay that that's a clear sign to me that I should do a podcast on it I was not expecting to do a podcast on it in fact I didn't even know it existed before a week ago I just did this live show in New York City with
Patrick ranesi and there's this guy named Jackson do who I exchanged a few messages with I was actually supposed to meet when I was in New York and he went to the show and we me and Patrick were talking about this idea where if you look at History's Greatest entrepreneurs
it's like are they very introspective people and my answer to that question was like no not really they have such an extreme bias for Action they tend to just put all their energy and focus into what they're doing and so after the show Jackson sent this message he says this this com the conversation about
self-reflection reminded me of this incredible section from The New Yorker profile gagosian and so he highlights this section which I'll cover later but I read this highlight it is like two sentences and I was like oh this is my kind of guy so that made me read the profile and then I love the profile so
much I want to talk to you about it but this is the highlighted section that Jackson sent me was was fascinating says gan's response was that he avoids self-reflection because that is how you quote lose your Edge and then it quotes this AR critic who knew gagosian and
describes him this way we think of Genius as being complicated but Geniuses have the fewest moving Parts gagosian is simple he's basically a shark a feeding machine that is absolutely excellent that is something I've noticed about a lot of people that get to top of their
profession they Master the fundamentals this reminded me of one of my favorite quotes where which I keep saved on my phone and I look at all the time as a way to kind of reenter because there's a lot of times where I drift and I do too much and I'm kind of over complicating things and so I read this it says a
novice is easily spotted because they do too much too many ingredients too many movements too much explanation a master uses the fewest motions required to fulfill their intention remember that sentence as we go through Larry's Larry Goan story today a Master uses the
fewest motions required to fulfill their intention there is a genius in the Simplicity that he applies to his craft so I want to go back to that opening paragraph because it says something this this speaks to the fact that he's constantly referred to as like a shark or a tiger and it says he is dubious of
art dealers who refer to themselves as galleris so he says I'm an art dealer other people that have the exact same job he does they say I'm a gallerist which he regards as a pretentious euphemism that obscures the Mercantile essence of the occupation that is a fancy way to say what what David ogy
discovered about the advertising business he says we sell or else he comes in the advertising business and he talks about oh these people think they're artists or they're trying to impress like the newspapers or the magazines or trying to win Awards he's like I don't care about any that our
customers are hiring us to sell more of their product and olave's point was that if you're an Advertiser and you're focused on competing for advertising Awards or trying to make your ads seem like a work of art you're obscuring the mertile essence of the occupation which
is we sell our else that is going to come up over and over and over again because his critics the lar goin's critics use that they're like oh well this is supposed to be about art this supposed to be about beauty and he makes it about Commerce and that is a very common sense approach that Larry G goine
has to his business because he's like yeah you're creating something it is a piece of art but at some point money has to change hands or all of this falls apart so let's not hide what we're doing here we are selling a product and then quick before I move on to the next highlight just this idea that hey he has
a business does over a billion dollars a year in Revenue he's got galleries all over the world and he owns it without a partner a shareholder or anyone else to answer to can't help but think of James Dyson in that situation the point of what he's trying to teach you in James
Dyson's autobiography which I covered all the way back on episode 300 and I'll cover again on episode 400 is about the importance of control what Dyson repeats over and over again is difference and retention of total control and you'll see the fact that he has complete
control over all aspects of his business allows him to come up with maybe different ideas than some of his competitors so let's jump right into that so traditionally the model for art dealers has been to bet on Raw Talent and then support these artists until work by some of themselves well enough
to cover the bets made by all others so in the startup ecosystem that's going to sound a lot like seed Investments By Angels or venture capitalist there is no seed investment from Larry gagosian in the system that he pioneered he does not even bother with nent artists he has
said plainly that an artist must achieve a certain amount of sales metrics Before He'll consider getting involved he is content to let other people do the wild catting let them drill the wells he will wait till that well is producing oil then to then get involved so essentially he uses his size to his Advantage once
they've discovered an unknown artist and nurtured her into a valuable commodity he can lure that artist away with Promises of more money more support and a bigger platform and so you might be able to guess the sense that comes next because in any industry at any time
anytime somebody stacks these bunch of these unfair advantages on one on top of another and then gets a bunch of size and then uses that size to their advantage they're described the same way by people that that lack those resources and lack the ability to do so so it says when contemporaries meaning his
competitors describe him they tend to summon carnivore analogies a tiger a shark a snake his own publicists once described him as a real killer and so on the next page I actually printed this out it's 77 pages when you print it out talks about the fact that there's part of his Empire that is very
confusing to a lot of his competitors and the fact that he has to have a high level of overhead and he operates on a much grander scale than any other art dealer and so he has these lavish Estates all across the world he hosts these really expensive parties but they're not really parties you can
clearly see what he's doing and we'll go into that the fact that they're essentially their sales events just disguised as a party so I'm just going to read through this and we'll get to I think where these people are confused but we've actually seen people use what other people think is liabilities as
assets and I'll get to that in one second so he talks about hey you know he's obsessed with control he he wants to host the parties right he doesn't want to go to other people's parties he wants to host and so they have that he has essentially his own social calendar
called Larry parties there's a Memorial Day party at like his uh beachfront mansion in Long Island he also throws a Labor Day party there he hosts a dinner in art basil in Switzerland he has a cliffside house in Capri he throws a New Year's Eve party at his place in St
Barts he hosts a pre-oscar party at his home in Los Angeles it goes on and on and on and so this is the line that really jumped out on me it says the sheer magnitude of his overhead is a source of envy and confusion other dealers are just dumbstruck that Larry could possibly be making any money
because he has such a high overhead and so when I got to this section I thought about where is the source of confusion like why are they so confused with what Larry G goin's doing because if you listen to Founders like I think this is obvious like they from the outside they
think these things are liabilities when we know that they're assets and so if you go back and I've done a bunch of episodes on the people that made a lot of money in shipping so think of Daniel Ludwick the invis invisible billionaire episode 292 I've done multiple episodes on aoso Onasis and they both arrived at
the same conclusion they invested heavily heavily in the some of the world's most luxurious yacht right I think they owned some of the biggest most luxurious Yachts at the time that they were alive and there's a line in The Invisible billionaire where Daniel Ludwig he's made multiple
fortunes but his first Fortune was on owning a bunch of super tankers and Hauling oil right and he said that he made more money from his his yacht than all of his super tankers combined what the hell does that mean he's not even on the yacht most of the time I think like
more than 70 or excuse me maybe 90% of the time his yacht was just circling the globe he wasn't on it he would use it to close deals so let's say You're The Sovereign leader of an oil producing country and you're spent a week or two with Daniel on his yacht and it's one of
the greatest experience you've ever had you're more likely to give him that contract just like if you're at Larry's house in St Barts and the walls are covered in pieces of Art and you're like oh I love that art everything around this guy is for sale he'll talk about this over and over again uh Bernard rol
goes to his townhouse Larry's townhouse in uh New York City he's like oh I like this chair and Larry's like okay you can have it this still goes on today things like Mansions Yachts private jets these these can be assets especially so this happens because I know a bunch of friends I have a bunch of friends that
you know they they run startups they raise money usually they're raising money from you know people worth 500 million multi-billionaires and I've heard stories it's like yeah this guy wanted in on the deal he chauffeured me and my co-founder in his private helicopter when we landed on his
Hampton's estate and imagine you're some 25-year-old kid that did not come from a world like this and now you have this world famous investor sitting across from you offering you a term sheet and you just flew you in and you're staying at his his mansion in the Hamptons over
the weekend like you you know this has influence the principle behind all this the principle behind the fabulous Greeks the shipping magnets the angel investors and veter capitalists private markets investors and G goian selling art it's the same principle behind all of it and
so just keep that in mind as we go through the rest of the profile because it is there is like we think of Genius as being complicated but Geniuses have the fewest moving parts gag goine is simple he's basically a shark he's a feeding machine he tells you right up front everything he's doing is serving
that one purpose which is to sell more art He makes himself very very easy to interface with and he has achieved such outside success at doing so that there's a line that he's really transformed himself it says gagosian has been so successful selling art to the Masters of
the Universe that somewhere along the line he stopped being their servant and now he is one of them and one thing that gagosian understands is that outside profits flow to people that are selling things where there isn't a substitute he sells things that aren't even for sale
listen to this unlike many luxury items artworks tend to be unique objects they're one of one in the parlance of the trade so then Mark Jacobs is being interviewed for this and he's telling uh the writer a story about gagosian uh Mark Jacobs told me Larry sells things that aren't for sale typically the most
coveted items become available only when the previous owner dies or gets divorced or goes bankrupt an elite dealer like gagosian can sometimes rest away a treasure by offering the new owner ideally someone he knows everything on this everything will run on relationships this is another huge um
important Insight that he that he understood really really early the entire world runs on uh relationships the entire art world runs on relationships he really he literally builds a treasure map of where all these assets are there's no like Central centralized directory on like where the
great masterpieces are and so he'll he'll just call he'll make a 100 cold calls a day mapping out who owns what where it's at and who I connect and who will sell what to this other person so fantastic and of course he's sitting in the middle creating the market and makes
money on both sides it's insane uh so it says uh Elite dealer like a goian can sometimes rest away a treasure by offering the owner ideally someone who knows a whopping premium if you want a specific art piece you call gagosian to help you find one hanging on someone else's wall and then you make the owner
an offer that he can't refuse if the owner does refuse you then double the offer and then if he refuses again you double it again it is the super rich equivalent of ordering off the menu and then there's another surprising aspect that go goian built his business around and it's the fact that there is status
anxiety he think about he he built a business around the person who already has at all they have all the money they have all the toys yet there's still even at that level status anxiety that is not spoken about listen to this part uh gagi maintains his influence by attending to
the discreet status anxiety of the buyer who are already has everything people in the art world are incredibly insecure the richest guy walks into the room he wants a certain painting but he cannot get it immediately he becomes insecure this is part of what Larry does he
exploits that a friend of G goian describes attending a dinner party at his Manhattan townhouse along with a fabulously wealthy Tech founder and witnessing a look of real consternation on the young man's face as it dawned on him that for all his money and power he was not as connected as gagosian this
Tech founder has more money than G goian even though they're both very wealthy right but gagosian has something that he lacks he has the social statuses in the right quote unquote circles and so this is the crazy part he inverted talking about gagosian he inverted this thing
where normally the art dealers were trying to emulate their clients Larry's clients are trying to emulate him and of course this next section is so important of course there is always a blueprint there is a blueprint there is always a blueprint and of course Larry G goian reads biographies gagosian is running
the Playbook of this guy that lived a long time before him that had his same job named Joseph duven this is incredible gagosian isn't the first to pull off this transposition he is a big reader and one of his favorite subjects is the life of Joseph duen the great art dealer who helped assemble the art
collections of Andrew melon JP Morgan and other robber barons there are several biographies of Joseph du and gagosian informed me that he has read them all one thing that duven did that gagosian is also doing is duven made a point of showing his clients that he lived better than they did and this
is what I mentioned earlier that everything G goian does serves his main purpose right numerous friends of gagosian caution me not to mistake this merrygoround of parties and Gallas and super yacht cruises for a life of leisure this guy is always working this [ __ ] Works 24/7 all of the fun
dinners they have a reason for being fun the parties are marketing showcases in Disguise and so ever since I did that podcast on Bernard and all it's episode 296 if you haven't listened to it uh yet I've just been fascinated trying to collect as many stories about him as
possible and there's actually he appears I mentioned this earlier but he appears in this piece and so he's at uh gagan's townhouse in Manhattan and he says Arn all expressed enthusiasm for some art on display and I told him everything here is for sale you want to buy this chair
you can buy this chair you want to buy the painting just ask it is all for sale this is what I mean about K GOI just makes it really easy to interface with him he just he's he's a shark for sales right K goine insisted to me that he does not sell art out of his house and then allowed that he actually has I love
that I don't do that oh yeah I actually do that he's just hilarious and he says a True Dealer knows that everything has the price and the best way to raise the price of something is to say that you would never sell it that is actually not a um direct quote from gagosian but that
does describe him so let me say it again A True Dealer knows that everything has a price and the best way to raise the price of something is to say that you would never sell it and so the majority of this piece focuses on like Larry's business how he built the business what
it looked like when he was uh in the early days what it looks like now there's not a lot of family history but it is fascinating because you and I talk about the river again that you can always understand the son by the story of the Father the story of the father is
embedded in the sun they do bring up the fact that his early life he was exposed to his dad was a bit of a drunk and a gambler and rather financially illiterate another example of one of my favorite quotes from Game of Thrones those on the margins often come to control the center those on the margins
often come to control the center G Goin did not start life as an Insider he grew up in a middle class Armenian American Family his father was an accountant who later retrained to be a stock broker it wasn't a happy childhood his father liked to gamble so he's he now G goian
is talking about his dad his dad's name is ARA ARA liked to gamble more than he should he drank more than he should still describing his dad his life didn't seem particularly disciplined most of his stock broking consisted of trying to talk his relatives into buying Securities from him his dad dies of lung
cancer at the early age of 59 years old at that time G goian is only 24 and this is really interesting that gag GOI and anybody describes him now as like super ambitious he's working all the time he knows what he wants and he's chasing after but in his early life he did not have that his early years meaning his
early 20s had a notable deficit of the quality that has now come to Define his life ambition he dropped out of college twice and it took him six years to finally graduate he held down a string of menial jobs he worked in a record store he worked at a grocery store he worked the graveyard
shift at a gas station then he became an assistant at the William Morris agency it's amazing how all these stories connect together I've done many many years ago I did a podcast on Michael Ovitz I'll eventually reread that book and there's a second book about the founding of CAA uh the The Firm that
Ovitz started that I'm going to read and make a podcast on as well but he is actually Mich at this time goian is working as Michael oit's assistant I think he's working like 60 hours a week for like 90 bucks and it was working in this office environment he's like oh I'm
never going to work in an office environment ever he hated the heirless corporate environment and the jocking of his colleagues likening the experience to a knife fight in a phone booth and Ovitz was interviewed for this piece too and he saids something was fascinating
he says that he he believed that g goian could have made a formidable agent because he said that art dealing and being an agent the vocations are similar you are buying and selling and that is the really The View that I have of goes into my mind after reading this is he's just a master salesman and he doesn't
try to hide that he understands that artists are usually internally driven they want to create art works of art because they have a the compulsion a desire to but he makes it easy for them to do that for a living because he makes sure that their bank accounts Stay full
and you know that because how he got into the business so he quits will the William Morris agency is's like I don't want to work in an office and so he goes and gets a job as a parking attendant and he's in Westwood this is in La he says then one day he noticed a street vendor selling posters at the
edge of the parking lot this is his first exposure to the art World selling posters of cats right on the street and so he's parking cars he noticed a street vendor that's selling posters at the edge of edge of the parking lot that he's at if gagosian possesses one secret weapon that has equipped for Success it
might be his dis inition that is not a common you probably know what it means that is not a common word so I went and looked it up disinhibition the inability to withhold an inappropriate or unwanted Behavior the inability to withhold an inappropriate or unwanted Behavior K
goian is going to be a very very polarizing figure you either love him or you hate him but you are compelled to have some kind of opinion about what's going on and so this is what they mean about disinhibition and why is probably a weapon that that he has wielded for
amazing success because this is like 40 years later he's still in this business so he goes over to the vendor and he's just checking out what he's selling it's a kitten a picture of a kitten playing with a ball of yarn so gagosian proceeded to in his words copy this guy's business G goian started buying
directly from the firm because he found out where the poster who's the supplier of the posters figured out who the supplier of the posters for says okay I'll buy directly and I will start doing this because this is a way to make money and I can do this outside I don't have
to be side in an office so he starts buying directly from the firm and selling on his own art was an arbitrary choice this is very important art was an arbitrary choice if the guy had been selling belt buckles kosian said I might have tried to sell belt buckles he just wanted a product that one he knew was
already selling and two then he would just sell it but the difference between go Goan and this guy that he found at the edge of the parking lot is the guy at the edge of the parking lot stopped there G goine is Relentless he's focused on one thing and he relentlessly improved proves that so what does he do
he adds a cheap frame to the kitten poster playing with a ball of yarn why does he do that by adding a cheap frame he discovered he could sell a $2 poster at a considerable markup he started charging $15 he starts making so much money he's able to lease a little patio and he
starts to sell these frame posters to passerbys on this Avenue then he began letting local crafts people sell leather goods and other trinkets on his patio in exchange for $6 a day in rent and 10% of their gross sales he called this the open gallery he's doing this in the year
1972 that would make G goian 27 years old at the time and 51 years later he is still in the art dealing business and it's important to note that he starts a business without knowing how to run a business so he starts hiring people when he's just a oneman shop he's making a bunch of money then he leases
uh the patio in the real estate then he hires a bunch of other people and he's just having trouble uh he's unpredict like his Revenue sources are unpredictable so he's got a bunch of unpaid bills he's got creditors chasing him down he almost had his car repoed one time uh the few employees that he do
does have uh they know that when he issues paychecks they literally have to run to the bank and whoever gets there first is the one that actually gets paid before those other checks bounce so he didn't know what he was doing but he's a very quick learner and soon he learns
how to run a business and so then he's like okay I don't want to just sit here and sell cat posters all day like what else can I do and he figures out this is how he becomes a very very novice art dealer and so his interest into Fine Art he starts carrying mostly prints and
photographs and he's doing this at a time where there's in the early 1970s in La there's a lot of young they call them young Hollywood types who were starting to collect art and they would get drawn in by something in the window outside of gagosian gallery if you want to call it
a gallery at this point and then they find themselves in conversation it says they find themselves in conversation with with the eager gregarious proprietor gagosian had no training in art history but he was a quick learner and so this woman that he was dating at the time said next to his bed he had all
these stacks of art books he was really studying and so in addition to books he's also reading all the trade magazines trying to familiarize himself and trying to teach himself this industry and this is actually really important because as he's looking through a magazine one day he comes
across a series of photographs he liked this goes back to his disinhibition so he's like oh I'm just going to cold call this guy so he calls the he looks up who the photographer is it's this photographer in New York named Ralph Gibson and G goian gets Gibson on the phone and says hey I've got a gallery in
the west coast your stuff's only available in New York why don't we do an an exhibition a West Coast exhibition of your photograph and we do it at my gallery and so at the time Gibson is selling prints to his work for like $200 a pop and he says okay I guess we can do
this what's the downside but you have to buy three or four of these as a guarantee to make sure like it it's worth my time and so go and does something very smart he immediately gets on a plane goes to New York with a check in hand to meet Gibson in person this changes his life a cold call changes his
life because Gibson at the time was represented by maybe the most legendary or one of the most legendary art dealers in New York at the time this guy named Leo castelli a description of Leo castelli in those days in the art World they called him the Pope the pope of art dealers and then immediately because
gagosian knows that building relationships run everything you have to build relationships he starts building a relationship with a much older art dealer and Leo took a liking to him and so gagosian talks about like what well why like Leo could you know build relationship with any Young art dealers
like why is he doing that with you and then this goes back to the main theme why why what got me interested in reading this profile to begin with genius is easy to understand He makes himself unbelievably easy to interface with just like Steve Jobs did Steve Jobs did it in three words insanely great
products you're interested in building insanely great products come work with me if you're interested in buying insanely great products buy my products he's so easy to understand and so kosian says that his impatience with the art World pretense may have endured him to
Leo castelli I did not do a lot of blah blah blah I think my bluntness appealed to him so they start building a relationship gagosian got on the plane that is so important get on the plane gets to New York so now he's building this relationship he eventually moves he moves as in entire operation to New York
I think he's 40 when he does that and so he's spending a lot of time in New York with Leo castelli and they're walking down the street this is going to be a new like another very very important relationship and he notices that castelli says hi to this guy walking in
the direction and G goian says who was that and he says that is Sai new house he can buy anything he wants Sai new house actually owned or I think he used to I don't know uh he's passed away now but he had a media Empire and he actually used to own the New Yorker in fact I'm doing some uh research on this
Anna winter episode and he actually hires Anna winter and puts her I think the head of Vogue I may have that wrong but when I do the Anna winter episode I'll make sure I get it right so anyways it's just fascinating how the they all connect so he's like oh that was sign
new house he can buy anything he wants go back to disinhibition gag goine immediately doubles back and introduces himself and says give me your number without an ounce of blah blah blah it was one of the most fateful introductions of his life and so sign new house will appear again I want to go
into another genius thing that gagosian did and essentially he created his own Niche and it's completely different what his mentor Leo castelli was doing so think about this it says Leo castelli specialized in what is known as the primary Market he guided the careers of living artists and sold their new work
in exchange for commission he took pride in spotting talent and so castelli would find an unknown artist Say Hey I want represent you and usually the commission uh percentages you know vary but for the primary market right uh piece of art that has never been sold before it's
kind of crazy but the artist will give up about 50% to the art dealer like a castelli right but what gag GOI realizes is like you well you have to do what you can where you are with what you have and he's like I can't do that because I don't have any relationships with
artists so his Niche is going to be the secondary market and he's going to to drastically expand and this Market's going to explode and this is where the base of his wealth is going to come from gagosian had no relationships with artists so he couldn't be a primary dealer what he did have was a gallery in
Los Angeles access to an untapped ecosystem of West Coast collectors so collectors and their parlan you and I would call that customers okay and gagosian had hoota castelli was AR aristocratic and civilized gagosian was a tiger and then the other difference between gagosian and castelli is kosian
wanted his he wanted to build a business around the richest people in the world uh castelli said that one of the best uh skills and traits that g Goin had was the fact that he knew how to deal with very rich people and this is why he wants to deal with very rich people
because he's like well who's who owns all the art if I build relationships with people that already own the art I can convince them to sell it and in doing so I'm creating my own Market uh in pursuing a very rich clientele G goian carved out a very different Niche from castelli one that harked back to
duven that's Joseph du's relationship with the robber barons remember he read he's reading the biographies as well essentially going to run duin's Playbook the secondary Market involves the buying and selling of previously owned work castelli had little interest in it and
this is why it was seen as a low status thing this sounds crazy to us today but at this time the secondary business was perceived as a Backwater by dealers it was considered a bit distasteful and it was also considered distasteful in Joseph duin's day duven had supplied his
newvo rich clients which are the robber barand right who who in many cases came from poverty now have more money but they don't have any culture they don't have the name they don't have the lands they don't have the titles right so it says duen often supplied his nvo rich clients by obtaining old Master
paintings from Noble European families that had fallen on hard times so was looked at as low stat and distasteful from people that may have been short on money but high on like social status or titles and all like the the old way we thought about wealth but duven didn't care about that and G GOI and sure as
hell doesn't give a [ __ ] about it either and so the thought that came to my mind as I'm in this section like if you really think about what's happening in gan's career it's like oh this is an opportunity that's hiding in plain sight that is ignored by The Establishment and
they have all these funny rules for why they want to ignore it and G Go's just coming in from like a blank sheet of paper and it's like I don't care about any of that I'm just this is clearly a good idea you have all this inventory that has been sold previously it's
hanging on people's walls this's this huge giant market I'm just going to figure out where everything is and I'm going to match the buyer and the seller it reminded me of when I when I uh one of my favorite books I I've done it multiple times uh it's probably if you've read it it's probably one of your
favorite books too it's episode 255 it's Sam Z Murray you know the banana king and it's the book the fish that ate the whale and if you think about that he came to this existing business the banana trade was not a new business right it was already there was already a
monopoly in the in the the banana trade but he's coming as a 19-year-old penniless immigrant and there's a line in the book where he's like well he he saw a market and the the reason he thought this Market existed was because they called it a calculation based on arrogance and it's this idea where you
have the Monopoly players throwing these bananas away that are perfectly good they're just throwing away now because they're not going to be good two or three days from now and so let me let me read from the fish that ate the whale because I think it's very similar to
what is happening in this story as far as he was concerned ripes were considered trash only because Boston fruit and similar firms were too slow-footed to cover ground it was a calculation based on arrogance I can be fast where others have been slow I can hustle where others have been satisfied
with the easy pickings of the trade gag goine is going to build an Empire he is going to go from being selling to the masters of the world or the M Universe to becoming one of them and the opportunity was hidden in plain sight and rejected by other people that were more established players in the industry
in which he's entering and just as important he's at the right place at the right time to run Joseph Devine's Playbook because this is in the 1980s and there's this massive massive explosion of new money just like there was a massive massive explosion of new money in the Robert Baron Day by by the
mid1 1980s a new generation of wealthy Americans was eager to assemble great colle collections Sai new house we're back to him sa new house had a media Empire and for more than three decades he was the owner of this magazine the New Yorker um and his family still owns
K nass which is the parent company of the New Yorker he was also obsessed with 20th century art and so what is the service that kosian is supplying to people like Sai new house the service that kagos provided was not scouting out the primary Market that market is already served why am I just going to go
in there and compete with everybody it was being a detective on the secondary market and so the way to think about what's about to happen here is that gag Goin was very secretive he's still very secretive to this day I think he would agree with this the the maximum that bad
boys move in silence but he's going to benefit because he's collecting all this information that no one else had so he's going to benefit from an information asymmetry and so it says masterpieces are rare and often hard to find there was no central registry that records the owners locations and prices of artworks
being a good secondary dealer requires knowing which people are collectors where they live what hangs inside their houses and whether they might be induced to part with any of it gagosian excelled at the hunt that is what they call this process the hunt and because goosin doesn't have any disinhibition and he
doesn't apply other people's ethics to what he's doing or other people like this might be a violation of some social order that he doesn't give a damn about like a secret society the Art Market was governed by obscure social codes and gagosian was so Unbound in his energies
and so Shameless in his tactics that he immediately attracted notice and controversy the telephone was his instrument of choice and he made a 100 cold calls a day sniffing out the location of artwork lining up buyers and then haggling with the owners until the work shook free and this was the result
significant art that had been locked up Suddenly became accessible and there was another key here and this is why I mentioned that Rel relationships run everything is the fact that he had it says he had access to a treasure map in the form of castelli castelli said I
could give him a lot of information on where the paintings were because I had sold most of them castelli had sold them when they were on the primary Art Market now his Protegé right and his friend is making a map of the secondary Art Market and he could just go and say castelli
tell me what where did you who sold what piece did you sell who did you sell to how much did you sell it for and when and so now he has this map he has this disinhibition personality tendency he is completely default aggressive and so it says now he's moved to New York it says he sometimes showed up at dinner parties
into which he wasn't invited he developed a reputation for wandering away from the festivities at private homes and would take secret Polaroids of any impressive art that he spied on the walls and then offered and then he'd offer those Works to his collectors think about how crazy that statement is
we need to pause here this guy shows up to a party he is not invited to he then leaves the dinner table walks around your house secretly takes pictures of your artwork the next day gets on the phone calls up a bunch of people says hey do you want to buy this Jason poock
or whatever artist name how much would you give it then he's going to call you and say hey great dinner party would you take5 million uh dollars for that painting that's hanging over your couch and your second living room his hunger aggressiveness and stamina were so
conspicuous that people began referring to him as go go and then what I love is throughout the piece you got to read the whole piece I'll link it down below but he's always like G goian will first like deny that he does something he's like oh I don't sell things out of my house and
he's like then immediately says yeah I I sell things out of my house and so then he does the same thing here where he's just like I didn't go around secretly taking pictures of people's houses and then his friend who's interviewed this a guy named Douglas Kramer says I was in
Larry's office once and I saw Polaroids of pieces that were in my house and I think this all relates together I think it just stems from the fact that g GOI and just believes that everything is for sale so Mark Jacobs is back in this piece and he's telling the writer about the time where he he's having a dinner
uh he hosted the dinner in his apartment in Paris and G goian was there and several days later G goian calls Mark and says hey uh would you sell these two paintings that I saw in your apartment and they wind up quickly coming to terms and Mark Jacobs describes at the pace in
which uh K goian uh moves so he invites him over to dinner he sees two paintings 2 days later he says hey will you sell them they they wind up hammering out the the amount right away 3 days later uh the money's in uh Marc Jacobs bank account and he was doing things like this all day long so another example
there's this uh this family that was big art collectors they wanted making their fortune in selling sheet metal and so the way gag goine established a relationship with them is very simple he look he knew their names knew they were art collectors he looked up their name
in the phone directory and he just cold calls them and offers to buy a specific painting that they owned and like well if you can get $1 million for it we'll sell it he hangs up the phone he then picks up the phone again calls Sai new house and sold him the painting for exactly $1 million now the commission
rates on the secondary Market are usually not as high as they are on the primary market and you know you can negotiate just like anything else for this kind of transaction there's other references in the piece highly likely it's somewhere around a 20% commission so you could think about that he just
made $2 million by making two phone calls and so if you grew up in a middle- class family your dad was a drone and he was a gambler you didn't have a lot of money and now you can make you know $10 million a day you would probably work 24/7 too and so by the 90s he's just
making a ton of money he's buying houses in Long Island he's got a carriage house on the Upper East Side he's driving a Ferrari he's leasing this giant new Gallery space on Madison Avenue and yet he is still not letting his foot off the gas so they talk about he just built out
this this uh gallery on Madison Avenue one of his friends is standing next to gagosian in in the gallery looking out out at the Street Watching all the people go by to his friend maybe to you and I those are people that's not what they were to G goian they were prospects listen to this so he says all these
people walking by he was clocking which men of extreme High net worth and which existing or potential art collectors were passing by and saying there goes so and so he knew who everyone was he saw them before they knew him that kind of aggressiveness and that eagle sharpness
for whom mattered there was no precedent in this business for that that's the eye of an industrialist that is someone who is seeking to build a massive Financial Empire and so this is a little bit about how gag GOI manages his Empire uh he does not like formal meetings he finds bureaucracy and protocol dull uh to
increase his sales he hired several people to join him as what he calls directors so directors are given a phone and a computer and instructions to sell uh there would be no mentoring from gagosian there's no hierarchy there's Larry and there's everyone else gagosian will telephone his directors all day
long if he cannot reach them he will call them 10 times he will call their spouses he will send companywide emails demanding to know why people have not picked up the phone why would directors put up with this because there's a lot of money on the table directors can make
10% of the gallery's profit on a sale and so the writer of this piece is at lunch GOI and and he's asking him he like okay well like there's no there's no mentorship like is this a succession plan or what's going on and he says he assured me that he has no plans to retire or to even step back a little I
enjoy what I do I don't know what else to do he's 78 years old when he says that describes him he's affable and Charming but noticeably guarded he will happily repeat anecdotes that he's told a thousand times but he greets any questions about his motivations or his psychology
are the particulars of his business with stoned face impassibility of a secret agent this may be the natural result of running an operation that is reflexively discreet gagosian reaps huge profits from asymmetries of information but fundamentally he does not seem to be an
introspective person go goian says that he avoids self-reflection because that is how you lose your Edge and then there's that line from the art that new gin we think of geniuses being complicated but Geniuses have the fewest moving Parts gag Goin is simple he's basically a shark a feeding machine so I
think there's two things that are at play here one is G goian like most of the people that you and I study on the podcast it's like they just have extreme biases for Action they don't sit around and Bone if things aren't going well they act they know exactly what they want to do they just keep pushing
forward in fact this reminds me of samel so uh my friend Rick Gerson was friends uh close friends with Sam zel for like two decades and he told me a story that is just absolutely amazing and I think is illustrative of this description of uh Larry gagosian and one time uh Sam
and Rick go and they they're doing this pitch for this opportunity that they want to pursue and the person that they're pitching decides hey this isn't something I want to do and so a few hours later Rick and Sam zel are on the plane and Rick brings up the fact that man can you like can you believe like
that that meeting didn't go that well and Sam zel looks at him and goes huh almost as if he didn't even know what Rick was referencing and then Rick brings it up again and Sam said something that again I think is genius in its Simplicity he goes I can definitely look forward I might be able
to look left and right I sure as hell can't look backwards Sam had already forgotten about the meeting and moved immediately on to the next thing he wanted to do he had an extreme bias for action and I can't help but go back to this line we think of geniuses as being complicated
but Geniuses have the fewest moving Parts gagosian is simple he's basically a shark a feeding machine and so relentlessly and automatically is on to the next thing it reminds me of this line that I read in one of the Warren Buffett biographies that I think is also really really important to remember
genius lies in ignoring the unimportant looking back at a bad meeting is unimportant the important thing is moving forward always and then another thing that genius is finding value in unexpected places one of my favorite lines in Peter Teal's book 0 to1 he says the single most powerful pattern I have
noticed is that successful people find Value in unexpected places and they do this by thinking about their business from first principles instead of formulas and so he actually almost 30 years ago kosian actually hires a scholar and this is why uh the Picasso biographer John Richardson became a
consultant for gagosian gallery hiring a scholar was unconventional but clever Richardson created a series of landmark Picasso shows which Drew an estimated 100,000 people to assume that kosian was motivated purely by his love for Picasso would be to miss his grassp of the
subtle physics of his business the historical shows were advertisements for the gallery affiliating the gagosian name with some of the greatest artists of all time and as you can imagine somebody that's been in the same business for 51 years likes to play the long game there was a another benefit to
hiring Richardson as for the rich relationship with Richardson Larry is playing the long game he understood the involvement that Jon had with members of the Picasso family Richardson has said has since passed away but now gagosian has relationships with several Picasso
heirs in the end gagosian got more from his relationship with Richardson than he ever thought he could and so the initial basis of his business was his secondary Market he becomes unbelievably successful in the secondary market and so then he expands out and he starts building relationships he wants money he
wants to get the money in the primary Market as well and so because he's well known he has a success it allows him to build now he can start building relationships with living artists and so this is he he builds the relationship with living artists just like he did
with collectors on the secondary uh Market which is he just calls them over and over again incessantly and so he wanted to build this relationship this guy's just has recently passed away but this this artist named chamley and initially chamble would pick up the phone and immediately hang it up over
and over again Goan kept calling and then he finally breaks through he says uh it's a crazy armanian do not put down the phone trambley was so amused that he decided to hear gagosian out and it's a good thing that he didn't hang up the phone because kosin is going to wind up
being ch's best salesman ever he's sometimes sells uh the paintings that they're doing a few days after they're created and then this is the kind of financial Arrangement that they came to money is the basis of everything gagosian had secured a commission rate of about 30% so he'd throw these these
shows for chamble in his Gallery he winds up selling 10 paintings in a night and he would make $15 million a night and then it goes on to describe this behavior that is you know looked down upon by other art dealers or competitors and his whole point is like listen if I
have side like if I have an advantage that my competitors lack of course I'm going to use that and of course they're going to get upset at it and he also doesn't care about your Traditions or your sense of Ethics he's feels perfectly com comfortable deciding what he's going to do for himself uh so it
says he poached artists with Reckless abandoned one advantage of having satellite galleries is that he could offer shows in other cities to artists who already had New York representation G goian scorns any suggestion that luring artists away from other dealers is UNS is unsportsmanlike and resents
any dealer who tries to burnish his ethics on my hide and so he constantly expands this idea that hey I admit that this business runs on the money right the rest of the art World tries to hide that fact even though they're after the money too and so a lot of his competitors don't like the fact that he
has these size advantages or he he has this aggressive nature but his artists like it because again he is providing a service for them not only does he sell their work and fill up their bank account but he helps them expand their Ambitions he helps them understand that
there's value in their work in fact there's a hilarious and the way he does this is really funny to me uh there's a hilarious exchange so there's this painter named Cecilia Brown she grows up in England or she grew up in England rather and her her stepmom first meets gagosian and you know they're all
English and this is how they describe him he's so American the looks the attitude he is very male and so he takes on Brown as a client and the first thing he tells her is like hey your paintings are too cheap for my customer you need to raise your prices um and they wind up
having a a really good relationship but she winds up leaving after 15 years because she said that he was too commercial and if you read this piece I don't think AG goian cares about that description of being too commercial because he talks about the fact that uh he says after all art is just money on
the walls and he says that three or four decades after he's been in this industry but he was like that from day one where he's just like I don't hide the commercial nature of this entire industry and so it's good for artists that he helps uh artists make a lot of money but he also helps collectors make
a ton of money and so there's all these like Master of the Universe types that are interviewed for this piece and uh David geffin is in here and I just got to read these parts to you from David geffin I did his his uh biography the operator a long time ago I think it's
like episode 111 of Founders or something like that um I should read it again I just find him a very fascinating person from where he started out to where he wound up um I'd love to meet him actually but he's just a character and I love characters and so David's on the phone with the interviewer and he
says uh when I reach David gon by phone he counted out loud he's talking about all the pieces he just you know David has houses all over the world he's got that giant yacht so he's just sitting in his apartment in New York on the phone and he's just counting off all the
different pieces that either bought or sold by gagosian for him so it says he counted out loud one two three four five six six pictures just in this apartment I spent an incredible amount of money buying pictur pictures from Larry geffin told me I've never overpaid for anything
for me they've been incredibly good Investments most of the money that I've given away which is well over a billion dollars I financed by Selling paintings that I owned and so for the next two pages I think I highlighted almost the the next three pages I've highlighted almost the whole thing this is excellent
and there's a lot of I think lessons in here so first of all we talked about the fact that g gozin started his business at the beginning of this massive Bull Run so part of the reason that gein's bets have paid off so extravagantly is that kian's tenure in the business has
coincided with a period of Staggering growth in the price of Contemporary Art In 1980 when a Jasper John's painting sold for a million dollars the deal made headlines because it was the first known instance in which a work by a living artist had broken seven figures okay so 1980 a painting by a living artist is
sold for a million dollar 30 years later 2010 Steph Cohen purchased another uh painting by Jasper John's for $110 million and so KAG GOI makes the point that yeah 1980 huge bull run but it's not all up there there's like ups and downs right overall the arching theme is obviously up and to the right but he
does something smart he goes to where his customers are there were subsequent dips to be sure but each Peak has been higher than the other one that preceded it in 2012 he opened a gallery on the grounds of some French airport I'm not even going to try to pronounce it's an
airport for private jets outside of Paris where his clients can buy art upon Landing in their private jets everything this guy does he just he just makes one smart move after another it is very logical very easy to understand I'm going to call it simple and I don't mean
that as a pror of he's there's a simp there's a genius in this guy's Simplicity he's just constantly looking for an advantage after Advantage regardless of what's going on even during downturns so here's David gein's not done he's still in the story okay so even during downturns he has found ways
to thrive after the Dow Jones dropped in 1990 geffin listen to how they describe geffin right geffin still as liquid as the day is long geffin who was still as liquid as the day is long swooped in looking for bargains according to gagosian staff at his Madison Avenue Gallery used to joke that when David
geffin stopped by it meant that they would make payroll this month and then during the same time period uh Sai new house was still alive him and his wife moved into like this this apartment that had all these windows and Larry goes to visit him and he does not like that he
has all these windows why because if you have Windows you can't hang up more art this guy is a shark he's so easy to understand Larry said don't you find this view a bit boring it's a view of the East River don't you find this view a bit boring why do you need so many
windows windows are the enemy of the art dealer but even the fact that they have less space on their walls gagosian turns turn that into Advantage the new houses sold off part of their collection to David geffin including many paintings that gagosian had helped the couple acquire he's making money coming and
going do you see what's happening here for these artworks gagosian landed a repeat commission I don't like to sell paintings to the museums he said then I can't get them back repeat serial commissions is a massive part of his business he's just making money over and over again selling the same thing for
higher prices over and over again in 2003 Steven Cohen bought a Jackson poock painting from David geffin for $50 million these numbers are insane okay so 2003 Steven Cohen buys a painting from David geffin three years later goosin asked geffin he if he'd ever sell this
other painting that he owned geffin said I'd suppose if you got me 140 million Stephen Cohen bought it that day and this sentence describes why I'm reading all this to you this is a lucrative situation in which to serve as a middleman as David geffin put it if Larry represents the owner and you want
it you've got to buy it from him and as gagosian recognized the competitive Drive of self-made billionaires does not go into remission once they've made their fortune and this also speaks to how well gagosian knows his customer and how well he knows human psychology he
seems to have understood that a certain kind of client is so unaccustomed to being told no that rejection can actually become an enticement that is a very very old idea IDE the longest book I've ever read for the podcast I think it's episode like 98 maybe somewhere in
there 97 it's Enzo Ferrari it is a thousand Page biography of Enzo Ferrari it's so hard to find I went to to try to find another copy recently I was unsuccessful in doing so I'm going to read an excerpt about what what Enzo Ferrari when he was alive understood about marketing that still resonates to
this day and it's exactly what's happening in in where we are in the story of Larry gagosian it says Ferrari was an absolute marketing genius I remember one visit from a very important and American uh very important and Wealthy American client the factory parking lots were filled with unsold
cars which we tried to hide from public view the American said of Enzo I would like to buy a Ferrari Ferrari replied yes of course well we have so many requests I'll do what I can but I'm afraid that you'll have to wait several months before you can buy one that was because a Ferrari must be desired it
cannot and must not be perceived as something that is immediately available otherwise the dream is gone in order to maintain the exclusivity of the brand produ production has always been lower than the requests of the market for a certain kind of customer being told no when they're not used to hearing no
makes them want it more and G goian uses that tactic over and over again people are always asking hey how can I see this how much it is it's like oh it's not for sale and so it says this is how Larry was able to lift the market by Conjuring an atmosphere of unpredictability and
Intrigue G Goin Imus the dealing process with excitement and creates a sense that when an opportunity finally presents itself you must seize it immediately at any cost when a VIP spots something new on the wall they would say Larry is that for sale and he'd say yes but only until
Tuesday the message was clear move fast we bought our first Picasso painting from him in that manner and then what's crazy is this success that he has this outside success he has compared to the other art dealers in the world it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where he becomes a brand and so therefore he's
able to raise the prices of what he's selling just because he's associated with it listen to this even with secondary sales gaging can demand a hefty commission uh the mere fact that he is the dealer endorsing and selling a work uh enhances its value whereas gagosian started his career by adding a
cheap frame to inflate a Poster's price remember the the cat posters that he was selling you know for two bucks or he excuse me he adds a $2 frame and then uh he increases the price all the way up to $15 right eventually it's his own brand that justifies the markup meaning the
fact that he is the frame a dealer who is friends with gagosian told me that collectors know that they're paying more when they deal with Larry and they're still happy to do it I have tried so this guy's trying to sell paintings too because he's an art dealer I've tried to sell the exact same painting to the
exact same collector and failed and that person then went and bought it from Larry with a significant premium on top willing to pay more for the exact same thing that is the definition of a great brand they're telling you Larry gagosian is a brand and he's also finds himself
to be in a unique position where he's the brand but he's also the market too he guides the prices so a lot of this check this out I didn't know this the lack of transparency in pricing is one of the reason that the construction of value in the art world can be so opportunistic and imprecise most
publicly reported prices come from auctions but auctions are estimated to account for less than 20% of the market that is why he is always collecting collecting collecting information he's collecting a ton of information and he's sharing none and this is some of the
most bad boys move in silent [ __ ] you over here people close to gagosian have sometimes been taken back by his Cloak and Dagger tradecraft Veronica Webb the model who once dated him uh told uh an interview about a time when a helicopter landed on their lawn gagosian told her
that he had to go look at a painting when I asked him which collector in which painting he wouldn't even tell me so there's no way he's going to tell the price but not even telling his live-in girlfriend who The Collector is and what painting he's even looking at and the prices in this world seem to be
completely arbitrary there's a great line by David Oggy where he says pricing is guesswork well it it's even more extreme in the industry that gagosian is operating in so let me tell you this story so there's this billionaire financier named Ronald Pearlman and Pearlman and G goian are like friends
and then they wind up suing each other and then they're now friends again but but they're telling a story where Pearlman is in the gallery one day this this happened all the way back in 2011 and Pearlman goes up to G GOI and say hey what is this what is this painting
cost and gag GOI says it's $8 million of course nothing in his gallery has a price tag on it okay so he's like this is $8 million and Perman is like I'm not paying eight I'll give you six and G GOI is like no I'm not budging uh so Perman leaves he keeps thinking about the
painting however and a week or so later he says okay I'll pay eight like I offered you told me eight I said six but I'll pay eight and then what does gagosian do you know what he's going to do he's not going to sell it to him too late gagosian said I just sold it to someone else sometime later gagin came
back to him and it sounds like it was like a few days later goag Goen came back to him and said that the new owner whose identity he would not disclose would sell for $1.5 million remember he's going to be making money on every sale both sides so okay you I told you
you could sell for eight you said no you said six then you came back and said eight now I'm telling you it's 11.5 milon and Pearlman who a few days earlier had balked at paying 8 million agreed I won't pay 11.5 million but I'll pay 10.5 million and it turns out that a few days before that gag goian had sold
it not for eight but for 7.25 million so then Larry calls the family that had just bought it for 7.25 million says do you want to sell me that painting they're like we just bought it but then he tells them I'll sell it for you for 10.5 million of course they're going to do it they just made 3 million
in a couple days they're doing nothing I don't I don't think they even took possession of it and so this is why gives you an insight into why Larry's obsessed with all these phone calls and how lucrative his business could possibly be in the resale to Pearlman the family made a profit of $2 million
and G goian got a million doll commission absolutely incredible okay so let's go back to this idea where he finds a way to insulate himself from all these like the the booms and busts in the art world the booms bus in the economy there is a just a reminder that there is always on the planet there's
always somebody somewhere making a lot of money and so of course kosine is going to sniff it out so there is this decrease in the American Market that coincides with this massive increase in the posts Soviet Russian market and so what he did one way that kosian has
insulated himself from the ups and downs of the art economy is by seeking out Emerging Markets so he goes and develops these relationships with all these post Soviet oligarchs is what they call them and this is the result incredibly between 2004 and 2008 so that 4year period this would be what let's say 35
this is almost 40 year he's been in the business for almost 40 years at this point 35 years something like that incredibly between 2004 and 2008 Russian buyers were responsible for almost half of gan's business worldwide eventually he has to shut down that part of the business because the US
sanctions Russia and so he has to stop selling to them and then just this is just the way he looks at it from our conversations I get the sense that kosian does not feel particularly burdened by ethical conundrums and that he aderes to a simple rule if it is illegal for him remember goes everything
goes back to Simplicity right it is illegal if it's illegal for him to do business with someone he will not otherwise it's not for him to parse the moral credentials of potential buyers and then g go in being a student of History points something out there there's a ton of you know throughout
this piece critics are saying you know money some critics and some artists are saying you know money ruins art it's all about the money it's not about the art and the point that they make in the piece is like none of this is new history doesn't repeat human nature does
uh there's nearly 500 years ago joria vasari wrote about the lavish prices that the great artists of the Renaissance commanded and the manner in which they jockeyed for wealthy sponsors it's the exact same thing 500 years later and then the piece ends with actually a story about him failing to
close like a young uh new artist and really speaks to the fact that there is like there is no separation between Larry gag GOI and and the person and the company and it's also an illustration of his domineering and Relentless nature the artist's name is wood wood wanted to know about the
gallery's long-term future so she asked what will happen when you die what the [ __ ] is wrong with you g goian exploded talking about my death when we're trying to have a meeting gagosian told wood that he wasn't going anywhere it may have been that he was succumbing to an
Affliction that is common among megalomaniacal plutocrats an inability to imagine a world in which he no longer exists wood excused herself to go to the bathroom then her phone lit up with a text from gagosian he sent the same text three times she thinks it was an accident he sent it three times this is
what the text said the other galleries that you are considering will most likely go out of business before my demise gagosian board meets twice a year nobody seems to believe that the board could take over should he die or retire so the question remains can go goian
survive without Larry like Chanel after coco or will the be a sale there has been speculation in recent years of a possible acquisition by the French conglomerate lvmh but Gan says that isn't happening the gagosian brand unquestionably has tremendous value but so much of what has made the gallery
Thrive is Larry's OWN Network and I and Persona in other words he is the company and the company is him and that is where I'll leave it highly recommend reading entire piece I absolutely loved it I thought it was incredible writing I will leave it link down below that is
325 down 1,000 AO and I'll talk to you again soon okay so real quick in case that you want to get access to my version of readwise which is called Founders notes.com you go to Founders notes.com to sign up that's founders with an S just like the podcast so Founders notes.com so when you sign up and you
get access I'm going to tell you how what what are the features that I use the most and so at the very top is the main feature the one one I use by every day and it says search highlights and there's a search bar and very simply I just search by whatever keyword I'm thinking about so it could be about
hiring about marketing about Obsession uh could be about a specific entrepreneur like Rockefeller whatever I happen to be thinking about or whatever problem I need to solve at the pro at the time so like the greatest example and I actually made like a 30 minute like short AMA about this it was asked
like how do History's Greatest Founders think about hiring and so if you type hiring in that box you'll see what what did Jeff Bezos say about it what did Thomas Edison say about it what did the people that founded Paypal say about it what did Estee Lauder say about it and
on and on and on and so I think that's pretty self-explanatory again this is a product for people already running successful companies I think I don't have to elaborate you already know what the value of that would be so the highlights feed is uh the searching SC me searching the highlights is what I
use the most now the thing I use the second most is called the Highlights feed and the highlights feed I'm loading it right now essentially it's just like these little almost like twet sized highlights from all different books and so it is completely Rand randomized and
it's almost like you have History's Greatest entrepreneurs speaking to and then just read through them and see what thoughts respond so like the first thing that came up was actually uh it's actually a highlight from one of Warren Buffet shareholder letters he's talking
about diversification and its relation to risk the next highlight is a quote from Ed KML the founder of Pixar talking about he didn't even realize at the beginning of his company how poor the communication was and that there was things going on in his company that that his the people his employees were not
telling him and his thoughts on how to fix that then there's a quote from a book that I read like six years ago and it's actually the the biography of Alibaba and he's talking about the importance of listening and that poor listeners actually have second rate negotiation skills and so that is the
second most used feature for me personally this might be different for you third feature books you have a list of all the books that are in there I think right now it says I have 307 books in here I still have a bunch I need to put in and then that that's very simple like I just went through the reason I
reposted the Mike Bloomberg episode for example is because I've been rereading the highlights and so I went back if I don't have time to reread the book which I will in the future but I just read through I think I have like 44 uh highlights of Bloomberg's autography and you read through them and there's just
so many ideas and this is happening like 15 minutes it's absolutely incredible so that's self-explanatory you can search my book The Last feature that I use the most is the favorites feature you know I have 20,000 highlights it's there's a ton of information in here and so what
I'll do is as I go back through the highlights and I've done this forever and that's why this number will always go up I have 839 favorites now but you know if you're listening to this months from now it's it's going to be higher and whether it's through searching whether it's through rereading the the
highlights on a specific book or through the highlights feed which is the random um just showing me like the random highlights that I've done if there's something like damn that's a good one I really want to remember that and so I I highlight it right I favored it and then
now that goes into the favorites feed so then I have an even more like specialized feed of ideas and highlights from different books all on one page so again need to re reiterate I think if you are like me and there's a good chance that you're if you're listening to this you're like me if you're like me
you're already running a successful company I think it's a it's a no-brainer I would at least test it out for a year there's a chance that you don't like it I not going to share that opinion with you because like I said before I listen to it or not listen to it I use it every
day and I think what I what this is going to be good for and what I hope to do is like man like for a Founder to just have a browser this this notebook sitting in a browser that they can tap into anytime I think that's going to be very valuable and I can say that because
it's been very valuable for me so hopefully that makes sense if you want to test it out it is Founders notes.com again Founders notes.com and I also leave a link down in the show notes if you want to grab the link from the podcast the show notes on your podcast player founders notes.com