Founders: #316 Bugatti

I'm back from California and I'm sleeping a lot better because I've been reunited after

several weeks away with my eight sleep.

While I was in California, I was meeting with a lot of founders that listened to founders

and I had lunch one day with two founders and the subject of eight sleep came up.

One of the founders has four eight sleeps.

The other founder has two of them.

So in addition to having great taste in podcasts, these two founders also take their health

and wellness exceptionally serious and they feel sleep is the foundation of that.

And so that is why they make sure they have an eight sleep wherever they fall asleep at.

Since I've been using eight sleep and I keep my mattress ice cold, it's actually cold before

I even get into bed.

Since I've been doing that, I've noticed an extreme improvement in my own sleep.

So much so that when I travel, I notice its absence immediately.

There are very few no brainer investments in life.

I believe eight sleep is one of them.

That's why they're growing like crazy.

That's why you have people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk tweeting about the fact that

they love their eight sleep unsolicited.

So if you don't already have one, make sure you get your own eight sleep.

You go to eightsleep.com forward slash founders and you can get $150 off.

That is eightsleep.com forward slash founders.

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If there was a prototype operation for what Enzo Ferrari envisioned, it had to be what

the legendary Itori Bugatti built in Molsheim.

This part artist, part engineer, part entrepreneur, part sculptor had created an automotive fiefdom

in a tiny village in Alsace, Lorraine, France.

The Bugatti estate included a small, elegant inn for the entertainment of customers, a

stable of thoroughbred horses, and the factory itself, which was a series of low buildings

set among landscaped gardens with a trout stream meandering through the factory machinery.

Bugatti was from Milan, born into a family of artists.

The boss, as he was known, was generally to be found conducting business dressed in writing

breeches, boots, and a yellow coat.

His automobiles were and remain a stunning combination of industrial aesthetics and the

jeweler's art, as if Fabergé had somehow been able to motorize an ache.

They were simple, flawlessly fabricated and reliable.

Bugatti was just one of a bevy of colorful eccentrics, dissolute nobles, playboys, dreaming

commoners, and hard-eyed egomaniacs who populated the world of European motorsports in the 1930s.

He certainly stood above the rest in terms of lifestyle.

A feudal barony had been created around the spidery machines that he manufactured in

limited qualities and sold only to those he personally deemed worthy.

By contrast, Enzo Ferrari, at the time, was still a drab, simple journeyman laboring in

a small garage in an Italian backwater.

But the example that Bugatti was setting for Ferrari did not escape him.

Bugatti was a prototype for success.

He was manufacturing cars for the very wealthy and fielding his own team of professional

race car drivers.

Mobs of people were flocking to Mollsheim to have their Bugattis anointed by the master

himself.

Surely, if Bugatti could succeed at this, a similar concept could be developed by Enzo

Ferrari.

That was an excerpt not from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, but a book

that I read originally back on episode 220.

It's called Enzo Ferrari, The Man and the Machine, and it was written by Brock Yates.

But that was the excerpt that originally got me interested in reading a biography of Bugatti.

Up until last week, I had failed to find one.

There is a founder's listener by the name of Cameron Priest, who has probably sent

me dozens.

I don't even know, maybe 50 excellent, hard-to-find biography recommendations over the years,

and he was the one that made me aware of the book that I'm actually holding in my hand,

which is called The Bugatti Story, and it was written by Bugatti's daughter, Leheb

Bugatti.

And this is the perfect book for a founder's podcast.

It was originally published, very hard to find.

It's originally published in 1967.

The copy that I'm holding in my hand was actually somebody's Easter gift in 1972.

You can still see the note.

And I can tell you right up front, this is a book that I'm going to wind up reading again.

I'm going to make more episodes on the future.

I absolutely loved.

I spent the last eight days going over the book.

I could have spent another week reading and just rereading certain parts of this book.

It is perfect.

I feel like I've stumbled upon some kind of hidden treasure.

Okay, so I want to start with the foreword where his daughter is talking about why she

decided to write the book.

This book was written in response to the long-felt desire of the Bugatti family to have a full

and objective account of the life and work of Hitori Bugatti.

And one of the things I like most about the book is the fact that towards the end of his

life Bugatti was very sick.

A few months before he died, he started to try to write his autobiography.

It was never published, but his daughter had a copy.

So there's large chunks of his autobiography in this book.

So it's like Bugatti speaking directly to you and I almost 80 years after he died.

So I want to start in the preface of this book.

It was actually written by an engineer who worked with Bugatti.

So an idea that you and I have talked about over and over again, there's always a blueprint.

All of the founders that were studying, they were inspired by founders or scientists or

inventors or explorers that came before them.

Obviously from the excerpt of Enzo Ferrari's biography, we see that in large part, the

blueprint for Ferrari was Bugatti.

And so these observations about Bugatti, the man made by the engineer that worked with

him, you can clearly see why somebody like Enzo Ferrari would want to pattern much of

his career after Bugatti.

And so he says car manufacturers at this time looked upon their products as parts of themselves.

Bugatti was one of the last car manufacturers to keep the flag of the artistically built

car flying high when the mass produced car invaded the scene.

Bugatti maintained that quality production depended upon a small number of skilled workers

and a small output.

His character was too strong to change to new methods.

So what they're talking about here is this is the reason this came to mind is because

Enzo Ferrari, he has this famous exchange with Henry Ford II.

So that is Henry Ford's grandson who was running Ford Motor Company in like the 1950s when

this is happening and Ford Motor Company had attempted to buy Ferrari.

And Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari get into this argument and Ferrari says that you make

ugly little cars in an ugly factory.

Ferrari like Bugatti before him were still hand building his cars.

In fact, in that book that the Ford versus Ferrari movie that came out a few years ago,

it's actually based on this book called Go Like Hell, which I also did a podcast on.

There's this great line that talked about how the contrast between the cars that the

Ford factory was producing and then these like hand built cars that Ferrari was making

at the time.

And so it says nothing like a Ferrari had ever graced American roads.

They were cars built by Italian artisans.

Every detail down to the steering wheel handcrafted using some of the same methods used to make

Roman suits of armor and the royal carriages of the ancient kingdom.

And so this idea of cutting against the bias to use the term that Balenciaga used last

week.

It's like the trends within your industry that everybody else is adopting and copying.

Bugatti was like Balenciaga, Bugatti was like Ferrari.

He would constantly cut against the bias.

So it says he was too strong to change to new methods as other car manufacturers resigned

themselves to doing.

So they're talking about changing from this like an artisan handmade factory to mass

production.

Bugatti had no interest in that at all.

And he taught all of his employees to adopt this mindset as well.

By his training, Bugatti raised his workmen to the love of artisans and craftsmen.

These two words evoke his own personality.

He was an artist and a craftsman.

He always insisted that his engineers and technicians should never ignore the promptings

of their intuition.

I was a young engineer at the time and I felt under the spell of his charm and his singleness

of purpose.

To the end of his days, he remained a figure of another age, an age in which the conveyor

belt had not yet eliminated craftsmanship and when individual imagination could have

free reign.

And then we get to the first excerpt from his unpublished autobiography where he says,

in order to explain the strange development of my career, I must first describe my environment

during my childhood and what my life was like as a youth.

And so the influence of his father, Carlo, is very fascinating to me.

It's going to go on for several pages, but I want to give you what I think are the most

important parts.

So he comes from a family full of artists.

They were pretty well off.

His grandfather was a famous architect and a sculptor.

His dad was an acclaimed jewelry and furniture designer and he also painted and sculpted

as well.

Art was extremely important in their family.

We can see this because they named Bugatti's younger brother Ram Brant and he's going to

be a famous artist in his own right.

But there was just one line that jumped out, I mean, when I was reading through this about

his early childhood, and that his dad would tell him that art could not be learned, that

if you were going to be an artist, it would be an innate skill, it would be something

that came completely natural to you.

And if you didn't have it, you were wasting your time.

The interesting thing to me behind that statement is the fact that that then sent Bugatti on

the search for one of my naturally inclined and talented at doing.

And Bugatti, like Henry Ford, just stumbled upon the fact that they had a gifted mind

for mechanics and engineering without any kind of training at all.

And discovering this also came from advice that he got from his father.

So his father told both of his sons that you should work with your hands and that you can

do whatever you want.

You just cannot be mediocre.

And so when he's really young, he's like 15 or 16 years old at the time, he winds up

trying out these things called a motor tricycle.

So it's just what it sounds.

It's a tricycle with a motor on it.

And this is the first time he realizes he has some kind of innate talent here.

In a short while, by just looking at the machine, I had grasped all the intricacies of its

mechanism.

His father attached great importance to his two sons being able to work with their hands.

And so Bugatti wrote that even in establishments of higher education, manual work would be

of great value to those who are choosing a career.

It is a relaxation.

And at the same time, it exercises your muscles and your brain.

And so a young, like high school age Bugatti, we're talking like late 1890s is where we

are in the story, right?

He discovers, okay, wait, he's at the right place, the right time.

He's the right person with the right set of skills.

He says, it was a time when people were awakening to the possibilities of self-propelled road

vehicles.

And I was immediately fascinated by these new machines.

None of the people who were working on these road vehicles at the time was in fact motivated

by thoughts of commercial gain.

Listen to the language that he uses to describe the work that he was doing at this time.

It was an aspiration to greater freedom, to an emancipation from the ties which bound

man to the earth.

And it's at this point where he realized, oh, this is going to be my art form.

Says he threw himself into this entirely new kind of art where so much was still to be

invented.

For Bugatti, the main attraction of was having something to create, to model, to perfect

and the joy of seeing the machine come into being as a work of sculpture did in the hands

of his father or his brother.

This revelation changed the whole course of his life.

And there's a factory producing high quality motor tricycles right in Milan.

This is where Milan is where Bugatti and his family are living at this point.

And so at 17 years old, he becomes an apprentice in this factory that's producing these motor

tricycles.

And so he starts with this initial passion, this passion of mechanics, this passion of

engineering.

And then it's going to join with another lifelong passion that he has and that is for racing.

Initially it is for motor tricycle racing and it's obviously going to be for car racing.

So by time, before he's even 18, he makes his own model of a motor tricycle.

Then he takes it from Milan all the way to this race in France.

And so before I get to why racing was so important to him, even when he was 17, it's important

to him till he dies.

I got to tell you more about his personality.

This guy's got like Kanye West levels of self confidence.

And so before he enters this race, he's on record saying, even before the start, I was

sure that I'd win.

And to put it in the context, why that's so astounding is this next sentence.

This tri-car was the first that he had ever made.

I want to get to this part why racing was so important though.

It was fascinating because the way that Bugatti thought about racing, and I talked about

this, you know, I did like a 13 part series years ago on all of these like early American

automobile company founders, it was still true in the late 1800s, just like it was true

in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe.

Racing is the best distribution channel if you're a car manufacturer.

You win a race, you have a line of customers out the door that want to buy that car.

But aside from the benefit of the business, Bugatti liked it because it was able, racing

was the only true objective way to prove to himself how good his designs were.

And so this is a little bit about how he looked at it here.

His passion for racing was at once aroused.

And this was a passion that he was never to lose.

It was not so much for the race itself.

It was because it was a natural complement of his passion for mechanics.

Racing constituted the testing bench without which all mechanical inventions remain abstractions.

It alone could decide all problems and was the indispensable true test.

And so the fact that this passion and obsession grabbed him from the very beginning refused

to let him go.

He didn't want it to let him go either.

He's one of the things I most admire about Bugatti and why I said earlier, this is a

book that I plan on reading and rereading many times in the future and hopefully making

many more episodes about.

And it's because of how he describes this.

He's 17, 18 years old at the time.

Essentially, he just wants to spend as much time as possible learning everything he can

about his obsession.

Meanwhile, I was studying the different types of engines, examining their qualities and

discussing their defects.

I determined to build a car of my own.

I had realized by then that I was completely taken by mechanics in which I could clearly

see so many imperfections.

My ideas gave me no rest.

And so this is like the first hint, but the book talks about it later on, that he kept

very irregular hours.

There's really no separation between him, his life and his work.

I mean, we even talk about the way he set up his house and his family, or it's literally

on the grounds of his factory.

That is like the physical manifestation of what is happening in his mind.

He would see the perfect car in his imagination, but he lacked the material to build it.

No one was prepared to invest in his capabilities as a car builder.

And so he has to get these ideas out of his head.

This is now something that he talks about.

He'll work this way for the rest of his career, and he would recommend other people doing

it as well.

He put everything down on paper.

He began to put all of his ideas down on paper in drawings and in designs, all the ideas

that his head was full of.

He spent whole days designing his car in every detail.

He talked about it with such enthusiasm that it seemed to be speeding along at 40 miles

an hour.

Even then, I sometimes feared that it might turn his mind.

So this idea where he sees the perfect car that he wants to build in his mind, it comes

from his imagination first.

He has to get it out.

So his version of a prototype is like drawing it out on paper, and then he uses this paper

to go and try to raise financing.

So this is very similar.

I talked about this before.

There is this legendary meeting that takes place between Steve Jobs when he was like in

his 20s and Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, when he was like in his 70s.

This is from the book Instant, the story of Polaroid that I've done multiple times.

And it talks about the conversation that a young Steve Jobs and an older Edwin Land

are having.

It says, the two inventors describe to each other a singular experience.

Each had imagined a perfect new product whole, already manufactured and sitting before him,

and then spent years prodding executives, engineers, and factories to create it with

as few compromises as possible.

That is exactly what happened with Bugatti.

So eventually, he finds two very wealthy brothers.

In fact, they invite Bugatti to their huge estate, and this is the first time...

Another passion.

Bugatti is passion personified.

Another passion of his, as you could probably guess, the fact that he conducted business

dressed as he was riding horses, was horse riding.

And it's actually at this estate from these two brothers that are going to wind up funding

this initial prototype that Bugatti's about to build when I think he's like 18.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's 18 here.

He learns to love horses and horse riding on a visit from their estate.

But these two brothers meet him and they're like, oh, this guy's a genius.

They recognize that once a hidden brilliance in him, and we're prepared to go into partnership

with him to enable him to build his car.

And then we get the first indication of something that he does for the rest of his life.

He's a micromanager.

He's involved in every single step of the process.

He supervises everything.

In many cases, he can do every single...

There's a line at the very end of the book in the appendix.

Let me get to it real quick, because I might not bring it up later.

And it reminded me of James Cameron and Christopher Nolan, who have just spent a bunch of time

studying and in the minds of.

And this is about Bugatti.

He says he can do any job in the factory as well as are better than the most skilled mechanic.

I'm not kidding.

This is crazy.

This book is...

What was it?

60 years old?

No, longer than that.

70 something years old, however old the book is.

That line, there's a line just like that in the James Cameron biography.

There's a line just like that in the Christopher Nolan biography.

It is spooky how you and I are keep studying the same personality in different bodies alive

at different times, working in different industries.

It's so crazy to me.

So let me get to this point.

He would let no one but himself put the car through its paces.

It was his from start to finish.

He had been responsible for or had supervised the whole construction.

He is 19 from the drawing board to the final assembly.

So then he goes, this goes back to this Kanye West level of confidence that is very beneficial.

He goes and enters this into the very first international motor show, which is being organized

in Milan.

This is the year 1901.

And so it's a car show based on obviously how the cars look, but actually how it performs

too.

He takes it like around this track and of course he drives it himself.

And yet again, we see more evidence that he was right, like he had stumbled upon this

innate talent because he wins it.

He won first place at the first ever international motor show.

And so this idea that you have this gifted person, he's a perfectionist by nature.

He wants to control everything.

He's completely obsessed.

He's keeping irregular hours.

He's giving everything to this like new craft by the time he's 19.

So he wins the international motor show, right?

And there's this car manufacturing firm in Germany.

It's called DD Trick.

They wind up offering Bugatti a contract to manufacture his car for them and he's going

to get paid a royalty fee.

So this is the first time he moves from Italy to Germany.

And so because his daughter had access to his unfinished autobiography, we see how he

writes about how he felt about his very first contract.

I mean, he had a bunch of success up until this point, but this is like the turning point

in his life.

And so he says, I received 25 or 30,000 francs when I handed over my designs.

I was happy to have money to spend on, which I had earned myself.

I drew satisfaction from being able to support myself without anyone's help.

And I found satisfaction in receiving a sum of money for a completed job of work, which

had given me pleasure to think about and to do, which had been fun to do.

He has work that feels like play.

And we see again, the sustained level of confidence.

He's 19.

He's like, listen, I want to do something new.

I want to do something that no one else has done before.

And this is the first time he mentions patents, but I think he winds up dying with like 900

patents or something.

It's a crazy number.

So he says, my patents result from my own work and I'm happy when I can improve on something

already existing and arrive at a point which others have not yet reached.

At one point I had been granted more patents in Germany than anyone else.

And then he talks about the importance, because remember he comes from a family of artists.

He had studied intently Leonardo da Vinci and he realizes that the way da Vinci approached

his work, there's ideas in the way da Vinci approached his work that Bugatti can use in

his own.

And the fact that he knew this at 19 is incredible.

The importance of being influenced by the great work and the great people that did that

work that came before him.

And so one thing you learn is like, oh, if you can, you can develop your like powers

of observation, that is like a meta skill that can be used for anything.

So he says powers of observation are indispensable in order to produce anything.

Leonardo da Vinci had wonderful powers of observation.

He could reproduce with exactitude, something which today would take a magnifying glass

to do.

He could catch movement as the camera does now.

And at the same time, he gave the illusion of life to his sketches, something that photography

is unable to do.

It is by this observation that one can penetrate into the nature of things.

If a man like Leonardo became a military engineer, he would have been an expert at it.

His advice on any subject would be invaluable.

And his ideas on the matter would be highly original.

An artist of this class misses nothing.

The smallest detail invisible to ordinary people is enough to enable him to fix his subject.

This habit of observation leads to the heart of the matter in all branches of human activity.

Faster progress.

This is wild.

Faster progress would be made in all fields if conceit did not cause us to forget or disdain

the work done by others before us.

There is a tendency to believe that nothing worthy of note has been done in the past.

And this has an unfortunate bearing on our judgment.

Thus the present trend toward mediocrity.

The improvements I have made to mechanical constructions have resulted from such habits

of observation.

And so he talks about that starts in your mind first.

I often think that one should not put pencil to paper before having visualized what one

wants to do from all angles.

Over the years and after much experience in drawing quite novel and complicated things

in pocketbooks, I have come to work by a series of mental images.

And the drawing board enables me to give effect to those images.

A technician who cannot put down his ideas on paper is at a great disadvantage.

To sum this up, the powers of observation and a great facility with the pencil are the

two attributes that matter the most.

And so before he sets up Bugatti as like his own independent company, he is going to design

cars for other car manufacturers and then he gets paid per car manufactured on like

a royalty basis.

And so he does this two or three times, but the way he sets this up, it really tells you

like how important independence like maintaining his independence was before I get there though.

This is what finding your life's work sounds like.

I was hypnotized, drawn more and more to the mechanics of motors.

These exciting problems had me completely under their sway.

And so began for me the hard uphill task, the thankless labor of constructing and destroying

and beginning again without a break or rest.

And for days, months, years even until success finally rewarded all my efforts.

And so he has a little team, there's like three people in the workshop putting together

the car, three people in like the design shop putting it together.

They don't have enough money to manufacture it themselves.

So he does another deal with this company called Deutz.

This is Deutz Gas Engine.

It's also in Germany.

So they're going to manufacture the car, but they also make Bugatti, the manager of

the production department.

In his contract though, he makes sure that he's always retaining his independence.

And so this is what he says, it was the first time that I had agreed to take an appointment

with a firm, meaning an actual day job whilst being compensated by the royalties I received

on the production of my car under their license.

I had retained, this is the important part, I had retained the right to work independently

on any other project in which I might be interested.

He did not want to be relegated to the servitude of employee.

He said so much himself, he had felt fettered by his appointment in the service of others.

And so that clause was the most important clause in the entire contract because what

he's doing is in his spare time, he is going to build the very first Bugatti.

So Bugatti decided to build it himself in his spare time.

He worked patiently for many months, gradually assembling it in the cellar of the house where

he was living.

When it was complete, he gave it a name which would later become renowned, per-sang, that

means thoroughbred animal in French.

And so this is the beginning of the business, this is the beginning of him building his

own world within the world.

This is the birth of mulchame where the Bugatti factory is still to this day.

So he goes to a banker with his plans, they give him the funding to start his business

and this is his daughter describing this point in their life.

At Christmas, we all moved into the new house where we were to live for the next 30 years.

So Bugatti's around 30 years old at the time and a description of the early days of his

company really tells you a lot about what was important to him says, his cars were hand

built, each an expression of the creator's personality.

He retained his independent outlook, his freedom to invent, and his urge for perfection down

to the smallest details.

He took little notice of trends among rival car manufacturers.

Reminding me of last week with Balenciaga was like this with other fashion designers.

And Bugatti paid no more attention to the presumed taste of the public.

That sounds like Steve Jobs.

And essentially what they're saying there is he relied on his own taste.

He built the product that he wanted to use.

And you're going to see another similarity with Balenciaga.

I think last week it said like Dior, Christian Dior made dresses for the rich and Balenciaga

made dresses for the wealthy.

Right from the very beginning, Bugatti with his actions is essentially saying, Hey, I

make expensive shit.

I only want to make high quality products and I'm aiming for the top.

And he did this from day one.

Bugatti made no attempt to compete with the low priced popular models already on the market.

The price of the Bugatti was higher than any other car of equal horsepower.

The reason is that this new production stands in a class by itself.

And so they start out making like five, 10 cars a year.

This is not a large production.

Within two years, his business is already fantastically successful.

And this is going to remind us of one of my favorite ideas that David Ogrevy noticed about

people that get to the top of their profession.

And he summarized it with the good ones, no more.

The public began to take notice of this new constructor of cars.

That's obviously Bugatti, whose business was only two years old and that he knew more about

the subject than the big firms whose fame had spread around the world.

And so before I move on, I just want to pause here.

You remember a few pages back where he's like, I felt hypnotized.

I was drawn to this.

I'm under the sway.

You fast forward two years later and he knows more about it than anybody else.

It reminded me of, if you think about the main guiding North Star to Paul Graham's essay

on episode three, 14, how to do great work, essentially he's just telling us over and

over again, what are you intensely interested in?

What are you irrationally curious about?

If you're interested in, you're not astray, just follow that.

And the reason I think he gives that advice is because we see when you do that, you wind

up like Bugatti.

You know more about the things that you're intensely interested and curious about than

anyone else in the world.

And so this idea that he starts out, he's like, listen, I make the best products in

the world.

They're going to be expensive, but you're not going to find anything better than them.

This is where these cult-like followings start.

To use the terminology of Steve Jobs, Bugatti believed that he made insanely great products.

And what happens?

You develop a cult-like following, and then those believers of Bugatti go out and recruit

more believers of Bugatti.

And so this guy named Dr. Espinette, winds up buying a Bugatti.

He's so obsessed with it.

He tells everybody about it.

He just happens to be really good friends with this world-famous pioneer aviator, this

guy named Roland Garros, who's going to wind up becoming a really close friend of Bugatti's.

And so Garros goes to check out, I was like, this guy, my friend Dr. Espinette won't shut

up about this guy.

Let me go to Malshim and see what's going on.

So he says he went to visit Bugatti.

His first impression was one of surprise.

When he entered the gate, instead of the usual coming and goings of a car factory, he saw

Bugatti dressed for writing, walking a fine pony around the courtyard.

And this actually enhances his work.

This is really, really important.

Bugatti loved writing and kept a number of thoroughbreds.

Many of his ideas and solutions of mechanical problems came to him while writing.

It was a means, a relaxation.

He would interrupt his writing and go to the workshops when the idea popped in his mind.

In writing breaches, if he had suddenly found the reason for a car part not working properly,

this is one of my favorite ideas from David Ogrevy's book, Confessions of an Advertising

Man.

It's this idea that you have to keep open the telephone line to your unconscious.

And you see this all the time.

Like, why do you have ideas like suddenly like a problem that you're like unconscious

or even subconscious mind is like mulling over, you know, maybe pops up when you're

in the shower or you're on a walk or whatever, whatever the case is.

In Bugatti's case, it's writing as horses.

And so you see this throughout history.

These people talk about the fact that like these ideas spawn to mind when you're doing

something else.

And so Ogrevy says, I have developed techniques for keeping open the telephone line to my

unconscious in case that disorderly repository has anything to tell me.

I hear a great deal of music.

I take long, hot baths.

I garden.

I go into retreat among the Amish.

That is not a joke.

He actually did that.

I watch birds.

I go for long walks in the country.

And I take frequent vacations so that my brain can lie fallow.

No golf, no cocktail parties, no tennis, no bridge, no concentration, only a bicycle.

While thus employed in doing nothing, I receive a constant stream of telegrams from my unconscious.

And these become the raw material for my advertisements.

That same idea is happening exactly where we are in this Bugatti book.

What I found fascinating is when Roland Garros, this famous pioneer aviator, is on the visit,

on this visit to the factory.

He finds out who he's interested in a car.

What happens?

He finds out who just bought this car, the Duke of Bavaria had just bought the car.

And this Duke just happens to be the brother-in-law to the king of Belgium.

And so it says Garros ordered one right then and there.

And so me and my friends use this word set up all the time.

And so what a set up is, is like, how does where you live and where you work and the

world you're building for your company and everybody in it, like how does it interact

with each other?

Bugatti has one of the best setups at Molsheim than anybody I've ever come across.

It gets even better.

In addition to having this like English mansion on the property for his family, his workshop,

the stream of trouts, the gardens, the horses, he also has a landing strip and a meadow.

A lot of the early Bugatti customers, there was a big overlap between people that wanted

super fast cars and were also capable of flying, you know, when they're flying planes, like

we're talking about like right flyers, like 1910, 1915 kind of planes.

And so they come in to Molsheim and they just land right in the meadow next to the factory.

And so between the increased production, the fact that he has, he's funding his own racing

team, obviously that's where a lot of people are finding this out about his cars and making

and making orders, like between the racing and the increasing the production, this is

a seven days a week, long hours thing.

This is how he's building his company.

My small factory acquired great important importance, Bugatti said.

Production was increasing.

The nights were often short, but orders were flowing in.

And then we get to the first of many turns in Bugatti's life that are outside of his

control but destroy his business.

There's a paragraph that comes later in the book after he dies.

He dies relatively young and I would make the argument that he actually died of a broken

heart.

Here's this paragraph that gives you an overview for what's about to happen in his life.

It says he was a creator and a humanist before he was an industrialist.

And then he showed himself to be an astute and wily businessman conducting the affairs

of his factory with success, despite King competition, financial difficulties and the

destruction of two wars.

This is World War One that is going to take all of the progress that Bugatti's been making.

So he's around 33 years old at this point.

He is around 200 employees.

He's been working at this since he was about 17 and is going to be destroyed.

Then came the war, World War One, and Bugatti's plans for the future had to be shelved.

And it's amazing that he was able to realize that he's in trouble and then he has to get

out right away.

A lot of people would hesitate, it's like, I'm going to lose everything.

And so his factory, now it's in France, but at this point it was considered German territory.

So like France and Germany is constantly fighting over, I think you pronounce it like, I'll

say Slurrain, I think is what it's called now.

But at this point in 1914, he's in German territory, he's like, oh, I got to get the

hell out of here.

So it says his decision was immediate.

Others might have hesitated, weighed things in the balance, considered the importance of

what was at stake, but not he.

As soon as mobilization was declared, he decided to close his factory and leave Molle

Schame with his family, giving up the rich prospects of his flourishing business.

And so the book goes into great detail about how like perilous the journey is.

He ends up getting his family out of Germany, gets them back into Italy.

Now this is a crazy thing.

He sneaks back into occupied German territory because he has to hide his engines.

Remember this part because this is going to become really important a few years from now.

The factory is later taken over by local authorities, but before then, soon after seeing his family

safely to Italy, Bugatti returned for a few days.

He buried the engines of three racing cars in the grounds of his estate.

These engines, which were his latest constructions, were never detected and he was able to recover

them at the end of the war.

And so imagine you're in his shoes.

You have, I think, three kids at the time, a wife, a successful business.

Essentially, his business is going to be paused for five or six years.

He's eventually going to go back and reclaim it.

He's going to lose it again in World War II, which we'll get to.

But what was he doing during World War I?

He's not building cars anymore.

And so we see for the first time that his mechanical genius is universal and he does

this for his whole life.

Like he'll make cars.

He'll make boats.

He'll make airplane engines.

He'll make rail cars.

His guy's a legit genius.

So he starts designing during World War I, he's making airplane engines for the Allies

and specifically for the Americans.

I just want to pull out one part because it made me laugh.

This American company, I think this is 1916, maybe, they're on there.

He's making airplane engines for him.

It says, Bugatti received a nice, fat check less than a week after his first contract

with the Americans.

And not being used to such promptness on the part of official departments, he went to the

bank with the check and had to ask if it was valid.

And so this is the first time that the book mentions, but I need to bring this to your

attention because I'm obsessed with Bugatti, the way he built his life, the way he built

his business.

Everything he did, I find him fascinating.

But this is something that also is extremely important.

This idea that friends greatly enhance the magnificent, mysterious odyssey that we call

life.

And Bugatti was a good friend.

He prioritized it.

I thought this was very fascinating.

An account of Bugatti's life would not be complete without mention of his friendships.

Work was not everything to him.

He opened up when in the company of a few friends.

He was fortunate enough to enjoy several great friendships during the course of his life.

And one of these was Roland Garros, who I'd mentioned the famous French aviator, the one

that would land in the meadow at Bugatti's setup, right?

Listen to how deep their friendship was.

This is incredible.

It's even more incredible in the fact that there is war raging on around them, right?

These are Europeans in 1915.

Garros offered Bugatti all the money in his bank account, about 200,000 francs.

It was his whole fortune.

You're helping the war effort, Garros said, just as I am, but I know of your difficulties.

You have a wife and three children.

I'm a bachelor and I might get killed at the front any day.

Garros has sent Bugatti a picture of them together, says, to Ettore Bugatti, the incomparable

artist who alone knows how to give life to steal in admiration and friendship, sign Roland

Garros.

This is how crazy this is.

He says, I'm a bachelor and I might get killed at the front line any day.

He does get killed.

He is a pilot in World War One, and he dies, I think, a year or two after this.

And so the deeper we get into this book, I think you can see why I had such a...

A passion and positive response to Bugatti, because there's just so many lessons he can

teach us.

It's like, one, can you find what you have a natural aptitude for and a deep curiosity

for?

This is going to sound a lot like...

I feel it's like Bugatti is the personification of Paul Graham's essay, How to Do Great Work.

It's like, what do you have a natural aptitude for and a deep curiosity for?

Can you work in that environment?

Can you make a commitment to be the best in the world at what you're doing?

Can you care deeply about making truly great work?

And then can you also make room for other humans in your life?

It's not just all work all the time.

Like, you saw in the way he built his entire life.

His kids were in the factory.

His son, Gene, who was going to die in a car accident when he's, I think, 30 or 32.

It's right before Bugatti's going to die shortly thereafter.

But like, his kids were involved in the business.

His wife was involved in the business from day one.

He creates an in on the property so friends can say, customers can say, he was relentless

about building deep friendships inside and outside of his industry and helping them as

much as possible.

And then another thing, listen, what about to read to you?

Your entire business was destroyed.

You have to start from scratch and Bugatti's like, all right, then, might as well get to

it.

At the end of World War One, this is the state of his business.

When Bugatti saw his factory again at the end of 1918, only the walls were of use.

What remained in the machinery and the tools was scarcely good for scrap.

A completely fresh start had to be made, but Bugatti did not hesitate.

And so before the war, he had his own company who self-contained.

Now he's like, okay, well, I have to build up everything from scratch.

I need a lot of money.

I don't have a lot of money.

What would I do?

So this is how he financed the rebuilding to finance his business.

He sold the license to produce his engines as well as a few of his patents to various

foreign car manufacturers.

So all these, they list a bunch of these companies.

He does this in Italy.

He does this in England and he does this in Germany as well.

And then he goes and recruits some of his former employees.

And so then we see this again, cut against the bias inside your industry.

Mass production had grown rapidly over the last four to five years, right?

And so some of his competitors were now mass producing and making 100 cars a day.

This was Bugatti's response.

Bugatti, true to his standards, took no interest in that aspect of things.

As in the past, he was more concerned to create than to produce.

And this is crazy how good he was.

Remember, he's picking up almost six years later.

Imagine having your business pause like that.

He recovered the three engines that he had buried.

They were just as he had conceived them in 1914.

The general arrangement of these engines is worth recalling for these cars were to dominate

racing in the early 1920s.

Six years later, almost to the day, one of those cars was entered for the light car Grand

Prix at Le Mans and won.

And part of the reason he was able to win is because it goes back to this idea of cutting

against the bias.

At the time, a theory was generally accepted that the heavier the weight of the car, the

better that the car would hold the road at high speed.

Bugatti, however, believed the opposite and he proved that he was right.

This lighter car would win the race with a lead of nearly 20 minutes.

This car was called the Bugatti Type 10.

Now, I skipped over it earlier, but there's a bunch of examples in the book where he's

just got a bunch of controversial innovations.

And they're controversial because they're essentially the exact opposite of what everybody

else in the industry thought and believes at the time.

So he was the very first person to place the driver and the engine low and towards the

back of the car.

And like many things at the very beginning, one of his engineers that worked for him,

that was right in the preface of the book, would talk about, hey, he preached to us like

follow your intuition, like you should trust your intuition.

The reason that he made this innovation, he instinctively thought that this was going

to be better for aerodynamics.

There was no way to test this.

It's just something he instinctively believed.

Every other car designer at that time believed that the driver being seated higher was

better. And we all know the result because now all the cars do it like Bugatti had

figured out, you know, 100 years ago.

Now you could say cutting against the bias is kind of a form of maybe confidence or

even stubbornness.

There's a negative side to it, like what if you're wrong?

And in the case like he's winning a ton of races and the races are what's fueling

like his sales growth, right?

This is in the early 1920s.

Now, what was fascinating is he starts to lose a bunch of races because he was stubborn.

He refused to add all of his competitors in the industry.

We're adding blowers.

So these are super charters and Bugatti thought that was like vulgar, like almost

unnatural.

So he, he resisted in doing it.

Takes him like a few years to realize, Hey, I have to do this.

And then once he does it, like he completely dominates.

I think they win like, I don't know, like 2000 races or something like that.

But this was fascinating.

And it was Bugatti's description of their sales strategy.

All the finest trophies were won easily by engaging in every important race without pause.

And so Bugatti, like Ferrari after him realizes, Hey, if I just win, if I just focus

on winning on the racetrack, then the sales will take care of itself.

You see this and how they advertise his models, his cars.

He knew that racing was the one true means of showing the quality of his cars and

enabling him to improve on it.

He was also well aware of the publicity he got from racing.

And right from the beginning, his annual catalog proudly listed his successes.

So the beginning of the catalog is just like, here's all the races I want.

Boom, I'll list of them.

All his racing.

And this is why it's important.

All of his racing cars were catalog models available to anyone.

And many amateur drivers were only too ready to purchase them.

And so something that reappears in the career of Bugatti is the fact that he was

constantly willing to scrap what he's working on to build something new.

He would not rest on his laurels.

And so what I would think about is what he's about to tell you and I here is

like, when you go do something great, just go off and do something else that's great.

Don't stop to like celebrate the win or like admire what you did.

Just keep going.

Like you just have to keep pushing progress forward.

And so he wrote, it is tempting to stop when you've made some progress.

But if you want to follow it up, you can't stop.

That is why I shall go on as long as I'm able to.

I know you can't always win, but when I'm beaten, I shall know why.

And I'll beat my rival later on.

When a car manufacturer builds a racing car, he always employs the best possible.

The best workman, the best engineers, all the best that his firm can provide.

Nothing is too good.

Nothing is too dear.

You've got to win whatever the cost.

You work day and night if necessary.

OK, so I want to spend more time going over Bugatti setup or what it was like at

Moleshine. And I think this is important because it's going to be a reflection of

him, of the man, of his personality.

Visitors came expecting to find a factory and none was able to hide their astonishment.

There was a factory, obviously, and even one of the most perfect of its kind.

For Bugatti sometimes found that the machines and tools that he needed were not

available, and so he designed and made them himself.

Of course he did.

However, Moleshine was more than that.

It was a house and a family.

It was a little world where the attitude to things and the relations between people

were out of the ordinary.

A customer came to take delivery of a car and got the impression that he had

suddenly discovered in this small corner of Alsace, this little fiefdom of an

Italian of the Renaissance, who had strayed into the industrial age.

And so this is what a typical experience would be like for a customer.

On arriving, all I could see at first were some stables close to a country house.

The stables were being used as a workshop and above them in a loft was an office

reached only by a short ladder.

There sat the accountant.

I was explaining the purpose of my visit to him when Bugatti came up.

He was wearing a Colonel helmet and a well-fitting cream silk jacket.

He took me to see the workshop.

Everything there, except for the cylinders, which were made for him

somewhere else, everything was produced in his workshop.

And this is one of the most important lines in this entire section, which this

section goes on for quite a while.

The personality of its founder continued to show in even the smallest details

and unexpected ways they start calling this the mulchime touch.

What a surprise.

You come across a hamlet of long, low buildings with brass bound doors of

polished oak and with cement paths between them.

Also clean and tidy, not a loose stone or a spot of dust anywhere.

A car factory, surely not.

And yet it is.

You get the feeling of being suddenly confronted with something unusual and

beyond classification.

The explanation of the shining cleanliness of all the doors in the various

workshops was quite simple.

An employee, one employee did nothing else, but keep the paths and the

workshop's floors clean and the door plates from which all oily marks left

by mechanics were wiped away immediately when they were made.

That is also something that pops up over and over again in the book, that he

insisted on everything being organized and clean 24 seven to the point where

he, somebody's job was to make sure the rocks were off the pathway.

And if there was a smidge of oil on a door as a mechanic left, that had to

be wiped away immediately.

And so before moving on, I want to go back to this one line, the personality

of its founder continued to show in even the smallest details and unexpected

ways, the best way to think about this is a line that I read in one of the

10 or 15 books, whatever I've read on Steve Jobs.

It says Steve made and remade Apple in his own image.

Apple is Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives.

You could say the same thing about Bugatti and another example of his

very unusual personality.

Bugatti once received a bill for electricity accompanied by a letter written

in terms, which he considered to be discourteous.

He said as much to the manager, adding, come and see me in a year's time.

I shall have something interesting to show you.

A year later, he had built his own electricity generating plant.

There was nothing at Mulsim, which did not bear the mark of one man, his taste,

his wishes, and even his moods.

This is one of my favorite parts of the book because it just goes on and on

page after page.

And I'd finally just wrote, I'd finally just wrote this note to myself.

All of this is excellent.

I love everything about Bugatti.

He was always well-dressed and wore his clothes with a quiet elegance, whether

at the factory or in town.

He had a style and manner all of his own.

He was an optimist.

He had a remarkable gift of observation, which spiced his conversation.

He was genial and generous in every respect.

And his egoism only showed if his habits were threatened.

He was excitable at times, young and lively in spirit, tackling problems with enthusiasm.

He liked beauty in all things.

Cost and financial return were secondary matters.

He made plenty of money, nevertheless, and almost without noticing it.

Bugatti used to say that work was never an effort to him, that he built up his

business while enjoying himself.

He was not envious of others.

Like some English squire, his personal interests were in his estate and his

horses and a boat or two.

High society held little interest for him.

And when obliged to attend social functions, he did so without real pleasure.

The truth was that his work was his life.

And in matters of work, he had a horror of utopias and of mad schemes.

His insistence on the job being done properly, down to the smallest detail, and

for any ordinary task, such as shoeing a horse, was evident of his concern for

exactitude.

And this made a great impression on all those who lived and worked within his orbit.

His brain was always at work.

He had no fixed hours.

He sometimes spent many hours in the drawing office at night, for he found

that the silence helped him to work out problems which had cropped up during the

day.

His starting point was always to create the most extraordinary things.

And so then I want to get into more of how Bugatti worked and why this reminded

me of an excerpt from James Dyson's first autobiography.

So said Bugatti had no technical education and possessed no diplomas.

He had learned as he went along from experience and a natural mechanical

ability.

And so then he tells a story about working as an apprentice when he was 18 and

realizing, hey, the best way to learn something is to try to take it apart and

try to figure it out.

So he comes across this engine and he says, I dismantled it all.

And I said to myself, what a mess this is.

I must put this right.

And that's how I began to understand internal combustion engines.

And so this race car driver is one of the first customers you ever had purchased

one of the first cars that Bugatti ever produced.

And he says, I was struck by the simplicity and directness of the

mechanical solutions in technical schools.

Apprentices were taught that the outlet valves of an engine had to be wider than

the inlet valves because the volume of gas was greater.

Bugatti was the first to do just the opposite, making his inlet valves the

larger, which is what everyone does now.

And so in his autobiography called against the odds, James Dyson tells a

story where he's a young man apprenticing with an older engineer, this

guy named Jeremiah Fry, who is one of the biggest influences on James's

career. And this is what he learned.

Here was a man who was not interested in experts.

He meets me.

He thinks to himself, here's a bright kid, let's employ him.

And he does.

He risks little with the possibility of gaining much.

It is exactly what I do now at Dyson.

This attitude of employment extended to Fry's thinking in everything,

including engineering.

He did not, when an idea came to him, sit down and process it through

pages of calculations.

He didn't argue it through with anyone.

He just went out and built it.

When I came to him and I say, Hey, I have an idea.

He would offer no more advice than to say, you know where the workshop is,

go and do it.

But I would say, but we need to weld this thing.

Well, then get a welder and weld it.

When I asked if we shouldn't talk to someone about, say,

hydrodynamics, he would say, the lake is down there.

The Land Rover is over there.

Take a plank of wood down to the lake, tow it behind the boat and look at what

happens.

Now this was not a modus operandi that I had encountered before.

College had taught me to revere experts and expertise.

Fry ridiculed all that as far as he was concerned with enthusiasm and

intelligence, anything was possible.

It was mind blowing, no research, no workings, no preliminary sketches.

If it didn't work one way, he would just try it another way until it did.

The root principle was to do things your way.

It didn't matter how other people did it as long as it works and it is

exciting, people will follow you.

And so those last few years at Molsheim were really the peak of his life.

And over the next 10 years, he has to endure unbelievable tragedy until he

dies.

The first thing to fall is the economy.

The Great Depression causes Bugatti to have to look for other ways to make

money.

So he has to actually travel away from the place that he wants to be most

because he's going to be designing rail cars for the French government.

In 1931, faced with a precarious financial situation, Bugatti had to turn to

rail locomotion.

The development and production of these rail cars resulted in Bugatti being

absent from Molsheim for long periods, for he was obliged to maintain close

contact with the engineers and administrators of the French railways.

His son Jean thus became gradually responsible for the Molsheim factory.

So his son Jean was supposed to be his successor.

The management of the Molsheim factory passed from father to son.

So the depression causes a terrible financial situation.

He then is forced to spend time away from where he wants to be.

His son has to run the factory.

Then there's a bunch of labor unrest spreading throughout France.

All these other factories were being shut down completely by strikes.

This is where Bugatti is actually like superhuman level of confidence

that she plays against it because he thought it would never happen.

He's like, oh, my employees love me.

One big factory after another was affected and brought to a standstill.

Bugatti thought his factory was safe from trouble.

I've got nothing to worry about.

He kept saying, my work people know me, they're part of my family.

But the impossible happened.

The men stopped working and there were protest marches.

The factory was occupied.

It was a terrible shock and Bugatti was embittered by what he took

to be so much in gratitude and an attack on him personally.

That is in 1936.

This is 1939, the death, the tragic death of his son and successor.

This young life was so rich and promise and yet so abruptly ended.

Jean met with a fatal accident on August 11th, 1939, while testing the car,

which had just won the Le Mans 24 hours.

He went out after dinner with the family, saying, I'll be back in 15 minutes

in answer to our warnings to be careful.

Remember, this is his sister writing this book.

He went out after dinner with the family, saying, I'll be back in 15 minutes

in answer to our warnings to be careful.

He was test driving a Bugatti at high speeds on a country lane.

A cyclist pops out, begins to cross the road.

Jean breaks hard, swerves and hits a tree, killing himself immediately.

Bugatti is devastated, breaks down, sobs uncontrollably, as you can imagine,

when he hears about the death of his son less than a month later.

The Second World War begins and Bugatti loses his business again.

The German invasion and subsequent

capitulation of France brought an end to his business for the factories

taken over by the Germans.

His life's work was gone after the war.

In order to have the business and premises restored to him, a court action

became necessary. I want to pause and review before we get there.

1931 Great Depression happens.

He has to go work for the railways.

All right. 1936.

There's a strike at his factory. 1939.

His son dies in a car crash.

A month later, start of World War Two, Germans invade.

He loses his factory and his home.

1944. His wife dies of a painful illness.

1945. He has to fight the French government to try to get Mollschim back.

He loses the first court case, which causes him a great emotional shock

and caused a nervous breakdown.

During the appeal, he has a nervous breakdown.

He's depressed. He gets influenza.

Then he has a stroke that leaves him half paralyzed, slips into a coma for four

months and dies on August 21st, 1947, at the age of 66.

Ten days before he dies and while he's in a coma, he wins the appeal

and the French government give him back his factory and his home.

He was thus deprived of the joy of seeing his factory returned to the Bugatti family.

The official cause of death may be a stroke, but I think he died of a broken heart.

I want to end by reading from the epilogue, goes back to the importance

of friendship throughout the life of Bugatti.

There is a letter called My Friend Bugatti, written by a famous French aviation

pioneer, Gabriel Voisin.

It is written about 20 years after Bugatti died.

And I think it's a great place to end this conversation about a great man.

There could be no better ending to this book than the moving testimony of friendship

to the famous aircraft constructor Gabriel Voisin has written.

We were both more or less the same age, but God was by his cradle on September

15th, 1881, and bestowed all her gifts onto him.

I do not remember our first meeting.

I seem to have known this amazing engineer all of my life.

Bugatti was already one of us in the pioneering days of aviation.

In 1908, our laboratory was in Paris, and there he used to visit us once a week.

I always kept our mechanical problems for that friendly occasion.

There seemed to be no snags or obstacles for this extraordinary man.

One had only to state the problem for it to be solved.

Many writers have written about the productions of the Mulsim factory,

but none of these writers have given us a faithful picture of the real Bugatti.

Some have recalled his charm.

Others have disclosed his whims.

None of them has seemed able to bring to life this great man.

The immense talent of this born engineer was concealed beneath a cloak of fun

and Gady, and he gave the impression of never taking himself seriously.

I am now 86 years old, and in these last years of my life, I can look back

and measure the worth of the men I have known in the course of a career full of surprises.

Most of my contemporaries were incapable of making an effort beyond what was required of them.

I have therefore very vivid recollections of those few who were capable of actions and initiative.

In his book, The Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega Egaset wrote these inspired words.

This is one of my favorite paragraphs in the entire book.

A human life, by its very nature, has to be devoted to something or other,

to a glorious or humble enterprise, an illustrious or obscure destiny.

This is a strange, but inexorable condition of things.

Ortega Egaset must have known Bugatti at the time of writing those lines.

The production of cars at Mulsheen was really just a game to my friend,

and his successes came easy to him.

He was one of the last car manufacturers able to imagine whole to assemble

in his mind the most varied and complicated mechanical constructions.

Effortlessly, yet with exactness.

In a word, Itori Bugatti was one of the last mechanics truly worthy of the name.

A larger volume would be needed in order to give a full and clear account of his influence.

After the war, this truly French technician was the victim of regrettable incidents

and his health was thereby affected.

He passed away in 1947.

In 1913, I lost my brother Charles in a car accident for which a third party was entirely to blame.

He was only 30, yet he must have found death to be kind.

He was at the wheel of a Bugatti.

And that is where I'll leave it for the full story.

I highly, highly, highly recommend buying the book.

If you can, I think there's only a few copies available.

I'm so glad this book came into my life.

It was the perfect vehicle to learn about the genius that was Bugatti.

I will leave a link down below.

If you buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.

That is three hundred and sixteen books down one thousand ago.

And I'll talk to you again soon.

I'm glad you made it to the end.

Founders, listeners are not quitters.

If you have not already signed up for the Founders AMA Private Feed,

I highly recommend doing that right now.

I will leave a link down below, but it's also always available at founderspodcast.com.

Because the insane amount of research that I have done over the last seven years

for this podcast, I have a very unique set data set that's available nowhere else.

There's over 20,000.

I've read over a hundred thousand pages where I like three hundred and one fifteen books

and like that I have somewhere between like 20 and twenty one thousand

highlights and notes from this project.

Ninety percent or probably over 90 percent of my highlights and notes

never make it onto the podcast, yet the information contained in them is excessively valuable.

So what I what I did is like I constantly getting questions all the time, right?

And I look at them like they're unique prompts to try to get some of this information

out of my head and out into the world.

So it's actually useful to you.

And one way to do this so everybody benefits is by actually making a private AMA feed.

So if you become a member, you'll be able to ask me questions directly.

There's a private email address that you get in the confirmation email after you sign up.

Do not share that email address because I read every single one of these emails myself.

I don't have an assistant doing it.

I'm the only one that has access to that email.

So I read every single one myself.

Now, the questions that I get from these emails, I turn I answer and I turn them into short AMA episodes.

So that allows other members to learn from the questions of other members.

You can also add a name and link to your website with your question so that other

members can check out what you're working on.

I've already got, I've already heard from subscribers to the AMA feed that they've

actually got new paying customers from people that discovered their business from an AMA question.

That feature alone is worth the investment.

So far, I've made 34 episodes.

If you sign up, you can actually start listening to those 34 episodes immediately.

I plan on making several new episodes every week.

If you are an enthusiast of Founders Podcast, I highly recommend that you become a member.

You can join by using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player or

we're going to founderspodcast.com.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.