"This will be one of the most incredible founder stories you're ever going to hear. For his entire 70-year career, Michael Ferrero was solely focused on serving his customer. As you'll hear, he gives h..."

"new features. Ramp is completely committed to using AI to make a better experience for their customers and to automate as much of your business's finances as possible. In fact, Kareem just wrote this...."

"he was alive today, he'd run his business on ramp. Let the robots chase your receipts and close your books so you can use your time and energy to build great things for your customers. Because at the ..."

"for 70 years from 19 until he dies at 89. This story is unbelievable. I can't stop talking about it. So Ferrer was a paradoxically private chocolate king who rarely appeared in public without his dark..."

"Italy. He kept a secret lab in Monte Carlo. Actually, I have to I have to tell you this part now, too, cuz it's just too good to save for later. This is very much a family business. And Michael wanted..."

"Red Bull when it comes to this. Uh he has this great line if you if you haven't listened to the Red Bull episode, it's one of the best episodes I've ever done in my life. It's episode 333. It was anot..."

"Langhe Hills. I promise you, I went and looked up how to pronounce these words. I still can't get it. I think it's Langghi Hills. The reason I'm talking about this though, it's very important that he ..."

"it super crema. And what they were trying to set out to do was offer cashstrapped Italian families a taste of affordable indulgence. Since Italians are so poor after the war, this spread that they're ..."

"overnight. He had no other life. He he was completely obsessed with the products that he was making and the company he was building. And this is one of the reasons he felt it was an obligation to his ..."

"Ferrero built a social contract in exchange for hard work and loyalty. The company would provide cradle to grave stability. And remarkably, in over 70 years of operations, Ferrero's workforce never we..."

"biggest brands by revenue. Uh, conventional wisdom held that children's sweets should be simple, but Michael introduced a candy bar explicitly designed for kids. It was a milk chocolate bar with a cre..."

"them, no other brand had a product in that category. And as Michael will repeat over and over again, he did that intentionally by diversifying beyond chocolate. Fero showed early on that his company c..."

"world's bestselling boxed chocolate. True to his form, Ferrero kept the development process for Rocher strictly secret. Only a handful of trusted employees knew the recipe and production method. So ag..."

"that I have over my publicly traded competitors. New confections were painstakingly developed in secret tasting rooms over months and years, then rolled out in select markets to prove themselves. And ..."

"past episodes, and it's really the the importance if you want to be truly truly great at what you're doing. The importance of being prolific. So, being prolific is highly correlated with greatness. Ju..."

"unprecedented decision to open the doors to one of his factories to a small pool of reporters. This was the first media visit in the company's modern history. So keep in mind, he's born in 1925. He st..."

"northern and southern hemispheres, ensuring a yearround supply of fresh nuts by the mid 2010s. Ferrero was purchasing roughly 1th3 of the entire world's hazelnut crop and had even become the world's l..."

"debtfree. And this is such an important point because of the podcast. I get to meet all these like privately held businesses that you've never heard of. You don't know who the founder is. You might kn..."

"long-term orientation. And before I move on, I guess the reason I bring that up is because because these they don't need outside investment. Because these are not public companies, they they they shun..."

"it. This is again this is just like James Dyson. Let me read from James Dyson's first autobiography. The best kind of business is one where you can sell a product at a high price with a good margin an..."

"They had two sons, Pro and Giovani, named after his father and uncle. And from the very beginning, they start training them from a young age in the ethos of the company. By the 1990s, as Michael appro..."

"son was simply always act differently from the others. Have faith, stay strong, and put the customer at the center each day. Michael often repeated this maxim. Only on two occasions should the newspap..."

"you do everything, you will win. Number eight, he was obsessed with control. He went to great almost absurd lengths to control everything about his business. And number nine, he had an extreme focus o..."

"in Italy at the time there was a lack of supplies. You didn't even electricity was even scarce to come by. Chocolate was considered a luxury. So for his entire life he never forgot how bad things coul..."

"in altitude. This is a level obsession that's very rare to come across. He would take existing and often times more expensive products and see if he could approve them. Some of what he learned by doin..."

"proportions wrong. I will try 2/3 hazelnuts and 1/3 chestnuts. You will see it will definitely get better. This obsession was present at a very young age. He brings a friend down to the basement and s..."

"priest did not approve. Michael convinces the priest of the necessity of working on Sunday. And to compromise, he actually has them move the mass and hold it in the courtyard of the factory. He built ..."

"company. And there's an interesting line about that that said Michael was interested in building infrastructure that supported both scale and identity. And so, this is another thing that Michael would..."

"every hour. Isn't that a wander? Michael understood that investing in new technology was not optional. It was mandatory. He said, "We need technology and innovation to grow in production and employmen..."

"different flavor, a better flavor. He had extraordinary knowledge of the raw materials. If you wanted to know all the details of an Indian mandarin, he could tell you in detail. He defined Oh, this is..."

"section, this is exactly what Sam Walton, they said. Sam Walton went into more stores, more retail stores than anybody has ever lived. He was obsessed with knowing everything that was going on in his ..."

"by differentiating from others. He would travel all over the world studying his competitors. He says, "You must go and see. You must understand how the the competition's products are affecting ours. Y..."

"products were liked or were not liked by his customers. He insisted on having a long-term orientation. He said if a new product for the first two years for the first year first two years doesn't make ..."

"with her in mind. This is one of my I mean he's got all all these ideas I absolutely love but this one my favorite ideas. His great care was for her. He repeated to us remember that if we're good Mrs...."

"proposed to his wife. Listen to this. The way he proposes to his wife. I would be extremely happy if he were to say yes to my proposal to marry you. But think it over carefully. And mind you, if you a..."

"create mythical products that create the markets. He looked at his business a in a three-part system. Number one, we must discover the latent needs of the customer. Number two, we must transform those..."