#151 Frederick Smith (FedEx)

Podcast: Founders
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 4056s
URL: https://afp-922710-injected.calisto.simplecastaudio.com/57933a1d-c5a9-4040-9aca-e766ae2ec0eb/episodes/09e106e9-2f03-493d-8d5c-a2e521afab31/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=57933a1d-c5a9-4040-9aca-e766ae2ec0eb&awEpisodeId=09e106e9-2f03-493d-8d5c-a2e521afab31&feed=3hnxp7yk
Fetched: 2026-03-03 08:49:45

At age 30, Frederick Wallace Smith was in deep trouble. His dream of creating federal express had become too expensive and was fast, fizzling out. He had exhausted his father's millions. He was in hawk for 15 or 20 million more. He appeared in danger of losing his cargo planes and his wife. His own board of directors had fired him as CEO, and now the FBI accused him of forging papers to get a $2 million bank loan and was trying to send him to prison. He thought of suicide, but any talk of suicide was uncharacteristic of Fred Smith. It is ridiculous to think of Fred even contemplating such a thing. Jump out of a window, he's more likely to throw somebody out of a window. Fred never talked about this difficult period. Perhaps the lowest point of his life. His infant federal express became a ravenous money-eating ogre. To keep his planes flying, Fred had to beg, borrow, and steal. At any risk, at any cost, he refused to let federal express die. The situation confronting him on this May morning in 1974 was dismal, at a dangerous ebb. Not only was federal express teetering on bankruptcy, but its founder, with the FBI and the US district attorney hard on his heels, could possibly go to prison for bank fraud. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is overnight success. Federal Express and Frederick Smith, its renegade creator, and it was written by Vance Trimble. Vance is the guy that wrote the last week's book, The Biography of Sam Walton. He actually wrote this book right after he wrote the book on Sam Walton. So that excerpt actually gives us insight into what I feel is the main benefit of reading a book like this, which is it details how difficult it was to start FedEx, and then all the pain and suffering that Fred actually had to persevere through before he finally got on solid financial footing, and it actually became a profitable, successful business. Almost went out of business multiple times, and so that's as I was sitting here reading over the parts that stuck out. Most of me, the highlights and notes I made, that is really what I focused on. I'm going to tell you a little bit about his early life, because I think there's a lot of similarities between his personality and his fathers. He didn't really know his father dies when Fred's just four, but let me go ahead and give you some background here. This is a little bit about, I'm going to read the section two, it's really, it's talking about Fred's dad's personality, but I would feel now that I've finished reading the book, I really feel these same characteristics were also part of Fred's personality. So it says, at age 20, James Frederick Smith started his climb to fame and fortune. His ambition was dead on, aggressively supported by unlimited energy, a quick mind and open, it should be an open and honest friendliness, plus a certain amount of gambler's luck. That part about a certain amount of gambler's luck refers to this famous story that I even knew before I read this book. It's also in this book, but Fred Smith, the FedEx is almost out of money. On a Friday, they're pretty sure they're going to close on Monday, he goes to Vegas over the weekend. I think there's two different versions of the story, one that he needed, $27,000 to meet payroll, the others that he needed, $27,000 for fuel bill. He winds up taking a few hundred dollars and wins over almost $30,000 at the black check table and that temporarily staves off bankruptcy. So that is actual true story. So now back to Fred's dad, as a young man, he actually gets hired by somebody that encourages, there's something really important that happens to him, is his boss encourages him to think entrepreneurly, and he's going to wind up starting two very successful businesses. He's actually working out in the Texas oil fields in the early 1900s, and he's selling trucks, and he's learning a lot from his boss, his boss is constantly for new opportunities, and it says, Nordid Fred Smith, now this is a little confusing, his name is James, his middle name is Fred, this is Fred's dad, but he wanted to be called Fred. So I'm still talking about his dad. And so it says, Nordid Fred Smith, mine the fact that his eccentric boss kept encouraging him to think entrepreneurly and look for opportunities to branch out. So this is where Fred's dad gets the idea to start a bus company. Later on, this bus company is going to become successful and he's going to sell it to Greyhound Bus. He winds up building a very nice-sized fortune, and he dies and leaves that to his kids. I think Fred Smith, the son, the founder of FedEx, I think his inheritance is somewhere around, somewhere around $8 to $10 million. I think total was $17 million, but that's split between a bunch of kids. And he's going to use a large part of that money and almost lose it all on FedEx, which is kind of crazy, but we're not there yet. So he says, I got a big idea and explain that he wanted to start a daily bus service from Memphis to some of the nearby small towns. He had a problem, no bus. It's very interesting that they both built their first business, there was a transportation, because essentially what he's doing here on a very small scale in the bus industry, there's a lot of parallels between what Fred does with FedEx. He says, Fisher solved that. He gave Fred Smith a used truck and loaned him $1,000. With his own tools and hands, Fred built a bus body on the old truck chassis that seated a dozen passengers. So essentially he's taking a truck and converting into a bus, Fred, the founder of FedEx is actually going to take a bunch of planes and convert them from passenger planes into overnight delivery planes. Now this is his dad. He says, I must have been working 20 hours a day. I was a ticket agent, conductor driver, I did it all. Even changing the oil and spark plugs and making repairs overnight, but I loved it. Again, the reason I'm bringing this up is because that same sentence could come out of Fred Smith Jr.'s mouth, but in regards to FedEx at the very beginning, he was working constantly and doing almost everything himself. This is Fred's dad on the need for discipline, self-improvement, and I think all the highlights I'm reading to you right now. Again, I think the Fred Smith Jr. actually would agree with everything he's saying. He says, I believe that a man who expects to win out in business without self-denial and self-improvement stands about as much as a chance as a prize fighter would stand if he started a hard ring battle without having gone through intensive training. Natural ability even when accompanied by the spirit to win is never sufficient. And here we see another parallel, another habit that they share. It says throughout his years, Fred Smith was a voracious reader. He educated himself by reading. He just read all the time. He was very interested in history and navigation. He predicted our son would go much farther than he did because he would have the advantage of an education. And he was right about that. So he dies at a young age. I think he's in his 50s. He had a heart attack and then I think he dies of complications from something else in the hospital. So he winds up dying. Now, his mother, Fred Smith Jr.'s mother, is the one that keeps the spirit of his father alive. And we see that Fred was very driven and purposeful from a very young age. He actually has a disease when he's younger. It has, I don't know how to pronounce the name of the disease, but I'll tell you what it does. Essentially, you have an insufficient blood flow to your hip and it causes an imbalance. You have to walk with crutches and you have like a limp. It is fixable and it was fixed. But we also see that the drive and purposefulness because they're telling them, you know, you keep your weight off the right leg and you've got to give your time, your hip time to heal itself. And it says the doctor said it would probably take a week for him to get up and down for a week for him to get used to the crutches. Well, he was running up and down the stairs the first day on those things. It was push and drive he inherited from his father. He had to be doing something all the time. And so one benefit, something that his mom did was that she let him know that the family had very high expectations for him. He says, I kept his father alive in his mind all those years. I told him how much big Fred loved him and how much he wanted him to have the best education possible and how he was certain his son was to pass his achievements in business. And one of the reasons Fred started FedEx is because he knew once he got back from Vietnam, he wanted to work in in and around aviation. He had a deep love of airplanes and flight. And he actually talks to this is how Fred talks his mom into letting him fly. And he's only 15 years old at the time. And you also give a lot of people in the book describing him as like a master salesman full of charisma. They said, you know, 99% of the people early employees in FedEx, if I forgot what what the scenario was, if you told them to jump off a bridge, they would have done it, that he was just extremely persuasive. So it says, back home, the 15 year old again, badgered his mother. Fred is one of those people who never gives up if he wants something and you say, no, he just goes on and on and on. So finally, he talked me into letting him take lessons. He said, mom, you can you can always say if anything happens to me that I died doing what I wanted to do. So since his dad died when he was a young boy, he had a couple. He had uncles and some other people in the community that served that kind of filled that father figure role. One of them is this attorney in Memphis. And I thought this section was very interesting because there's a great double entendre that I always think about. It's called avoid boring people. Means obviously you anybody you find boring, you should not spend time with them. And then the flip side of that is, you know, make sure that you're when you're communicating with other people that you're not boring people. Like you read a lot, you you're curious about the world around you. And so there's a lot of benefits to being good at interacting and other people just frankly finding you interesting. And so this we see that Fred was the opposite of a boring person. This is he's not really a father figure. He's not old enough to be his father. I would say maybe like a much older brother. But let me read that to you. The lawyer rejects the idea that he was a father figure to the young Fred. And then this is what he's talking about. His impression of I think Fred's around 18 years old at the time. So so Fred was just an interesting young man. And I was glad to have him around. He was good company and vigorous and interested in things. Not many young men can talk about things of that kind. He was very bright. He is a person of fresh ideas. And one of the greatest qualities that he has that anybody can have is he's a veracious reader. You could talk to Fred Smith about government or literature. A whole range of things that kids his age didn't know much about or care much about. So remember that that remember that perfect later that idea that veracious reader later in the book after FedEx is on solid footing. Fred talks about the way he comes up with ideas. And essentially he spends like four hours a day reading and assimilating information and then combining ideas from different areas with his own like unique twist on them. He says that's a good way to spot opportunities that others don't like that that others can actually see. Okay so I want to fast forward to when Fred is in college. This was very interesting. The idea for FedEx started out as a term paper. This is not very different from Nike. Phil Knight wrote a term paper. He's like hey the same way that Japanese have out competed Germans for I think it was electronics. They could do the same thing because at the time Adidas was a German brand. It was dominating the market and athletic shoes and he says well there could be a low cost high quality Japanese competitor and that's essentially the idea that he built around Nike. And just like when Phil Knight talked about it in his book shoot dog and Phil Knight's he talks about you know I gave this presentation. It was a great idea. I put a lot of my you know effort into it and essentially the response from his classmates and his teachers was like crickets like no one gave it damn it all. And it's not very different than what we're seeing here because this paper that Fred is writing that essentially lays out the blueprint that's going to be FedEx one day he gets a C on so it was kind of humorous to me. So it says Professor Hall read the the read the 12 or 15 pages Fred Smith had typed up for his 1965 term paper in the course called economics 43a. For a few minutes he thought about the hub and spokes concept expounded and he debated what kind of grade it deserved then I'll explain what he means by how much folks in a minute. Then he picked up his red pen and wrote C at the time it was not important not even to Fred Smith but later that paper and its grade became a paradoxical Yale University legend if not embarrassing at least whimsical. Fred is a man if Fred is a man with a good mind obviously very bright said Dennis Tipo one of his Yale roommates I remember reading it meaning the paper when he got it back and I think Fred joked about the grade this idea always seemed to be in the back of his mind you knew he was going to do something about aviation he was going to devote his life to some aspect of it several times he brought up the concept of FedExpress obviously wasn't calling it there. Way to hear why it's called FedExpress it's hilarious I think it was germinating it was all it was in his mind exactly why Professor Hall had such a poor opinion of Fred Smith's paper will never be known but the incongruity of the C did not become a public matter until the early 1870s when newspapers magazines and television began probing the house and wise of this phenomenal growth of the upstart Memphis air express company. There is no great mystery to the hub and spoke concept as Smith visualized the plan the hub which is going to be located in Memphis would be located in a middle America location he was thinking of Little Rock or Memphis with spokes rating rating out radiating out to Boston Los Angeles Seattle Miami and other cities the four corners of the country a package from Boston destined to the west for the west coast for instance might be flown in on the Boston spoke in a few hours to the Memphis hub where it'd be sorted and routed out on the plane that had just bought in shipments from Los Angeles and it would and it would be a board when that plane flew back home arriving before dawn in other words Boston to Los Angeles overnight so I'm going to pause right there because that's important that is the main innovation of FedExpress there's very hard at the time it was nearly impossible to overnight something and so it's funny that the book is called overnight success because that's why FedEx was successful the fact that they were the first people to figure out how to overnight something and guarantee next day delivery it's obviously not true that it happened overnight he has to go through like a half a decade of struggle before that before that actually FedEx could be considered a successful company but that is the main innovation right there Boston to Los Angeles overnight Fred Smith thought of his system as similar to the telephone network where all calls are connected through a central switchboard routing process okay so after college but before he starts FedEx he winds up fighting in the Vietnam War he's actually very high he was served in the Marines he's a very highly decorated war hero so I'm just I'm going to just give you a summary of his war efforts he kind of remind there's a lot of similarities between him and Sam Walton where they both were supreme overachievers and almost everything they did even when he was in school he was a good student he just voted like most versatile you know played sports just it seemed to just apply this this relentless discipline and drive to everything that he did including serving in the war and it was you know he went the book goes into detail like seeing you know obviously just to gruesome things that that uh he saw people you know getting killed right next to him the guy one of his friends is standing right next to him gets shot in the neck and he is Fred essentially sits there and watches you know the guy essentially drowned his own blood um it's very very like graphic but here's the summary Fred Smith had stayed on the battlefield uh to within three weeks of his 25th birthday gone were three years of his young life what what did he have to show for it being alive and grateful for that of course medals uh medals enough and then the author is just going to go here and list all the medals he got the silver star the bronze star two purple hearts the presidential regimen citation the navy commendation metal and the Vietnamese cross of gallantry to reflect his courage and heroicism newly honed this talks about all the other stuff that he's uh learned during Vietnam and he's also going to apply uh to running FedEx newly honed leadership skills and inspirational tricks that would prove useful in the world of business learned on the killing fields where soldier discovered that every fresh sunrise had been bought at a very steep price okay so right after the war his father-in-law has to borrow like fifty thousand dollars to uh from Fred uh because now he's got his father's inheritance and he buys uh uh uh like half interest in this company that he thinks is good winds up being a really you know just terrible business is called Arkansas aviation so Fred goes in and starts running it to try to get his investment back right and these essentially what's happening here this is the early days of what is eventually going to become FedEx and there's uh two things that I left notes on for these two pages um one is they operated in secret and two they were just full of uncertainty they had to arrive at the idea for FedExpress through trial and error and we'll see that here so it says uh he was a kid but smart as a whip and this is this guy named Tedder that is going to work with him uh sharpest person that I've ever run into it was clear to Tedder that Smith had come back from Vietnam with a goal a very large ambition he this is really interesting what he says here he wanted to do something constructive he wanted to do something that nobody else had done which also he's picking an extremely hard target he's identified a gap he's like listen there's no way and he winds up identifying this gap because uh Arkansas aviation they they ran out like hangers and they do like airplane repair business kind of thing and Fred hates the business he's just very labor intensive not very profitable at all but he can't get he uh when he orders parts he's like it's unreliable when they're actually going to arrive and he's like well what's the chance that I'm the only business in the world that's experiencing this problem because let's say a plane sitting there uh I don't have the parts to I don't have the parts to fix it the customers to wait longer my people are just sitting around like this is a gigantic waste it's an inefficiency but it also goes to speak to he wanted to do something no one else has done so one that's going to tell you that's most likely to be hard and if you can survive then it's going to be extremely lucrative like if he actually is able to solve this problem which he was like he fast forward now he's into 70s he's like 75 76 something like that you know worth multiple billions of dollars he had a negative net worth lost almost lost all his inheritance had a negative net worth for the first what five 10 years of the company um so again if you can actually survive through that struggle and do something difficult on the other side there's probably a lot of value there for their people so he says um he wanted to do something nobody else done that was his main objective I guess he liked flying and wanted to do something connected with aviation Smith swore tether to secrecy we were really hiding behind Arkansas aviation he didn't want anybody to know what we were doing Smith wasn't traveling in a straight line himself he tried he tried first one project then another all of them were built around this idea of acquiring and operating a fleet of jets we tried several things it didn't start out as a package outfit so this goes back to the importance of reading to being curious around the world uh about the world around you and synthesizing all that information to find new opportunities this is where this is the first draft of FedEx the original idea for FedEx I'm going to read to you now he says uh for months it had been percolating in his head the genesis was twofold his habit of voracious reading especially history economics and business affairs plus several deep discussions with bankers about the inner machinery of the federal reserve system the length of time required for checks to clear this is uh I think when the early 70s now the length of time required for checks to clear through the federal reserve system frustrated bankers and depositors alike the mechanism was old fashioned and unwieldy inefficient and slow checks received in each district fed bank had to be sorted there and then dispatched in bundles to other individual federal reserve districts where the accounts drawn on were located it takes two or three days sometimes a week or ten days to clear a check one of his uh one of his bankers complained that's a heck of a time lapse between receipt of checks and crediting accounts the whole fed system handles close to eight billion three hundred million checks and cash uh letters a year a figure uh i figure that's a float of about three million dollars a day and that's just the way it works but it didn't have to stay slow and cumbersome Fred Smith reasoned he could speed up the check clearing by applying to the uh applying to the process of his Yale university hub and spoke air freight techniques see what he's doing there he's trying he starts off he's not trying to figure out if I want to send you a book or something to the man I went overnight to you that's not what FedEx was created to do obviously you can do that today it starts off as saying hey how can we reduce this float that seems ridiculous that it takes eight ten days sometimes three or five days for you to to actually draw uh for the check to actually arrive and then uh either be a depositor drawn from that account and federal express you know that that's a couple hundred million dollar uh a year problem that they're having uh so that's his idea he's gonna go back to he says he proposed to go into business with a small fleet of jets that would nightly pick up and each federal reserve district that days checks and fly them to a central sorting hub there they would be processed at once by federal reserve employees inserted into bundles to transfer for the appropriate Fed bank his pilots would take off before dawn to return to each Fed district its package that would eliminate the time lag checks would be cleared overnight all across the United States now you probably already get the hint there but this is why FedEx was named FedEx it says on June 18th he incorporated a company he called federal express corporation feeling certain federal would be apt when he got his contract from the federal reserve system now this is also sees that Fred Smith is a crazy person what's the subtitle renegade creator right he starts a company starts buying jets before he has the contract what could go wrong uh Fred Smith had his new jets flown to Little Rock that he starts in Little Rock before he starts Memphis and began awaiting the decision by the federal reserve system let's see he's he had everything figured out as soon as the Fed said yes which he was certain they would he felt he could negotiate a profitable five-year contract so they haven't even proved the idea and even if they do approve the idea he doesn't know what he could get paid for it didn't stop him this in turn would serve as a guarantee to finance the acquisition of the needed additional jets which Pan Am had option to him at bargain prices they're called Falcon at once the federal and once the federal reserve flights were running smoothly he would merely build on top of that a larger air cargo express system that would serve the whole country for delivery of small packages it's really smart he found a wedge first right it would have been smart if he worked out the gap he identified as a real profit making opportunity if he could get their first so he's talking about the issue that he was back when he was running Arkansas aviation about you know there's no I have no idea where my packages are they can't deliver they can't guarantee delivery at a certain date and then they don't know where they are even in transit so that's very difficult he liked the idea that the government in effect would be financing the creation of the federal express air cargo system that's fantastic what could go wrong the federal reserve said no so says in the late summer of 1971 Fred watch Fred watched his entrepreneurial plan collapse reeling from the disappointment he had invested this is still about three years before the start of the book where you know he's almost lost everything about to go bankrupt and thinking about jumping out of the window he had invested a lot of late night study many trips to New York and Washington hundreds of hours of explaining negotiating and haggling to lay the groundwork in his hanger were two jets idle on which he owed three point six million dollars that wasn't a big worry though he was sure he could sell them and make a profit on the transaction but he had no intention of parting with his jets they were still essential to his future plans okay so now we get to where the struggle uh the north myself is I rename the book instead of overnight success just people overnight struggle and so this like half decade period I found very very interesting because it's just it's just unbelievable the amount of chaos and one problem after another and just so many times when FedEx just could have died and Fred just refuse to quit which I found most admirable in a few sentences Fred Smith sketched his air concept so he's trying to get this aviation marketing consultant to the feedback like on his idea so he says I didn't think much of it his name is bass bass responded it sounded like a dumb idea by feeling at the time was just was just like a lot of other people's feelings bass recalled and this is why the reason I'm reading this part is because it's just again we live in you know the area the the era of overnight delivery I mean now they even got it down the same day delivery but at the time it's just like how do you even start it's like the chicken and eight problem like how do you you have to build out an entire uh national network before you even take except one package like are you insane do you know how hard that's gonna be how much money it's gonna require and the answer was Fred did not know and uh there's a lot of paragraphs in the book some of which I highlighted which really get really um illustrates the value of ignorance I always think about that mark in recent quote where he's like uh it says something to the fact like I I believe that people that do really difficult things are doing them for the first time and I think part of that is because they don't realize how difficult it is when they start we're not there let me get back to this the cost of running a jet would be prohibitive for that kind of business venture that's number one so he's listening all the reasons this idea will not work essentially and number two is the length of time it would take to create a network and then get market acceptance and I just love this next sentence it says Fred Smith was learning not to be disheartened or dismayed by negative reactions he saw other high hurdles ahead so that's not only is the the actual fundamental idea the the main part of the idea almost impossible to achieve but then it's he's operating one of the most heavily regulated industries there was on the face of the planet at the time so says starting up would take a lot of money another uncertainty was how to convince shippers to use his air express line I'm going to get to the regulations in a minute I want to pause there for I just jumped over this part starting up would take a lot of money I can't tell you 25% of the book is is is Fred struggling to get other people to invest bank loans venture capitalists private investors everybody that's a huge part of the federal express story in reality at this point Smith was just an untested entrepreneur with a clear cut idea but not enough personal business training and financial expertise to make everything go in fact he was stymied before he before he even started now we're going to get into the program to regulation right his plan was to fly under the civil aeronautics board that's a CAB air taxi regulations that would permit federal express to fly anywhere anytime not restricted to certified routes however he ran a foul of the registration known right this is a regulation known as part 298 which limited air taxis to a maximum takeoff weight of 12,500 pounds why is that a problem the Falcon jets could not possibly operate under that limit even equipped and empty the aircraft weighed 15,000 pounds others might have given up how many times does that sentence in the book Jesus but Fred Smith just logged ahead hoping luck would be with him he believed he could get the CAB to rewrite and modernize part nine nine eight part two nine eight excuse me to permit greater takeoff weight otherwise the cost of flying the plane would absorb any profits now this next paragraph was interesting because this is how Fred connects to last week's podcast how he winds up using same I don't know if you call him banker I guess I guess they're investment bankers of the people he's trying to hire to get him to to help raise money as Sam Walton so it's his Smith introduced was introduced to him by that by a banker in Little Rock Arkansas getting a southerner like Remal that's his name on his side would be a good move Smith thought Sam Walton the Arkansas small town discounter who then was trying to launch his Walmart chain was working with Remal as well now this next paragraph gives us an insight into like the master salesman the charisma that Fred Smith has um and he winds up hiring two the bankers are like hey like you're just like some idiot kid um there no one's gonna loan you money like they don't know anything about a market like can you have a I know the market doesn't exist yet but can you get like nationally recognized consultant firms essentially to do a market study so we can take their research because they're respected to investors right and so he winds up hiring two super firms they do this and they wind up loving the idea so much and Fred Smith so much that he recruits them and they become some of the very first employees of FedEx um but there's also something interesting I'll tell you uh I'll tell you what I thought of this when I read it after I read it to you so it says the three a bg partners don't worry about that name as well as Roger frock we're destined to to join Fred Smith's circle of partners in in the ever quickening FedEx adventure all this is most important sense of the section all were Mavericks true non-conformists courageous and crazy for four of the five years in the early 1970s their lives and Fred Smith's even more so would always be hectic and too often herring and again when you read a paragraph like that the thought that jumps into my mind is like we only get one life who the hell wants to waste it being normal this is a gigantic like first while looking at whether to describe Mavericks non-conformist courageous and crazy right ones of paying off because of the time they're just they have I think they're in the early 30s Roger frock I think it's 35 um you know they're they have relatively successful careers they could have stayed in that job forever uh at way less risk than jumping into this crazy FedEx experiment but because again you only have one life why not maximize it want to make an interesting life that you can look back and tell your kids and grandkids yeah I had I had a hell of a time here um I just love that idea that you know what I'm just gonna you know what I'm not going to take the safe path I'm going to take the path that's going to give me the most interesting life experiences because that at the end of the day is what it is life is one giant experience why waste it why waste it being normal now this is Fred's personality during this time and this is uh that tether guy again uh just talking about you know the early days of FedEx this as Fred Smith was serious and intense Fred never played he was always serious minded we'd go somewhere to do business and then we'd hit the hotel and have a martini he'd have maybe one and that would be it he hardly ever relaxed rarely went off for a week and have fun and once in a while when when he was really under stress and he didn't have anything big to do we'd slip more martini into his glass and get him drunk okay so this is more about the early days of FedEx I'm gonna tell you how this relates uh at least to me how it relates to Henry Ford so it says to an experienced manager like tether the people round Smith and the boss himself didn't know how to manage anything they all came in with a lot of wild ideas to how to put federal express together and only a few of them made any sense they were an impetuous bunch Fred Smith was single-handedly trying to run the operation uh he was described as a nitpicker he had his hand in everything he worried about little little itty-bitty problems other people could handle and that created confusion and delay the accounting department was a mess with no internal controls uh reports were rarely on time Smith's tinkering for example fouled up the cash flow because of a lag in buildings with Fred it was always business I'll tell you the truth we worked for we worked for three or four years and the only time I had off uh for over six hours was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we worked around the clock trying to get everything done that was back when computers were just coming out much of our work was on calculators you know the old style tether recalled many late-night meetings to set policy or solve problems that turned into knockdown drag out affairs tempers flared uh especially Smith's Fred would get really tense tether stated once in a while he would throw something against the wall so we would try to get him drunk at some bar hoping it would relax him and perhaps keep him away from the office the next day but the boss not yet 30 and healthy had an iron constitution early the next morning tether said he'd come bouncing back ready to take on the world again essentially there's talking with this entire section of that book he's talking with the very like the first year FedEx could also describe later years but this is I think the first year and essentially they didn't know what they were doing um they had in their an idea in their mind what did they want to achieve they had zero idea how to actually get there so there is a quote that I read in that book by Charles Sarenson called my 40 years of Ford and ever since I read I can't stop thinking about it I'm just gonna read this paragraph to you so says Henry Ford had no ideas on mass production he wanted to build a lot of autos he was determined but like everyone else at the time he didn't know how everything I just said about Henry Ford applies to Fred Smith so obviously if it's it's applying to Henry Ford Fred Smith it's applying to us or anybody else trying to do something they don't know how to do yet you have an idea of what you want to do but you're not really sure how you're actually going to get done uh in later years he was glorified as the originator of the mass production idea far this is the most important part the census right here far from it he just grew into it like the rest of us and this story if you read this book and it goes with almost every other book that I've read they're growing into it no one no one's born knowing how to create and manage and run a gigantic business like FedEx so you have no other choice you have to grow into it okay so more about the early days of FedEx and um and and Fred Smith at this time this is his his his first secretary uh Charlotte Curtis recalling her days with him between 1972 and 1976 said uh he was so preoccupied he was in such deep thought all the time he was constantly thinking this is also uh way other people later also described Fred Smith um he was constantly thinking such late hours sheer determination there was no doubt in that man's mind where he and the company were going you could walk into his office and he'd be thinking about something and literally wouldn't know you were in the room that is a that is one sign of a great mind the ability to concentrate in that period two critical items dogged his mental agenda recruiting staff and finding investors the former was fairly easy the latter was almost impossible and now when I read that section people will talk about concentration off in my opinion now I always make the case that Edwin Land founder Polaroid uh the blueprint for Steve Jobs he's got to be one of the most important entrepreneurs that have ever existed it's funny if you could bring him back from the dead and ask him if he was an entrepreneur even if he was a founder of Polaroid he would describe himself as an engineer but he has some great quotes tons of great quotes and he talks about concentration when you read I run I think there's four different books I did for Ed on Edwin Land and for this podcast five because I think one of the books uh one of the podcasts that did two two books and one but he talks about concentration over and over again which again like the guy's an absolute genius like we should probably like why is he bringing this up so much but he has this great quote we says my whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had and so when I hear something I was like why is one of the smartest people to ever walk the face of the face of the earth talking about concentration so much why is he saying that if you don't if you avoid interruption and you think deeply about something that you're passionate about that you're interested in and you do that hour after hour with no interruption that you're going to tap into things and ideas and have resources you didn't even know exist that's probably really important okay so I want to go back to this idea I was like why FedEx is nearly impossible to I cannot believe he succeeded in doing that like this is essentially the part I'm going to read to you this is a great way to think about how hard FedEx was to start and this is getting John Jacobi you have to forgive me there's I've told you about this before I can't there's way too many characters in a lot of these books I can't keep track of who everybody is so I try to focus on one person which is the founder but he's I think this might be an investor maybe a marketing analyst not really important other than what he says is really important he talks about you know why is it so hard to raise money for FedEx he says in John Jacobi's view to open an air express company would imply that packages could be delivered anywhere at least in the United States there would be few customers if half the time federal express didn't serve the city the customer wanted to reach and so he says so they had to put in place a system covering the whole United States just to carry one package which meant you started off with all fixed cost and no variable cost and the ideal business is you can get that first order and make money from day one and expand on that this is where he talks about you know founding Walmart's very hard but FedEx has to be a lot harder think about this he says like any I love this analogy to really for me illustrated how difficult this was like you open a Walmart store and if that form of succeeds and you do well you open a thousand them but you don't open a thousand of them to take the first order and that is what FedEx had to do it's I mean it's just really really again I've I know I repeat myself over again this book is about perseverance that's the main he he he set us he Fred set his site on something so difficult there's a reason it didn't exist before him and you're not going to get to do something for the first time in human history and it be easy so again I just think exposing ourselves to these constant stories because they're human just like you and I and what is what we can achieve if we just stop quitting and look around you over the vast majority 90 plus percent of people around you just quit at everything at everything the first little bit of pain the first bit of discomfort the first setback and they just give up they fold and they just go meekly into the night not Fred Smith so this Jacobi guys still talking about this so he says Jacobi now sees because he's saying you know this is crazy it is stupid it's not gonna work Jacobi now see Smith as a truly remarkable person he did so much to look crazy to me he overpaid for LRA I gotta take that this story's wild I'm gonna get to know in one second about that overpaying for LRA but he was just so focused on overcoming this is the most important sentence let me back up and then we read it again but he was just so focused on overcoming whatever obstacle spring up in his path essentially Smith this entire story is Smith focusing on just eliminating the obstacle that's in front of him he knows there's other ones that they're coming behind it I gotta take care of this one first and I'll go tackle that one later so the crazy thing is they have to he's buying these jets but then you have to do all this like a body work to them right because you think about the size of like a person walking through the cabin door as opposed to like a palette like a fork lifting you know a bunch of cargo in there and so they have to do these they're cutting open the side and they're putting on doors to be hires LRA is the company the hires to do this work and FedEx has no money the whole story is they they're scrambling for money that's why he commits fraud we winds up getting acquitted though but um he's you know struggling he gets a loan pays off creditors temporarily and so what he realizes is uh let's see what's a sentence he's he's asking the guy that owns the company because they they stop doing work on them because he doesn't have any money so he says well what if I want to buy your company he says if we get the money to buy LRA what would you sell it for they so they tell me I'll sell it and he says the his big this is a crazy thing so he couldn't get a loan anymore for FedEx but he realizes hey I need money because I need those doors put on the planes right the bank will loan me money to buy the company they will not loan me money for the doors the loan me money to buy the the company that's installing the doors how crazy is that so he says um his bank was willing to loan the money to buy LRA but not the money to buy the cargo doors so what smith's solution all right I'll just buy the company he has to overpay and he's I'll just I have to make up the money later on but I have to get this done now so he buys the entire company then he doesn't have to worry about paying the bills because he now is the company they will be paying it's hilarious okay so obstacles are obstacle I need to tell you about the pathetic launch of FedEx and this again is one of the most inspired I don't mean that I'm not making fun of them it was pathetic by their own I think that's even the word they use but again just shows you know today who knows the revenue they do gigantic successful company has made you know billions of billions of billions of profit this is how it started though and I think this is very inspiring to see you know I just went and and watched some videos um because he's still alive and he you know gets talks and stuff and I was like you know I'm gonna stop myself doing this because this this book ends you know this book is from the early 90s that I have in my hand um and it ends you know he's still a young man uh they IPO relatively young I think he's maybe 40 maybe early 50s late 40s kind of thing um but I realized I was like I'm sitting here watching 70 something-year-old Frederick Smith talk and I was like that's not the person that built FedEx it was the third it was the you know the 25-year-old the 35-year-old that did that that's a completely different person and because of the benefits of the late gratification and the benefits of compounding that 70 something-year-old is reaping the benefits but that it was really built by the younger version of him and so you know that's 70-year-old talking about you know they do I don't even know what billions of packages every day I forgot what the number was well that's not what the young Fred Smith had to deal with because the first time the first opening day of FedEx they did six packages Smith hope to inaugurate air expressed by the middle of March uh the Memphis staff divides the network of a few startup cities and open offices in each hired couriers provided delivery vans oh so you know how they do it's another great thing you see FedEx and UPS and Amazon trucks and everything FedEx didn't have trucks they rented them from Hertz at the very beginning that was hilarious um so it says they they were trying to get out the world that FedEx could deliver packages overnight the effort was all pathetically puny um looking back a few years later Smith confessed to a Harvard Business School interviewer the business asset we had going for us was our naivete god takes care of fools you know uh the cities to be served mainly all within 500 miles of Memphis hastily assembled inexperienced blitz teams of four or five salesmen invaded the targeted cities working two or three weeks in each to presale the company's service advertising was confined to an opening announcement in local newspapers and direct mail in the sense it was funny they expected the planes to be pretty well loaded up uh so there's a bunch of crowd that's that's uh gathered some early investors and um employees of FedEx and they're sitting at the airport Memphis as the first plane comes in uh it says I saw the anguish in their faces as they waited most of them were worried about their future it was a critical moment of time critical moment in time for all of them right after midnight the jets swooped in their cargo doors were flung open empty in all the jets bought six packages one was a birthday present from Fed from Fred to Tedder the guy kept quoting and one was a bundle of dirty laundry sent home by the FedEx salesman in Kansas City so they have four customer packages that is the beginning that is the launch of federal express okay so there's a ton of paragraphs just like the one about to read to you spread throughout the book over a year after year really nothing changes uh FedEx is almost dead is the summary here and then they also talk about the value and ignorance against again uh FedEx rest remained in desperate trouble expenses were soaring income was too thin to pay all the bills the deficit at the end of April was four point four million dollars every dollar Smith and the family trust had pumped into the enterprise was gone so that's his inheritance he lost this he's done uh Smith was hurt and frustrated and furious and we'd be considered a betrayal so he hired his he's invested this investment banker uh that I mentioned earlier remal and whatever um he's from like a company called white and weld um and he had a misunderstanding so since Fred said that he was given to understand that white and weld said they would do the this deal if it uh as if it was a fate of complete meaning hey we're gonna try to raise 20 million for you was really what they said but Fred's interpretation was we are going to raise 20 million dollars for you and their failing so he's like I've made commitments here because I thought I had a promise from you uh he did not understand I don't believe he truly understood that it was a strictly a best efforts deal and the money wasn't in the bank and then he had a long road to hoe uh because of being misled he had made commitments and taking risks that he never would have taken in terms of and this is uh another group um this is an early one of their early attorneys for FedEx this has in terms of starting a company of the size we were first grade novices and I think that really played to our advantage because we were not fully aware of the obstacle we faced are the difficulty in overcoming them I look back on it now and think oh my god why in the world would anybody try anybody try to do something like this so I want to tell you a little bit more about his personality and uh something essentially that Fred Smith would tell you don't burden others with your troubles uh when Smith uh what Smith learned a Vietnam about leading troops with personal courage and confidence helped him now nothing seemed to face him of course internally he's distraught but externally you don't see that he rarely let you see him get down he kept them private he would constantly look for the bright side of trouble and laugh that was pretty infectious so we all kind of followed suit okay so they're still trying to raise money they come across this guy I want to tell you about I'm gonna look for a biography on him because he found it very interesting his name's Colonel Henry Crown I don't think he was actual Colonel but he says uh they they're starting to meet with them and he's you know start off as poor I think what was he like uh not Russian Lithuanian uh immigrant and he winds up becoming a billionaire I'll tell you more about him in a minute so their meeting with him he says we loan the money or guarantee the note for us to exercise this option which is an integral part of uh fitting federal express together the worst thing that can happen to us right now is if you decide you don't like this program you can sell the aircraft at a profit saying hey uh we need you to we need this loan I think it's trying to buy more jets from pan am um if you guarantee it because uh he has control of general dynamics at this point and if you guarantee it worst case if you decide not to continue investing federal express we can sell the planes for profit uh Crown was sympathetic real satisfaction uh he said comes from creating building or taking a business that hasn't been doing too well and making it better but he couldn't rush to the rescue for one thing his financial vice president was hospitalized he wanted to delay any decision until the man was back on the job so what do they do here Fred and the guy that he's with Mir decided go to the sky's hospital room uh to Mir's credit he wasn't to be stalled he took the unorthodox course of invading the finance man's hospital room and spending the afternoon laying out their proposition with Smith doing most of the talking they convinced a sick man their brash move seemed to impress Crown who knew firsthand about enterprise and aggressive struggle in sharp contrast with fed Smith's background of wealth Crown had been born to poor Lithuanian immigrants he dropped out of school at 16 for a four dollar a week office boy job uh he quickly learned the hustle even when young even when young he had a remarkable imagination for creative finance hearing and now he wrote around Chicago in his roles Royce and donated a hundred million dollars to charities um so they come up with a deal and it was really i mean they could have essentially bought 80% of FedEx for almost no money i think for 16 million they went up not exercising its option but it says the upshot was a general dynamics agreed to guarantee a short term bank loan to FedEx for 23 million but at a huge price the agreement provided that federal express would have to repay the loan just four months they want to extending this time period now there's all kinds of other details i'm going to leave out because it gets a yum like the book is full of them really there's a quote in i think it's the only biography that i know of Elon Musk it's called Elon Musk Tesla SpaceX in the quest for the fantastic future it's the first episode of Founders Ever but in this um there's a there's a paragraph that reminds me i think i think Elon says in uh six words describes what he was going through the difficulty of jumping these hoops to raise money for both Tesla SpaceX during 2008 to essentially what um Fred is dealing with here let me just read that to you Musk went to the secondary markets to try to sell some of his shares in solar city he was uh he also seized about 15 million dollars that came through when Del acquired a data center software set up called everdream that was founded by Musk Cousins in which he had vested um and then this is where it says uh this is what i mean about Elon having the gift to succinctly describing what he was going through it was like the fucking matrix Musk said describing his financial maneuver at this point this is December 3rd 2008 so even with this bank loan and others they're still they're always behind until they IPO essentially till they they finally were able to IPO they're they're very they're very close um they just have so many creditors and so so much it was so expensive they thought it was going to be like 25 million to get to break even it was like 60 million dollars or something like that it was a lot of money especially in the 1970s but this is a how they one of their strategies because again FedEx is in debt up to their eyeballs which means you know they could they're not making payments they could lose all their assets in the company it doesn't have any assets to they don't have the planes then they have no business right so it says um this was a bank uh says Teter was fearful the bank would try to seize the mortgage planes uh the bank had a young officer keeping track of the situation every time he showed up at the airport Teter recalled we would radio the jets not to land can't confiscate if we never land it was all very touchy in Detroit the air oh my god this gets wild here in Detroit the airport parked a fire truck in front of the federal express jets so it couldn't take off without paying an overdue bill for fuel and landing fees we went on by the skin of our teeth for a long time um employees got a memo this it just I mean there's a story after story after story of this it's really really insane employees got a memo asking them not to cash their paychecks some officers recall uh that they just dropped their paychecks in a desk drawer and left them there for weeks um a one frustrated courier was owed three hundred dollars uh for expenses he pulled a gun and took the situation uh excuse me and took the station manager hostage then he telephoned Fitzgerald which is the the manager of this this part of FedEx and said if I don't get my money right now I'm gonna blow this sucker's head off and shit in the hole Fitzgerald got the money there fast and so as you could imagine the stress cuz you know Fred's response ultimately responsible for everything that's going on and this is what he said Fred Smith himself said that no man on earth will ever know what I went through in 1973 to 1974 when I read that uh again I because I've read so many books on them because I I would argue he might be the smartest person that I know of uh I have a little Charlie Munger that I put on my shoulder and I try to uh I try to ask him questions on on the sins I need to make and he says a quote that I love he says life will have terrible blows in it horrible blows unfair blows remember Charlie lost in nine I think it's someone's nine years old died of leukemia so it's just devastating I remember reading uh I think it was in poor Charlie's Almanac where you know he just walking the streets outside the hospital just you know crying his eyes out as you could imagine um so he's saying life will have terrible blows in it horrible blows unfair blows it doesn't matter and some people recover and others don't and I think the attitude of epithetists I never had no I pronounced these great guys uh the attitude of epithetists is the best he thought that every miss chance in life was an opportunity to be to behave well every miss chance in life was an opportunity to learn something and that your duty was not to be submerged and self pity but instead to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion that is a very good idea and that's the end of Charlie Mungers quote uh so during this time this is where he actually gets uh he gets fired by the board Fred Smith gets fired by the board by the time they had this meeting Smith had lost his position as chairman and CEO of the company but he was left in office as a president under a two-year contract with the help of corporate corporate headhunters they came up with a new FedEx boss a retired Air Force general named Howard howell Estes he was 59 years old not gonna spend too much time on the new boss essentially he was window dressing they needed somebody older and that looked respectable so they could raise more money I mean you're talking about third fourth fifth round of funding at this point um the new boss is is a dummy um he waste time uh very valuable time you know the entire company's on fire he's talking about perks uh we want to make sure he has his own parking space he wants a limo uh he's the very first day half the day the secretary has to contact california like DMV to get him a refund because now he moved to Tennessee and he he's since he didn't he wants like a partial refund on his license plate just absolute dummy i'll read this paragraph uh this is actually the guy that hired um one of the investors named lay that hired um Estes looking back at his period of time Fred Smith was a good soldier for quite a period of time he put up with the general who was our storefront dummy in my opinion we used him successfully he got us through at least a very important financing but after while he got to be terribly out of the culture the general insisted on his perks his limo and his expensive hotel rooms and so on and so forth while the rest of us were living in eighteen dollar day hotel rooms so it really began to be an issue not only Fred but with everybody else um we'd take the general who looked like daddy war bucks and he was credible he uh here was Fred he'd gotten a little rundown in his ability to forecast the future was very uh solid at the time uh I couldn't have taken Fred back to these investors and had him put up put up a nickel so he's talking about the strategy of saying hey now we have adult supervision in charge right you know an investment is an act of faith and you can do all the homework you want but in that last analysis it comes down to whether you believe the guy who's going to execute the plan and Fred was not very believable in those days so we needed somebody who was like the general and he served a very useful purpose and it was during this financing that Fred essentially wipes out almost all of his equity in the business Fred Smith would take a battering he and his family at the outset owned the controlling stock um but the effect of the third round would be would cut his holdings down to just 8.5 percent eventually he buys back I think 25 percent of the company before IPO if I'm not mistaken something like that so he gets this money back it was a true excruciating hard uh this was the end of the road I had begun discussions with people about bankruptcy that was going to be our next step stock for 90 percent of the business was available for just a relatively modest amount of capital Fred was being wiped out he had put his entire personal net worth in this thing well now it was amazing that Fred never quit but I don't want to give you the false impression that he didn't try to or didn't think about it and this is where he almost quit um he says Fred said I just he's talking to a bunch of the remember these mavericks he's non-conformist and the people that that joined him in the early days he's talking to them he says Fred I just wanted I just wanted you to know I'm going to resign tomorrow at the board meeting uh in one of these guys says oh bullshit you can't do that um Fred said no I'm going to do it and I said Smith you are over the hard part he said no there's just too much pressure I can't take it anymore I'm going to resign uh I said where are you fits and I will come down and talk to you so they want to meeting up with them and you know this is an act of a genuine act of friendship here because imagine how different Fred Smith's life would have been if he actually went through quitting right they found him in his office on the second floor and in one of the FedEx hangers uh Smith had a six pack of beer up there so we drank our beer and we talked to him and we talked to him and we talked to him he was serious he had written a hand uh he had written a letter to give he had handwritten a letter to give to the board our arguments with him were just we're basically it we got over the hard part the hard part is just about over from then on it was going to be all downhill it was very obvious at that point that he had done nothing that he should be basically ashamed of so this is where he's under indictment um he essentially falsifies some two different banks want collateral so he he essentially um he makes up like fake minutes from a board meeting and the the the main issue is that he pledged collateral that was fake um the jury winds up acquitting him but at this time he's like you know I they just found out um I'm going to go to jail the FBI's on me the district turnies on me so he's very down um so it says it was very awesome at that point that he had done nothing that he should that he should be basically be ashamed of he had done nothing at all that was detrimental to the company so what they're talking about there is they get into like the issue why he got acquitted was because if it's the difference between like knowingly and willingly these are like legal terms that the judge has to explain to the the jury like five different times or something but Fred made the point that he thought he had the authority to do so and he just thought by forging the documents it was be faster because he needed the money that day and then if he actually had the meeting they would have approved it anyways um so that's what they're talking about the manager in group we knew believe two things no matter who would take over the leadership if Fred Smith wasn't there uh the thing would not ultimately be successful that is how much we believed and Fred Smith and his ability to know and understand the business and in his charisma and his leadership capabilities that was very sincere we felt that way and the other thing was that even if that hadn't been true we sure as hell we're going to sit around and take orders from general estes because he didn't know what the hell he was doing uh in the hangar office the men drink their beer and talk until five thirty in the morning we ultimately convinced him to stay so he stays a few months maybe a year later he's back into financial trouble so he goes back to colonel crown and and ask them to because they already did a small investment but now they they don't want to keep throwing uh they don't want their good money after bad so he asked them to to guarantee another loan and they won't and this is where he almost glitz again general dynamics turned him down on the loan it was a blow that made him think of resigning Smith wrote colonel Henry crown asking that they consider him for a management position in either general dynamics or trans world airlines that's crazy okay you won't give me a loan we give me a job uh the file did not show their response it may have been considered the momentary whim of a terribly distraught man uh the strain affected his home life uh his wife uh was young and wanted a social life Fred was not much inclined towards the social realm when Smith was not at federal express uh are flying around the country on company business he stayed at home to read i read about four hours a day he told an interviewer so that's going to lead to uh his divorce uh before i get to the IPO which saves the day uh he's got a great quote on time management you have to be absolutely brutal in the management of your time uh so they want manage to actually uh do the initial public offering and this really helps FedEx they're finally out for the first time in their lives on solid financial footing and this is where it just takes off like a rocket so he's over the hill over the really really hard part obviously building up in so many companies not by any means easy but it's probably not going to go to business so it says the first profitable fiscal year was 1976 with a net income of 3.5 million i'm just going to list off the profits as they go right next year so it starts out 3.5 million then they make 8.1 million then they make 20 million and then by uh five five years later they're making 90 million a year in profit um so when they make 90 million a year in profit uh at that time the company was only nine years old uh just a quote from Fred on problem solving uh Smith believes that the key to successful innovation is constantly to subject problems to every angle of scrutiny that can be thought of with the idea that unless you are trying to defy the laws of nature some risk-taking will some risk-taking way will will be found to solve the problem and he's uh he's saying this in 1986 interview looking back he's describing the very early days of FedEx that's why i thought it was so important okay and i'll close on this this book ends it reminds me very much of the the Bill Gates book because it talks about his own life and then up until the IPO it ends let's say late 80s uh essentially in the in the history of FedEx so still uh obviously post IPO relatively successful obviously grew from leaves and bounds from here but this is Fred talking to us essentially about the importance of timing um the importance of reading and how to synthesize information to get ideas and solve problems and i thought this was a good place to end. Smith estimated that throughout the 80s he spent at least four hours a day reading he found he relied quite heavily on his own vision back by assimilating information for many different disciplines all at once the common trade of people who have vision vision is that they spend a lot of time reading and gathering information and then synthesize it until they come up with an idea that precisely happened to him it became more and more obvious so he's talking about the innovation according to this book the first now you know you track a package you know exactly where it is uh FedEx was the first one to come up with that system and other people copied it so he says uh it became more and more obvious if I don't express must have the ability to track at every moment every item their system was transporting uh this is where Smith is direct coastal Smith it looked as if it were impossible it had never been done before at that time i've been reading some very different types of things about the grocery business and the price performance of computers well one thing led to another and we began to look into using a version of those bar codes that are on soup cans to give a number in sequence to every package it turned out to be a very good idea it's interesting remember he talked about the the um inspiration for the hub and spoke concept uh he took from the telephone network now he comes up with this barcode idea from from grocery stores and soup cans without it then he talking about wow he's talking about how important this this innovation was without it we could not have controlled this organization it would have been impossible to take millions of items every night and deliver them with the reliability we do and he talks about the very next page he's talking about again he starts off with the importance of reading of being curious of the world around you it's uh simulating and synthesizing different ideas he picked up a autobiography of Dwight Eisenhower and discovered what he considered a perfect perfect example of the role of luck in terms of success uh now this is Jericho from Smith Dwight Eisenhower in 1940 was a soon to retire lieutenant colonel with a respectable but not particularly outstanding military career but it just so happened that he turned out now watch how he which I think everybody does you know I told you over and over again it's amazing that when you read biographies of great people you realize they the people that were studying and themselves read biographies these great people why because they take parallels and other people's lives and apply it to them he's going to apply the the role of timing in the success of Dwight Eisenhower to FedEx and then he's going to further elaborate how that applies to other startups um so he okay so it says but just so happened that he turned out to be the right person the right place at the right time and most important he had the right skills mainly the skill to force coalitions and then he built on that opportunity and those skills to go on to be president of the United States well my guess is that there are probably a thousand Dwight Eisenhower's at any point in time and Fred Smith's to read that because that's very important remember last week I ended on what Walton said in his book that there's hundreds of thousands of people out there that can can that out there they're looking for opportunities just like he did and they could do the things that he did right so he's used hundreds of thousands we are those hundreds of thousands and let's go back to what Fred Smith's saying here well my guess is that there are probably a thousand Dwight Eisenhower's at any point in time and thousands of Fred Smith's too we are those thousands the same exact idea here is not amazing I think timing is often more important than luck in my case for example the idea that is federal express absolutely positively would not have worked five years before we did it and five years later the market would have been so clear that somebody would have served it in one way or another and that is probably true for most startup organizations and that is where I will leave it if you want to read the book and support the podcast at the same time there is a link in the show notes also you can go to founderspodcast.com on that link you'll see every single book that I've ever done if you buy a book using that link it benefits the podcast if you want to go directly to the URL it's amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash founders podcast that is a hundred and 51 books done one thousand ago and I'll talk to you again soon