You and I always talk about this phenomenon that reoccurs throughout the history of entrepreneurship, that you can always understand the son by the story of his father, the story of the fathers embedded in the son.
The story you're about to hear is one of the most remarkable industrial odysseys ever told.
And at the center is this relationship between a father and his two sons.
The founder of this family dynasty was a great inventor, but he wasn't a great entrepreneur.
He knew how to build great products, but he didn't pay enough attention to the financial side of his business, and as a result, he goes bankrupt.
That is a mistake that his two sons actually learned from and successfully avoided.
His sons, Ludwig and Alfred, were both world class entrepreneurs and some of the wealthiest people on earth when they were alive.
They both built their businesses to last.
They never went bankrupt like their father, and they were both obsessed with watching their costs.
They both knew that it's not enough to build a great product, you have to build a great business.
And people that built great businesses, businesses that last is who we study on this podcast.
And every single one of them was obsessed with controlling their expenses, just like Ludwig and Alfred were.
In fact, this book talks about the fact that Ludwig and Alfred were both born in the 1830s.
And there's all these great founders are also born in that decade.
And the book talks about what some of these great founders, all born in the 1830s, had in common.
And one of the people that is mentioned in the book is Andrew Carnegie.
And Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again.
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.
This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co founder and CEO of Ramp.