#373 Breakfast with Brad Jacobs + How To Make A Few Billion Dollars

Founders

David Senra

Steve Jobs, Founders, James Dyson, Company Builders, Technology, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Business Professional Biography, How I Built This, The History Of Entrepreneurship, Jim Clark, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurs, History, Founder, Business Autobiography, Jeff Bezos, Entrepreneur, Biography, Biographies Of Entrepreneurs, Biographies, Business, Business Biography

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2024

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Brad Jacobs is one of the most talented living entrepreneurs. Brad has started 8 different billion dollar or multi-billion dollar businesses. He has done over 500 acquisitions and has raised over $30 billion. He started his first company at 23, has over 40 years of experience as an entrepreneur, and is the most energetic person I have ever been around. Earlier this year he published his life story: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. How to Make a Few Billion Dollars was one of my favorite books that I've read this year and the episode I made about the book was one of the most popular episodes of Founders. This episode is what I learned from having breakfast with Brad Jacobs and reading his book How to Make a Few Billion Dollars.

Transcript

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0:00.0	One of the most important things I learned from Brad's book, and we spoke about this when I had
0:03.9	practice of Brad as well, was the importance of working with the smartest and most talented
0:07.8	people that you can. Brad says that the most important thing that a CEO does is recruit
0:12.2	superlative people. And Brad will recruit the smartest people he can find. And he actually talks
0:17.7	about this. Brad says there's no substitute for smarts. And that reminded
0:21.6	me of something that Steve Jobs said in this interview I read that Steve gave in the late 1990s,
0:26.8	and this is what Steve said. I think that I've consistently figured out who the really smart
0:30.3	people were to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that
0:35.5	in most things in life, the dynamic range between the
0:37.7	average quality and the best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested
0:43.2	in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the
0:48.6	best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that, you are well advised to go after the cream of the cream.
0:57.2	You need to build a team that pursues the A-plus players.
1:02.1	And this is exactly what Ramp did.
1:04.8	Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry.
1:08.4	Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months,
1:13.9	they hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. That means when you use Ramp, you now have
1:21.3	top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24-7
1:28.3	to automate and improve all of your businesses,
1:31.3	financial operations, and all of this happens on a single platform.
1:35.3	The longer you use ramp, the more efficient your company becomes.
1:39.3	And this is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography,
	...

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