Brad Jacobs is one of the most talented living entrepreneurs. Brad has started 8 different billion dollar or multi-billion dollar businesses. He has done over 500 acquisitions and has raised over $30 billion. He started his first company at 23, has over 40 years of experience as an entrepreneur, and is the most energetic person I have ever been around. Earlier this year he published his life story: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. How to Make a Few Billion Dollars was one of my favorite books that I've read this year and the episode I made about the book was one of the most popular episodes of Founders. This episode is what I learned from having breakfast with Brad Jacobs and reading his book How to Make a Few Billion Dollars.
One of the most important things I learned from Brad's book, and we spoke about this when I had breakfast with Brad as well, was the importance of working with the smartest and most talented people that you can.
Brad says that the most important thing that a CEO does is recruit superlative people.
And Brad will recruit the smartest people he can find.
And he actually talks about this.
Brad says there's no substitute for smarts.
And that reminded me of something that Steve Jobs said in this interview.
I read that Steve gave in the late 1990s and this is what Steve said.
I think that I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with.
You must find extraordinary people.
The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is at most 2 to 1.
But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1.
Given that, you are well advised to go after the cream of the cream, you need to build a team that pursues the A players.
And this is exactly what Ramp did.
Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry.
Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible.
In the last 12 months, they hired only 0.23% of the people that applied.
That means when you use Ramp, you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 247 to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations.
And all of this happens on a single platform.
The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes.
And this is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation.