I want to jump right into this episode, but I have two very special announcements to make. I'll do so at the end. So make sure that you stick around to the end of this podcast. I'll give you a sneak peek now. One has to do with the first ever in person Founder's conference that is happening in 60 days. I'll tell you why I'm doing it, what it is, and how you can attend after this incredible story of the Red Bull founder. I'll see you on the other side. Dietrich Mateschitz is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our age.
He has 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 500,000,000 to 800,000,000 a year in annual dividends, and he had a network somewhere between 20 and 30 billion dollars.
Dietrich Mateschitz 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 issues conventional advertising in favor of marketing through its own events, shows, sports teams, and publications.
He has produced his 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. Dietrich Mateschitz calls the multimedia assault one of the most important line extensions so far. As a major content provider, it is our goal to communicate and distribute the world of Red Bull in all major media segments from TV to print to new media.
He also owns four soccer teams. They have a NASCAR team and two Formula One racing teams. He finances the annual $200 million cost of his F1 teams out of the company's healthy operating income. And this is what he said about that. In literal financial terms, our sports teams are not yet profitable, but in value terms they are.
The total editorial media value plus the media assets created around the teams. That's such a good insight. Plus the media assets created around the teams are superior to pure advertising expenditures. He then launches into a spiel that he's been delivering for the past 25 years. He explains that Red Bull is not just a drink. Instead, it's a philosophy, one seemingly derived from his own outlook on life.
And a functional product used to improve strength and performance and to revitalize the body and mind. Those are his words. He is also quite serious prone to beginning sentences with the phrase, it is a must as an it is a must to believe in one's product. If this was just a marketing gimmick, it would never work. And it is something that he believed on because he worked on Red Bull for over the last 40 years of his life. He just recently passed away.
That's why I wanted to do this episode now. This is a little bit about the beginnings of how he discovered this idea. He was on a chance trip to Thailand in 1982, which would prove to be a turning point in his life. He was curious to know what attracted the locals there to an uncarbonated tonic, which they called a word and tie. 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. 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 introduced the drink to the rest of the world. With one crucial change, it would be carbonated. This is going to be his partners. His last name, I'm going to guess is Yuvida Ha.
He liked the idea and so the two agreed to invest $500,000 a piece to establish a 49, 49 partnership with the remaining 2% going to Yuvida Ha's son. When I said earlier that he was paying dividends somewhere between 500 and 800 million to himself a year. His net worth was somewhere between 20 and 30 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 masterstroke. He would sell Red Bull as an ultra premium drink in a category all of its own. At $2 a can, it was far and away the most expensive carbonated drink on the shelves. This is what he said about that.
If we only had a 15% price premium, we'd merely be a premium brand among soft drinks and not a different category altogether. At this point most histories of Red Bull tend to depart from Mattishitz and focus on Red Bull itself, which is exactly how he wants it.
A curious hybrid of a mogul, Mattishitz 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, Mattishitz pulls the strings behind a consumer cult and cults rely on message control and cults rely on message control.
Mattishitz 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 Mattishitz 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 taste very good.
Mattishitz says he doesn't care about the taste issue then. He didn't care about the taste issue then and he doesn't care about it now. This is what he says. It's not just another flavored sugar water differentiated by color or taste or flavor. It is an efficiency product. I'm talking about improving endurance, concentration, reaction time, speed, vigilance, and emotional status. Taste is of no importance whatsoever.
That part actually shocked me. Red Bull, I wouldn't say it tastes great, but it certainly doesn't taste bad. I think maybe the author is exaggerating a little bit here. Mattishitz proved his marketing genius, especially in the era of crisis management with his early decision to foster rumors about Red Bull's content instead of trying to squash them.
I'm going to go into a lot more detail later on about this, but I want to give you an overview. This is what I'm trying to do. I'm just giving you an overview of who he was and his approach to company building, which I found fascinating. By the way, I've been texting friends nonstop. I was like, I cannot believe all this stuff. This is an example of that. So again, he wants to foster rumors. That is just free.
We're going to go into Christian Dior's comment on this, which I just covered a few weeks ago. He's just like, oh, this is just free propaganda. You don't try to squash them, foster them. And so in the early days of Red Bull, you have all this like wise Red Bull so effective. Why is it giving me so much energy? Why is it letting me to party all night? Because that was like a really spreading clubs to begin with.
And so he says his early decision to foster rumors about Red Bull's content instead of trying to squat to squash them tails being to circulate that torrent, which is one of the main ingredients, Red Bull was derived from bull testicles or even that it was bullsemen. Oh, the company let the gossip travel unchecked and even set up a page devoted to the rumors on its website.
He has an incredible, incredible quote about this. He says the most dangerous thing for a brand branded product is low interest. That's reminds me of Edwin Lann, founder of Polaroid, Steve Jobs Hero and the patron saint of Founders podcast.
He said something that was fascinating and he says the test of invention is the power of an inventor to push your invention through not in the face of staunch opposition, which most people think, right. But staunch indifference Edwin Lann like mattresses would tell you that indifference is your enemy if they're talking about your product that is a good thing, even if they think that it's coming from.
The secret ingredient is bull testicles was this all by design did he really anticipate that a combination of rumors 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 was like think about if he said okay well you know I have a new drink and there's like some caffeine in it some sugar, you know maybe some B12 or some other vitamins.
I've already forgot what he said but if somebody whispers like hey there's this new energy drink and the energy comes from bull testicles even if one I wouldn't drink it because of that but I won't forget it.
That's actually a really powerful insight that he that he had there so good 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 or talking about the fact that red bull was forbidden to be sold in several European countries that he initially tried to launch in.
I'm actually just is emphatic yes we expected it it was part of the strategy from the beginning we would make the brand interesting enough that people wanted to get their hands on it red bull's marketing campaign has always been its claim that it can improve athletic performance to prove it the company took a page out of Gatorade's book and targeted athletes except with a twist mattress is zero in on the extreme sports crowd okay so that idea is not new I've done multiple podcasts and read multiple videographies of the founders of.
Companies like a dea's Nike and then vans shoe if you realize like a dea's started getting a lot of traction by sponsoring their making athletic shoes so they sponsor athletes Nike season success they're doing and so they do the same thing there's a lot of stories about them competing in the early days of Nike but what was
the thing is Paul van Dern who I did a podcast on a long time ago he's the founder of vans what he did he's like well I'm not making athletic shoes but I like the idea that a dea's 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
Olympians or basketball players whatever he's he found and underserved underserved niche which was skateboarders and so he went out and tried to sign like the early skateboarding industry and that was a huge influence on the early success of vans and so you see mashed his using a very similar playbook from Gatorade and then other products that also were very successful targeting athletes today red bull under
rights more than 500 athletes and 97 sports this state is about what I'm working off was like 15 years old so it's probably much higher than that like everything else at red bull the negotiations that lead to these sponsorship deals are unorthodox as well
windsurfer Robbie naysh recalls his for the first time he met madashas almost 20 years ago we talked in the courtyard of his office and pretty soon we realized that we were both really in the cars that was the end of our business meeting because he wanted me to show he wanted to show me his for
Robbie GTO so we went driving off into the mountains and after 15 minutes he pulled over got out and told me to drive back I didn't want to that's a million dollar car but he said 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 right kept texting people about this guy to madashas 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 madashas 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 soapbox rate race soapbox race in Los Angeles or a motor car
motor cross spectacular in Brazil the week after is what they said about that this is fun stuff and is 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 far
on can you imagine me at a shareholders meeting madashas has certainly created some enviable havens for himself like Richard Branson he has his own private island and Fiji he bought it off of Malcolm Forbes when I ask him what motivated him to buy vacation home so far away he resorts 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 madashas also says that he's always been a track
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 I'm going to talk to about today as an excerpt from this long form piece in Bloomberg called red bulls 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 red bull and it is only available in German my friend Cameron priest who's been a long time listener founders and he's probably over the years semi no exaggeration at least 40 great
biography recommendations actually helped me translated into English the translations not the greatest spending several hours reading what is technically English but in a way the words were organized it's almost like you're reading a different language so what I did is I just pulled out a bunch of highlights and try to rewrite them into explaining the main ideas
used to build you know one of the most valuable private companies on earth and I think the stories incredibly important because he even though he's not American he's Austrian he lives 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's this really unique book I would say cohesive company building philosophy that is completely unique to his personality and the way he wants to read it live his life like he said he could have taken a public he's not going to be a
little bit more than 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 eight hundred million dollars 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 the hinted at in that article just how private and secretive and how he was just obsessed with controlling the message is a very private person he was always always promoting red bull
and so the author of this book and I apologize I'm butchering all these names I've already missed a chance at like half a dozen things his name is Wolfgang for for Wagger I'm just going to call him Wolfgang so he actually runs into as he's writing the book he actually has a chance encounter with Dietrich and he tells him that he's writing a biography on him and Dietrich does not like that and you there's going to be some wild stuff here he is neither interested in an authorized biography
or in a case history about red bull I was able to have a brief personal conversation with him and when he found out that he wanted to write a book on him he described the publication of a book that he had not authorized as quote a disaster so you and I have talked about this maximum over and over again very common in history of entrepreneurship 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 says it's he yet there's a strict prohibition of discussing internal matter so if you are an employer red bull you can't say anything about what's going on so most of the people interviewed in the book are actually
former employees of red bull but this is fascinating they unanimously these people have left the company right but they unanimously express positive opinions about their former employer he is universally described as a person with great charisma so the way he is with employees and
people he knows is very different than the way he is with journalists with journalists he's extremely shy and reserved and the few times he's done interviews he's done some with like these European publications he did one with the economist with Bloomberg this is what he says about that
my philosophy is very simple since it's not me on the shelf for sale but red bull it's perfectly logical that red bull is at the center of our marketing activities and not the person naturally I also have a pronounced desire for privacy and then we see he utilizes an idea that you and I talked
about on episode 292 I did this episode on this guy named Daniel Ludwig the name of that book is called the invisible billionaire when Daniel was alive in the 80s he was the richest American and no one knew who he was I think there was only like one picture of him and Daniel actually Ludwig
actually paid his PR team to keep his name out of the press. Mattishitz does the same thing the press office of the red bull headquarters is is a press prevention office whose tasks is to say nothing and find a justification for why their boss is unavailable and so even though Mattishitz was one
of the greatest greatest promoters that we've probably seen in the last half a century public relations was not a part of the company's marketing strategy and the interviews that they do do they're only granted to select publications and select journalists and I really need to hammer on this point
about how extreme he was in doing this there he's in Austria he's the richest man in Austria right and there's a society magazine so like you know I don't I guess we call it like kind of like a tabloid or like a gossip magazine in the States but he actually buys it he buys this magazine just so he
will not appear in it and he was actually asked about this and he actually confirms 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 on all forms of media but he's also a perfectionist who has to control his projects the product that he's making and the environment 100% and so extreme success usually comes from extreme characters extreme personality traits he actually threatened to have this is way before
this book was actually written about him but there was another potential biographer this Russian author uh that tried to start writing a biography on unauthorized biography on matcha shits and uh matcha shits threatened to have his kneecaps broken um he didn't like that the author was going to
like his hometown he was like knocking on the door of his elderly mother and it says this aroused the wrath of the otherwise charming matcha shits you've harassed my mother and I will not tolerate this as long as a preferated kneecap in Moscow costs $500 you will not be safe and so let's go into what he was doing before he started read well 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 any what's fascinating he calls himself like a very lazy student so he actually chose marketing as his major and it was perfect because he's one of the greatest marketers I've ever seen but he had to work his way through college he was actually
working at like a 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 have you finished the University of
economics at the age 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 from money both of his parents were schoolteachers so after college he takes he starts working for one of the the largest
consumer package good companies in the world Unilever he works all the way up and becomes a marketing director for the international division of a Unilever subsidiary called Blendex his toothpaste he's marketing toothpaste and he did this for a very long time uh he went 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 he 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 independence and control over how he spent his time and so it's at the same time that he's having
these thoughts that he finds that tie version the uncarmative version of Red Bull gives him a lot of energy and cures his jet lag and then reads the article it's like wait a minute the people that make drinks like this pay the most they make the most money they pay the most taxes in this
entire country and so he immediately starts to study the existing products in this very nation energy drink market and he would literally grab every single samples of every single kind of drink that's very similar he would get together with other people that he works with and he
called them he organized them what he would call energy drink parties and at the time they were calling them stimulating juices so these stimulating juices were all essentially taste tested and there was like this a giant like self-experiment to see not only how it tastes but also the effects
that it had on them and so one relationship that he's going to make right now actually changes his life because he realizes that there is a tie franchise partner of a unilever group right they're making toothpaste but they also produce and bottle that that tonic drink the uncarminated 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 agreed to put in five hundred thousand dollars 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 them whether you read articles a book anything you come across he has profound profound self belief because believe because when he 41 he quits his job and starts his first company
and puts all of the money that he has in it he's 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 a you can see brochures that he was like pitching people on
about like the business I don't I think I might have been using this to try to raise money but he says there is no market for Red Bull we will create one and there's this great line in the English translation of this German biography where it says rarely in the world of business has such a
bold announcement been implemented into reality like this one and so creating your own market is also not only do you have to educate you know the potential customers but then you have to deal with all the regulators and so he tries to set up shop in Germany and they didn't even know what
the hell energy drink was and so he had to he applied for what was going to be the first ever Europe-wide approval of a new type of indulgence which is the energy drink right as you might imagine European bureaucracies not known for for fast approval time so he's waiting over a year to
try to launch just in Germany he gets extremely frustrated so then he went to packing his bags and going to Austria and it's like I'm just going to launch an Austria 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 a 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 shifts 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 of his product and he would bring it and deliver it to places buy palette and let people try it and drink it free of charge this is very similar to one of my favorite entrepreneurs all time is estate lauder and in the early days of her company which she also started
when she was 40 I just realized that now she actually took money out of her advertising budget and instead made more of her product to give away and this is what she said about that you give people a product to try if they like it quality then they buy it they haven't been learned 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 matteshitz 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 broot buttering these words but this bank called I'm gonna call it spangler was the only one to actually believe in the
product and the concept behind it and so they actually lent him money now this is another main theme uh that's repeated over again matteshitz 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 it's a several hundred thousand cans were sold in the first year the next year that number goes to 1.2 million and then the year after so year three they're at 1.7 million so
they're growing but they're not you know growing crazy fast they're also spending a ton this is when they really start putting putting a lot of their money i think it's something like over 30% of their gross revenue they spend on advertising at the beginning it was even more than that but the
remarkable thing is they get 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 gonna go into here one that he was all in he had that burn the boats mentality he wanted to go high end from the start and he knew that there was no market for this so he had to create one and so he talked about the great personal risk that he did in starting 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 price 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 to man 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 it's
it's very unique that i don't know if i've heard before is he hires an advertising firm from the very beginning it's sound it calls him is his former study buddy so i'm assuming that is this is his friend from college this guy named Casner at this time Casner was already a founder of an advertising agency called Casner and partner so Casner is going to play a very important role because he's the guy that comes up with a slogan red bull gives you wings now here's i think a testament to how unique
mashes it 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 we actually
helps out in the agency as a freelance employee just to pay for the marketing advertising that the advertising agency that his friends started is doing a behalf of red bull another important point everybody's telling us about idea his friend immediately recognized its potential and he
said if this is pursued consistently this idea will lead to success so again mashes is very self confident has a ton of as you can imagine has a ton of self confidence in himself and the idea he's doing but it is very helpful for other people especially people that you trust and admire
because he said he says that castner was a very clever fellow and he knew that he was 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 i'm bailes might be telling you this bad idea but if you
pursue this consistently you give it like it will lead to success and so castner was talking about this time he's like listen to 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 ways to market it mashes rejects every single one of them but castner 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 to have in this conversation and
were they're like well anyway the 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 mashes is in the middle of the night and immediately the mashes is like yep that's it so it was it was a the the fact that that was a good idea was immediately obvious to both of them the thing about crazy that is you're fighting for
a year and a half going through 50 things he calls you you hear it you're like yep that's it let's go and so now they had the branding and the tagline they wanted the advertising to be this is the the traits that they were looking for they wanted to be self ironic non-conformist smart and
rebellious and their point was that they that's how they viewed their own personality and so they're like we're going to put a lot of our own personality into this and so now they're up and running five years there's still in just in that small single market in Austria five years
in then they they expand to hungry that's the second market that they open up and then they start adding market after market after market in Europe now this part was a bit confusing to me but it seems that the formation of the European Union was one of the waves he served if you listen to
episode three twenty nine on Port Charlie's Omnack there's something fascinating that Charlie Munger would talk about that because he several times that book he will analyze like outside success and he's trying to teach people like well what what would account for this success of like a leshwa
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 matches it's 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 fine Berlin member who's trying to get in Germany finally allowed Red Bull for the German market as well this made matches as 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 sites 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 with the one that comes to mind most is most top of mind right now because I just covered Christian Deore's autobiography and he talks about this is that rumors in Innuendo you
have to think about them as great free propaganda and so Christian Deore says the relative secrecy in which I chose to work sounds a lot like Massachusetts right the relative secrecy in which I chose to
work aroused a positive whispering campaign which was excellent free propaganda gossip malicious rumors are worth more than the most expensive publicity campaign in the world that is the end of Christian Deore'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 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 actually made it more charming because like more forbidden so this is the foundation of the 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 and fettamines 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 mashesits once lecture the most dangerous thing for a branded product is low interest then they get approved right in the first three months of a legal market presence they sell 33 million cans in Germany alone
this idea is not new to you and I right this idea is like if something's banned it's all it 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
the original Jordan shoe at the very beginning Nike's like oh hopefully we're going to sell like I think it was like four million dollars or no I think it's three million dollars by the fourth a year and then the NBA bans the shoe and then make a smart decision like just keep wearing it
Michael will pay the fine and so instead of hitting I think three million by the fourth year they did $125 or $126 million dollars the first year and so mashes 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 the entire revenue of the company this time where we're on the story they're doing 70 million euros at that time they're in a few different markets he sets the marketing budget for Germany at 10% just that one market more than 10% to 7.5 million euros for that year and then
I learned something that was actually surprising because you go look like Red Bull essentially just has Red Bull they might have like different versions right but they essentially sell one thing in the book there's all kinds of examples like they have this coffee and this this this coal
align but in the early days you could tell that he's learning from his mistakes and eventually goes in and really puts like all of his energy behind one arrow because let's see he's a couple years into the companies 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 obviously
learned from his mistake is 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 mention multiple times the fact that he hates
banks and is very afraid of debt and so most of the growth is just fueled from actual the profits the company's making and so he's able to do something that's very rare which he's able to control costs and maintain financial discipline even when they're making a lot of profits and he preaches
that to his employees over in urban Kansas 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 if you listen
to the Anna Winter episode I did on episode 326 I said if Anna had a tagline it would be I have to make sure things are being done right I feel matched this was the same exact way and sorry I from mispronouncing his his name when he died there was a bunch of different reports I went on
YouTube to try to figure out how to pronounce his last name and they 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's
going to make sure things are being done right and so former employees are saying there's always a great deal of pressure to perform one can make a mistake but you can only make the same mistake once so he expects a lot but he also provides a lot he pays salaries that are above industry average
and in addition this is wild every Red Bull employee from the secretary to the board has a company car passed employees repeat the same thing that he's extremely loyal they describe him as a gentleman they say if you've helped him once he will never forget it and there's also some bizarre things
when I got to this part this is the note I left myself when I read this part I go because he's talking about you know there's it has a cult like following outside and then you get 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's 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 this is a great quote in this section that I think applies to this cult brands have their own laws otherwise they
would not be cultish and again to you and I when we describe something as cult that's not a pejorative this is a very positive thing a lot of the greatest companies in the world a lot of greatest brands you can 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 just really the founders personality writ large the accepted code of conduct for Red Bull people is set by Massachusetts himself he is a fine and elegant person who values a culture 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 matchess and matchess hits 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 glomerate again marketing is our core competency we're going to outsource everything else Red Bull has no production facilities or warehouses many large corporations outsize 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 are outsourced now this is also speaks to being a gentleman being
more like an old school way of approaching things the main relation so when he's outsourcing all the bottling in the production right his main bottler relationship was sealed with a handshake the bottler is his family businesses has been around for over 100 years he meets with the lead the
head of that company right it's in German I'm not gonna try to pronounce it they agreed to produce Red Bull on a handshake that was in 1987 and they still have this collaboration this is what 40 years how many yeah about 40 years I says we are hopelessly loyal to each other
master sits once described as that's how he described his relationship with his bottling partner for Dietrich mattresses a handshake among men is still worth something so Charlie Munger said something though is excellent there's actually two he said this in Charlie Munger said this in
this interview that he did with the release of the publication of Port Charlie's Aminac it's on the invest like the best podcast feed if you haven't listened to it I keep talking about this it's so important it was released December 5th 2023 it is invest like the best episode 355 it is
John callison co-founder of striped interviewing Charlie Munger in that podcast which I've listened to I think four times already Charlie Munger says something is fascinating he says trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth he is constantly trying to maneuver it all if he maneuvered
himself into a high truck well I think he calls like a web of 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 great way that Charlie describe
that that trust is one of the greatest economic forces forces on earth this is the trust that madashas had with his main baudler and if you really stop and analyze everything else the way he's he set up his business is like well why would he do that well this asset light approach freeze up
funds for marketing he was building a marketing conglomerate from the very beginning he understood that at the very beginning he's going to outsource anything that's not his core competency something else you see that he thinks like a marketer so if you remember James Dyson had this great
realization from trial and error in his career and he says you should if you're making a physical product make your product look different from the start talk about it a huge advantage right he's distributing his vacuum cleaner it the same place everyone else buys vacuum cleaners you go to
store he said you'd see like a line of like let's say five vacuum cleaners you see four the look like like very similar and then a fifth one is like what the heck is that doesn't mean you're gonna buy it but you're again in difference is the enemy to the inventor right he's like you might
not buy my vacuum cleaner but you're sure is how going to notice it and match this to the same thing where he made the can there I think everybody seen what a red bull can looks like no another can look like that back then now some have copied this but he made that tall slim can with the
intention of looking different and standing out from every single other thing that would be on the same shelf and one hilarious little story is red bull has its own private 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 that's not 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 and 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 as motto it says absolutely no debts to a bank and he is 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 an 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 it means it paying off because then in 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 hundred million this year he made 165 this year he made 400 that year he 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 is so valuable that you essentially just are living on unlimited money and when he talks about this i think you get insights on to why like why that was so important to him it really
think about i think i think it was warm buffet said it was a warm buffet 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 general george patens um speech to the third army uh i listened to it to like hype myself up i don't know i probably listened to it hundreds of times but there's something that he says that patens 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 matchtats 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 are his soldiers that i don't
want to get any messages saying that i'm holding my position we're not holding the god damn thing we are advancing constantly and when i'm getting to this section about the fact that the red bull empire you know through the founder uh he's constantly keeping that empire constantly in motion uh for
some reason that that quote from patent popped my mind goes back to this idea that red bull as viewed from the founders lens is a marketing glomerate his economic empire is a marketing glomerate and hence the entire activity of red bull is to be seen against the background of marketing all corporate
projects like formula one football air races media serve the core business which is the sale of the energy drink and he was way way ahead of his time on this economics especially the consumer goods industry he said is essentially a battle for attention red bull throws more material into this
battle than all of his 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 uh other company in the same market and something that he picked up to was the importance
of differentiation he says you learn this in the first semester of marketing that you have to differentiate yourself consumers want the original not the copy so he even applies that not only to his product but also to the way he markets like all these media events and these crazy things so
these outrageous and unique events like the guy jumping from space if you think about like why that's so smart an outrageous and unique event will get covered for free in other media so essentially he this is multiplying his advertising and marketing spend for free and so some of the things that
they spend money on it says about half of the marketing budget is spent on unusual unusual sports as running in the Himalayas skydiving over the English channel surfing on the Amazon or Mike are 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 got any sports
event you see you know this beers advertising and this company's advertising he buys so he is bought 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
by advertising space we don't want to be like Mara Borough 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 marketing and all the events and all stuff that he's investing in it's very he has a very symbiotic relationship with other media like other larger distribution forms of 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 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 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 air race the red bull air race world series that content that red bull made and owned they gave it to over 70 different television 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 define your watchers or listeners or whatever your audience will find interesting here we don't want anything for you just play it for free and because the media
outlets don't have to pay to produce that material they jump all over it so again a very clever way to just multiply his advertising and marketing spend and so I mentioned earlier that he has developed his own company building philosophy one that is very unique to him and so he talks about the fact
that even though he went to school for business he just doesn't really believe a lot of the stuff that he was taught and so it says Massachusetts has amounts his wealth has a mass his wealth despite or perhaps precisely because he's at odds with some basic business principles if someone says to him
that the primary goal of a company is to maximize profit he simply declares that to be incorrect he thinks longer term and more broadly than his competitors I just don't believe everything I learned at business school he has repeatedly said he never tires of emphasizing that money was
never his main motivation for starting his own company rather the driving forces were longing for freedom and independence as well as finding joy in the work this is why you don't retire right if you if you love what you do you're obviously making a bunch of money in it you're free and you have complete independence to control what you work on who's around you there's nothing better than that our motto going back to a quote from him our motto is the journey is the destination I don't want to go
to the summit to stand at the top but to do the climb up one of the great one of this maximum I have saved on my phone this great line they 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 messages 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 Southburg and he wants to moving the headquarters this tiny village that I can't even pronounce and it only has 1500 inhabitants it's like almost all red bull the local like governing like the local politician said that if it wasn't for Red Bull the place would be
impoverished and I think it's like one of the richest communities in Austria and so he actually moves the company headquarters to this little tiny village this is very similar to the idea like if you listen to the podcast I did on the founder of Bugatti he did this exact same thing that's
episode 316 Brunella Kuchinelli you know it was a huge again Bugatti did his business for till he died Brunella Kuchinelli 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 and emphasis like where you're actually doing your work and I'm fascinated by these people that actually build like physical manifestations almost like their entire like building a building a 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 match hits this little communities 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 have 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 wanted to build a network
of underground tunnels so you can move from building to building without being seen and then more about the fact that his business is kind of like his personality writ large he stays incredibly fit he loves extreme sports aviation riding his motorcycle and he he
constantly talks about he refuses to ever get married I'll tell you this funny since it's on that they call him the top bull which is hilarious I don't know if that's just it's the German translation in English I hope not I hope they actually call him the top bull because that was funny
the top bull takes care of his body keeps fit and is amazingly good shape for someone almost seven 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 in in order to enjoy it outdoors I need the indoor program so he's saying his dedication of his
fitness to be able to perform well on 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 and 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 helpful and indeed make sense madashat 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 have to speak German also leave some links to some long form like longer form profiles
written about D-Trek in the economist and in Bloomberg in case you want to do any further reading that is 333 books down one thousand ago and I'll talk to you again soon okay so I hope you enjoy that I had a lot of fun researching and reading and learning about madashats and I think
there's a bunch of ideas and his approach to company building 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 founder's 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 nearly every single day for the last five years and if you think about the story about how founders notes came to be one it's it's the best possible way
you can support the podcast and yourself so if you haven't subscribed and haven't invested in this description yet highly recommend you do you can you can click on the link in the in the show notes or you can just go to founders notes.com everything I'd ever do because I'm about to tell you about a
conference called founders only is always says they asked just like the podcast founders podcast founders notes and now we have the founders only conference but I think that 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 between founders I've seen the difference in my own life of creating these relationships with founders in fact I'll just get it basically I'll just tell you about both these at one time I was 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 with a guy who was his job he was hired by a bunch he was hired by a family office so you know a 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 and the reason they put so much time and energy and resources behind that was he had a great line he said because relationship between these two people like these two investor or founder types they produced non-linear returns you and I have talked about this idea
over and over again because they're in all the books and I've put a maximum to it that relationships run the world this is something that I had the pleasure of speaking to both Sam Zell and Charlie Munger in person and this is something they said it in different ways but 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 because relationships run the world and so if you think
about how founders notes came to be is I didn't like I started building a relationship with one of the co-founders of Reed Wise his name is Tristan and it's because Tristan sent me a DM he was listening to the podcast all the back in 2019 realized that I was kind of psychopathically reading and he's
like hey 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 start using it
I became not only a super super user but they told me that I was their best sales 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 become friends with Morgan Housel
who's obviously you know one of the best selling authors of the last you know decade he wrote psychology of money 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 human human nature just repeats but anyways Morgan
had heard me on a podcast I described Reed Wise as a smart Twitter feed and so he winds up signing up using any like oh that's exactly what it is and so anyways over the years I've been adding to this I've over 20,000 highlights in Reed Wise that I can search I can constantly reference and
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 makes sense in a minute
and so because I had a relationship with Tristan I contacted and 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 Reed Wise and so what that allows you to do is you can search every single one of my highlights by book by keyword I just did this yesterday 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 know I'm not because obsession I mean this is every single person in the podcast 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 Geore talks about their obsession Bill Gates talks about his obsession the founder of Ikea Ingvar Camperat talks about uh becoming obsessed with his work Napoleon Christopher Nolan James Dyson Leonardo Da Vinci Arnold
Schwarzenegger S.T.A. Lauder Steve Jobs Jeff Bezos Mike Ovitz and such as 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 your highlights you can also do this thing called the highlight feed that is what Morgan Howell called the smart Twitter feed with the highlight feed is it's going to show you a random thing 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 from all the different books and founders that we covered so I just clicked on it I see something here from Jeff Bezos from David Olgovi some of a Von Schennard 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 buy 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 favorites right now that number will constantly go up and it's updated because I'm doing this constantly as 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 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 is there's two features that I haven't discussed one is and we're
gonna make this I just talked to the team read wide just today we're gonna 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
person on your team you can do that for free this is available by default if you already have a founders note subscription you can do this as well so every single subscription is comes with a additional one for free the second thing and then I want to get into 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 that have already subscribed and want to help on this but this is
already in development there's going to be a founders gbt version I should begin testing it myself 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 the price will go up the point is if you sign up now you're you're locked in at that price of all the additional improvements that I do and all the additional features that I do you don't ever have to pay
any additional money if you're already running a successful company and you already understand the 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 as you
comply to your own company then I would encourage you to test it out for a year you'll have access to with 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 from
it from it myself so relationships this is another thing that people have requested a lot over the years they want to meet other founders that listen to founders I did 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 star for the sort of encouragement they'd 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 foundersonly.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 rented out an entire venue it is a private venue not available to the public I spent a few days with 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 literally you literally never have to leave the compound so that's Austin Texas March 12th through the 14th so little over 60 days from now it is going to be limited to 150 people 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 eliminated 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 in 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're interested if you're willing to travel to Austin Texas and be there
from March 12th through the 14th go to founders only dot com I will obviously leave a link in the show notes as well founders only dot 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 dot com founders with an S go to founders only
dot com if you want to attend the conference and build relationships with other founders and then go to founders notes dot 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