#45 Built From Scratch: How A Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion

Founders

David Senra

History, Entrepreneurship, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2018

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What I learned from reading Built From Scratch: How A Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank. --- The creation of The Home Depot began with two words: "You're fired!" [0:01] Blinders on focus on the customer [5:45] Learning how not to manage people from Ming the Merciless [8:37] Meeting Ken Langone / the prehistory of Home Depot [11:00] 81% private / 19% public partnerships [18:40] Ken sells to Ming. Predicts Ming will fire Bernie [28:30] Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened [35:00] Bernie Marcus at 49 years old: little cash and a ruined reputation [38:15] How Bernie Marcus walks away from Ross Perot [38:50] The importance of equity [49:19] Do not work with people who don't know how to care about other people [51:00] How they got the money to open The Home Depot [55:30] The critical importance of selling at the right price [58:32] Knowing the right way to do something by seeing it done the wrong way [1:08:54] Mistakes can teach us we're never as smart as we think we are [1:11:25] ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Transcript

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0:00.0	All the way back in 2019 I received a message that changed the direction of this podcast forever.
0:04.6	It was from Tristan who is one of the co-founders of Reed Wise.
0:08.0	He said, hey, I love the podcast and he told me about the Reed Wise product.
0:12.4	I responded, thanks Tristan, love the idea behind Reed Wise. and he told me about the Reed-Wise product.
0:12.5	I responded, thanks Tristan, love the idea behind Reed-Wise,
0:15.2	I will definitely check it out.
0:16.3	I had no idea that I would become a super user of his product.
0:20.8	And so over the years, I've added my highlights and notes for over 300
0:23.7	books I have over 20,000 highlights and notes for the books that I read for the
0:28.3	podcast and because I can search every single thing I've ever done I use ReedWise every day. I never
0:36.1	close the browser tab. The tab on ReedWise is always open because as I'm
0:40.5	reading, as I'm thinking, as I'm researching researching I'm constantly going in
0:44.7	and re-reading all my notes and highlights.
0:47.3	And you might already know this because every other podcast I go on I talk about
0:49.5	Reedwise, I tweet about it, I post about it
0:51.6	constantly, I've been saying for years it is the best
0:53.9	app that I pay for. And because I go around shouting about how great it is from the mountaintops,
0:58.8	I get a bunch of messages. Nearly every day people have asked me, hey is there a possibility that I can actually get access to your readwise?
1:05.6	And this happened so much for so long. And I thought it was like a superpower of mine.
1:09.3	So I was like, no, no, no, no. And then I started thinking, it was like, well, why is everybody
1:12.3	want this? Like like why do they keep
1:13.7	asking for this and I thought about it's like well if you think about this is like has anybody else in the world
	...

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