4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2022
⏱️ 41 minutes
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0:00.0 | People are living longer, so the career you expected to cap off at 40 years could last 60. |
0:06.5 | There are very few people who can work 40 years and save enough money to not work for another 30. |
0:13.0 | Get ready for a 60-year career with a special series on your money briefing from the Wall Street Journal, Wednesdays in September. |
0:21.0 | From the Wall Street Journal, this is Bad Bats. I'm Ben Foldey. |
0:25.5 | In our first episode, the brand new company Trevor Milton started, Dehybrid, and passed its first big test. |
0:31.5 | The company had impressed executives at Swift Transportation, one of the biggest trucking companies in America. |
0:37.5 | We'll come back to that. But spoiler alert, Dehybrid would ultimately fail. |
0:42.5 | There's a reason you've heard of Nikola and not Dehybrid. |
0:45.5 | Years later, when Nikola went public and Trevor Milton was being hailed as a visionary founder, |
0:51.0 | he talked about his past failures and what he learned from them. |
0:54.0 | He raised on a podcast called The Truck Show. |
0:56.0 | Saying that Nikola investors were treating it as a company worth billions of dollars, in part because of those failures. |
1:02.5 | They want to know that you've failed. They want to know that you've been destroyed and gotten back up. |
1:07.5 | And because when times get tough, they want to know you're the right leader. |
1:11.0 | So all those guys out there listening right now, like, if you failed, all that means is that you're going to be a better leader in the future. |
1:18.0 | You're going to have more compassion, you're going to understand more, and you're never going to give up. |
1:21.0 | And people will invest in you because of your failures. |
1:25.0 | That's how Trevor saw it. But what's interesting to me, having reported this, is how Trevor pitched and managed the companies that ultimately failed. |
1:33.0 | And what happened to some of their investors? Because as I dug deeper into Trevor's past, I found patterns that repeated themselves. |
1:40.0 | Trevor, a natural salesman, would build up his businesses using charm and a big vision. |
1:45.0 | He had a real knack for raising money, often making big promises to investors. |
1:49.0 | And later, just like they would at Nikola, some investors in those businesses would be left with big life-changing losses, as Trevor rolled on. |
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