#243 Francis Greenburger (Real Estate Billionaire)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. As soon as I took the phone call, I regretted it. All of my authors had a lot of personality, but Jim was never happy about anything.
I just read about your latest real estate deal in the newspaper, he said.
I'm not sure how you can be doing your job for me when you're busy buying up this city.
I didn't appreciate Jim's questioning my competence as his agent when I not only worked hard on his behalf, but I had also discovered him from the slush pile.
Not long after my father died, I had taken over the agency. I put a small notice in the New York Times calling for authors to send in their work in an effort to drum up some new clients. Accepting unsolicited manuscripts was very unconventional for an agent. I was deluged with all manners of books. Most were not worthwhile, but I did find a good, highly stylized, fast-paced thriller built around a political assassination. I liked the book and contacted the author to take on the challenge of selling his first novel. A challenge is exactly what it became. I went through 27 rejections until I found an editor who didn't say no immediately.
If the author would rewrite it, the editor would consider publishing it. Jim agreed and rewrote the book, which I resubmitted to the editor, who nonetheless declined it. Most agents would have certainly given up at this point, but I can be extremely stubborn when I have a hunch about something.
On the 38th submission, not only did the editor buy it, he paid $10,000, a very generous advance for any first novel, and especially one that had been rejected 37 times.
Jim's first book, published in 1976, won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery. It was a nice little success story and a parable on the merit of dogged determination, but it hardly warranted him calling the shots in my career. Look, he said, you have to decide whether you're buying buildings or you're selling books, because I can't have an agent who does both.
If you want to keep me as a client, you have to give up your real estate business.
I didn't even need two seconds to think about my answer. There was no contest. I wasn't going to let any author, not even James Patterson, who would go on to sell over 350 million books, put an end to my real estate ventures.
That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Risk Game, A Self Portrait of an Entrepreneur, and is the autobiography of Francis J. Greenburger. So this book has been recommended to me probably five or six different times. I bought it a while back. It's been sitting in a pile of unread books. A few days ago, my friend Mitchell recommended it to me again. And I said, okay, there's gotta be a reason why so many different people have recommended reading this book. Let me pick it up and see what's going on. And I was less than halfway through the book when I realized that this book is nuts, and it's totally not what I expected when I picked it up. And I'll expound on that idea as we move through the book. I have no idea where this podcast is gonna go. You'll see what I mean. This is a very odd character, and he doesn't try to hide that fact at all. Let's go to the very beginning in the prologue. He's talking about what it was like trying to build the largest project of his career. This is this giant skyscraper in New York City in 2008 And it's this project called 50 West. And he says, I knew all too well that markets can turn on a dime. And I had spent my career always looking over my shoulder for signs of trouble and keeping an ear to the ground for the sounds of crumbling economic conditions. Even so, I completely missed the signs of this disaster that I experienced through the very expensive prism of 50 West. And so this project was expected to cost him about 500 million, just one building, 500 million dollars. And it's just one part of his gigantic real estate empire. So it says, when in January of 2008, we began demolishing the three buildings on the site, I was full of optimism. And why shouldn't I have been? Arranging the financing for the project had been a given. It was only a question of which bank we would allow us, we would allow to give us the money. That's how flush those times were. Then on September 15th, Lehman Brothers filed for chapter 11 in the largest bankruptcy in US history. And the world got really strange really quickly. I made the decision to shutter everything at 50 West. As high as I had felt when I was surveying the plans for the skyscraper was as low as I'd sunk while putting a stop to the building.