#389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon

25:52They set up a very tiny showroom. And then in the back, there's an office and they're very frugal. She said, we were very frugal. That's a line in the book. We set up an office, two desks in the basement. There was no windows and no frills. So then she's like, okay, I don't have any experience as an entrepreneur. I've never made shoes. I like wearing them. I like looking at pictures of them. I liked writing about them in Vogue, but I don't know where do I make them? So what do I do? Let's go find a list of people that make shoes and go ask, will you make shoes for us? So she goes, I found a book that just had all the factories in Italy and who they worked for.

26:25So we went to Italy, cold calling and knocking on doors to see if we can get an appointment. We were two young girls. She's working with Jimmy's niece, Sandra. At the time, we were two young girls representing a brand that they never heard of with not so much as a single order to give them. Now, eventually you find somebody to manufacture their shoes. and the first trial run was an unmitigated disaster. They had to do it in a fast turnaround time because they were gonna sell them at a trade show in New York. And so at the very beginning, they had no way to manufacture a high quality product. They had to learn how to do so.

26:59Our selling samples barely made it to New York on time and when we saw them, we were horrified. They were covered with black scuff marks and the stitching was awful. They were so bad, we absolutely could not use them. I tried to carry on selling off of sketches, but nobody was interested. Again, then the next breakthrough is gonna be really important. She goes back to the fact that I am the customer. Jimmy, it turns out, had no interest in becoming a designer. He was just a cobbler. And so she goes, oh my God, I set up a business with a creative head who in fact had no creativity. So then she realized I have to play this role.

27:33I'm the one that has to come up with the ideas. And so she looks for inspiration in a very basic place. She just goes down to the flea market and tries to pick out pieces that could inspire designs. And then she realized, hey, I'll just take a little idea from here, a little idea from over here, and I'll combine them, and I come up with something new. Then she would go to manufacturing trade shows in Italy, and then she found all these different pavilions that had all these materials that people weren't putting on shoes at the time. So she's talking about feathers and flowers and studs and glass beads and then a glitter fabric that winds up becoming a Jimmy Choo staple later on.

28:07And this is what she said about this. I'd never known there were so many possibilities. But that's how the Jimmy Choo DNA began to emerge. The first collections were based on things that had caught my eye. The lovely part of that was that the things that struck me and that I related to emotionally, other women related to as well. One of my favorite filmmakers is Quentin Tarantino. I did an episode on him. He was completely obsessed with movies for two decades before he made his own. And so when he starts making movies, they're like, oh, do you have an audience in mind when you're making a movie?

28:36Like me on the audience. I've been obsessed with movies, just like she was obsessed with shoes for a very long time. Well, before I made my own movie, just like she was obsessed with shoes well before she made her own shoes. So I'll just make what I want to see in the world. And it winds up paying off. This is incredible. So then she finds these trade shows that other buyers go to. Okay. And she says they were on the edgier realms of fashion. There's again, understanding the importance of she was like an insider into the industry. that now she's creating for, right? She's like, okay, we'll go to this exhibition.

29:09It's on the edgier realm of fashion. This wound up being one of the most important things that ever happened to her because there's a buyer from Saks Fifth Avenue there. Her name is Julie Townsend. She stops by their exhibition, looks at the samples, says, wow, these are great. And then she was so enthusiastic, she does an order for 3 ,000 pairs of shoes. And Tamara says, just like that, we were in, we cracked it. the reason I wanted to put this part in because they had modeled this out and her and her father realized, hey, if we just sell 20 pairs of shoes a week out of our little location, we actually have a business.

29:47That was their expectation going in, 20 shoes a week, and then they get an order for 3 ,000 pairs in one shot. And Saks is going to be a huge partner with Jimmy Choo. They're going to put them in 30 or 40 stores pretty quickly. So it says, suddenly we had the rarest of good fortunes for a startup company, positive cash flow. Our sales for the first year were $250 ,000 and the shop cost us $15 ,000. And there's only one employee other than Sandra and myself. And then this is a great description, the very beginning of a business that will eventually sell for $1 .2 billion. I was still living at home.

30:18I had no car and I had absolutely no social life other than entertaining related to the business. Now, right at the beginning, this is what I mentioned earlier, the prehistory of Jimmy Choo is really, I think, important to the story. When I got to this page of the book, I was like, oh, this is just a page full of good ideas. This is her understanding the power of media and celebrity and the importance of ambushing potential customers. And what she realized that magazines had always put beautiful models on their cover. But over time, they realized that featuring an actress instead would send their newsstand sales to the roof.

30:50A magazine feature could reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers for a fashion brand. Magazine, she She understands intuitively because she saw this at Vogue, magazines and media can push product. And then she goes, okay, so we don't want to just target models. We want to target celebrities. Celebrities are becoming more and more important, especially in the mid nineties. So how can we get that? How can we get to them? And so they, they would gift shoes to celebrities forever. Okay. But then they realized, well, there's actually a more effective way to do this too, because if you gift them to their agents, their stylists, even their lawyers, like the same stylist, if you can build a relationship with a stylist, that stylist might have a relationship with five or 10 of the celebrities that you want to reach.

31:35Even more aware of the cutting edge with a stylist to the stars. And because these people work for multiple clients, contact with a single stylist gave us many more shots at scoring a wind. So they would gift shoes to celebrities with the hopes that they're either going to be photographed or they'll talk about them. Right. and they have a huge win right from the very beginning doing this. In the spring of 1998, we made our first foray into the Oscars. I was up all night on the phone trying to orchestrate the gifting of shoes to all the right women that same year. Kate Winslet, who was nominated for Best Actress for Titanic that year, she mentions that she's wearing Jimmy Choo shoes.

32:11That has such a positive effect on sales that going forward, Oscar night was a huge focus. And so they would try to dominate the Oscars every year. And so the idea here is a very simple but effective one. Just identify the media, whether it's magazines, TV, podcasts, radio, award shows, dinners. Like, where are your customers congregating? And then make sure your product is put in front of them. And this combines with the idea of ambushing your customers. Go back to Tamara's decision to place her first door where people like her are likely to go and visit, okay? On July 5th, 1998, we made our first appearance on Sex and the City, and our visibility skyrocketed.

32:45The script had Carrie Bradshaw running for the Staten Island Ferry. when she stumbles and screams out, oh my God, I lost my chew. That one mention helped turn us into a household name. Suddenly, women who had never heard of us, women who lived in small towns, thought about us in the same company as other luxury brands being mentioned like Prada, Gucci, and Manolo Blahnik. Manufacturers of everything pay fortunes for product placement in movies and TV. We got this huge call out entirely for free. Why? The show's creator said she put the reference in the script because she'd been in London and stopped by the store on Mottcombe Street and fell in love with the product.

33:24Ultimately, Jimmy Choo would be mentioned on the show 34 times. So that is the good. Now we need to get to the bad and the ugly. So this is all about her husband, her first marriage, and the dangers of drug addiction. There is, I mean, I've dealt with this my whole life. So I've seen, you know, cocaine abuse. And it's like, well, I've never done it. I never would. You never get around a cocaine and be like, oh, that seems like a good idea. like a good path I should I should go in life so you read this book her experience you know when she hit rock bottom the fact that she she was doing a bunch of drugs going into clubs and drinking but she turned her life around some people never turn her life around and including her husband it's actually devastating because I get really angry reading about her husband in the book for what he was doing to his wife and his daughter and then you I looked up after the book was published she actually dies a few years later from a drug over a relatively young age and the reason I got angry is because you left behind your daughter, man, your inability to get your shit together.

34:19I remember a friend of mine a few years ago and I, we don't talk anymore. And maybe this is like related to it, but I remember him making excuses about why he was drinking. And a lot of this just had to do with the fact that he was, his inability to eliminate the root cause of his stress that, that, you know, led to him drinking. And I just couldn't break through to him and finally told me we had we had kids around the same age at the time and I was like he had a little son I was like one day your son right now you're his hero no matter he doesn't understand like what's going on he can't comprehend anything and he looks at you and he admires you and he loves you and spend time with you one day when he's old enough he's going to take the measure of the man and when he's able to do that what do you want him to see some fat fucking drunk that can't get his life together if you won't change for him there's no possible way i can help you and so this is this is the devastating part so matthew mellon is actually the great great great grandson of judge thomas mellon this is a you know family dynasty uh thomas mellon and then his son andrew i actually have biographies of both of them he's one of the few robber barons that i haven't actually um done episodes on even though i have books on them but you would put Judge Mellon up there with, you know, Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts.

35:39And then now the generations have gone down and you see how far they've deviated from the kind of person that Judge Mellon was. And here's a description of Matthew. Matthew used to hire limos with drivers rotating shifts. Coked out of his mind, he kept the party going around the clock. This is their wedding night. I went up to my room alone and Matthew partied until dawn. This is, Again, you're not going to clean up yourself. You just want to clean up for yourself, but at least do it for your children. This guy turns into a cokehead. He's doing crack. He's an alcoholic. Meanwhile, his wife is the one that has to support the entire family.

36:16I was in the office every day working hard, and Matthew had nothing but free time on his hands. And I'd come home to find him freebasing in the kitchen. At times, I had to track him down relying on his limo company. Once, I found him in a crack house. This is why I think this story is important to tell on the podcast, because it's all the stuff she had to do. She's going to have a series of ongoing problems. She's got to deal with the promise of building a successful company, which by itself is unbelievably difficult. Then she's got her husband's drug habit. She's got her mother tormenting her.

36:45And then she winds up just having all these partners with these short -term outlooks that have these ridiculous ideas that are at complete odds with a founder that loves what they do, that loves the product and wants to build the best product that she possibly can. So from the very beginning, remember, she goes through so many partners. She's going to last from, let's say, they start to come around 96, 97. I think by 2011, she's out. And from there, she's got like four different partners, which we'll go over. But from the very beginning, Jimmy Choo and her and Jimmy Choo never had a good relationship.

37:17He was not interested in, turns out he wasn't interested in manufacturing shoes at all. He wanted to keep doing his bespoke shoes. And so they start having this huge fight and her dad has a great idea. It's like, we should just buy out her, his shares. It's like, why don't you just tell us what you want for the shares? If that would have happened, would have been the best possible thing for them with what's about to happen in the story. Jimmy's response was to sue them for 22 counts of breach of contract. And then he decides, Hey, I'm not going to sell my shares to you guys. I'm going to sell it to a private equity company.

37:48Okay. So he says until this time, we'd been entirely self -funding. They were profitable from day one. After that, they didn't need any other investment after the first 150 grand they put up, okay? Tamara's gonna tell us, you know, a fatal mistake. The main lesson from the book, and it's the main lesson from a lot of them, is like, if you're a founder and you love what you do, never, ever, ever give up control. Retention of total control, retention of total control, retention of total control. This is why every 100 episodes, it's episode 25, it's episode 200, it's episode 300, It'll be episode 400 is James Dyson's autobiography.

38:23That is his main lesson, retention of total control, because that's his story is a life story of being the main source of value creation, the creative force, the inventor behind everything, the one running the company and having stolen from him until he finally realized, I'm not going to let anybody happen. And then what happens? You fast forward 30 years from 30 years later. From what I hear, James is pulling at James on James Dyson owns 100 % of his company. And from what I hear, he's pulling out a couple billion dollars a year. So Jimmy sells his 50 % share for around $8 to $10 million to Phoenix Equity Partners, and he leaves the business.

38:56This is where Tamara makes a fatal mistake that she warns future entrepreneurs to not do. They come in, they're like, we don't want just 50%. We want 51%. And her dad's like, no, we're not doing this. And he says he was never one to surrender control of anything. But she says, I was so desperate to get rid of Jimmy, because they had such a bad relationship, that I talked my dad into taking the deal. Later, I could only blame myself. And so at the very end of the book, she's going to talk about one of the reasons that she wanted to write the book was for the benefit of future entrepreneurs and retain control is one of the warnings that she had for future entrepreneurs.

39:31This is 2001. For the next 10 years, she's going to go through hell with this series of private equity partners. She hates private equity. And right away, she realizes, oh, that 1 % is a huge deal. The fact that someone else would now have the final say in how we ran the company was going to take some getting used to. This is my first painful lesson in private equity. The founder is no longer in control. And they just do a bunch of dumb shit. So their idea is like, hey, we're going to buy this company. We're going to, in the short term, we're going to maximize EBITDA because we're going to sell it to another private equity person in a few years.

40:04It's essentially the opposite of what a missionary founder would do. She says these people were all about the exit. Our EBITDA going in when the deal was completed was $2 .9 million. So make it about $3 million a year. OK, which is a lot for a company with only nine employees. Jimmy Choo was not a distressed asset. We were a household name with a product that was flying out of the stores. And so now with her new partner, she wants to continue on with that same exact strategy. We should ambush our our our customers. We should be using influence. I guess it would be called influencer marketing today.

40:34But one, influencer marketing, one is not new and two can be excessively valuable. So they talked about a single picture of Madonna coming out of a store was worth millions of dollars to them. And so Tamara has this idea, hey, we want to sponsor this very prominent dinner. It's at the British Academy of Film and Television. Her idea was like, well, look at other luxury brands. Cartier has they own this event called the Cartier International Polo Tournament. We should have a prestigious event around like this annual like an annual gathering. there's a lot of potential customers in the audience a lot of chance for us to photograph the event and use that for promotional material and so it's like this is incredible the turnout is going to be incredible but the but the ceo his name is robert who she hates by the way looked at the numbers and canceled our participation robert's decision was incredibly foolish and a wasted opportunity comparable to the loss of exposure we would have suffered if we had been too timid to take the risk and make our commitment to outfitting stars on oscar night.

41:31So again, when it's a founder led company, you don't have to think about this. I know gifting these shoes to actresses and to stylists and to being a mainstay on Oscar night is worth the investment. We have a very similar idea playing out now, but in England, we should sponsor this very prominent dinner at the Academy of Film and Television Awards. And Robert doesn't want to because he sees this, hey, it's going to cost us, you know, $200 ,000. That's going to temporarily decrease our EBITDA. Akil Morita, the founder of Sony, would be turning over in his grave. Do you not remember? In his autobiography, it's hilarious because his whole thing was like he really believed in the marketing and promotion, the educating of the entire, of educating your customers, especially when you're designing a new product and how important it was.

42:15And he was getting a lot of pushback. He wanted to spend, I think, like $2 million on his campaign for one of the new products. And the guy running the campaign is like, oh, what if we spend like last, I think it was like a couple hundred grand or whatever it was. and they go back and forth for several weeks. At one point, Akio can't sleep. So he calls the guy in the middle of the night. He's like, if you don't spend $2 million in this campaign, you're fired. Akio understood that as a long -term investment because Sony was going to outlive him. But if you're this Robert guy and you don't give a shit what happens to Jimmy Choo after you sell it, you'll make decisions like this.

42:46And this is a heartbreaking sentence. I was being treated like an employee at the company I had founded. Now she's fighting with her supposed partners. and she still has her husband in his crackhead -like behavior. He was doing coke and alcohol to the point of psychosis. We had a board meeting at my house a week after I gave birth, and all the while I was worried my husband might be freebasing in the kitchen. It's very difficult times in her life. She's a new mom. She's a founder with terrible partners, and she's got a drug addict for her husband. I realize now the full irony of my huge mistake.

43:19I had rid myself of the man who had vexed me most, which is Jimmy Choo, only to saddle myself with an insecure CEO whose damaged ego knew no bounds, in addition to which I now had a bipolar, drug -addicted husband who was spiraling out of control. I actually met Tamara at a mutual friend's birthday party last month. I should have asked her. If she had retained control and if she owned a majority of Jimmy Choo, I wonder if she'd be, I bet she'd still be working on it to this day. So here's, it's funny in my mind, I had a series of people. I was thinking about Edwin Land. I was thinking about Steve Jobs.

43:52I was thinking about James Dyson and Keo Morita. I was thinking about all these other people. Essentially, like, what is the opposite of this behavior that I'm reading about in this book right now? And maybe the best example of this, because they're in the same industry, is Bernard Arnault. He's the opposite of his partners. He's all long -term. And there was a hilarious... He actually pops up in this book, which is really hilarious to me. And I didn't know this Robert, the CEO of the first private equity company, used to work for Bernard. So it says, we were visiting a Chinese shopping mall when we bumped into Bernard Arnall, the head of LVMH.

44:21Robert stepped forward to shake Arnall's hand and Arnall recoiled. It was a reaction of disgust. What would Arnall do? He wouldn't make any of these short -term decisions. Wait till they get to like, hey, we got to cut product. Use cheaper leather. Don't refurbish the stores. Don't invest in any marketing. It's like, what are you guys doing? And what I also thought was fascinating was the fact that Tamara, even back then, his book is 12 years old, understood the genius of Arnall. She said, the luxury brand offered the owner the opportunity to profit from ideas and image with almost limitless prospects for scaling up.

44:54A brand image could travel all over the world and migrate to other products. One of the very first to see the opportunities here was Bernard Arnault. One of my favorite tweets I've ever read was by this guy named Cedric Chin. And he says, one type of remarkable career, and certainly the most interesting type, comes from finding an earned secret and then exploiting the hell out of it for the good part of two to three decades. That is a great way to think about Bernard Arnault and what he's done with LVMH. Now, there is another devastating tragedy that's going to happen in Tamara's life. Her father dies unexpectedly.

45:33On April 19, 2004, my dad suffered an aneurysm. I was in shock. I couldn't believe this was happening and I was utterly torn apart. He was my dad and I loved him, but he was also my mentor and my business partner. He was the one solid rock I'd ever known in my life. And now he was leaving me. I held him and tried to say goodbye. And he was so strong that it took him 18 hours to die. I don't think I stopped crying once the whole time. She's around 36 years old when this happens. And from here on in, she's dealing with just one private equity company after another. I'm just going to give you the outline so you understand how many times Jimmy Choo was sold.

46:172001, Jimmy Choo sells 50 % share to Phoenix Equity Partners and leaves the business. Three years later, Lion Capital buys Jimmy Choo for $101 million. Three years after that, Lion Capital sells Jimmy Choo for $185 million to Tower Brook Capital Partners. Four years after that, Tower Brook Capital Partners sells Jimmy Choo to Leblow for $525 million. Three years after that, Jimmy Choo IPOs, companies valued at $546 million. Three years after that, Michael Kors Holdings acquires Jimmy Choo for $1 .2 billion. So now she is left without her father and her business partner. She's dealing with all these different owners and partners of Jimmy Choo.

47:06and in the middle of this, her mom sues her. This is so sad and nuts at the same time. So the lawsuit is complicated, but it boils down to her mom wanting more money from her even though she had nothing to do with building Jimmy Choo. The note I left myself on this page was instead of being proud of the woman that your daughter has become, you fucking sue her for more money from a company you didn't even build. This is insane. Tamara says, I think my mother was simply born a narcissist whose extraordinary beauty only made her selfishness that much worse. This is how she describes her mother. Madness combined with stunning beauty.

47:49So in the middle of this lawsuit, her mother is losing a lawsuit and her mother's attorneys asked to meet to discuss settling. This is the first time that she sees her mom. She's going to see, first time she sat across and saw her mom in four years. and the description here I need to read to you. I hadn't seen her up close in four years and she looked amazing. Everyone ages, so God knows what she's been doing to retard this process. Then again, that's how she spends all of her time. She couldn't even look at me. I studied her face. I was facing down my most profound demon and her mom loses and withdraws the lawsuit.

48:29Finally, he came to the point. They were folding. We're gonna withdraw. You take the money that's owed to you and each side will cover our own legal fees. Half the $4 million I've recovered went to my lawyer's fees. After 40 years, we were at last severed. This might be the last time that she ever sees her mom. There was no sense of exuberance or celebration. I could see nothing but wreckage all around and I felt empty and alone. And so all the stress of all these factors just compounds and makes her absolutely miserable. Keep in mind, she's still building the company. She's still fighting with her partners.

49:02She had a deal for this lawsuit with her mom. She went through a divorce. She says, I've been having massive anxiety attacks and night sweats. I couldn't sleep. I was so distracted. They would take me hours to dress. I couldn't make decisions and I couldn't stand to be with other people. Then they're also fighting over some stuff that is ridiculous. Our owners became greedy and they began pushing us to improve our margins. They told us we could no longer use leather that costs more than 30 euro a square meter. Why? Why such an arbitrary decision? I was thinking about what Warren Buffett says about this.

49:35Because when you're reading about the direction that some of her partners want to take the company in, some of the ideas they had for product, which is essentially just like, let's charge more for a shittier product. Yeah, that's going to work long term. It reminds me of something that Warren Buffett would repeat over and over again. Munger also made the observation. And Buffett's like, hey, keep in mind, Buffett had in his mind, essentially like an outline of almost every single business in America. And he says, the real issue is mediocrity. There are way too many 240 hitters in business. Businesses often settle for a notch or two above mediocrity, Buffett said.

50:11Buffett continues, we've seen so much of the ordinary in business that we can fully appreciate a virtuoso performance. So the way I think about this is mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up and exposes it. Her partners are trying to pull her into mediocrity. They push our factories to lower their prices so they're forced to use cheaper materials and otherwise cut corners in the manufacturing process. The product we were beginning to produce wasn't my idea of who we were. From Italy, where they were manufacturing the shoes, Anna saw the decline in manufacturing specs being approved. She sent me this message.

50:42It's the beginning of the end. So that is the direction that her partners want to take Jimmy to. And they own most of the company at this time. I can't remember her exact ownership, but it's not large. And she doesn't really have as much control or influence as she obviously wants to. So that's one description of the direction of like somebody just doesn't really give a shit about the long -term health of the business. At the same time I was reading this book, I reread this excellent interview that Steve Jobs gave when he was 29 years old and he gave it to Playboy magazine. And there was a paragraph that I read in that interview.

51:15The same time I was reading this section of the book, I'm like, wow, this is a contrast. Steve had soul in the game. These are the entrepreneurs I admire the most. They have soul in the game. This is what having soul in the game sounds like and looks like, and compare that to what you and I have been talking about with these private equity partners. We didn't build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

51:48When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there. So you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back for you to sleep well at night. The aesthetic, the quality has to be carried all the way through. And so she goes and says, Hey, we've now had these stores for over a decade. We need to refurbish them. They're not good enough. We need to constantly nurture and protect the most enduring franchise and valuable thing that we have, which is our brand.

52:21And their response is, that's not going to pay off during our time horizon. They still cared nothing about the long -term health of the business or the actual quality of the product. I actually cared about the business we were in, the product, the people. I wasn't merely passing through. And then she makes an excellent point. Every few years, we're selling the company again. So what happens before you sell the company? You have to prepare the company for sale. So their competitors don't have this very costly distraction that Jimmy Chu is going to. She says facilitating due diligence had become a tiresome second job.

52:58Meanwhile, our competition wasn't necessarily going through the same kinds of distraction and could focus on the real work of creating and maintaining quality and innovation. And so a situation like this can only continue so long for a founder until it finally has to reach its end. She finally reaches her limit. She steps down from the company she founded. it. She steps down from the company that she gave a large part of her life energy to. This is why I always tell you it's bullshit when people say, oh, it's not personal. It's business. For founders, it's always personal. On August 1st, 2011, 15 years almost of the day since I'd gone to that first trade show in New York with samples too awful to show, I gave them my notice.

53:35What I was feeling was a combination of anger, relief, mourning, and a profound sense of loss. After leaving Jimmy Choo, this is in the last chapter, she has all this advice for entrepreneurs. She says, I've learned to always retain majority ownership and control. And then she tells us why she wrote the book. I'd love it if entrepreneurs find it useful. My most fundamental piece of advice is to follow your instincts. If you have the wrong instincts for what you're trying to do, that will become evident soon enough. And you may require you to change course, but being blown back and forth by the winds of conflicting opinions will get you nowhere.

54:17And then this is what I meant about, I think this is actually the most important lesson other than the retention of total control that she wants to pass on. And it's breaking the cycle that she was born into. I enjoy the pleasure of watching my daughter's transformation into a smart, beautiful, and resourceful young woman. In the mornings when she comes in to kiss me before she's off to school, it's the greatest gift. Sometimes she'll climb under the covers with me, give me a hug, and we'll have a little chat before we start out the day. I feel truly sorry for my mother that she denied herself the pleasure of this kind of relationship.

54:55But just because I missed out on this kind of closeness as a daughter doesn't mean I can't treasure it now that I'm the mother. And this is the perfect ending. This is the very last sentence in the book. It may have seemed that now and then I needed a rescuer, but over time I learned to rescue myself. And that is where I'll leave it. For the full story, I highly recommend reading the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player or available at founderspodcast .com, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. Make sure you're on my personal email list.

55:28For every book that I read, I email you my top 10 highlights from every book. It's available down below and also available at davidsenra .com. That is 389 books down, 1 ,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.