What I learned from rereading Random Reminiscences of Men and Events by John D. Rockefeller.
One of the best things about this.
Book is that Rockefeller is constantly talking about the way that him and his partners built their business.
And he would compare and contrast the methods that they would use compared to some of his quote, unquote, unintelligent competition, which is the word and the phrase that he uses.
And his description of unintelligent competition was the type of person who never really knew all the facts about their own business, that they kept their books in such a way that they did not actually know when they were making money or when they were losing money.
And he has a great phrase for this, where he says, this casual way of conducting affairs did not appeal to me.
And even when, years before he founded Standard Oil, when he was working for other people, when he was 16 years old, he said, I learned to have great respect for figures and facts, no.
Matter how small they were.
The importance that Rockefeller put on cost control jumps off the pages and he repeats it over and over and over again.
This obsession with cost control is something that Rockefeller had in common with Andrew Carnegie.
In fact, Andrew Carnegie is mentioned multiple times in Rockefeller's autobiography.
There's a great line in one of Carnegie's biographies that I read that said Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again.
Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace.
Costs, however, could be strictly controlled.
And in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in costs were permanent.
This shared obsession is something that 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 listen to the podcast and then 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 gives you a massive competitive advantage over your quote, unquote unintelligent competition.
In Rockefeller's words, that is a main theme for ramp.
The reason the ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend.