#356 How The Sun Rose On Silicon Valley: Bob Noyce (Founder of Intel)

24:02This is so important. It's amazing how all this fits together. After Sputnik, the glamorous words in the semiconductor business were computers and miniaturization. Now, this is what the beginning of a new industry sounds like. So it says, if you visited Fairchild, you would not have had the faintest notion that you were looking in on the leading edge of the most advanced of all industries, electronics. The work bays, where the transistors were produced by PhDs mostly, right, looked like slightly sunnier versions of garment sweatshops. You would see rows of people hunched over work tables, squinting through microscopes, doing the most tedious and frustrating sort of manual labor, cutting layers of silicon apart with diamond cutters, picking up the little rectangles on them with tweezers, trying to attach wires to them, dropping them, rummaging around on the floor to find them again, swearing, muttering, climbing back up to their chairs, rubbing their eyes, squinting back through the microscopes and driving themselves crazy some more.

25:04Now, this is the beginning of one of the most important initiatives that ever exist. And what they are producing had a 50 to 90 % failure rate. That is bananas. Anywhere from 50 to 90 % of the transistors produced would turn out to be defective. And so Noyce is examining what they're doing. It's like, there has to be a better way. Noyce had figured out a solution. There was something primitive about cutting individual transistors out of sheets of silicon and then wiring them back together in various series. Why not put them all on a single piece of silicon without wires? Noyce realized that he was not the only engineer thinking along these lines, but he had never even heard of Jack Kilby.

25:45So Kilby at the time was a 36 -year -old engineer working for Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas, okay? In January 1959, Noyce made his first detailed notes about a complete solid -state circuit. A month later, Texas Instruments announced that Jack Kilby had invented one, Kilby's Integrated Circuit, as the invention was called. Six months later, Noyce creates a similar integrated circuit. Noyce's silicon device actually turned out to be much more efficient and more practical to mass produce than Kilby's. And so Noyce actually gets to set the standard for the industry. And it was that way that Noyce became known as the co -inventor of the integrated circuit.

26:26Now, some people have heard this invention referred to as integrated circuit, but way more people have heard of what the invention would come to be known, which is the microchip. And it says Noyce knew exactly what he possessed in this microchip. Noyce knew that with it, he had discovered the road to El Dorado. And this is another fantastic description of what the beginning of an entire industry, an entire industry looks like. We just went through, you know, anybody coming to Fairchild's like, they don't even know what they're looking at. The idea that 50 to 90 % of the things they were producing, you know, were defective, were failures.

27:02Obviously, they're going to improve that. But listen to this. the integrated circuit was based on the transistor, but the integrated circuit opened up fields that the transistor did not even suggest. The integrated circuit made it possible to create miniature computers to put all the functions of the mighty ENIAC on a panel the size of a playing card. Remember, they said the ENIAC, let's go back to that a few pages ago. It was 100 feet long, 10 feet high, and required 18 ,000 vacuum tubes. And now they're able to produce the same level of technology and fit it on the size of a playing card. Thereby, the integrated circuit opened up every field of engineering imaginable, from voyages to the moon, to robots, and many fields that had never been imagined.

27:45It opened up so many fields that no one could come up with a single name to include them all. And what happens next is fascinating, because remember how they got the financing for the company to begin with. It is just a startup inside of a larger company, right? the importance of the integrated circuit was certainly not lost on Fairchild camera back in New York. In 1959, they exercised their option to buy Fairchild Semiconductor for $3 million. The next day, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, and all the Shockley traders woke up richer than they had ever dreamed of being. Now, listen to this. This is going to cause you to chuckle a little bit because they were not in it for the money.

28:26Now, Noyce is going to go on and build fabulous levels of wealth. But at this point, he's like, I can't believe I'm so rich. Each of the traders eight received $250 ,000 worth of Fairchild stock. So I went back and put it into the inflation calculator. That would be each of them equivalent of about $2 .6 million in stock today. And to place that into even more context, that was 20 times the amount of annual salary that he was getting. He was making about $12 ,000 a year at this point. Noyce did not know what to make of his new wealth. He was 31 years old. The semiconductor business had not seemed like a business at all.

29:04It just felt like an esoteric game in which young electrical engineers competed for the occasional round of applause. So even though they sold the company, Noyce still stays there. He's the general manager of the entire division. And this return on investment for buying this company for $3 million, I should see if I can find the total amount of money they made because the growth of Fairchild Semiconductor in the next few years is going to blow you away. And I love this. NASA chose Noyce's integrated circuit for the first computers that astronauts would use on board their spacecraft. I don't know if they ever did this, but used by NASA had to be great ad for Fairchild Semiconductor.

29:43After that, orders poured in. In 10 years, Fairchild sales rose from a few thousand dollars a year to $130 million a year. for a company that you paid $3 million for. I got tears in my eyes right now. I don't know why I'm laughing so much. The number of employees rose from the original 12 to 12 ,000. And so now Noyce has to learn how to run a giant company, which he says multiple times in the future, he didn't actually like doing it. During the startup phase of Fairchild Semiconductor, there had been no sense of bosses and employees. There had only been a common sense of struggle out on a frontier.

30:18Everyone had internalized the goals of the venture. They didn't need exhortations from superiors. As Fairchild expanded, Noyce didn't even bother trying to find experienced management personnel because in the semiconductor industry, that didn't exist because they're also inventing the industry at the same time. Instead, he recruited engineers right out of the colleges and graduate schools and gave them major responsibilities right off the bat. So this is really about Noyce's management style or almost lack thereof in some degree. The young engineers who came to work for Fairchild and Noyce could scarcely believe how much responsibility was suddenly thrust upon them.

30:57Some 24 -year -old just out of graduate school would find himself in charge of a major project with no one looking over his shoulder. A problem would come up, and he would go to Noyce, and he would ask him what to do. And Noyce would say, listen, here are your guidelines. You've got to consider A, you've got to consider B, and you've got to consider C. But if you think I'm going to make your decision for you, you're mistaken. Hey, it's your ass. And I think to some people this might be counterintuitive, but the response for that young 24 -year -old wasn't sadness or depression. It was joy and exhilaration.

31:30Said the spirit of the startup phase. My God, who could forget the exhilaration of the past few years to be young and free out here on the Silicon frontier? Noyce was determined to maintain that spirit during the expansion phase. But as is the nature of these things, what's going to happen? You go from 12 people to 12 ,000. The talented young people are going to now be like, hey, I can do this too. Just like Noyce and the traders are under shock. They're like, hey, I can do this too. So they call them defectors. This is not a pejorative, but this is the term that the author uses. So this is the one I'm going to stick with.

32:06Defectors from Fairchild started more than 50 companies, all making or supplying microchips. The defectors had a name. The defectors were called the Fair Children. And this is why this is so important. This is why I'm reading this entire essay to you. This is why I'm dedicating an entire episode to it. It was the Fair Children who turned the Santa Clara Valley into Silicon Valley. Acre by acre, their fruit trees were uprooted, and two -story Silicon, modern office buildings and factories went up. Everywhere the Fair Children went, they took the Noyce approach with them. The new breed of Silicon Valley were disciplined.

32:49They became absorbed in their companies the way men once had in the palmy days of the automobile industry. So they were drawing the parallels between, let's say, 1950s, 1960s Silicon Valley with, say, 1900s and 1910 Detroit, Michigan. It's the same person. I did like a 12 or 13 part series on the early founders of the early pioneers of the American automobile industry. It's the same person, same personality type. They were just taking advantage of the new frontier of their day, which, you know, if you were alive, you were this personality type and you were alive and you were in America in 1900, you got your ass to Detroit and you were working in the automobile industry.

33:23The same personality, if they were born 50 years later, they're in Silicon Valley with Bob Noyce and the Fairchildren. And there's a line that Tom Wolfe uses in this piece that could describe Detroit, Michigan. It could describe Silicon Valley. It could describe a lot of the early industries that you and I talk about. It says the young engineers were giving themselves over to a new technology as if it were a religious mission. And then the rapid improvement of technology is incredible. Listen to what happens over the next 17 years. In 1959, Noyce's invention had made it possible to put an entire electrical circuit on a chip of silicon the size of a fingernail.

33:56by 1964, so that'd be six years later, okay? You had to know how to put 10 circuits on a chip that size to enter the game. And the stakes kept rising. Another six years after that, the figure was 1 ,000 circuits on a single chip. So Bob starts out with one circuit. Six years later, it's 10 circuits. Six years after that, it's 1 ,000 circuits. Six years after that, it would be 32 ,000 circuits. By 1968, Bob Noyce had a dozen new integrated circuit and transistor patents. And the future potential of Noyce's invention far exceeded anything he could have possibly predicted. It says because as a direct result of Noyce's invention, the invention made the flight of the Apollo 8 possible.

34:43The Apollo 8 was the first crewed spacecraft to leave Earth's gravitational sphere and the first human spaceflight to reach the moon. that crew orbited the moon 10 times without landing and then came back to Earth. And there would have been no miniature computer without the integrated circuits invented by Noyce and Kilby and refined by Noyce and the young semiconductor zealots of Silicon Valley. If you wanted to talk about the creators of the future, well, here they were in Silicon Valley, just before Apollo 8 circled the moon, Bob Noyce turned 41. And he was one of the oldest CEOs in the semiconductor business.

35:15He was the father of Silicon Valley. And so now we got to get to Noyce's decision, along with his co -founder and partner Gordon Moore, to leave Fairchild Semiconductor and found Intel. And so when they start their own company, they go back to Arthur Rock for financing. He's like, well, you helped us out when we started Fairchild Semiconductor. We want to, we have obviously a proven track record. We want to start Intel. And Arthur Rock was like, this is the biggest no -brainer ever. And now Rock had his own venture capital company. They merely told Rock what they wanted to do, and then they said they're going to put up $500 ,000 of their own money, so $250 ,000 each.

35:53Rock's like, cool. He winds up putting up $2 .51 million of additional startup money, and another $300 ,000 came from Grinnell College. Now, before I go into what they wanted to build Intel, this was a hilarious part of Silicon Valley history lore. They say he was the magnet that held Fairchild Semiconductor. So when he leaves, it was obvious to the other company. Remember all these, there's dozens, maybe hundreds of other companies sprouting up in the valley at this point. So they're like, oh, now the noise is gone. The entire workforce is going to be up for grabs. And so there's a hilarious, this made me laugh.

36:31One person put what happened after noise left to the workforce of Fairchild Semiconductor says people were practically driving trucks over to Fairchild Semiconductor and loading up the trucks with new employees. And so Fairchild responds by pulling off one of the best corporate raids, one of the best raids in corporate history. And so the remaining employees at Fairchild, one day they see this platoon of young men that are moving into the executive office cubicles. Now this is hilarious. So the young men were led by C. Lester Hogan. So Hogan was the chief executive officer of the motor of the semiconductor division for Motorola.

37:12And so Hogan shows up at Fairchild's semiconductor with all of his top engineers and administrators. And so what Fairchild had done was, you know, kind of simple brilliance, I guess. Fairchild had hired the whole bunch away from Motorola and installed them to take place of Noyce. So he didn't just say, hey, I want you, Hogan. He's like, no, I want you and your entire staff. And Fairchild had lured them away in the most direct way imaginable. He had offered Hogan and his team an absolute fortune in money and stock. Now, this is the funny part of Silicon Valley lore. Hogan received so much money that henceforth wealth in the valley would be measured in units called Hogan's.

37:56So that's one way to solve the problem when, you know, Noyce leaves and everybody else is poaching your employees. It's just going to poach an entire division from a larger company. So Noyce and Moore then go set up Intel. And they do so in the exact same way they set up Fairchild. They just started with a dozen bright young electrical engineers. And they're going to bet everything on research and product development. At the beginning of Intel, Noyce and Moore are actually putting on white coats and they're working at lab tables. This is the part that Noyce loved the most, but their strategy in the product they're developing is a little different.

38:30They would not be competing with Fairchild or anyone else in the already established semiconductor market. They had decided to move into what was called the most backward area of computer technology at the time, which was data storage and memory. Within two years, Noyce and Moore had developed the 1103 memory chip. Each chip contained 4 ,000 transistors and did the work of 1 ,000 ceramic ringlets and did it faster. So before this invention, a computer's memory was stored in ceramic ringlets known as coarse. And so Intel invents the memory chip that does the work of 1 ,000 ceramic ringlets and does it faster.

39:12And so as the technology progresses, so does the environment in which that technology has to be produced. It says the work base, remember, they said they used to look like a step above like sweatshops. And now it says the work base now look like something out of an intergalactic adventure movie. So they're in these giant suits that look like astronauts because it has to be a completely clean environment because a single speck of dust could ruin one of the miniature circuits. And we see what is this reoccurring theme in this life of Bob Noyce. He has another hit on his hands. So at the end of Intel's first year in business, which had been devoted almost exclusively to research, sales totaled less than $3 ,000 and the workforce had 42 people.

39:52In 1972, so four years after founding, sales were 23 million and there was a thousand people working there. And the next year, sales went to 66 million and they had 2 ,500 employees. So four years after founding, remember the first year they're doing $3 ,000 and they have 42 people. Year four, 23 million people, or excuse me, $23 million in sales, 1 ,000 people. Year five, 66, five years after founding, $66 million in sales and 2 ,500 employees. So then it goes into detail about some important ideas that Noyce had at the very beginning of Intel. From the beginning, Noyce gave all the engineers and most of the office workers stock options.

40:34He had learned at Fairchild that in a business so dependent upon research, Stock options were a more powerful incentive than profit sharing. Talks about the incentives that go into this. Incentives rule everything around us. People sharing profits naturally wanted to concentrate on products that were already profitable rather than plunge into avant -garde research, which is what Noyce really was interested in, rather than plunge into avant -garde research that would not necessarily pay off in the short run. He also wanted the fewest layers of management as possible. He wanted ideas to win out over hierarchy.

41:05Noyce's idea was that every employee should feel that he could go as far and as fast in this industry as his talent would take him. He didn't want any employee to look at the structure of Intel and see a complex set of hurdles. At Intel, executives would not be walled off in offices. Everybody would be in one big room. Noyce worked at an old, scratched, secondhand metal desk. As the company expanded, Noyce kept the same desk and new employees were given desks that were not only newer, but bigger and better than his. Everybody noticed the old beat up desk. Then it goes into more detail how he structured Intel.

41:44Noyce decided to eliminate the notion of levels of management altogether. He and Moore ran the show, but below them, there were only strategic business segments as they called them. So a segment would be comparable to like a major department in an orthodox corporation, but they had far more autonomy. At Intel, here's an example that. At Intel, if the marketing division had to make a major decision that would affect the engineering division, the problem was not routed up a hierarchy to a layer of executives who oversaw both departments. Instead, councils made up of people already working on the line in those divisions that were affected would meet and work out the problem themselves.

42:21Noyce was also a great believer in meetings. The people in each department or work unit were encouraged to convene meetings whenever the spirit moved them. If Noyce called a meeting, then he would set the agenda. But after that, everybody was equal. If you were a young engineer and you had an idea you wanted to get across, you were supposed to speak up and challenge Noyce or anybody else in the meeting. You were face -to -face with the inventor or the co -inventor, and he was only 41 years old and he was listening to you. So I mentioned this earlier. It talks about the thrilling for a young, talented person.

42:54Imagine you're 24 years old, just out of graduate school, and you're in a meeting and Bob Noyce is paying attention and making you feel important. This was much more like a cult or like a religion than it was a company. This wasn't a corporation. It was a congregation. There were sermons. At Intel, everyone, Noyce included, was expected to attend sessions on the Intel culture. At these sessions, the principles by which the company were run were spelled out and discussed. And this was fun to me. Who's teaching these sessions? Andy Grove. The principles of Intel were explained via the Socratic method at management seminars by Intel's number three man, Andy Grove.

43:36And so there's an example in the essay or the article of the way Grove taught and then his personality. I'm just going to read the whole thing to you. It just made me laugh. So Grove would say, how would you sum up the Intel approach? Many hands would go up and Grove would choose one. And the employee would say, at Intel, you don't wait for someone else to do it. You take the ball yourself and you run with it. And Grove would say, wrong. At Intel, you take the ball yourself and you let the air out of the ball and you fold up the ball and you put it in your pocket. Then you take another ball and you run with it.

44:11And when you've crossed the goal, you take the second ball out of your pocket and reinflate it and score 12 points instead of six. Grove was the most colorful person at Intel. He was in his mid -30s at the time. He was the epitome of the religious principle, the Intel religious principle, that the greater the freedom, the greater the obligation to exercise discipline. And then it goes into some of his managerial contributions to Intel. Grove was the inspiration for performance ratings. So we're kind of like a report card. And so all the employees are graded. There's, let's see, five different ways you could be graded.

44:47Sounds a lot like A, B, C, D, and F. So it's superior, exceeds requirements, meets requirements, marginally meets requirements, and does not meet requirements. And Noyce loved this system. And the reason he loved it, this is very fascinating. He says, if you're ambitious and hardworking, Noyce said, you want to be told how you're doing. In Noyce's view, this is the very surprising part to me, in Noyce's view, most of the young hotshots who were coming to work at Intel had never had the benefit of honest grades in their lives. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, college faculties had been under pressure to give all the students passing marks so they would not have to go off to Vietnam, and they had caved in until the entire grading system was meaningless.

45:32at Intel, they would learn what measuring up meant. The person that put that idea in my mind the best and made it the most memorable for me, this idea that, hey, if you're ambitious and hardworking, you want to be told how you're doing. Nick Saban said this one time, and I've never forgot. I have it in my notebook. I read it all the time. He says, average players want to be left alone. Good players really want to be coached and great players want to be told the truth. What did Noyce say? Noyce said, if you're ambitious and working, if you have the desire to be great, you want to be told how you're doing.

46:10And so then we revisit this reoccurring theme that Noyce, it's constantly innovating, constantly improving upon what he's already doing. So Intel has a phenomenal second act that is bigger than their first act. So by the 1970s, the 1103 memory chip had given Intel an entire corner of the semiconductor market, right? But that was only a start. An Intel engineer named Ted Hoff came up with an invention as important as Noyce's integrated circuit had been a decade earlier. He invented the microprocessor, which was known as a computer on a chip. This invention leads to the possibilities for creating and using small computers.

46:50Computers so small, they surpassed what most people thought imaginable, even people already working in the industry. And it's important to highlight that this was an illustration of one of Noyce's strongest held belief that innovation is a young person's game. So in Ted Hoff and always trying to nurture like young talent and giving them as this entire, you know, essays talked about, he gave them a lot of latitude and freedom and a lot of responsibility and put them in like a place with resources and structure. An environment that hopefully, you know, yields, like turns their genius into a tangible product that makes the world better.

47:24In Ted Hoff, Noyce was looking at proof enough of his hypothesis that out here on the electrical frontier, the great flashes came to the young. Hoff was about the same age as Noyce had been when he invented his integrated circuit. And so this new invention caused an explosion in revenue. Obviously, the company is going to keep adding people and growing. And so Noyce does the same thing he did. Once the company gets too big, he wants to step away. So in 1974, Noyce turned over the actual running of Intel to Gordon Moore and Andy Grove and kicked himself upstairs to become chairman of the board.

47:57His major role was now to become the spokesman of Silicon Valley. He was awarded the National Medal of Science from the White House in 1980, and he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1983. By then, Intel sales had grown from $64 million in 1973 to almost a billion a year in 1983. 1883, Noyce's own fortune was incalculable. Grinnell College's 300 ,000 investment in Intel had multiplied in value more than 30 times and doubled the college's endowment. For those who follow the semiconductor industry, Noyce was a legend, a national treasure, the man that led the world into the 21st century across the electronic grid and into space.

48:39And so when this piece ends, Bob Noyce is 56 years old. He does not know, but he only has six years left to live. He dies at the relatively young age of 62 from a heart attack. I will leave a link down below in the show notes available on your podcast player and at founderspodcast .com for you to read the entire essay. I think it's worth your time. But I also wanted to tell you what I was thinking about and what I was doing and how this came to be. So a long time ago, I read this book called The Intel Trinity, How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company is written by this guy named Michael Malone.

49:14I'm going to read it in the next few weeks. I'm encouraging you to buy a copy and to read it with me. And so even though I read that book over seven years ago, there's still an idea in that book that I've never forgotten. I think it's really important. And it's the idea that for a new product, you have to educate the market. And that's what Bob Noyce, Andy Grove, and Gordon Moore realized with the invention of the microprocessor. It says, when you are trying to convince an audience to accept a radical innovation, almost by definition, the idea is so far from the status quo that many people simply cannot get their minds around it.

49:48They quickly discovered that the marketplace wasn't just confused by the concept of the microprocessor, but was actually frightened by its implication. Many of my engineering friends scoffed at it as if it was a gimmick. Their solution? The market had to be educated. And this is what's so fascinating. The best founders know that they are the ones that have to take the lead on this. At one point, Intel was conducting more seminars and workshops on how to use the microprocessor than the local junior college's total catalog of courses. Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove became part of a traveling educational roadshow.

50:28They became educators and it worked. Another founder who understood this at a fundamental level was the founder of Sony, Akio Morita. This is what he said in his autobiography. One must prepare the groundwork among the customers before you can expect success in the marketplace. It is a time -honored Japanese gardening technique to prepare a tree for transplanting by slowly and carefully binding the roots over a period of time bit by bit to prepare the tree for the shock of the change it is about to experience. This process is called nimawashi, and it takes time and patience, but it rewards you if it is done properly with a healthy transplanted tree.

51:13Advertising and promotion for a brand new innovative product is just as important. The way Akio would educate customers about a new product was inspired by the Japanese tradition of nimawashi. The thing they both have in common is that they both require time. So that idea that we see at Sony, that we see at Intel, that idea that it's very important that when you're bringing a new product to market that you realize you have to educate the customers about why the product exists and what it can do for them is really, really important. And so that was led me on this tangent to read this excellent piece by Tom Wolfe, The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce and How the Sun Rose on Silicon Valley.

51:53I will leave a link down below for both this piece and the Intel Trinity book if you want to read it with me. Links for both of those will be down below and available at founderspodcast .com. But that is 356 books down, 1 ,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon. Two quick things before you go. If you already subscribe to Founders Notes, make sure that you log in and you grab the new private podcast feed that is included in your subscription. I just made an episode that you're not going to want to miss. I updated that feed a few days ago. If you have not already subscribed to Founders Notes, I have made a tool for me that you can now get access.

52:28That is Founders Notes. Founders Notes allows you to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Since 2018, for over six years, I've been putting all of my notes and highlights for all the books that I've read for the podcast into this giant searchable database that you can tap into. So on this week's episode, on last week's episode, on all these episodes, when you hear me reference ideas from Jeff Bezos or Walt Disney or Sam Walton or Charlie Munger or J. Paul Getty, the quotes that you just heard about Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore and Andy Grove realizing the importance of educating the market about what you're doing, and Akia Morita, the founder of Sony, arriving at a similar conclusion.

53:07That comes from me searching founders' notes. I literally could not make the podcast without this tool. That is a really important point to get across. When you see, if you subscribe to Founders Notes, what you see is what I see. It is the tool that I use. You see the exact same thing that I use, the tool that I made for myself that you can now get access to. So many subscribers of Founders Notes are using it to help them think through issues they're having in their company, from hiring and recruiting, to marketing, to leadership, to preparing for board meetings, to preparing for sales presentations.

53:39If you're already running a successful company, I think it's a no -brainer to invest in this tool. And I've added a new feature that is also going to show you how I use it. And it's going to push ideas from History's Greatest Entrepreneurs directly into your brain quickly. And that is this private podcast feed that comes with every subscription to Founders Notes, which I call Sage Advice. And so let me give you an example. The episode that I just made, I had previously read both autobiographies written by James Dyson. that probably takes on a low end 50 to 60 hours of reading and then countless hours of inputting my notes and highlights into Founders Notes.

54:15And so what I did is I went and reread every single note and highlight. There's also an AI assistant that I had built that lives inside of Founders Notes. It's called Sage. And you can ask questions and it searches all my transcripts, all my notes, all my highlights. And so what I did is first I reread every single note and highlight from the to autobiographies of James Dyson. Then I went and started talking to Sage and I was searching and just asking questions like, give me a list of James Dyson's best ideas. And it gives you a concise list. Give me how did James Dyson think about marketing? What did James Dyson say about persistence?

54:47Things like that. And then what I did is I just composed all of this into a single document. And then I distilled down what I thought were the most powerful ideas from James Dyson's 50 -year career. The career over 50 years where he's built this multiple, multiple billion dollar company that he owns 100 % of. And then I distilled all that down into an episode that you can listen to in 12 minutes. And it is just rapid fire. Here's how James Dyson thought about this. Here's another idea from James that you can use in your career. Here's another idea that you can use from the life and career of James Dyson in your life and career.

55:22And so the idea with these many small episodes that I want to create is this is just a tool that where I can condense, if I can condense somebody else's like somebody's greatest ideas, like there, I think there was 20 ideas in that episode, you know, the best 20 ideas out of 50, 60, 75 hours of research into something that you can listen to in 10 minutes. And then the important part of them being short is really important because you're going to be able to listen to them over and over and over again. And that's if you listen at one X speed, most people don't listen to podcasts at one X speed. And so these mini episodes will serve as this constant reminder.

55:53And it's really an easy way for you to download the ideas of History's Greatest Entrepreneurs into your brain really quickly. So then you can use them in your work. So if you want to access the tool that will give you the superpower to access the collective knowledge of History's Greatest Entrepreneurs when you need it, make sure you go and subscribe at foundersnotes .com. That is founders with an S, just like Founders, the podcast of foundersnotes .com. And then the second thing that I want to talk to you about is these founder events that I put on for the sole reason to help you build relationships with other high value founders, investors, and executives that listen to this podcast.

56:29The first one of these events I did in March of this year, it was a massive success. All the relationships that came out of it was frankly mind -blowing. But this is also something that's been known throughout the history of entrepreneurship for a very long time. The importance of building real relationships with other high value people. This is something that both Charlie Munger and Sam Zell talked to me about in person. They both said in different ways, you really need to invest in developing relationships with other high value people. Both Charlie and Sam did that. And they wound up compounding those relationships for decades and building friendships and doing business with these people for decades.

57:03The maxim that I put on this idea is that relationships run the world. And so the next Founders event is happening July 29th through the 31st in Scotts Valley, California. There's also one happening September 27th through the 29th in Austin, Texas. These events take place at beautiful venues. So I rent out the entire venue and they're all inclusive, which means all you do, all you have to do is get to the actual event. And then your ticket includes your lodging, your meal, access to every single event. It's just really simple and the way, frankly, they all should be. And one of the benefits of renting out the entire event is that means that every single person you see there has the same interest that you do.

57:38So all you have to do is get there and I take care of the rest. If you're interested in building relationships with other people that listen to founders, other founders, other investors, other executives, other high value people, come hang out with me for two days at a founders event. You can learn more by going to founderspodcast .com forward slash events. That's founderspodcast .com forward slash events. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you very much for the support. I hope to see you at one of these events and I'll talk to you again soon.