Brad Jacobs - Think Big and Move Fast - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS]

0:00 Welcome to this classics episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past ten years published once a month. These are N of one conversations with N of one people. Brad Jacobs' simple principle of think big, move fast is one I think about often. He is a true force of nature and I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.

0:22 This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolosis.com. Vanta automates security and compliance for over sixteen thousand fast moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey. Keeping them audit ready around the clock. It's the number one agentec trust platform.

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2:13 Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Some. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.

2:40 Mm. My guest today is Brad Jacobs. Brad's resume is remarkable. He's founded seven companies, all of which Are billion dollar or multi billion dollar businesses. He's done five hundred MA transactions and raised thirty billion dollars of debt and equity capital.

2:56 Currently, he's the executive chairman of XPO, a commercial trucking company that he started in 2011, and has grown into one of the largest logistics businesses in the world. He's also written a book that will be out in January titled How to make a few billion dollars. What a title. Brad's energy is infectious and our conversation unpacks his strategies for M and A. his propensity for speed and methods for earning team buy in.

3:19 Please enjoy my great conversation with Brad Jacobs. So Brad, it's hard to know where to begin this conversation because You have built so many interesting businesses across so many different industries. So maybe the uniting thread is what are you looking for? When

3:37 searching for the next opportunity because there's definitely through lines to what you've done. But there's also you've made pretty big jumps. I think maybe you'll make another jump and maybe you'll never stop. What is it that you're looking for in an industry or a market or an area? as you're sussing out what to do next. In a word, scalability. So the only way I know to create huge value is to

4:00 create a company that five and ten years after you started. is much, much larger. And the easiest way to do that is through M and A. Of course, you have to have organic growth as well. But I look for industry where

4:12 It's large enough. If I want to create a company that's Tens of billions of dollars in revenue, then I have to do an industry that's hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. If I wanna consolidate an industry, there has to be things to buy. There have to be things to buy on accretive terms. There has to be things that we can buy at lower multiples than what we're gonna trade at.

4:30 I look for industries where There's synergy as you get bigger, there's economies of scale, there's benefits of size, that as you buy things and get bigger, you just don't get bigger. You get better. You spread your SGA out more, you get better technology, you get a better sales force, you get better training. So the advantage to size, you have a better cost basis. You please the customer better. You have more density, more

4:54 advantages of being a national network or maybe even a global network. Basically come down to scalability. So If that's the metric, why aren't there ten of you? Why is there only one distinct story? Like yours that somebody in a serial fashion

5:07 sort of goes and builds Companies with Some similar ingredients. in the recipe in different industries. It's strange that there's not other people That have had a similar story like yours.

5:18 There's plenty of other people who've done MA and created tons of value doing MA. I've maybe done a little more MA than most people, and the teams I've led have done it very well in terms of integration and optimization of those acquisitions. But I didn't invent MA. MA's been around for a long time. One of the things you said is the ability to do great accretive

5:36 acquisitions buy at a lower multiple than your stock trades at, maybe. I think of Henry Singleton or some of the great stories through history. what are the markers of industries that have that feature? Do they tend to be very mature? Industries? Do they tend to have anything else that you would look for that would cause those low multiples to exist? Hyperfragmentation or something else? It's not that they have to have low multiples, although I tend to go to industries that are single digit multiples, not double digit multiples, maybe low double digit multiples, but I'm not a

6:05 Fifteen twenty times even dog kinda guy. If you look at the five hundred or so acquisitions that I and my team have done average multiples in the mid to high single digits. And I don't like to buy things that are priced for perfection and everything's gotta go perfectly swimmingly right in order to achieve and maintain at fifteen or twenty times Ebidal multiple. I look for industrial companies for the most part.

6:28 Not a tech guy. I use a lot of tech. I invest in tech. I am tech forward in my companies. We utilize tech every possible place we can. We automate anything we can. But I don't

6:38 by tech companies per se. Mainly'cause the multiples are too high. Can you tell me the story of the earliest acquisition that you did that stands out in memory as one that taught you a lot of lessons? Earlier ones taught me more lessons than my more recent ones because I messed up so many times. I made so many mistakes. in my first few dozen acquisitions, that's where you really learn. You learn from your mistakes. Don't

7:00 Learn as much from your success. And the main mistakes I made in the earlier acquisitions We're around people and integration. I was too slow to integrate. No, I'm real fast when I integrate. When I integrate now

7:12 I rip off the band aid and I'm on one CRM one HRS one E R P One dashboard, one Key performance indicator metric universally throughout the system is everything is one one one.

7:25 because you have visibility into the business and you can manage it better. You have clear understanding of what's going on in real time. You have your finger right on the pulse of What's going on and it's really important when you're leading a company, particularly when it's growing so fast. You have the controls in place, you have the oversight, you have the governance in place. When I was younger. I used to be concerned about

7:45 The inevitable fallout when you do integration because people whine and scream, Oh, I like this, I've been using this and There's some temporary discomfort, but it's worth doing that. You gotta do it really fast. The other types of mistakes I made. earlier in my career in acquisitions were Sizing up the people.

8:01 I think I've gotten better at that. You start seeing patterns. in different types of personality types, different character traits and so forth and That's the most important thing you can do is make sure you get fantastic talent. Mix can we talk about the positive and negative patterns that have emerged in the people? I assume you're talking about both the seller, whoever it is that is representing the seller or the seller themselves and their teams.

8:21 What are the things that you've gravitated towards and away from as you've done more and more acquisitions? First of all. I never buy a company if I don't really like the seller. Because I've seen a correlation between how I feel about that seller. And how that deal turns out one, two, three years later.

8:37 The integrity of the sellers really important to me because the company that seller has created. Reflects. The Integrity or lack thereof of the owner or of the CEO of the senior leadership team? It reflects the work ethic.

8:50 It reflects The amount that they are collegial and respectful and collaborative or not. I really need to like the seller. It's very important to me that I have a personal affinity for them. To define integrity.

9:03 Technology is real simple. It's being honest. It's doing what you say you're gonna do and being straightforward about it. Not playing games and I like to work with people that don't require a lot of effort to figure out what do they really mean. I like to work with people who They mean exactly what they just said, and they say it in real simple terms, so they're very predictable and very straightforward. What about the negative side of the ledger? Is it just not integrity, or are there other things that you found lead to bad deals two, three years after doing them?

9:29 Two, three, four years down the line. If you find bad things with the company, it's really my fault. If I haven't fixed it by then. But in the first year or two, sometimes is undisclosed liabilities, sometimes there's things in the company that you really weren't aware of because Buying a company's a little bit like getting married. You you don't really know who you got married to until after you've been married a little while. Fortunately in my case that's worked out really well, but sometimes

9:52 People get surprised. And when you buy a company Particularly if you buy it in a process. If you buy it in a banker run process. You don't get the fulsome amount of due diligence that you really need in order to responsibly by a company and confidently think you're not gonna have a lot of surprises.

10:08 I'd love to ask you more questions. One great quote that I saw you right was that there's three times that people go insane, and one of them is when they're selling a company. What is the psychology like of a seller? And how do you take that into account? when you are negotiating the deal itself.

10:26 So I have a relative who's a psychologist. And she told me that And otherwise Perfectly sane person.

10:34 Two times in their life. becomes temporarily insane and develops an access to personality disorder for a short period of time. And those times are when their spouse tells them, I'm divorcing you. And another time is when your boss tells you you're fired. And Just people have a very bad reaction to that and they can just lose it. And I've noticed that. I've noticed those two examples and many people. But I'm gonna add a third to that as I write in the book. Thank you for reading it.

10:57 Which is when people sell a business. When people sell a business, particularly if they've Spent decades building it up. And they have family in the business and they're prominent in their community and their identity. Is associated with that business.

11:09 They get really nervous. And they get a very anxious. And they're very stressed out. And it's extremely important when You're buying a company to be

11:18 Very understanding and very respectful and very empathetic towards the seller. It's not just a personal family business either, even a corporate one. Even a corporate one if the stakes are high. And they have advisors telling them to do this and do that. And it's usually not really good advice for in terms of relationship building, which for me is the most important thing in in M and A is Having a good relationship with the seller with the other party.

11:40 So do things that they normally wouldn't do otherwise. How tactically do you run these processes? And I'm especially curious, since obviously you must have built some sort of machinery around this. So you're doing so many acquisitions you're not personally in there doing them all. So What have you learned about

11:56 Pacing. Building relationship, but keeping moving very quickly, balancing those two things, and any other relevant machinery that you found to be most helpful for doing so many of these at scale. I'm probably more Involved in M and A and the weeds. Like I said earlier. You need to know what you're buying.

12:13 And in order to do that, you have to gobble up as much information as possible from every possible source you can get it from, external and the company directly. And That's really the main stuff I want to figure out when I'm doing a deal. I want to understand what is this company really about? Every company's got positive things about it, strong things about it, opportunities, wins, successes. And every company also has Negative parts.

12:35 That's normal. There is no coming to this. All good or all bad, at least that I've come across. So the due diligence process in M and A is to try to figure out Both of those things. What are the things that Make it a strong investment case.

12:47 These are risks. These are downsides. This is hair on the deal. Is this hair we can take off? Is this a risk that we can live with? What do we think of the chances of the risk happening? And if the risk does happen, is it fatal? Does it destroy the whole investment thesis? So you really gotta get both of those things and

13:04 I write in the book about A friend of mine who's done a lot of MA Once showed me a Four quadrant chart. Of M and A.

13:12 And the top two quadrants were Large. Easy deals with no hair on them. We don't exist. Below that

13:20 On the bottom part of the four quadrants are Small Hairy deals. Nobody should do a small hairy deal. First of all, it's small, so how are you gonna create a lot of money doing a small deal? And it's hairy. So if you take the hair off, it's a small deal, you're not gonna make a lot of money on it. And then

13:34 The quadrant And the bottom. Right. are small unhairy deals. Straightforward, easy, no problem.

13:41 But it's more. So it's not gonna work. Which leaves you with the most important quadrant up in the upper right hand one, which are large hairy deals. And that's where you make the big money. You make the money on Large deals

13:54 That certainly they have issues But the issues that you've thought through You've analyzed. And you have figure out how you're gonna solve them.

14:02 How you gonna dress them? And if you can shave off the hair. On those big hairy deals. Definitely make a lot of money in M and A. I'm curious in each of these different company stories, how much of the MA was You've got some grand vision. There's some puzzle and you know the puzzle pieces you need, and you're going out and finding them one by one to build this picture that you've pre-built in your mind.

14:23 versus it being more organic and bottom up. Where you just say if something comes up that could slot in, we do that deal if it's a great deal. So is it more Bottom up or top down as you built. It's both. There certainly is a strategy and a plan.

14:37 And a vision of where you're going. But you have to be opportunistic. You have to be agile, you have to be flexible, you have to be open minded. You can't be rigid on this. You have to Take deals that come to you and say

14:48 Yeah, that's interesting. Wasn't in my original plan. Actually, this makes sense. So you look at XPO for example, we started out The very first company we bought was a company called Express One. where XPO came from. That was their ticker symbol. They were a small cap company, less than$200 million market cap. And

15:05 their ticker symbol on what was then called the Amex. was XP. And they were in the A few things. They did truck brokerage, which we like. They were doing Expedite, which we like.

15:14 And they're doing freight forwarding, which is okay too. And our original plan was, okay, let's buy this company and let's Keep buying more companies. In those three sectors. particularly the truck brokerage, but that's also ad intermodal. So we thought intermodal would

15:27 go together. And a few years later we bought Pacer, which was a big intermodal company. And that was the original vision. Over the course of time. We had opportunities presented to us to buy New breed logistics, which is in my opinion the best run

15:40 warehouse contract logistics company that's ever been around that Louis DeJoy was selling at the time. And I remember Eli Gross who's now head of investment banking at the end. Morgan Stanley, then he was running transportation, called me up on a Sunday and saying, I got an interesting deal. Now North Carolina, it's a little bit different.

15:55 Here in the sense that it wasn't in the original strategy. It was a pivot. And he said it's a little bit off. What your original strategy was. But

16:03 I think it fits. That fits real well. And I said, What is it? So it's contract logistics. And I said, Okay.

16:09 What's contract logistics. I didn't know what that meant. That's a part of the world I never really explored. And so I got some fast education and tutorials about The warehousing business, that's supply chain management, contract logistics. I looked at who the customers were. I saw opportunities to do things for those customers in the original four things we were looking at and made perfect sense. So that was an example of

16:30 Yeah, we had a strategy. Yeah, the strategy was working. But an opportunity to enhance the strategy by getting to holding the line of business. And Over time we bought other contract logistics companies, put them all together, integrated on a global basis, eventually we spun it off. And today that's called GXO Logistics, which is a New York stock exchange company trading out on its own and Doing super well.

16:50 Another example of pivoting of being opportunistic of having an opportunity fall on our head and instead of getting a headache, we looked at it and said That's interesting. Trying to buy this company called Menlo Logistics, which was the contract logistics subsidiary of Conway.

17:06 And in the course of negotiating with the Conway team and getting to know them and Flying out to Ann Arbor and Learning the business but they had And Menlo.

17:16 They proposed to me, I said, You know what? Why don't you just buy the whole business? Why are you just buying contract logistics? The LTL business is a fantastic business. Why? Why is that a fantastic business? But I I kept an open mind about it. They persuaded me. They said it's a business where there's been no new entrant of any size. For several decades.

17:32 There's a big moat around the business. It's got great pricing power. capacity actually has been leaving the industry. Not coming in the industry. And

17:41 There's ways to continually improve the business. Over time. So I studied it. I studied Conway and It was interesting because they told me

17:49 They say, Brad, one thing you need to know is there's not a lot of cost out opportunity here. Okay. And I went in And I found tons of cost out opportunity because I saw the organizational chart.

18:00 It was like someone just took spaghetti and threw it against the wall. It was three different HR organizations, three different IT organizations, three different operating divisions. Everything was three for the different parts of the company instead of having a shared services, which is a more traditional way of doing it. I said, wow, it's like a lot of money we can take out of this. Just do just doing that. They had a they had a government relations division with a fairly sizable staff and significant budget, but they didn't really need that. So we pivoted and we said, You know what? Let's get into Asset based LTL. It was a big pivot because we had been previously doing non asset businesses. Although Intermodal was Quasi acid.

18:34 At least the trailers. The containers. So that ended up becoming a fantastic deal. Had I turned that down. Had I been Rigid in my thinking on that. And I just stuck to

18:44 the original initial strategy and said, You know what, no That's a little off the bean path. we would not have created billions of dollars of value. Because we bought that company for three billion dollars. Today, we're not selling it, but if we were to sell it, it would be many times that. What are in your mind the components of a fantastic business? Term you just used. The perfect business, which doesn't exist, by the way. But if I had the perfect business, here's what it would look like, Patrick. Number one.

19:09 It would be Highly respected. in the industry by its competitors. It would be very highly valued by The customers.

19:17 I'm willing to pay more to do business with This company. 'Cause their service is so great. And their people is so great, and their technology is so great. Everything about them meets my needs. It delights me as a customer. It's a business that has

19:31 Lots of organic growth just grows by itself. in terms of price, in terms of volume. Some industries you're not gonna be able to raise price because it's too competitive. Some industry should not be able to grow volume. Because There's just so much market out there. Maybe it's a declining market. It's not even a growing market.

19:46 So if you can find a business that can grow both price and volume And You have ways to continuously improve. The operations and grow your margins. That's a great business. And I'll go another step further.

19:58 Perfect business for me. And this is a key point for me in every acquisition I've ever done. What's the return on capital? Because at the End of everything.

20:06 That's what creates shareholder value. What creates shareholder value is you have a Finite amount of debt and equity. You need to put that to use. And you have to

20:15 Get back. A lot more capital. Then you put out. That's what it's about. And

20:20 A business that has a high RYC Whether it's in favor, whether it's out of favor, whether it's the fat, a moment it doesn't matter. Over the long term? Will absolutely create value. When you think about the deals that you didn't do, how often was it price? So if you've got this fantastical business on one side.

20:37 There's no business for which a terrible price can't ruin the investment. So how does and has price slotted up against the quality of the business. Many times. I've seen An interesting business. Maybe not perfect, but

20:50 Definitely good enough. And would love to buy it. but I can't buy it at a price that makes sense. So The I C in R O I C matters. So the I C in MA is the purchase price. And whatever you're subsequently gonna put into the business. If there's capex improvements, invest it, you wanna grow it, that requires capital.

21:09 The aggregate of Your purchase price and how much money you're gonna put in over the next year or two. Assuming you're gonna put in rather than take out money. That's your investor capital. And that's what you have to Generate return on So the purchase price is very important and you must stay disciplined.

21:23 on price. If you overpay for an acquisition You're in a hole. And it may be many years. of destroying value. Before you're creating value. That's a sin. No management should do that.

21:33 If you were to boil down source of returns and equities as simply as you could, you might say it's multiple change and fundamental change. Growth of the business, change in the multiple. It sounds like changing the multiple meaning buy well, buy at a good, reasonable multiple. has been your strategy. More than materially change the business. Is that roughly right?

21:52 Not really. All the businesses that we've bought. we've integrated very tightly into the business. We don't run a loose confederation of lots of different companies, which you see some business models and some of them have work. I don't like doing that myself. I feel out of control. I like to have everything standardized and one way of doing everything. The price does matter. But the multiple matters too.

22:12 For example When we looked at ourselves in the mirror at XP Logistics a few years ago. And we said, look, we've been trading at eight and a fraction times EBDA for a while now. That's what the market says this is worth. We didn't think it was worth that.

22:26 We thought if you looked at the sum of the parts of the business. This should be training. Many turns of multiple higher than that. Significantly higher than that. But we said

22:34 I don't think we're gonna get there on our own. Because the market has spoken. So we decided to do something that Very few companies do, which is to make ourselves smaller. And we divided the company up into three companies.

22:44 And those three companies We put the circles around the different parts of the the business of how we're gonna divide it up with two things in mind. One was How can we run this business with greater focus operationally?

22:55 Execution wise. And secondly We'll get a better mother. Because Wall Street generally likes pure plays. As of general rule, not always, but generally likes pure plays. It likes to have

23:05 Easy to understand stories. Typical sell side analyst, for example, covers thirty-two stocks. So they don't have the luxury of time to really go deep studying stuff. We divided the company up into One company that was primarily LTL. Just XP L. Another company that was primarily brokerage, truck brokerage, non asset, which is

23:21 Or XO. And a third company, which is we were talking about before, which is the supply chain business, was the GXL. And now each of those companies multiples of eleven, twelve, thirteen times. It's a big change. So we unleashed. the value from getting multiple expansion

23:37 Bye. Dividing the company up into smaller companies. So the the multiple you get Fall Street matters because it goes back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, where You have your cost of capital, what you can raise money at. To put it in more simpler terms, what multiple you can raise money at.

23:50 And then you have Businesses that you can buy, acquisitions that you can do. And a lower multiple. So there has to be a spread. And when you look at all the ways that you create value, and there's dozens and dozens of levers in the business plan, that often is the most important leverage. Sometimes it's

24:05 one of the top three, but the differential, the disagio between the delta between What you can raise capital at What the market'll give you money at. And what you can deploy it at in acquisitions, that's a big value creator. So you need to pay attention to that. In that value creation mechanism, the relationship with capital markets and with Wall Street specifically is obviously very important.

24:24 How do you as a CEO manage that relationship well? What have you learned about interfacing with Wall Street? in the most constructive way possible. I have a lot of friends who are portfolio managers and analysts. And it's very easy.

24:37 They want to make money. It's as simple as that. They've never bought my stock because I'm handsome or I have a full set of hair or anything like that. They bought my stock and supported me because We create an alpha and we out. Did the competition and we were a great investment. Made a lot of money for investors. And I think if The investment community understands what you're doing.

24:55 And you're truthful with them and you tell them as we were talking about before the good things and the bad things going on'cause it's always both. And you can't be one of these management teams like everything is sunny, everything is great, everything you want. That's baloney. It's not like that. If you confide in your shareholders of What's worrying you and what the challenges are and at the same time What the opportunities are and what your vision is, and you consistently post up good numbers.

25:16 consistent with what you forecast it and they should be ambitious ones, then you'll get a following. I'm lucky and humble that I have a pretty big following, but I have no illusions of why that is. The reason I have a big following is I made a lot of money for investors. They get bonuses. Have you made any major mistakes? Dealing with capital markets.

25:31 I've made major mistakes in everything, including capital markets. Absolutely. So sometimes I've raised too much money. And then I didn't have a use for it right away and then it was delutive. Sometimes I didn't raise enough money. I had these fantastic opportunities and I didn't have the capital. And you when you do acquisitions in particular You can have the money. Then you can't credibly go to a seller and say, Hey, let's sign a deal and I'll go raise the money. You can raise the money.

25:55 Things change. Geopolitical events happen, market correction, all kinds of stuff happened. And so sellers wanna make sure your money goes. Sometimes they happen. capitalize the business enough. And I think in my next ventures, I will err on the side of raising more capital rather than less capital. I've lost so many opportunities over the years because I w didn't have enough money on the balance sheet. Can you tell the story of the large buyback that you did with XPO on the opposite side of the capital allocation ledger from acquisitions? So that was another example of opportunism where we had

26:22 Something fall on our lap that we weren't expecting and wasn't in our plan. And that came in the form of this crazy short sell report back in two thousand eighteen. I don't remember the guy's name, it blanked it out. But this report came out. It's just pure nonsense. We were doing this, we were doing that, and he was very sophisticated in the sense that

26:41 He knew all the right buzzwords to say and we researched him afterwards, and he says pretty much the same thing about every company does a short storage on the word processor. That just gets the bots. To repeat it and then sell the stock and to Yeah. various media outlets to write the story. And it's a near certainty that when he comes out with that report

26:58 The stock's gonna go down. It's almost a hundred percent certain. And they lever up quite a bit. They use derivatives and If the stock had gone up like twenty cents, he probably would have gone bankrupt. The stock's not gonna go up twenty cents. It came down in our case it came down like twenty six percent the first day. Big drop. And it was interesting because

27:14 The day it happened, just as it happened, just by coincidence. I had Adam Carr and Matt Adams in my office who were The two top guys. running a little over a billion dollar position at the time. In XPO.

27:25 Visiting my office. Paper, a screenshot actually of What had just gone on if the stock is down twenty something percent, and some short sellers making up all this crazy stuff about it. And so we so in real time we talked about it. Because every situation

27:42 There's a play. Every situation There's a way to make money. If you're stay cool and you're smart and you Keep an open mind and don't take it too personally. You'll find ways to capitalize in that situation. In this case

27:54 We said okay, look. Stock is down a lot. But for no reason. It's not like our numbers got worse. It's not like we did a pre announcement and we're gonna miss by mile our earnings. It's not because

28:04 There was some big lawsuit that was very vicious or the government regulator. There was no reality to this. It was just bunch of silliness. And so it temporarily the stock was dislocated. So you say what's the right move here? The right move was really obvious. Let's go buy back our stock. Orbis bought

28:18 I think they bought over a billion dollars of stock and we bought about two billion dollars of our stock back. And I remember talking to the bankers when we were mobilizing to do this and they said, Nobody's ever done this before in terms of the percentage of market cap and a buyback in a short period of time. It would be Blazing new ground, new territory here. And I said, So what? That's interesting data point, but the fact of the matter is.

28:38 We're definitely gonna make money on this trade. We take two billion dollars and buy our stock at was already On the low side but After it fallen down like this. It was ridiculously cheap. I any measurement. So let's do it. So we bought it back.

28:50 And Two years later the stock was three times where the price was when we bought it. We made six billion dollars on that trade. So it was a very advantageous thing for us to have done. There's a great Winston Churchill quote which is always more audacity. What do you think of that quote? I don't know.

29:04 You don't want to have audacity just for the sake of audacity. You don't want to be reckless. You want to be disciplined. You want to be rational. You want to be logical, but you need to be bold too. You need to be creative. Like most things in life. You wanna have One ounce of Daringness. And one ounce of cautiousness. Balance those two out and

29:21 Come up with really good. Moves. Good strategies, good tactics. How do you think about setting your own scope of ambition? Because when I was talking to your colleague before we started and asked them to describe you in two words or two phrases. One of them was

29:35 Related to the scope of ambition, and the second one is related to the pace of execution. We'll talk about both. But starting with scope of ambition, it does seem as though that's been a common theme in your various entrepreneurial stories that maybe you're just wired to click the ambition dial a couple points higher than most people are. So I'm curious. how intentional that is and also

29:56 Whether you think more people should think that way. Well it's funny you say that,'cause I wasn't part of that conversation'cause it showed up earlier than I did here. But that's what I would have said. I would have answered it Think big and move fast. I I don't think I invented that phrase, but that's a very good phrase that describes my team. That's our culture is to think big and execute fast because things don't get better over time. Law physics is entropy sink in.

30:17 I think it's important to Often you're not gonna accomplish a hundred percent of what you are achieving. If you're not thinking huge to begin with, you're not gonna accomplish anything big. And life goes by fast. I'm sixty-seven years old. I feel like I'm thirty seven, but technically speaking, I'm sixty-seven. I am. That's my biological age. If I live to I don't know what, eighty-seven, that's twenty years. You take twenty years.

30:40 You multiply that times three hundred and sixty five days. That's only about seven thousand some odd days. That's not a lot of days. And your last one or two thousand days I know you see how your best days. I have 5,000 great days left here. I want to accomplish something really important every single one of those five thousand great days. And so I think Time is important to utilize properly.

30:59 Time is not something to waste with frivolous things. So the goal of the CEO is to Get the whole management team to Collectively to buy into a big vision. Big goal.

31:10 Very clearly thought out, very clearly envisioned what that is. And then for everybody to sign up for What are they going to do? in order to help materialize that goal.

31:20 So thinking big, but then you gotta get a team. You can't just think big. You've got to get a team together to Get mobilized to materialize that big goal you've put out. That's not unique, by the way. There's plenty of other companies that think big and move fast, but we've been consistently thinking big and very big.

31:36 And We've been consistently executing with discipline on that big vision. What are the keys to moving fast at scale? You always hear that pace is the advantage of the startup, right? Like they can move a lot faster than the incumbent, but you're trying to do this at scale. So what's specifically about moving fast, even when there's lots of people and lots of companies and lots of stuff going on What have you found unlocks speed for you and your teams?

32:00 The most important thing in order to unlock speed is have people on the management team We're comfortable with moving fast. But moving fast. In a disciplined way. Use this analogy. You have a car. driving down the highway as fast as it responsibly can. The hubcaps may be shaking a little bit, but they're not gonna fall off. You don't wanna drive so fast that you're gonna have self-created problems. You can't be reckless, you need to be disciplined and be professional. But you wanna move fast. Jack Welch was a big proponent of speed.

32:28 was always emphasizing throughout the whole organization, you gotta move fast. Things get worse, not better. Particular with deals, by the way. When I do MA. I do them very, very fast. I can get a deal done in two weeks. Whereas I've gazumped, I've interfered, I've preempted many cell side processes where a bank has a book and a data room and a whole

32:46 schedule of here's the first round, here's the management meetings, here's the second round. Everyone gets their consultants and they spend spend all this time and money doing all this due diligence. I know what I'm looking for. I don't need a lot of that due diligence. I need to meet with the people. The basic fundamental paperwork, obviously. But I I don't need to know why SGNA is an eighth of a percent higher than it was in the forecast and hire a consultant to write a report on that nonsense. And then you just take the report and you no one ever does anything with it afterwards. I need to meet with the people. If I can meet with the top dozen or so people in a company.

33:18 And I can spend an hour, hour and a half with each one of those people. I know everything I need to know about that company. Do you have favorite questions to ask in those processes of those people? It'll change. It'll change from company to company because what's pertinent is different from company to company. So there are some things that are the same. Things about How do they make money? What's the game here? What is different about their company than the next guy?

33:38 What's their advantages? What are their disadvantages? What are the opportunities? If they were CEO, had they been CEO, what would they have done differently? What if I buy this company, should I change? Because it's not optimal. What if I buy this company that I should definitely not change because it's really good. And it's working really well.

33:54 And My list of questions. I wanna hear what the answers are. And then based on listening carefully to those answers.

34:03 Follow up questions. I'm much more interested in what they want to set the agenda than what I want to set the agenda.'Cause they know the business. I'm just learning the business. They've been living the business maybe for 10 or 20 years.

34:14 What is your favorite part about post acquisition integration? Speed. Getting to the point. Where You no longer can tell.

34:22 That this is a company we bought. three months ago versus a company that We home grew or ten years ago we bought it. And it's been with us for decade. You got the same look and feel, the same brand. The same IT.

34:35 The same culture, the same excitement. They're using all the same internal social media because I always like to communicate a lot through our internal social media. And it just It's identical in every way. I shouldn't say in every way, because Every branch, every location, every district, every region.

34:51 flavored has its own personality because you have cultural differences in different parts of the country or in different countries, but the general Blood and guts of the businesses is the same. And for me, that's the goal. The goal is to get to the point where you have fully integrated this business. On every level. into the rest of the company and it's part of the family.

35:10 How do you do the cultural component of that, especially if the culture leans most different from the culture that you've been running? Listening and demonstrating sincere respectfulness. So this is Probably my most important learning in integration is Not to come into an acquisition.

35:26 Thinking I know it all. And getting up there on stage and tell everyone, okay, and giving them a long speech of here's what we're gonna do. No. What I wanna do is I wanna come in with a very open Receptive mind. Say look.

35:38 We've just paid Millions and millions, in some case billions of dollars for this business. Obviously we think it's valuable. And these are the people who are Gonna make this company work.

35:47 And I look at those people as An extremely valuable source of information. about the company that we just spent all that money to buy. And I often find I write about this in the book that

35:59 I often find that Employees at all levels, whether they're frontline, middle management, senior management. have never been asked. What's your best idea to improve the company? Tell me everything that you would do if you had my job. And when you ask them that

36:11 And then shut up and just listen. carefully to what they say and write it down. It's an amazing experience. Sometimes you ask those questions. And then

36:19 For forty five minutes. All the people you're interviewing just are piling on and interrupting each other'cause it's just s such an exciting experience to say how they could improve the business. It's unleashing These perspectives this knowledge, this information about the business that you don't get otherwise. I find a lot of companies

36:36 Many companies, in fact, the majority of companies, they have this Valuable. thing there in terms of this repressed information that's not unleashed. And if you're not going to be able to You can go in there and figure out ways to unleash this information flow and get these feedback loops going.

36:51 and recognize people for contributing to this. Improvement plan. Wow, you can create tremendous opportunities. Tremendous and make a lot of money for everybody. Are there most common sources of bloat that you've seen in companies that you've acquired? Oh yeah, I've seen lots of float.

37:06 I should caveat that. I've seen Two types of travesty. way too much expense. Just bureaucracy and red tape and People who aren't really Triplicates of every division.

37:19 Well then say, so how do you contribute to the value of the company? And this is this long pause. They're really not. They're just on some tangent that just wasn't managed properly, just grew up like a weed. But I also see companies that are underinvested, that haven't put enough money into the business and they've lost opportunities to grow the business as a result of not investing in the business. Both of those too much Bloat or actually just bloat. And two skininess. in the overhead. Both of those things are bad things. You want to find

37:46 Like most things in life, you wanna find that middle path. You wanna find that good harmony. Can you tell me about Ludwig Jesselson? Oh, I love to so Ludwig smile comes on my face. So Ludwig Jessison may rest in peace. He died in nineteen ninety three. Louis Jethelson Was

38:00 The head of Philip Brothers. Which was Before there were hedge funds. The word didn't exist back then, but he was the largest hedge fund. I would call him a hedge fund, because they were a commodity trader. They traded oil, they traded metals. And a global business. And Mr. Jesselson, I never heard anyone call him Woodwick, but Mr. Jessel and I was called sometimes Mr. J. Mr. Jesselson was an amazing individual, and he was

38:20 My first Big business mentor. And any time I met someone in my business career, who was older than I was And was very successful.

38:30 I tried to glom onto them and I didn't just pick their brain and just ask them, So how'd you Get so successful. How did you accomplish all this? What are your secrets? What did you achieve? And I found that Every time I did that, they're very generous with doing that. Mr. Jesson was my first big business mentor. And he was a customer of mine, Philip Brothers, because I had Amarks, which is a oil brokerage firm, and Philip Brothers is a big trading firm. So I was Getting oil from them and matching them together with Exxon and Shell and B P and Texaco and

38:58 Gulf and all the different major oil companies and the independent refiners. And I started doing a lot of business with them. Because we came out of nowhere. And suddenly we were after a relatively short period of time, we were doing billions of dollars of brokerage volume.

39:10 And Philip Brothers was a big player, so naturally our paths crossed. One day I got a call from his secretary saying Mr. Jestison would like to have lunch with you. So wow. I'm in. Tell me when. So I went in and this became one of many lunches I went to New York to his office. And and during those lunches, I paid attention. I just zeroed in on everything he said, everything he did, his nuance, his face, everything. And I just asked him lots of questions. And he was very generous with sharing his insights on stuff. And I learned a lot about business and I learned a lot about life.

39:40 He was a very religious person, much more religious than I am. And He believed in principles. He believed in certain basic concepts. And in Judaism he was Jewish.

39:50 It was a lot about morality. It was about ethics. It was about right and wrong and about Certain things are not gray. They're either black or they're right. Murder's out. Murder's not good. He saw life in terms of Honesty. He saw life in terms of

40:03 People. who he could trade with, who would be reliable trading partners. And people who were in Yiddish they call Ghanafs, thieves. And He tried not to do business with the Ghana's and when he had a trading partner that was honest, that was ethical He did a lot of business with them. Because back then, remember, there was no email.

40:21 There wasn't even the fax machine, though, it was telexes and twixes that barely worked. And so Your word really was your bond. And you needed to trade with people that were Gonna perform. Because if you bought a cargo of oil for someone, twenty three dollars and then the market went up to twenty five dollars.

40:35 You didn't want a partner that said, I'm not honoring that deal, there's nothing in writing. So you needed people who would Honor their work, had integrity. He placed a very high value on integrity and dealing with people And he put a lot of emphasis on dealing with people

40:48 Uh would perform what they said they were going to perform. If you could have a five hour session around a nice fall fire with Mr. J and Two or three other. people, who would you pick? Who would you add to that conversation?

41:01 I was fortunate to hang around with his family a lot of times on Shabbat. But unfortunately on Shabbat you can't talk business. So I couldn't talk business, but that's okay. We talk about life. But at many lunches with him and his son Michael, who's a good friend of mine now and I spent a lot of time with his wife. Mrs. Jesselson, Erica Jesselson has an amazing story. She came out of the Holocaust.

41:21 And Before the Holocaust she had Dozens and dozens of She had a pretty big family. Pappenheim family in Austria and Vienna, she had dozens and dozens of cousins, and after the Holocaust she had a handful. And then the large majority of her family die, and that really formed her worldview. Wow.

41:36 Evil in the world exists. And it can have very serious consequences if it's not addressed right away. I spent a lot of time with Mr. Justin and his family. I was very fortunate to do so. Pretty wonderful. If you think about The process

41:48 of employing technology in your businesses. What lessons have you learned there? Because you said before you're not a technologist, but you use a lot of technology. I imagine that today AI is probably on the front of your minds in some way, shape, or form, if you're a user of technology. How do you approach problems like this? Okay, there's a toolkit out there in the world, it keeps getting better. Pretty cool. I get to use that stuff. When do you know how to be an early adopter, a late adopter, quasi technology business? The Adams versus Bits question for you in particular seems very interesting.

42:17 So one of the things I learned from Mr. Jesselson, and I write about this in the book, is you can mess up a lot of things if you get the major trend right. And if you get the major trend wrong, you can do a lot of things right and you're not gonna make a lot of money. So getting the major trend right. is very important. In any business. You can't be on the wrong side of the trend.

42:33 The biggest trend of them all This technology. So In the book I have a Two million year.

42:39 Synopsis. I think it's really interesting. chronology of technology in inventions starting from over two million years ago when Caveman started using pebbles for tools. And then invention of fire. Little time later and then

42:52 When I say a little time later, like a half a million years later, and then the invention of shelters Another half a million or more years later. And then all the inventions that accelerated in time, leading up to today where we are in this very AI centered world. Technology is critical to get right. You cannot be in a business where technology is going to disrupt you and technology is going to diminish the value of the service or the product that you're providing. And on the other hand, you must be in a business where technology is your ally, is your friend, is wind to your back. And all my businesses, fortunately, we've been on the right side of technology.

43:25 On technology, if you look at Today the three companies that I chair. I'm no longer CEO, but then I chair. Technology's all over the place. You look at XPO.

43:34 The third person I hired at XPO back in 2011. was a guy called Mario Harick. Mario Hart and an advanced degree MIT and machine learning and AI. And I loved him the first second I met him and I said, Okay, I'm gonna hire this guy'cause

43:47 Like me, he talks fast and thinks fast and we were just completely gotten what my vision was of automating brokerage. My original hypothesis for brokerage back in twenty eleven was this is gonna get automated eventually. You're not gonna have People in rooms talking on phones.

44:02 You can have computers talking to computers and we gotta get ahead of the curve on that. He understood that immediately. And I hired him very quickly and he was my CIO for a number of years. And then he became chief customer officer. Did a great job there. And then he ran LTL and today's CEO of the whole company. And he's doing a fantastic job. This morning the stock was up twelve percent. They announced earnings and they did a great job. It's a good quarter. So

44:22 Technology has been a big part of the culture of XPO largely due to Mario and my support of that. Right from the get go. And If you look at the companies we spun off

44:32 R XO. So R XO is a very tech forward Brokerage company. So They're matching together shippers. and deliverers, trucks and shippers and doing it in an automated way. When we started that business

44:45 Zero percent was done automated. Today, ninety seven percent Almost a hundred percent, ninety seven percent is either generated or fulfilled. Electronically. So it's complete transformation of business.

44:57 Using technology. If you look at The third company that I chair, GXO Logistics. So GXO Is the largest pure play warehouse company's got over two hundred million square feet

45:09 With about a thousand warehouses in dozens of countries. And It's probably the most tech forward warehouses you'll ever see. Not you'll ever see. In the future they'll all be automated like that, but you will be able to see today there's warehouses that are large warehouses that a competitor may be running.

45:26 And having hundreds of people Running it. And G Xo is running it with fifteen people. Everything's well engineered and well designed using state of the art technology and it has a big joint venture with Nestle over in Europe of the warehouse of the future, which now is the warehouse of today.

45:42 So I'm just giving you a few examples of utilizing technology, but I can give you hundreds of examples because That's a mindset. That's in every company I've run. Is how do we use technology and capitalize?

45:54 on the trends. How do we make technology our friend, not our enemy? In your entire history of studying trends and making sure you don't miss the big ones, What is the fool's goal that you've seen? When does it seem sometimes there might be a trend and what might be the reasons that something that initially appears to be the next big thing, in fact, is not? I give you one very graphic example of something I thought was a trend And I wrongly thought it was a trend and I ended up losing a lot of money on it.

46:19 Back in I want to say around nineteen ninety nine or so. There was this. Transportation Equity Act for the 21st century. It was called T21. And The idea was to

46:29 Repair all the bridges and the tunnels and the roads and all the decaying infrastructure across the United States. And the government was gonna spend six hundred billion dollars to do that. And I thought that was a trend. It's like wow, I gotta get in on this trend. We're gonna see a lot of by the way, six hundred billion back in nineteen ninety nine was a lot of money. Today that wouldn't I don't know how many headlines it would even get. It's not trillions. But back then it was the equivalent of today trillions of dollars.

46:51 I th we need to get in this game. And I went out and I bought lot of barricade companies and cone rentals and striping and All those things that are orange on the highway of doing reconstruction, bridges and tunnels. And I said, I'm gonna be like the big rental guy.

47:05 This burgeoning trend of the government re fixing all the roads around the country, the infrastructure. And of course, as governments often do, they didn't spend the six hundred billion dollars. They spent a much smaller fraction of it. And it didn't go to companies like United Rentals for the large part, so It just didn't work. I ended up getting out of the business because it was turned out to be a lousy business, and I resold it for a half a billion dollar loss. So sometimes You spot a trend and get all excited about it and act on it. It's not a real trend. That's an example of that. You got to be careful that you don't have false trends.

47:34 When I was reading the tech chronology in your book It gave me flashbacks to reading Ray Kurzweil's work back in my twenties or something. The singularity is near. What do you think of that notion? Surely anyone that looks at this, if you put it on a visual chart. You see this. very Kurzwellian exponential growth. What do you think about this notion of the singularity? So

47:55 You'll notice the very beginning of the book. I have the acknowledgment section. And usually. In the acknowledgment section. You thank your manager and your publicist and your publisher and your wife and God, whatever. And they're pretty much all the same.

48:08 And I said, I don't want to waste the readers' time. Do some boring thing. I tried not to put anything silly in the book. I tried to be snappy. I tried to make it substantiative and respect the reader's time. People are busy and they're doing me the privilege of reading the book, I want to give them something in return, something that's worth reading. So the in the acknowledgement section. I

48:25 Picked about. Fifteen or twenty people. That have been my mentors, that have been my teachers, that have been my friends that I learned stuff from, just people that I've really benefited a lot. Gain some wisdom, gain some insight that I wouldn't have had otherwise. And that's what I put. I put the person's name and then in one sentence

48:41 What did I learn from them? What's the one of the most important things I learned from them? One of the acknowledgements actually is Ray Kurzweil. Because In I would say two thousand six.

48:50 Done six or so. Call the singularity is near. And Its premise was The technology is advancing.

48:58 At ever increasing speeds, accelerating. And Humans are not evolving as fast as machines, as technology, as software and hardware. And ultimately We're going to keep using that.

49:09 technology that we're creating. Technology is a tool that we're creating, just going back to the stone tools I talked about a few minutes ago. Just like fire, just like the wheel, just like the telegraph, just like all the tools that we've invented over the years. This technology that we've been creating is becoming more and more integrated with us. And

49:27 We're using it to enhance our senses. We're using it to enhance our cognitive functioning. We're using it now to enhance our feelings, our relationships. So many things that AI is generating, our writing are now generative AI, and His hypothesis was and still is that We're merging with technology. And just as Ninety nine point nine percent of all the species

49:48 that have ever existed on the planet have gone extinct. Humans we're gonna go extinct someday too. He thinks we're gonna go extinct not too long from now. He thinks we're gonna go extinct in the next decades, not the next centuries or millennia. And he thinks The next Species will be A combination of humans and machines, humans and technology

50:06 That will be so different. That you have to call it another species and I don't know about the timing on that, but directionally Makes a lot of sense. When you're evaluating how to deploy a new technology, let's just take AI. It's the one of the day for sure.

50:19 inside of a business. What are the tactics of doing that? Is it pushed down to your team? Is there a normal way that you run this process in some regular interval to say, are we using the technology of the day efficiently enough? How do you actually Do it. Real world Heavy.

50:38 CapEx heavy, acid intensive. This is not a bunch of software around. So the exact opposite of what you would originally think. I don't say Okay, here's all this technology. How can we use it? The exact reverse.

50:50 Ask all my employees. And I have formal ways to do that. through questionnaires, through emails, and we also do town halls and a big campaign. To ask all of our employees if you had a wish list. And there was no

51:03 Financial impediment Just an initial exercise. Don't worry about it what it costs. And you could design any technology you wouldn't want have. What would make

51:11 Your job easier. You could do your job faster if you had it. What would you be able to please the customer more if you had it? What are customers asking you for? What are ways that instead of something taking ten minutes can be done in ten seconds and fantasise. Fantasize your perfect technology. Your

51:28 Ideal World of technology. And then you get all these ideas come in. Than the Czech people. who have to be very tightly integrated with the commercial people. Otherwise they're creating stuff that there's no application for. They're very much involved in this process.

51:41 They then take it together with the FPA with the financial people and Look at each one of these ideas. And say, Okay, what would be the financial impact? Supposing we did this. Suppose we automated this function, for example. How much more

51:54 money would that save and we could pass along some of that to the customer and keep some of that for ourselves and we grow margin here. And then what would it cost? And how much time would it take? What would the timetable look like on that? What would be the investment in that? And then it all becomes down to ROI C, which is the basic

52:09 thing of business is R O I C you're deploying capital and getting money back. And then they stack rank all those. And now we've got the beginning of a business plan for our tech group. Here's what we And

52:19 All of our employees What's the fantasticest Tech, you can imagine. And Now we've

52:26 going into detail of what would cost and what the return would be and Time for it. And we've stack rank them. And now we have our plan. And then we track that plan. We execute that plan.

52:35 Based on a time scale. We assign responsibilities to people. Now we have a checklist. And we have Weekly and monthly meetings where we color code our progress on that of how likely are we to hit the goal by that date that we initially said. Is it green? Is it yellow? Is it red?

52:50 And then we attention direct based on that. And we don't just do with employees. We ask all of our customers. And our vendors. We say, What could we do in technology?

53:01 That would make you love us more. That would make you want to do more business with us. That would make your life easier. That would delight you. And then we do the same exact process I just described. Get that all down. Maybe we have hundreds or thousands of ideas. And then we stack rank them based on R I C. You seem to love problems. Yes, I do. And by the way, you mentioned Mr Jesselson before. One of the things I learned from Mr. Jesselson.

53:21 Is that Problems are your friend. Problems are your opportunities. Problem solving problems. That's the way you make money. So if there's no problems to solve, you're not gonna make any money. Shareholder value comes from

53:34 Identifying problems, running towards the problems, solving the problems. Talk to me about thought experiments and the role of thought experiments in your life. I haven't had a lot of time for a lot of hobbies'cause I've been Very busy. Building great companies, leading teams and Just running fast. I haven't had a lot of time for a huge amount of hobbies.

53:50 So a little time I've had My biggest hobby is meditation. So I meditate twice a day. And I've been doing it since I've been sixteen years old. Holy cow. Fifty one years. I've missed almost no days. I've done it almost every morning and every afternoon. And I've tried lots of different forms of meditation and I've mashed them all together and made my own personal meditation that works for me. And one of those approaches to meditation are thought experiments.

54:11 Thought experiments actually is not a phrase I made up. It comes from Albert Einstein actually. Albert Einstein had a German word that I can't pronounce, it was phonically something like Gedanken experiment, which translates to thought experiment. In fact. Using a thought experiment. is how Einstein discovered relativity'cause he pictured himself, he imagined himself, did thought experiment. of riding a beam of light. And picture what that would be, and he saw the relationship between time and space, and all became clear to him. So thought experiments are

54:38 picturing things intentionally in your mind. And I try to do things that are numinous, meaning I try to do things that are novel, that are different, that are inspiring. that take me out of my comfort zone, that give me a perspective that's Not normal, so to speak,'cause if I just have normal

54:52 perceptions, I'm gonna achieve normal results. And I want to achieve supernormal results. I want to lead teams that create huge amount of alpha. In order to do that. I've got to have people think differently. I have to have people think out of the box, think in a different way than ordinary thinking. So thought experiments for me Help me do that. So sometimes I think in terms of

55:10 Different perspectives on space. Either very big bigger than the universe. an infinite number of universes, a multiverse. Sometimes I shrink my awareness down to tiny spaces like I'm in inside an atom, even on the quark level, there's elementary particles. Sometimes I do that not just with space, I do with time. I go back in time.

55:27 maybe decades and memories of from my childhood or growing up. smells or sights or sensations or faces or places. And sometimes I go back Thousands of years or millions of years. And I picture What would have been in the past. Just giving you a few examples of

55:42 Different ways of thinking. That's time, that's space. I apply similar ways. Of Looking at sensory activity, feelings, emotions and Some of the best emotions in life, like love and figure out ways to amplify those emotions and

55:55 I have a lot of fun with that. Sixteen is very early to start meditating. Maharishi Mashogi I saw a poster of. I was at Northfield Mount Herman School. I was a junior. I was sixteen. I saw a post of this man with a beard and There was a saying under the post that said, Life is bliss. I said that's interesting. That's a different You don't really think about life being bliss. That's not like a normal saying it was a free lecture. So I went to lecture and

56:16 There was this red headed woman to Janice Alwan, I think her name was, I still remember to this day, and she seemed to have something interesting about her, a certain calmness and glow about her, and I learned T M. I learned T M and I did it for decades and I hung around with Maharishi when I was a student, but when I was younger. And then eventually I left the TM movement and I started studying other types of meditation and I built on that foundation. What was he like to be with? What was the affect? He was a very interesting guy and a person who

56:42 was complex, had a lot of different things about him that We're opposites. On the one hand he was Very humble man, a lot of humility and a lot of sensitivity and a lot of caringness, a lot of love and very kind hearted person generous. And in another angle, he had a lot of big plans himself.

56:58 And a lot of big things and you were either on the bus or off the bus. And if you were not helping with that, you were off the bus. But he was a very bright person. Extremely intelligent. Very charismatic. He was able to

57:10 Charm. thousands, actually millions of people to follow him. I liked following him. I liked being part of a group that was different, that was learning new things, that was experimenting with He called it consciousness as a field of all possibilities. I thought that was really

57:24 Cool saying. He knew a lot about meditation. He had studied meditation. Deeply in India. had met many different gurus that he had met with, and he had formulated it that was something that was easy for Westerners to do. So he was very brilliant with meditation techniques. What formative experience comes most easily to mind prior to age sixteen?

57:43 For me it was education. For me. I was lucky, I was privileged to be able to go to summer enrichment camps instead of normal camps like most kids go to. My mother Put us into

57:54 Geeky nerdy camps that were for the sciences and for the arts and or educational, basically extensions of the school year. And there was one at Moses Brown School in Providence, and there was one that was called the Governor's School for the Gifted. I participated in these summer programs that I learned that There's a lot of people a lot smarter and gifter than I am. I learned it was really nice to be around it was very enlivening to be around people who were smarter than me. People more talented than I was. 'Cause when you're in your own school, maybe you're the top student in that class or the top one or two students in the class.

58:25 You think you're really smart. When you go to school for the gifted, you realize suddenly you're in the lower quartile, not in the top one or two students in your classes. I found that very enriching. In fact, they were called enrichment camps. And I remember the excitement of being in a group of really bright people. Maybe twenty, thirty people in a class. and a very talented teacher up in front.

58:44 and that teacher bringing out a lively conversation. For me, that was a learning of an electric experience, how to run an electric meeting, which fast forward to today is the title of one of the chapters of my book is How to Run an Electric Meeting. And one of the keys to that is to make sure that people in the room have the right people in the room. Yeah, you're doing my job for me. You gotta tell us about the electric meetings. What are the components? So our meetings in all three of those companies are different. Very different. Then

59:10 The typical boring meeting that most companies have. Most companies have a meeting Where Someone's up there and they've got a power point, they've got a speech they've prepared and People are sort of semi listening to the speech.

59:22 Going back to what I was saying before. When you get my age, you only have Five to seven thousand days left. You wanna have every minute of that something exciting, something valuable, something rewarding and That's not the kind of way I want to spend my days going forward. The way we get those meetings very exciting and very valuable and productive.

59:38 is to first have the right people in the meeting. People who are Very honest, who are very intelligent. who are very hard working, who are very collaborative, and people understand respectfulness. People understand how to listen.

59:51 and how to be open and receptive to other people's ideas. And people who can think of it. dialectically, meaning thinking from different perspectives on the same problem. Not rigid thinkers, not black and white dichotomous thinkers, not people who think I've got it all figured out and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong and I'm never gonna change my mind because you don't get anywhere with that. So you want to have an atmosphere.

1:00:13 Where people are encouraged To disagree. But disagree respectfully. And if you can create a safe zone for people to Lean in. and disagree with each other in a nice way where the person who's being disagreed with doesn't feel bad'cause you're not

1:00:27 attacking that person, you're debating that idea. very different. You're not labeling the person or denigrating or demeaning the person. And there's no bullying or any of that kind of stuff. There's passion in those meetings, there's energy in those meetings, but it's the energy of ideas. It's the energy of a shared purpose. Between all the people in that meeting.

1:00:44 that we want to get to the right decisions on these things and we want to then as leaders of the company go back to the field. And mobilized large numbers of people. to create a ton of alpha. That's a fantastic medium. The way you run an electric meeting is

1:00:57 The leader doesn't set the agenda for the meeting. The people set the agenda for the meeting. So what I do is I send out what would normally be the PowerPoint presentation of the agenda for the meeting. Ahead of time. And people are expected to read that. And then I have everybody we have an app and everybody should has to fill out the app and put in

1:01:14 Their biggest takeaways do they learn from From reading that and from being in the business Unrelated subjects. And secondly, they have to put in Okay, now we've read what our challenges are, what our opportunities are.

1:01:25 What our goals are. What do you think are questions that are worth going around the room once we meet in person? It's a good use of everyone's time. That's going to help us achieve goals of creating value for shareholders, for delighting customers, for improving their employee engagement, and so forth. And then we take all those. We eliminate the dupes.

1:01:44 'Cause often you get a lot of dupes on the good takeaways and the good questions. And We send them back. And everyone rates each one of those takeaways and each one of those questions on a scale of one to ten. In terms of the importance.

1:01:57 of the value that they think discussing that in the group would add. And now we've got our agenda. We start with the ones that were have the highest rankings and we go down until Class is over. I'm joking class. Until the meeting is over. And That becomes

1:02:10 An inclusive democratic way to set the agenda. that people really buy into. They really pay attention to what's going on in the meeting because they set the agenda. This is what they wanted to talk about. And that's a rule of the meeting is that There are no devices on.

1:02:23 There are no side conversations. There are no distractions here. You have to pay attention. If you have the privilege of being invited to this meeting. You're concentrating on the one person who's speaking at a time, and you're giving that person your one hundred percent attention. Your eyes are right on that person, your ears are listening right to moving from that person's mouth, and you're feeling what they're feeling, and you get really in tune with the person. And it's such an exhilarating experience. For the speaker and for the people listening, for the person speaking. Imagine how validating that is, Patrick.

1:02:53 that you're in a meeting, you got 20 of your colleagues of your peers there. And Everyone is just looking right at you. And really genuinely interested. And what you have to say.

1:03:03 It just builds up your confidence. It also gets you in the flow, gets you in the zone. And you also feel a certain inspiration and motivation to Say important things because you've got all these people paying attention to what you're saying. So Gets you really in the zone.

1:03:17 And then all the people are listening and it cultivates a flexible mindset. Which is so critical in leadership in business, where you're constantly reevaluating your hypotheses based on new evidence, new information. And that's what those meetings are like. People.

1:03:31 Really want to be in those meetings. Who's the best leader you've ever experienced? I've had the fortune to have lots of great leaders in the company that I've led. If I had a point to the best leader, I'd have to say three. Because by definition I thought they were the greatest leaders in the company because

1:03:47 I promoted them to be CEO of the three companies. These are the people I felt that were most qualified, most suited to lead. Over a hundred thousand. People. And They're very different.

1:03:57 So you look at Mario Harak for XPO, you look at Malcolm Wilson for G Xo. Look at Drew Wilkerson for RXO. On the surface. Very different ages, different

1:04:07 backgrounds, different cultures, different accents. One's from Lebanon, one's from England, one's from South Carolina. They look very different from each other. But when you dig down to the things that matter, not the superficial stuff, but the more important things, they're identical. These are people who are

1:04:23 Honest to the bone. That's critical for leader. You won't get Tens of thousands of people to follow you. If you're a BS artist. People are smart.

1:04:31 People are smart. They may be making twenty dollars an hour. They're still smart. People can know. If a leader is telling the truth. Or if they're Giving'balone. They can smell it. It's like the people are programmed for that.

1:04:41 So these people have integrity. These people are hard working. These people are not people you have to check on and prod them. People who are all in. lean in and all in and really take a lot of pride in doing a really good job. These are people who are collegial.

1:04:53 These are people who get along with other people. These are people who are Collaborative. These are people who are not arrogant. These are people who are humble. These are people who Understand that.

1:05:02 We come and go in a few decades, we're not that important. We're just a little tiny flick and flash in the whole universe is a huge universe. And people don't take themselves too seriously. These are people who have on the one hand Enormous amount of self confidence, enormous amount of self confidence that a leader has to have. At the same time, even though it's an opposite trait. don't overemphasize to themselves how important they are because we're not that important in the end. So they have humbleness. And so these are people have the qualities. These three people are great leaders. They have the qualities that I've just been articulating. They really embody them. They don't have to be tutored and mentored and get a coach to get them to be more honest and get them to be more collaborative and get them to be harder working and so forth. This is what they're made of. This is their DNA. What if anything about business

1:05:43 Are you interested in that you feel like you haven't yet figured out? What I'd like to figure out more is Something that I've figured out a lot. But haven't gotten to the end zone yet. Which is how do I motivate and deal?

1:05:54 With people who aren't thinking clearly. Who are Victims of their own faulty way of thinking of their biases, their prejudices, their Cognitive distortions.

1:06:04 There's schema in life. The prison that they have. to interpret all the things that are happening in life and sometimes you see people who have Some significant weaknesses in the way they're thinking. And I would really like to figure out a way to better communicate with those people, to be better mentor those people, coach those people to just unthink their stinking thinking as they say. That's something I would like to really get better at.

1:06:24 I'm not bad at it, actually. I'm good at it. I'm good at identifying that. I'm good at being empathetic and helping people, but I'm not proficient at it. I'm not perfect at it, and I would like to get better at it. A related question is the key to getting the most out of someone. Everyone has something to offer. It varies person to person. Both in type and degree. is the best way to get the most out of People.

1:06:45 In business. How about paying them well? How about paying them a lot of money? If they perform. So two things there. Paying them a lot of money, but If and only if they perform.

1:06:54 So most people come to work. People wanna make money. That's the purpose. They're coming up because they want to hang out. Although if you have a fantastic company That is a motivation to come in because they like the people they work with maybe as much as the people they live with. But that's not the main reason why a person is coming in. The main reason a person's coming in is'cause they want to make a lot of money for themselves and actually for the people they love. In most cases it's For the people they love. It's for their spouse and their kids and Whatever else they donate to and they're

1:07:19 Whatever's important in their life. They want to give back and they want to support people, they want to get the self esteem from Enabling other people to live a comfortable life. And so if you can provide them with an opportunity to make a lot more money than they're gonna make

1:07:32 cross the street, but tie it to performance. Tie it to them. Actually executing on the things that will Help us materialize our big vision. People will create miracles.

1:07:42 People Do things that they didn't even know they were capable of doing. What do you want? Now. You're someone that has done a lot of thinking big, a lot of moving fast, had a lot of success as a result of those two things.

1:07:53 Cross a lot of industries. You strike me as someone that's not gonna stop or slow down. So What do you want? What do you still want? I have a big long list of things to do. My wife and I actually have a bucket list. She keeps a little book where we have our date nights and every time we come up with a place we wanna go, or something we wanna do, she puts it down there. We're not gonna get through five percent of that list because there's just not enough days left. But

1:08:11 My main goal right now Is to continue what I've been doing, which is to start companies from scratch and make them into Big multi billion dollar companies. And make the shareholders

1:08:22 A lot of money. And make The employees real happy and make the the employees a lot of money also. I wanna have a funny tree organization where everyone who's touching that organization is getting their fair share of gold. And for me, I get a lot of satisfaction out of that. It's something that really turns me on. I really enjoyed doing that. I like the creativity of Getting a big idea.

1:08:41 It starts off By definition abstract, it's all in your mind. You're just picturing something in your mind. I wanna create this large industry leader. I wanna create this gargantuan company that's gonna be respected in the industry and customers are gonna love and so forth. and that shareholders are going to want to invest in it. And then making that concrete. And then materializing that

1:09:00 Abstract vision. With precision. For me, I really enjoy doing that. It's a creative process for me. It's the same process that a musician has or an artist has where you first got to conceive of something, and then you actually make that happen. One thing that you have to do well by definition given you've started all these companies and all these industries, is no one to leave.

1:09:17 How do you know when a chapter Is done. I was talking to James Gorman the other day, who's a retired CEO of Morgan Stanley. And I was telling James, don't quit. He's stepping down as CEO. And he's gonna become executive chairman. And I have a great relationship with him and I have a great relationship with his bank and

1:09:32 I really don't want to see you go. You're still in your fifties. You're still young and he said No, I feel it's time to go. I feel it's the right time to go. Everything is Well and wisely put, I've got good succession plan in place. I think I can leave holding my head high and if you're real good, what accomplished.

1:09:47 And I understand that. 'Cause I've left many companies over the I've left five companies over the years that I built up to very large companies and It's time to move on. There comes a point in time when it's time to move on. It doesn't feel the same.

1:09:59 You look forward the next few years and you say, What do I want to accomplish? And is that aligned with what the company's going to do. And if it's not perfectly aligned, you don't have your heart hundred percent into that, you should leave. You should leave and move on. And if you feel the slightest bit bored as a leader, it's time to move on because If you're doing your job right. You're not gonna be bored for one second. You're gonna go through every day You're gonna have a to do list and you're not gonna get through a quarter of your to do list every day. If you do your to do list is too short.

1:10:24 And When you get to the point when there's some type of a been there, done that mentality, then then it's time to move on. I'd love to do a really quick tour of the businesses and something surprising about the business that you learned building them that people might not appreciate, maybe starting all the way back with oil business and your couple of adventures there. For the first ten years of my business career from ages twenty three to thirty three, I was in the oil business. And I loved the oil business. It was this

1:10:48 global business That back then in nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty nine There was no internet, there was no email. Futures exchange were just starting towards the end of that and information Was

1:11:00 hidden. Particularly information about pricing. So you could go to an OPEC country and sign a contract for Twenty dollars a barrel. And they only set the price every three months or so when they would meet in Vienna or they meet in Geneva.

1:11:12 In the meantime, the spot market is like thirty three dollars a barrel, for example. And you can resell it for ten dollars a Back to back with no risk. If the price happened to go down, you just don't lift the cargo. You minimize the amount of liftings you have. So this was a wonderful business to be in because of the information immaturity. the lack of free flow of information, you would find out the pricing of oil if you weren't in the game, if you weren't in the business all day long, by a snail mail newsletter you would get from McGraw Hill Plats Oil Grant, it was called and

1:11:38 That's how people discover price. There's now you discover it every second it's up on the screen with futures and You see it every tick. So that was a big opportunity to make a lot of money. I would no way make the kind of money I made back then today. doing the same thing because That just doesn't exist. The pricing is transparent and where the oil is and where it has to go is transparent. And we did a lot of processing deals.

1:11:59 We did a lot of deals where we would rent quote unquote the refinery from Shell Rotterdam or B P Antwerp and we would Then Get the oil.

1:12:07 Charter ship. Bring it to that refinery. Pay him a couple of dollars or whatever to process it. And then we would sell What came out of that?

1:12:13 And people say, wow, that's real risky business. And we were like really was almost no risk. It was a little risk, but almost no risk because we understood each component of that. And today Everybody understands that. That's not unique proprietary information. But the timer's really great. The next business I went into was waste management. And this was I started

1:12:31 a business in nineteen eighty nine and took a public in nineteen ninety two. called United Waste Systems and The strategy there was real simple. It was to go into these tertiary markets, not even secondary markets, but to go into The upper peninsula of Michigan or Appalachia, West Virginia, Kentucky and go down to rural Mississippi and

1:12:48 buy up the landfill capacity. And then by the hauling companies, the collection companies that were coming, it was called tipping at those landfills. And build up scale. and build up a density so that you could run the business, you could run one truck instead of ten trucks and pick up the same amount of garbage

1:13:04 the same amount of time. Obviously margins would increase quite a bit as a result of doing that. And we use technology to do route optimization, which now everybody does, but back then that was revolutionary. And That business We outperform the S P five hundred. From nineteen ninety two to when I sold it to what's now called waste management for two and a half billion dollars by five point six X. So if you bought one share of the S P and one share of the United Way, she would have made five point six times more money.

1:13:28 On the other waist one. What I learned from that Was that the trend is important. Again, we would not be able to make that kind of money today in the waste business. We had a trend going on where right around that time.

1:13:38 The EPA was outlawing these dumps. Which were unsanitary. and we're polluting the environment and really should be outlawed. And the amount of landfills decreased by a large amount. And the remaining landfills, which then cost about four or five million dollars to build up. Made a lot of money.'Cause they were the survivors. So

1:13:54 We capitalized on that. And then after that was rentals I ran for ten years. United Rentals was based on one simple premise. The premise was There was a lot of construction equipment. That was

1:14:06 Being owned. By construction companies and by the end users. That was only used like A few months. A few weeks.

1:14:14 Sometimes a few days out of the year we said, This is nuts. This is absolutely crazy. It makes absolutely no commercial sense. And then you had to have a maintenance team and It's almost like the Uber and Airbnb insight before them. In a way, in a different industry. Yeah, absolutely. It was a form of sharing, of crowd sharing. And at the time about fifteen percent of construction equipment in North America was rented. Eighty five percent was owned. We said, That's gonna flip. There'll come a point in time where there'll be more

1:14:39 Equipment. Rented. For short periods of time. and utilized over the course of the year by sharing it with many different Users.

1:14:46 than is owned all year long. And of course that turned out. So we had a tremendous amount of organic growth. And we had a tremendous amount of M and A opportunity as well. We bought Well over two hundred companies in the industry, and we bought them at multiples. lower than what we were trading at. So we create a lot of alpha.

1:15:00 The first Monday at seven o'clock in the morning we showed up after we bought a deal just by the accretion and then the deal. They're all creative deals. The other thing I took away from United Waste was That was my first exposure to public markets. Everything I did in the oil industry was private. The waste business was the first time I I had a public currency. And I remember when we I PO'd it with the two banks that then at that time were the two leading banks in environmental services. There was Payne Weber.

1:15:22 And there was Alex Brown. Of course now Alex Brown's part of Deutsche Bank and Paymer was part of UBS, but the time I went to two conferences and I saw Jim Groninger, it was an investment banker speaking for Payne Webb, and I saw Tammy Preston, who was the investment banker for this field. Alex Brown.

1:15:37 These were the two big shot bankers. I said, I want to use these bankers. I want to work with the people who actually doing the most amount of business in the area, who understand the business well. And so I did. And I formed good relationships with them. I took their advice. We took it public pretty quickly. Then I said after we sold United Ways for Two and a half dollars. I wanna build on the skill set that we've developed that we've honed of doing MA, of doing integration. Of running a business.

1:15:59 In a standardized way. I was in the town next over from Dan Tully. It was the CEO of Merrill Lynch at the time. Fantastic man. May he rest in peace.

1:16:08 And Dan? This is in the old days when you could meet with the banker and the analyst in the same room. So Dan set up and his son who's also named Dan set up A series of meetings. Well, I say about a dozen meetings.

1:16:19 With different parts of Merrill Lynch. That had ideas. Of what should be the next industry that I should consolidate. Where are there M<unk>A opportunities? And we looked at healthcare, we looked at financial services, we looked at education, and we looked at equipment rentals. So that got me into United Rentals. And you're done in rentals.

1:16:34 was a big win, obviously. United Rentals I started at the company was three dollars and fifty cents a share. I haven't checked it today, but recently the stock has been four hundred and thirty five dollars. It's over a hundred bagger. United Rentals was a durable business that we created. And then XPO I started in Two thousand eleven. And it was a similar business plan. was a business to consolidate an industry that was still fragmented.

1:16:55 And that's what I did. I looked at Over two thousand acquisition opportunities. And I bought eighteen companies. And we tightly integrated those eighteen companies. And if you look at those companies that we bought.

1:17:05 Before we bought them. They were doing roughly about a billion dollars in EBADA collectively, pro forma. You look at'em today. They're doing something like two and a half billion dollars even does so. We and

1:17:16 My management teams that succeeded me have improved those businesses, have made those businesses more profitable. And that's the other component. You can't just buy stuff. You have to buy stuff and then integrate them and optimize them. And that's a very important part of the value creation opportunity. That's what I learned at X Bill Logistics is to I just hone the skills and just build on the skills that we had done in the previous company.

1:17:36 What? having listened to this would still surprise people about you. I was talking to one of my investors the other day and he said he's learned more about me in the last three months'cause I've been on interviews and different forums. I've been opening up a little bit about my personal life. I've usually kept my personal life and my approach. just out of it and just try to just institutionalize myself and just be a corporate CEO and just do a real good job and deliver the numbers and get results and people will appreciate that and do it. So

1:18:01 I've been interviewed a bunch of times the last few months and I Taking questions like the good questions you've been asking me and I've been answering them. So I don't know what would surprise people about me. I really don't. I think I saw somewhere that you would consider something like accounting as an area that you might go check out, but then decided against it. And I'm always just so interested by why you might pass on something. Is that a real example that I have that right? And if so, why did you decide not to do it? Over the last year

1:18:24 I've looked at over five hundred opportunities. Mostly M and A opportunities, industries that we could consolidate, businesses we could Do a lot of acquisitions in And I've rejected the vast majority of them. I'm down to a very short list. And accounting was one of the ones I looked at.

1:18:38 And I gotta be careful because every business I have has accountants, so I don't want to say anything that's annoying my auditors, but I think this is a real existential risk to accounting. I think AI and five years, ten years, fifteen years, I I don't know the time frame, could do everything that accounts do right now.

1:18:53 individuals personal income taxes, for example. I think that's very mechanical. And anything that's mechanical and just process and can be formulaic, AI's gonna rip that out. Just Do it for cheaper or for free, even. So I don't want to get into a business Where technology trends

1:19:10 are gonna be my enemy. I wanna get into a business where technology trends My friend. I want to get into something where AI is going to help us grow margins, help us grow the business. Is there anything else about software versus physical?

1:19:21 Technology in the software sense of Incredible software businesses obviously have been built, but software can get disrupted by other software fairly easily. Whereas disrupting united rental or something, I guess is possible, but it's not gonna be done by a programmer in his closet. I like to be in businesses that you can touch and kick and there's nothing physical there to it. That's not necessarily better, it's just me. That's what I like. I gravitate towards things like that. I like to be in businesses where

1:19:47 the metaverse is not going to replace it. So there's certain things Like your house. all day long you're wearing goggles or a contact lens or somehow you're in the metaverse for a large part of your time. You're probably gonna still sleep in a bed. And you're probably gonna still take a real shower with a real shower and you're gonna brush your teeth with a real toothbrush.

1:20:03 There's other things that will be replaced. Then it's no longer going to be. And I wanna make sure I'm in the first category, not in the second category.

1:20:12 I love the idea of think big and move fast. I interpret it almost as a challenge. That's something I can take and go do, try to do more of each of those two things. Is there any other way that you would frame a challenge? To those listening. to live what obviously has been a very full life. The book is called How to Make a Few Billion Dollars.

1:20:30 It's a little bit of a misnomer. Because it's not just about how to make money. It is. It's designed particularly with Aspiring CEOs in mind. But that's not the only purpose of the book. The purpose of the book also is to help people

1:20:42 Achieve whatever they want to achieve. in their personal life, in their business life. in relationships, but anything important. Something that's big. Life goes by real fast. And You can just d dilly dally through it and just

1:20:55 Die or you can Do real fun stuff. And real exciting things and you can Change the world if you want to change the world. You can help other people if you want to help other people. You can learn things that are really important to learn. You can explore the arts and the science and there's so many things that are

1:21:10 Amazing in life. Life is a wonderful opportunity. We have a privilege. The biggest privilege we have is just being alive. Being a living, breathing organism that has cognitive functioning and have sensory activity that has purpose and a meaning and has feelings and Can know what love is and have relationships with people. This is not what most things have. But we don't have it for a long period of time. We have it just for a few decades and it goes by fast. As you get older, it goes by fast.

1:21:37 Faster and faster. I remember when I was a kid. Summer seemed like forever. Today summer seems like it goes by in a week. I think the book is to help people dream. Big?

1:21:46 Have people. Get out of Their right of thinking and Explore bigger, newer, important ways and Increase their desire, increase

1:21:54 Their goals. And to help them At least show'em what's worked for me. Some of those things will resonate and will be applicable and will help people and they can use those same techniques. But hopefully even the ones that don't know.

1:22:06 We'll give them examples and ideas and illustrations of Things that they can customize for themselves. I'm not A perfect genius to know the answers to everything. I have some things that Are proprietary and idiosyncratic.

1:22:18 to how I've built these beautiful businesses that I put in the book. One thing I learned from writing this book is I have A few dozen, maybe a hundred unique ideas and I put'em all in the book. I don't have another book in me. This is my only book. I'm not writing another book. At least that's not my plan because I don't think I could come up with another hundred things that are unique and special and different. But I did put down in that book every single thing.

1:22:40 That I think at least was responsible for the success that my teams and I have had. How did you get the book done so fast? Concentration, just really focusing on that. And this is just the way we've done everything in business is Having a clear vision of what we're trying to achieve. And then

1:22:55 Laser focus on that. So we talked earlier about the acknowledgement section where I listed various mentors and friends and people I've met that have learned important things, life changing things. One of them I mentioned is Louis DeJoy. One of the people is now the postmaster general of the United States. And I got to know Lewis pretty well because I bought his company and he was on my board of directors for a while before he went into government service. And what I learned from Lewis was Laser focus. On the things that matter.

1:23:19 And avoid distractions. He would say that over and over again. So that's a distraction. When he was running a meeting, there's an agenda and It was something that came in that was just not helpful to what we're trying to achieve. We said no, let's refocus. Let's stay focused on the points. And when we was running a warehouse. We have everybody focused on the KPIs, the key performance indicators, the metrics.

1:23:38 The measurements of success. That mattered. And just kept coming down to that. And I watched him how he would run the business. He had these video conferences with all the managers at the different warehouses, and he got into great detail of what they were doing. And he would always bring the conversation back. to the 10 or so KPIs. How are we doing on this? How are we doing on this per hour? How are we doing on this number? How are we doing on this productivity? How are we doing on employee engagement? How are we doing on customer satisfaction? How are we doing on defect?

1:24:02 Focus, focus, focus on the things that matter. The thing that gives me joy is something that's happened today, which is I've done four hundred of these. I've not met someone quite like you. You're this interesting combination of almost like John Collison's Endless curiosity and optimism and energy with Frank Slootman's intensity or something like that. Some really interesting combination that I haven't encountered and I've done a lot of these and I've met a lot of people and so I've just really enjoyed

1:24:26 your effect. It's really cool. The book is fantastic. I have one final question for you. And I ask everyone the same question, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? That's an easy question for me to answer. I don't need any time to come up with the answer. It was the president of Bank Periba was a gentleman called Christian Bayer. W E Y E R.

1:24:45 Christian Wire. And still alive. Hundred and one years old. French, but living in Geneva. And Christian

1:24:51 Did two things for me. And the second one is the most kind. The first one was very helpful for me in business. He gave me a billion dollars line of credit. from Bank Paribad to go do oil trading. So he had confidence in me, he believed in me.

1:25:02 And I didn't let him down. Really appreciated that. But the second thing was even kinder. He introduced me to my wife. We've been together now for almost 40 years. Fantastic.

1:25:11 Brad, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, sir. If you enjoyed this episode, visit joincolossis.com where you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with hand edited transcripts. You can also subscribe to Colossus Review, our quarterly print, digital, and private audio publication featuring in-depth profiles of the founders, investors, and companies that we admire most. Lear more at joincolossis dot com slash subscribe.

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