Charlie Munger said that Li Lu was the only outsider he ever trusted with his money. Decades before Li Lu made Munger half a billion dollars, Li survived one of the most horrific childhoods imaginable: Born into poverty, abandoned, hungry, beaten, surrounded by death. Persistent. Smart. Disciplined. Intensely curious. Obsessed with reading and learning. Determined to escape. This is a story you absolutely cannot miss. What I learned from reading Moving the mountain: My life in China from the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square by Li Lu.
A few weeks ago, I was talking to John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, and he told me one of the craziest things anyone has ever said about the podcast.
He had listened over 100 episodes before he met and he told me that if founders existed when he was younger, that Whole Foods would still be an independent company.
He said that since the podcast and all of history's greatest entrepreneurs constantly emphasize the importance of controlling your expenses, he would have put more of a priority on it, especially during good times.
It is natural for a company, and I think for human nature to just not watch your costs as closely because everything is going so well.
Andrew Carnegie had one of the best ways to describe why this is so important.
Cause he would actually repeat this mantra time and time again.
He would say, profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces on the marketplace.
Costs, however, could be strictly controlled.
And in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in the cost were permanent.
That quote from Carnegie is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co founder and CEO of Ramp.
Ramp is now a partner of this podcast.
I've gotten to know all the co founders of Ramp and I've spent a ton of time with them over the last year or two.
They all listened to the podcast and they picked up on the fact that the main theme from the podcast is on the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend and how doing so can give you a massive competitive advantage.
That is a main theme for ramp.
The reason that ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend.
Ramp gives you everything you need to control your costs.
Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team.
Automated expense reporting and cost control.
Those last two words, cost control.
There's a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography that says cost control became nearly an obsession.