#271 Vannevar Bush (Engineer of the American Century)

**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. Now on the episode you're about to listen to, 20 or 30 minutes into it, something like that, you're gonna hear me go a little crazy and get way too excited. And it has to do with the fact how so many ideas, even though they're separated by time, they connect. And so in this podcast, it talks about how if you can domesticate something, if you can make something easier for customers to do, you expand the market. And I go into detail how both Steve Jobs and Vannevar Bush did this. And today's sponsor, Fable, is doing the exact same thing. And what Fable does for your company is it helps improve accessibility for people with disabilities. And something that blew my mind when Fable approached founders to sponsor episodes was that over a billion people live with various disabilities, and parts of the internet actually remain inaccessible to those people. Fable's founders, Alwar Pallai, I was listening to her describe her company, and she did two things that I thought was really smart. One, she said that this is a billion-person problem, and making your product accessible to people with disabilities is actually just a technical problem, and technical problems have solutions. I also like the point that she made that this is actually a problem that's hidden in plain sight because most design teams are made up by young tech forward individuals who may not understand what a user interface looks like to somebody with a disability. So what Fable does is they actually built a platform that puts design teams directly in touch with people with disabilities, and then these teams can do testing and get direct user feedback to make sure that their product is usable. So go to makeitfable.com forward slash founders to learn more. That's a make it Fable that's spelled F-A-B-L-E, makeitfable.com forward slash founders. As always, also leave the link down below.
The founders of Tegas are starting to do something really smart. They know they have a great product. They know it's growing like crazy. And so now they're making their brand name ubiquitous. You're gonna see me use this exact playbook for founders. It's already been happening in the last few weeks as a matter of fact, but Tegas is on all these podcasts I listened to, just heard them on Acquired. I heard them on a bunch of the podcasts that I'm on the network of, Invest Like The Best and Business Breakdowns. And I was just reading my friend Liberty's newsletter and there's a Tegas ad. I'm gonna read what my friend Liberty wrote and then I'm gonna tell you why this is so important. So it says Tegas has got you covered on the information front with over 25,000 primary source expert calls covering almost any industry or company that you may wanna learn about and the ability to conduct your own calls with experts if you so choose at a much lower rate than you'll find anywhere else. Tegas is the service to turbocharge the depth and breadth of your knowledge. And so what he's talking about there is the first innovation that Tegas had. They took an existing industry where a ton of companies want to talk to experts about specific companies that they're researching or specific industries that they're researching, whether they wanna do it for an investment or whether you wanna get a lay of the land of the competitive environment in your industry, right? You can get on a phone call and ask an expert in that area, anything that you think that they'll know about that helps you make the decision. That has been happening forever. The innovation Tegas did, which was really brilliant, is hey, let's record and then transcribe these tens of thousands. And I have to be careful what I'm gonna say here because this is still a private company and I have information that I don't think is made public, but there's just, let's just put it this way, they're growing fast and the amount of calls that are happening on their platform every day is ridiculous. And so therefore the amount of knowledge that happens in their platform is growing at an insane rate. And so instead of just doing one call about one company or one industry, you can literally see everything. There might be 500 different calls about that company or industry that you're interested in. And then since everything is recorded and transcribed, Tegas can then layer all this software on top of it to help you analyze and parse that data. And so the way it's been described to me by somebody who knows the company very well is Tegas is essentially a search engine for business knowledge. It is going to be the hub for where you do research on public and private companies. And so why did I start this by saying, hey, what they're doing is really smart, that I went from not knowing who they were to I can't get away from them. And that can be summarized in a maxim that you and I have talked about on this podcast over and over again, that reputation is persuasive. The more familiar you can make somebody with your company and your brand and what you're offering, the more likely they are to purchase whatever it is if that service fits them. This is something that I actually learned from David Ogilvy. And he made the fantastic point in his book, Ogilvy and Advertising. He's like, listen, advertising, you need to treat the advertising of your product as a production cost. And so this is what Ogilvy said. He says, I've come to regard advertising as part of the product. It should be treated as a production cost, not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard any more than you would stint on any other essential ingredient in your product. There's a variation of that idea that Izzy Sharp, who founded Four Seasons, actually talked about in his autobiography, which I thought was interesting. And he says, it's tempting during a recession to cut back on consumer advertising. At the start of each of the last three recessions, the growth of spending on such advertising had slowed by an average of 27%. But studies show that during these recessions, the companies that didn't cut their ad spend had, in the recovery, captured the most market share. So what Az did, he's like, OK, we're in a temporary pullback, we're in a temporary recession. I'm still spending, to build up the advertising and the brand awareness of the Four Seasons brand. This was the result. So we didn't cut our ad budget. In fact, we raised it to gain brand recognition, which continued advertising sustains. And so all of these thoughts are tied into repetition is persuasive. What Tegas is doing is they're doing exactly that line at the end with what Az just said. The continued advertising sustains.