Dietrich mishits 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 and3 billion meshits also runs an efficient Enterprise in 2010 Red Bull employed just 7,758 people which works out to more
than 667,000 in Revenue per person this success is the realization of a business plan that isues 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 matches hits cause 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 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 1 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 his field 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 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 even 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 now 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 and 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 uh this is going to be his partner his last name I'm going to guess is Ida and he liked the idea and so the two agreed to invest
$500,000 a piece to establish a 4949 partnership with the remaining 2% going to yaha's son so when I said earlier that he was paying dividends you know somewhere between 500 and 800 million to himself a year and his net worth was you know somewhere between 20 and 30 uh billion dollars 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 Master stroke 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 from mat shits and focus on Red Bull itself which
is exactly how he wants it a curious hybrid brid of a mogul mishits 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 mishits pulls the strings behind a consumer cult and Cults rely on message
control and Cults rely on message control mesit 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 madit 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 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 Tastee very good Mas madit 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 VI vigilance and emotional status taste is of no importance whatsoever that part actually shocked me and Red Bull I mean
I wouldn't say like tastes great but isn't it certainly doesn't taste bad I think maybe the the author uh is exaggerating a little bit here Mas has proved his marketing genius especially in the ERA this another funny thing 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 uh later on about this but I want to give you an overview this is what I'm trying to do I'm just give you an overview of who he was and how his approach to company building which I found
fascinating by the way I've been texting friends non-stop I was like I cannot believe all this stuff this is an example of that so he again he wants to Foster rumors that is just free we're going to go into you know Christian dior's comment on this which I just covered a few weeks ago you just like oh
this is just free propaganda you need 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 to party all all night because that was like a really
spreading clubs to begin with and so uh he says his ear decision to Foster rumors about Red Bull's content instead of trying to squ to quash them Tales began to circulate that torine which is one of the main ingredients Red Bull was derived from bull testicles or even that
it was Bull Seaman oh the company let the gossip travel unchecked and even set up a page Dev voted to the rumors on its website he has an incredible incredible quote about this he says the most dangerous thing for a brand branded product is low interest that reminds me of Edwin Lan founder of Polaroid Steve
Jobs hero and the patron saint of Founders podcast he said something that was fascinating and he says uh the 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 Lan like Mist
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 you the secret ingredient is is bull testicles was this all by Des did he really anticipate that a combination of rumors
in public outcry would play such a big part in driving early sales even think about that I'm going to pause real quick I would like think about if he said okay well uh 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 bll testicles even if one I wouldn't drink it because of that but I won't forget it that's actually a really powerful sight that he that he had there uh so because 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 uh initially tried to launch in match is emphatic yes we
expected it it was part of their 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 and performance to prove it the company took a page out of gatorade's
book and targeted athletes except with a Twist mattress is 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 Van's shoe if you realize like
Adidas started getting a lot of traction by sponsoring they're making athletic shoes so they sponsor athletes Nike sees the success they're and so they do the same thing there there's a lot of stories about them competing uh in the early days of Nike but what was fascinating is Paul Van Duran who I did
a podcast on a long time ago he's the founder of Vance 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 uh Olympians or
basketball players whatever he's he found an undeserved uh excuse me underserved Niche which was skateboarders and so he went out and tried to sign like the in the early skateboarding industry and that was a huge influence on the early success of Vans and so you see Massachusetts uh
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 and 97 Sports this state is about what I'm working off of is like about 15 years old so it's probably much much higher than that like
everything else at Red Bull the negotiations that lead to these sponsorship deals are unorthodox as well wind Surfer Robbie nich recalls his F the first time he met matus 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 me to show 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 dooll car but he said
it was 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 why I kept texting people about this guy to matus 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 mishits it's just one big image campaign with many manifestation potential customers might actually attend one of the dozens
of global events that Red Bull puts on it could be a Red Bull soap R race soapbox race in Los Angeles are a motoc 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 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 mishit had certainly created some enviable Havens for himself like Richard Branson he has his own private island in Fiji he bought it off of uh Malcolm Forbes when I ask him what motivated him to buy a vacation
home so far away he Resort 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 matus 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 about today that's an excerpt from this long form
piece in Bloomberg called Red Bull's billionaire Maniac 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 Founders and he's
probably over the years sent me no exaggeration at least 40 great biography recommendations actually helped me translated it into English the translation's not the greatest spending several hours reading what is technically English but in in a 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 try to rewrite them into explaining the main ideas that M's used to build you know one of the most valuable private companies on Earth and I think the story is incredibly
important because he 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 um and the way he wants live his life like he 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 Wolf
Gang for for wagger I'm just gonna call him Wolf Gang so he actually runs into as he's writing the book he he actually has a chance encounter with Dietrich and he tells him that he's writing a biography on him and dietr does not like that and there's going to be some wild
stuff here uh is neither interested in an authorized biography or in a 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 uh 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 uh Bad Boys move in silence they find an advantage they don't like telling 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 say it's he 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 uh 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 I did this uh episode on
this guy named Daniel lwig the name of that book is called The inv Invisible billionaire when Daniel was alive in the 80s he was the richest American uh and no one knew who he was there I think there was only like one picture of him and Daniel actually lwig actually paid
uh his PR team to keep his name out of the press madit does the same thing the Press Office of the Red Bull headquarters is is a press prevention office whose task is to say nothing and find a justification for why they're boss is unavailable and so even though Mist was one of the great greatest
promoters that we've probably seen you know 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 he's in Austria he's the richest man in Asia right and there's a Society magazine so like you know I don't I guess we'd call it like kind of like a tabl 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 it 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 and so extreme success usually comes from extreme characters extreme personality traits he actually threatened to have
this is way before uh this book was actually written about him but there was another potential biographer this Russian author uh that tried to start writing a biography an unauthorized biography on magit and uh madit threatened to have his kneecaps broken um 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 other wise Charming manits you've harassed my mother and I will not tolerate this as long as a prefer 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 uh but way before that and and he 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 work his way through college he was actually working at like a steel Works 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 he took 20 semesters to graduate and he says normally you you finished the University of Economics at the age of 22 and not 28 years old like he did which was interesting because uh that he
was a bad student because both of his parents he didn't come for money both of his parents were School teachers so after college he takes he starts working for one of the the largest uh consumer package good companies in the world unil Lover he works all the way up and becomes a marketing director 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 uh he wind 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 have been fun as a younger man but as the ages uh 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 like this can't I don't want I don't want to be 48 and still in the same position and
really what motivated him he's this is something he was going to repeat over and over again he desperately desperately wanted Independence he wanted Financial Independence and he wanted T Independence and control of 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 mo 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 like essentially taste tested and 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 cuz he realizes that there is a Thai franchise partner of a unil lover 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 $500,000 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 whether you read articles a book anything you you come across he has profound profound self belief 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 like large buffer he
doesn't have a lot of money and even from the very beginning and the reason I think I say you have to have a profound self-belief because there's uh you could see brochures that he was like pitching people on about like the business I don't I think it might have been using
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 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 uh 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 is 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 uh European bureaucracies not known for for fast approval time so he's waiting over a year to try to launch just uh 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 uh there's a lot of benefits from that but it also one of the main benefits is he had 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 till 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 match shits 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 an advertising at the very beginning he actually made more 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 uh 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 it it's quality then they buy it they haven't been lured in by an advertisement but
but convinced by the product itself we took the money we had planned to use on advertising and invested 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 madit 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 these words but this bank called I'm going to call it Spangler was the only one to actually believe in the product the concept behind it and so they actually
lent him money now this is another main theme uh that's repeated over and over again mat sits 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 a several
100,000 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 you know growing Crazy Fast they're also spending a ton this is when they really start put 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 there were 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 highend 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 pric 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 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 so that's very unique that I don't
know if I've heard before is he hires an advertising firm from the very beginning it sound it calls him his 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 partner 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 Metts 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 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 the marketing advertising that the advertising agency that his friend
started is doing on behalf of redball another important Point everybody's telling this 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 mes has very self-confident has a ton of as you can imagine has 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 uh he he says that uh 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 you know everybody else might be telling you this a bad idea but if you pursue this cons consistently you give it like it will lead to success and so Kastner was talking about this time he's like listen this 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 you know ways to either slogans or way ways to Market it matches 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 having this conversation and 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's like well
you drink it and you become strong like what's the what's the right tagline or motto for that and in the middle of the night castner has the idea that Red Bull gives you wings and so he calls matus in the middle of the night and immediately mat like yep that's it so it was a it
was a the 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 in
the tagline they wanted the advertising to be this is the the trait 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 5 years in then they they expand to Hungary that's the second uh 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 omac there's something fascinating that Charlie merer would talk about that because several times in that book he he will analyze
like outside success and he's trying to teach people like well what what would account for the success of like awab 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 these this brand
new formation of the European Union was one of the waves that massach 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 F Berlin remember he was trying to get in Germany finally allowed Red Bull for the German Market as well
this made massetts 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 the one that comes to mind most uh is most top of mind right now because I just covered Christian dior's Auto iography and he talks about this is that Rumors in inuendo 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 M chits 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 again I have to like rewrite this because the translation is kind of funny but there was a 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 there's a 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 like more
forbidden so this is the foundation of like 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 like clubs and bars and stuff like that and it says the company did not did nothing to counter these bizarre rumors and again I want to repeat that excellent quote that he had as Master sits once lectured the most dangerous thing for a branded product is low interest then they get approved
right in the first 3 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 it's 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 the Nike episodes when the NBA banned uh 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 we'll pay the fine and so instead of hitting I think three million by the fourth year they did $15 or $126 million the first year and so mates does something that he does for his entire career he really pushes the paste they they launch in Germany and he
his marketing budget right so right now their entire revenue of the company at this time where we are in the story they're doing €70 million EUR at that time theying a few different markets he sets the marketing budget for Germany at 10% just that one market more than 10%
to 7.5 million 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 right but they essentially sell one thing in the book there's all kinds of examples
like they have this uh coffee and this this this Cola line but in the early days you could tell that he's learning from his mistakes and eventually goes and really puts like all of his energy behind behind one Arrow because let's see he's a couple years into the company it's in 1989 he comes out with this this
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 just 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's he obviously learned from his mistake he like well Red Bull has this power law outcome it's really silly for us to like 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 you know 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 is like huge spike in sales on the graph and then he also launches in America 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 mentioned 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 fin 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 expenditure 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 um if you listen to the Anna winter episode I did on episode 326 I said uh if Anna had a tagline it would be I have to make sure things are being done right I I feel met just was the same exact way and and sorry if I'm mispronouncing his his name um 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 all they're all like European press reports so they all pronounce it differently but anyways this idea it's like well his the role he's making you know he talks about the
fact that he's a control freak he's a perfectionist he 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 um he pays salaries that are above industry average and in Edition this was 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 then 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 there's it has a cult like following outside and then you get the
the the the idea that there's a cult like following inside and I read 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 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 perjorative this is a very positive thing a lot of the greatest companies in the world a lot of the 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 sounds it's just really the founders personality r large the accepted code of conduct for Red Bull people is set by Metts 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 matchit and Mattress shits 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 outside their Outsource their marketing and advertising activity Red Bull consistently took the opposite approach
it Outsource 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 requires simple manual labor or outsourced now this is also speaks to being a gentleman being uh more like an old school way of
approaching things the main relation so when he's Outsourcing all the the bottling uh and the production right his main bottler relationship was sealed with a hand hand shake the bottler is this family business that has been around for over 100 years he meets with the the lead the the head of that that
company right it's in German I'm not even going to 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 uh he says we are hopelessly loyal to each other Metts
once described his as that's how he described his relationship with his bottling partner for mattresses a handshake among men is still worth something so Charlie Monger said something that was excellent uh there's actually two he said this in Charlie merer said this in this interview that
he did with the release of the republication of Port Charlie Zak 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 uh it was released December 5th 2023 it is invest like the best episode 355 it is John Collison uh co-founder of stripe
interviewing Charlie merer in that podcast which I've listened to I think four times already Charlie M says something is fascinating he says trust is one of the greatest economic forces on Earth he is constantly trying to Manu his whole life he maneuvered himself into a high a I think he calls like a
web of a seamless web of deserve 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 had did this exact same thing one
of his important suppliers I can't remember what 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 the great way that Charlie described that that trust is one of the greatest economic Force forces on
Earth this is the trust that mishits had with his main bodler and if you really stop and analyze everything else the way he's 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 uh 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 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 going to 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
H going to notice it and uh matches to the same thing where he made the can there I think everybody's seen what a Red Bull can looks like no another can look like that back then now some have copied this um 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 a Red Bull has its own private like 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 uh when asked he was asked like why why he did that and uh Dietrich said everything is marketing let's go back to this Focus that he has he puts all of his energy behind you know one Arrow I sell Red Bull I sell energy drink called Red Bull in a can
might have a couple 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 I it's insane to me like I can't believe this is true um
so he talks about the fact like he hates Banks uh 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 uh loyal to them but the company says that they only spend what they've already earned and so all the growth uh 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 as the managing director of the corporation and that all the profits had flowed back into expansion and so how many people would have been
able to do that 15 years you're just making I'm sure the salary is great but nothing like I mean winds up 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 a 100 million this year it made 165 this year it made
400 that year it 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 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's so valuable that you essentially just are living on unlimited money and when he talks about this I think you get insights onto why like why that was so important to him if you really think about it I think I think it was Warren Buffett said it either Warren Buffett or Charles the
gall but to win you must first survive and so the way he's operating his companies 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 another theme that just flows through this entire story I love uh ge
General George Patton's um speech to the th Army uh I listen to it to like hype myself up I don't know I probably listen to it hundreds of times but there's something that he says that Patton says to his uh soldiers in that speech when they're fighting they're about to fight
the Germans uh that I think is very similar to How match chitz like kept it says that he was he kept his Empire constantly in motion that he was constantly trying to to grow and expand it and so patent 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 the Red Bull Empire you know through the founder uh is he's constantly keeping that Empire constantly in motion uh for some reason that that quote from Patton popped my
mind goes back to this idea that Red Bull as viewed from the founders lens is a marketing conglomerate his economic Empire is a marketing conglomerate and hence the entire activity of bull is to be seen against the background of marketing all corporate projects like Formula 1 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 in recent history no other company uh 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 learned
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 he this is multiplying his advertising and marketing Mar 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 Mike 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 new numerous media outlets and thus reach a larger audience and so even his approach to like Sports sponsorship right you would think okay there's you go to any sports event you see you know this Beer's advertising and
this company's advertising he buys so he is bought the the his formula one teams his football teams the crazy thing is when he starts he's 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 teams they rename 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 and sports sponsorship is not to run around with a suitcase full of money and buy advertising space we don't want to be like maror on the Ferrari but we want to
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 uh marketing and all the events and all stuff that he's investing in it it's very has a
very symbiotic relationship with other media like other larger d uh distribution forms in media so what they'll do is like they put they control everything right they put up the money for the event they make the event uh 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 material every year from like TV shows radio stations uh print and then they'll go to other brought 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 airace uh the Red Bull airace World Series that content that Red Bull made and owned they gave it to over 70 different tele television stations all over the world and said hey we put all this money into this here's something that the people 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 companyb 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 Mist has amassed his wealth has amassed his wealth despite or perhaps precisely because he is 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 long 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 if you love what you do you're obviously he's 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 that 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 mes 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 salburg 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 uh the the local like uh governing like the local politicians said that if it wasn't for uh Red Bull the place would be impoverished and now I think it's like one of the richest uh communities in Austria and so he actually moves uh the company headquarters to this little tiny village
this is very similar uh to the idea like if if you listen to the podcast I did on the founder of Bugatti he did this exact same thing that's episode 316 Brunello Cinelli you know it was a huge again Bugatti did his business for till he died you know Bruno Cinelli is still alive but he's been doing his business
for like 45 years that's episode 289 this idea it's 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 in 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 M shits this little Community is on this
picturesque Lake in some word I can't pronounce and he said they asked like why he why he moved it there and his simple 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 the controls environment it also said that he he wanted to build a network of underground tunnels so he could move from building to building without being seen and then more about the fact that his business is
kind of like his personality large uh he stays incredibly fit he loves extreme sports Aviation riding his motorcycle and he he constantly talks about he refuses to ever get married I'll tell you this funny sentence on that uh 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 called him the top bull because I thought it was funny uh 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 a with Physical Agility motor
skills dexterity strength and stamina enjo 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 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 the one exception of course one can never say never for a strategic minority Stakes sometimes they can be help ful and
indeed make sense mishit 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 and that is where I'll leave it I will leave a link below to the German
version in case you happen to speak German I'll also leave some links to some long form like longer form uh profiles written about dri in uh The Economist and in Bloomberg in case you want to do any further reading that is 333 books down 1,000 to go and I'll talk to you again soon okay so I hope you
enjoyed that I had a lot of fun uh researching and reading and learning about mat shits and I think there's a bunch of ideas uh and his approach to companyb building um and really just the way he lived his life that that are going to stick with me so I want to tell you about two things and they're really
related so one I want to give you an update on found Founders notes Founders notes I really feel is the world's most valuable notebook for Founders and I can say that because I've been compiling and adding to it and editing it uh nearly every single day for the last 5 years
and if you think about the story about how Founders notes came to be one it's uh it's the best possible way you can support the podcast and yourself um so if you haven't subscribed and haven't invested in subscription yet highly recommend you do you can you can click
on the link in the uh in the show notes or you can just go to Founders notes.com everything I ever do because I'm about to tell you about a conference called Founders only uh is always has the S just like the podcast Founders podcast Founders notes and now we have the founders only uh conference but I think
it there these two things are related to like why I'm doing an in-person conference that is targeted on the mission is to build real relationships R train Founders I've seen the difference in my own life of creating these relationships with Founders in fact I I'll just get B basically I'll just tell
you about both these at uh one time I was uh there I've had this idea for a long time and I'll tell you how it relates to to Founders Notes too but I wind up having a conversation was very fascinating uh with a guy who was his job he was hired by a bunch uh he was hired by a family office uh so you know
very wealthy family office in Texas and his job was to introduce and do these in-person events for other people in other family offices the reason they put so much time and energy and resources behind that was he had a great line he said because a relationship between these two people like these two investor
or founder types they produce nonlinear returns you and I have talked about this idea over and over again because they're in all the books and I've put it a maxim to it that relationships Run the World this is something I had the pleasure of speaking to both uh Sam zel and Charley
Monger in person and this is something they said it in different ways but the the the same idea was behind it that invest heavily in the relationships build a seamless web of trust find the most talented people you possibly can and work with them uh because relationships run the world and so if
you think about how Founders uh notes came to be is I didn't like I I started building a relationship uh with one of the co-founders of rewise uh his name is Tristan and it's because Tristan sent me a DM he was listening to the podcast all the way back in 2019 realized that I
was kind of uh psychopathically reading and he's like hey uh I built an app that makes it really easy for you to store your notes and highlights so then you can search them and you can recall them and they have all these interesting features you might want to check it out and I didn't even know what it was and
then I immediately started using it I I became not only a super a super user uh but they told me that I was their best sales uh salesman unintentionally because I would go on I would go on all these other podcasts and I'd be like this is the best app I pay for I use it every day I've become
friends with Morgan howel who's obviously you know one of the bestselling authors of the last you know decade uh he wrote psychology of money um and then he just released a new book and I should do a podcast as a new book too it's called same as ever and a main theme is that that human human nature
just repeats but anyways Morgan had heard me on a podcast described rewise as a a Smart Twitter feed and so he winds up signing up using it and he's like oh that's exactly what it is and so anyways over the years I've been adding to this I have over 20,000 highlights in
readwise that I can search I can constantly reference and uh what happened was I kept having people ask me over and over again how do I get access to your notes and all your highlights and everything else that you have and so I wind up because I had a relationship with Tristan this is going to relate to
the conference this all make sense in a minute and so because I had a relationship with Tristan I contacted him I was like hey I think we have an opportunity to work on a project together and the result of that project is Founders notes which again I think is the world's most valuable notebook for
Founders because what you see when you sign up for Founders notes you see exactly what I see you have a exact replica of my readwise and so what that allows you to do is you can search every single one of my highlights uh by book by keyword I just did this yesterday uh
because I was I was like man I'm becoming even more obsessed with making Founders podcasts and like finding other ways to teach and like share these lessons and you know I was like am I going crazy and I obviously no I'm not because Obsession I mean this is every single person in the podcast uh that we
cover was obsessed with what they were doing and I just decided I was like let me just go through and it's and I started reading highlights just by searching the term Obsession I was like oh Anna winter was obsessed Christian Dior talks about their Obsession uh Bill Gates talks about his obsession the
founder of Ikea ingvar camrad talks about uh becoming obsessed with his work Napoleon Christopher Nolan James Dyson Leonardo da Vinci Arnold Schwarzenegger Estee Lauder Steve Jobs Jeff Bezos Mike Ovitz and and so just reinforces this idea that if you want to get to the top of your profession which I definitely do
uh you know obsession is a prerequisite so that's one of the main ways when you get access you'll see the the first thing you do is search for highlights you can also do this thing called The Highlight feed that is what Morgan howel called uh the Smart Twitter feed with the Highlight feed is it's going to show
you a random think about like any kind of really social network it just shows you like a piece of contact after another instead of you know the ramblings of these crazy people on the Internet it's highlights and notes uh from all the different uh books and Founders that we
covered so I just clicked on it I see something here from Jeff Bezos from David ogvi some Ivon shinard it's like History's Greatest Founders talking to directly to you every single day and so that's why I say it's like if you have access to this whether you already have
access or you want to subscribe now keep it up in your browser I never X out of it unless I do it by accident so you can do the highlights feed you can then go by books and search and you know uh and then actually read let's say you just want all the highlights from an individual book that's what you want to
read that day and then the other feature is favorites which what that means is when I go I so I reread my highlights every day and as I do this I'm constantly favoriting the ones I like so I have you know 700 800 something like that uh favorites right now that number
will constantly go up and and it's updated because I'm doing this constantly and so you can see what I'm reading and you can see the what I feel is like even highlight is special in one way right and then now I'm saying oh I've reread these highlights and this is something even more special something I
want to remember so anyways that is a general overview what I wanted to update you on uh is there's two features that I haven't discussed one is and we're going to make this I just talked to the team at readwise yesterday we're going to make this more obvious if you when you
subscribe and if you go under billing you can actually invite and give access to one other person for free so let's say you want to give it access to a co-founder a very important uh person on your team you can do that for free this is available by default if you already have a Founder's no subscription you can
do this as well so every single subscription is comes with an additional one for free uh the second thing and then I want to get on to the conference because I think it's really important and we only have 60 days so I got to move on that I didn't want to talk about features before they're released but
I've had so many people a lot there's a lot of like AI Founders that have reached out um that have already subscribed and want to help on this but this is already in development there's going to be a Founders GPT version I should be getting testing it myself uh in the next week or two and you'll be
able to actually communicate ask questions and use that chat format which is becoming extremely extremely popular and so the important point is if you sign up now as I keep adding features and obviously keep adding more and more data to it uh the price will go up the point is if you sign up now you're
you're locked in at that price so all the additional improvements that I do and all the additional features that I do you'll never have to pay uh any additional money if you're already running a successful company and you already understand the importance of constantly being in touch with the
knowledge of History's Greatest entrepreneurs and you want an easy way to reference their ideas to search through them to find ideas that you can apply to your own company then I would encourage you to test it out for a year you'll have access to the world's most valuable notebook for Founders and I
really do believe the value that you'll get will be incredible because I use the product every day and I get incredible value for it from it myself so relationships this is another thing that people have requested a lot over years they want to meet other Founders that
listen to Founders um one of my one of my favorite quotes from Paul Graham and he's got a great a lot of great quotes but he talks about the importance of being around other ambitious people and so he says ambitious people are rare So if everyone is mixed together randomly
as they tend to be early in people's lives then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers when you take people like this the very ambitious and put them together with other ambitious people they bloom like dying plants given water probably most ambitious people are starred for the sort of
encouragement they get from ambitious peers whatever their age so for the last several months I've been kicking around this idea like what would a Founders conference look like first of all it's called Founders only you can go to Founders only.com to apply you can see the dates it is happening in Austin
Texas March 12th to the 14th it is going to be limited to 150 people I rent it out an entire venue it is a private venue not available to the public I spent a few days there before I absolutely loved it once you get past the guard gated gate you never have to leave again so all you have to do is get
yourself to Austin Texas and then every single thing else is taken care of accommodations food the entire event you never lit you literally never have to leave the compound so that's Austin Texas March 12th through the 14th so a little over 60 days from now it is going
to be limited to 150 people uh you have to be a founder of a company CEOs with founder mentality are welcome to it should be unlike any other conference that you've ever been to because my stated goal the mission statement the North Star is to help other Founders build relationships with other Founders
to that end that's why I've limited it to just 150 people that's why I chose the the venue where it's at it is also why before the conference I'm going to talk to every single attendee every single person one-on-one I want to gain an understanding of who you are what your business is about and what is
important to you and then I'm literally building a Founder map and that way I can literally match Founders together who I think should know each other I think this is incredibly important that's why I'm going to dedicate so much of my time to doing this I am the only one doing this I have a world class
events team behind me that are taking care of all Logistics but I'm the one matching all the founders individually myself and obviously I will be there the entire time I will get there before anybody else does and I will be the last person to leave I think this is going to
be incredibly important because I've seen it in my own life that before I had these relationships and the network I have to after it's not even remotely the same relationships really do run the world and I want to help other Founders build relationships with other great Founders if you are interested if you're
willing to travel to Austin Texas and be there from March 12th through the 14th go to Founders only.com I will obviously leave a link in the show notes as well Founders only.com and do so as soon as you can because this is limited to just 150 people okay so that's it go to
Founders only.com founders with an S go to Founders only.com if you want to attend the conference and build relationship with other Founders and then go to Founders notes.com to get access to the world's most valuable notebook for Founders as always thank you for listening and I'll talk to you again soon