The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:02:10 · Scott Galloway
[00:02:10] S1: So I don't have, David has more empirical data. Mine is just anecdotal. Haven't worked for anyone else since the age of 24. When I got out of UCLA, did the tier analyst program at Morgan Stanley. And since then I've started my own companies and done my own thing other than I've been on faculty at NYU for twenty two years, I'm largely kind of a free agent there. So we tend to romanticize entrepreneurship. I would argue that my venture into entrepreneurship was more self awareness and a recognition of the assets and attributes I did not have. To be successful in a corporation you have to be politically savvy, you have to be patient, you have to actually be quite mature. Because the only thing I can guarantee you working for a corporation is a series of small and big injustices. People will get promoted over you that don't deserve to. Projects you're working on will get canceled for you can't even find out why they were canceled. But if you can navigate that and put up with it, The US Corporation is still the best place to get rich slowly, is what I found. There's never been a wealth generator like the US Corporation. I recognized fairly early at Morgan Stanley, I did not have those skills. If people went into a conference room, I would think they were talking about me. I literally did not have the maturity to handle a lack of information. And I recognized that the only way I would be happy would be to have control and start something. And also I wanted to play into my strengths. I'm very risk aggressive. I like to sell. Entrepreneur should be the first synonym for sales. You're always selling. You're selling people to join your company. You're selling capital. You're selling customers. You're selling clients. And you're selling at key employees to stay with you after they get an offer from Salesforce. You're constantly selling and you're willing to take risks, specifically the risk around public failure that most people aren't. So for me it was just an assessment of not only what attributes I had in the opportunity, but quite frankly my deficiencies. The people who tend to crumble are like, how do you handle public failure?
00:04:21 · Scott Galloway
I have a lot of friends who are wildly successful coming out of business school in the 90s, went into the alternative investment space and their fund gets closed down or they start a fund and it doesn't work and they just get stuck. Like they've never known failure. So your ability to mourn and move on, think is really the kind of the attribute. Because if you start several businesses, many or most of them are gonna fail. So many moons have to line up for a business to be successful. And then the key is, what do you do after you fail? Do you get stuck? True entrepreneurs are sort of like, okay, this didn't work, next. So the undergrads at NYU typically make better entrepreneurs because if someone has decided to go to business school, means they're sort of risk averse in taking a more certain path. But yeah, my venture into entrepreneurship was a function of 70% of entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs because they have no choice. If you immigrate here from Korea without the certification of an education, you don't get to work go to work for Google or JP Morgan. You start a small business. So anyways, I think it's honest self awareness around if you're really cut out to be an entrepreneur. Any any thoughts before we move on to two, David?
00:05:36 · David Senra
[00:05:36] S2: Yeah. Think the my favorite quote on this again is comes from Steve Jobs. He just says that like half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones are just pure perseverance. It's exactly what you said. It's kind of they're impervious. It's like, yeah. This is a problem. That's okay. I'll just, get back up and try it again, do it over and over again. I'm a big fan of MMA, and I actually think there's lot of analogies from sports that that are helpful in business. And I heard one one of these guys in the UFC said one time was like, his strategy where he has his advantage is like, need to get my competitor on their back. So I need to do a takedown to get to my best position. Right? And my opponent's goal is to stop me from getting there. So they stopped my first takedown. That's fine. He's like, you stop the second one. That's fine. You stop the third one. That's fine. Get ready for four, five, six, seven, and eight. And his whole point is just like, I know what I need to do, and you can play defense on this, but I'm gonna keep doing this until essentially I die trying. And I think a lot of entrepreneurship... Entrepreneurs are like that. And I loved what the the point that you made where it's like, well, a lot of this is out of necessity. You know, if you immigrate here from Korea and you can't get a high paying job, then you might want to start, you know, a a restaurant or a car... Like start washing cars or doing something that anything that you can do on your own without permission, I think is the key there.
00:06:48 · Scott Galloway
[00:06:48] S1: Question number two comes from a listener who emailed us. A lot of founders seem to have given up their health, marriage, or kids for their company. Is it possible to build something big and also have a life outside it? Did?
00:07:00 · David Senra
[00:07:00] S2: Yes. But the same kind of personality type that wants to build something big usually doesn't want to do anything else. On my other show where instead of just reading histories... Biographies of history based entrepreneurs, I start having sit down conversations with them. And I just released an episode recently with this guy named Nick who runs Revolut, and it's the largest private company in Europe, like a $115,000,000,000 valuation. And in in the episode, he says, you know, 99.5 percent of my time is spent on work. And in the comments, some people are like, yeah. But he's missing, you know, time with friends and going for a walk in the park. And he's just like, well, that kind of personality type is not interested in going for, you know, barbecues and and ball games. He found his mission in life. He has excessively high agency. He's just kind of chasing after this with, like, this monomaniacal focus. There's a ton of examples of... From the history of entrepreneurship, people building big things. So Sam Walton is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. I think his autobiography is like a central reading for anybody. And, you know, he still found time in his day. He'd work from the time his eyes were open till the time they closed, but in... He would take breaks throughout every day. So he liked to to hunt with his dogs. He's like quail hunt during during the day, and he liked to play tennis. So if you look, let's say he's he's awake for, you know, seventeen hours a day. He's probably working fifteen of those hours, but he's still making time to try to have dinner with his family to, you know, get exercise, to do the activities he wants. It's much more of... Jeff Bezos has this line where he doesn't believe in work life balance. He believes in work life harmony, and I think that's what you see. Now with that being said, there's way more examples of people destroying every single other element of their life for business success. There's this book by this guy named Larry Miller, it's called Driven, an Autobiography. And he was writing it when he died. Larry Miller was the richest entrepreneur in Utah. The average Utah citizen could not go a day without spending a dollar in one of his businesses. So he owned things from car dealerships to movie theaters to restaurants. He just owned a ton of businesses.
00:08:54 · David Senra, Scott Galloway
And he wrote that book as a cautionary tale because he ignored his health. There... He was such poor health as he's writing the book. They're literally having to chop off parts of his body. He's having... Because his circulation is so bad. [00:09:05] S1: Diabetes. Yeah. [00:09:06] S2: Die... It's so much... It's so bad. And then he talks about, hey. I I don't know who my kids are. I don't have a relationship with my wife. And it's a devastating, devastating story. He's writing. He's like, I'm I'm in a 30,000 square foot house on top of a mountain overlooking the town... The city that he lives in. He's like, it's just... None of this made... Mattered. And I... And he goes, and the worst of I didn't even have fun. And the last chapter is actually written by his coauthor and his wife because he dies in the middle of that book. And his wife, I said, thinks... I think his wife says the most devastating thing you could ever hear. And she's like, yeah. I miss him, but it's not like he was here when he was alive anyways. Yeah.