Founder interviews

Podcast

Les Schwab: Building a Tire Empire on Profit Sharing

Founders January 5, 2020

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Founder interviews 9

Culture building 7

Bootstrapping 6

• Built $1.8B tire company by treating employees as 50% profit partners.
• No formal education; mastered business through obsessive study and customer focus.
• Out-maneuvered bigger competitors by fixing dealer incentives, not cutting wages.

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Origin stories

Podcast

How Sara Blakely found the idea that became Spanx

Masters of Scale January 3, 2020

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Origin stories 10

Vision & mission 7

MVP & prototyping 6

• Blakely hunted for a big idea for 10 years before Spanx found her
• "This should exist" — the three words that signal a real opportunity
• She built a billion-dollar company with $5,000 and zero outside investment

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Case studies

YouTube

Best of Scaling Up: Ten Episodes, Ten Lessons for Growing Leaders

Bill Gallagher December 31, 2019

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Case studies 9

Management 7

Pricing psychology 6

• Your pricing is almost certainly too low — and customers know it.
• One top-25 influencer list scaled a startup globally in 36 months.
• Corporate gifting is mostly money spent on negative impressions.

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Founder interviews

Podcast

How Eric Ries is rebuilding public markets for the long term

Acquired December 30, 2019

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Founder interviews 9

Business models 7

Fundraising & VC 6

• Activist investors with 10-minute holding periods control public company governance
• LTSE lets founders legally bind themselves to long-term principles — with real penalties
• Lean Startup started as anonymous blog posts to avoid being yelled out of boardrooms

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Origin stories

Podcast

How Ingvar Kamprad Built IKEA From Nothing

Founders December 30, 2019

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Origin stories 10

Business models 6

• Obstacle-driven innovation: every constraint forced IKEA to reinvent and outcompete.
• Obsessive cost-cutting and supplier partnerships replaced industry middlemen for decades.
• Problems are opportunities—a mail-order collapse led to the store model that built the empire.

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