#316 Bugatti

**David Senra** (0:00)
I'm back from California, and I'm sleeping a lot better because I've been reunited after several weeks away with my eight sleep. While I was in California, I was meeting with a lot of founders that listen to founders, and I had lunch one day with two founders, and the subject of eight sleep came up. One of the founders has four eight sleeps. The other founder has two of them. So in addition to having great taste in podcasts, these two founders also take their health and wellness exceptionally serious, and they feel sleep is the foundation of that. And so that is why they make sure they have an eight sleep, eight sleep wherever they fall asleep at. Since I've been using eight sleep and I keep my mattress ice cold, it's actually cold before I even get into bed. Since I've been doing that, I've noticed an extreme improvement in my own sleep. So much so that when I travel, I notice its absence immediately. There are very few no brainer investments in life. I believe eight sleep is one of them. That's why they're growing like crazy. That's why you have people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk tweeting about the fact that they love their eight sleep unsolicited. So if you don't already have one, make sure you get your own eight sleep. You go to eightsleep.com forward slash founders and you can get $150 off. That is eightsleep.com forward slash founders. I want to tell you about another product that several of my founder friends are also using. That is Vesto. You can check them out at getvesto.com. Vesto makes it easy for you to invest your businesses idle cash. They can actually help businesses of all sizes with their treasury management. When you own treasury bills, the US government has guaranteed your cash and you earn interest on the cash while it sits there. I have one founder friend who raised a bunch of venture capital money, and so he uses Vesto as a way to extend his runway. And I have another founder friend who bootstrapped his company. He has a bunch of money, and he uses Vesto to get a better rate of return than if it was just sitting in his bank account. If this sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend you go to getvesto.com and check out what they offer. I know the founder Ben. I've spent a bunch of time with him. If you schedule a demo, if you go to getvesto.com and schedule a demo, you actually speak directly to the founder Ben. I think he's incredibly impressive. And I think if you speak to him, you'll think he's impressive too. Make sure you tell him that David from Founders sent you.
If there was a prototype operation for what Enzo Ferrari envisioned, it had to be what the legendary Itori Bugatti built in Molsheim. This part artist, part engineer, part entrepreneur, part sculptor had created an automotive fiefdom in a tiny village in Alsace-Lorraine, France. The Bugatti estate included a small elegant inn for the entertainment of customers, a stable of thoroughbred horses, and the factory itself, which was a series of low buildings set among landscaped gardens with a trout stream meandering through the factory machinery. Bugatti was from Milan, born into a family of artists. The boss, as he was known, was generally to be found conducting business dressed in riding breeches, boots, and a yellow coat. His automobiles were and remain a stunning combination of industrial aesthetics and the jeweler's art, as if Fabergé had somehow been able to motorize an egg. They were simple, flawlessly fabricated and reliable. Bugatti was just one of a bevy of colorful eccentrics, dissolute nobles, playboys, dreaming commoners, and hard-eyed egomaniacs who populated the world of European motorsports in the 1930s. He certainly stood above the rest in terms of lifestyle. A feudal barony had been created around the spidery machines that he manufactured in limited quantities and sold only to those he personally deemed worthy. By contrast, Enzo Ferrari at the time was still a drab, simple journeyman laboring in a small garage in an Italian backwater. But the example that Bugatti was setting for Ferrari did not escape him. Bugatti was a prototype for success. He was manufacturing cars for the very wealthy and fielding his own team of professional race car drivers. Mobs of people were flocking to Molsheim to have their Bugattis anointed by the master himself. Surely, if Bugatti could succeed at this, a similar concept could be developed by Enzo Ferrari.
That was an excerpt not from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, but a book that I read originally back on episode 220 It's called Enzo Ferrari, The Man and the Machine, and it was written by Brock Yates. But that was the excerpt that originally got me interested in reading a biography of Bugatti. Up until last week, I had failed to find one. There is a Founders listener by the name of Cameron Priest, who has probably sent me dozens, I don't even know, maybe 50 excellent, hard to find biography recommendations over the years. And he was the one that made me aware of the book that I'm actually holding in my hand, which is called The Bugatti Story. And it was written by Bugatti's daughter, L'Ebe Bugatti. And this is the perfect book for Founders Podcast. It was originally published, very hard to find. It's originally published in 1967 The copy that I'm holding in my hand was actually somebody's Easter gift in 1972 You can still see the note. And I can tell you right up front, this is a book that I'm gonna wind up reading again. I'm gonna make more episodes on the future. I absolutely loved, I spent the last eight days going over the book. I could have spent another week reading and just rereading certain parts of this book. It is perfect. I feel like I've stumbled upon some kind of like hidden treasure. Okay, so I wanna start with the forward where his daughter is talking about like why she decided to write the book. This book was written in response to the long felt desire of the Bugatti family to have a full and objective account of the life and work of Vittorio Bugatti. And one of the things I like most about the book is the fact that towards the end of his life, Bugatti was very sick. A few months before he died, he started to try to write his autobiography. It was never published, but his daughter had a copy. And so there's large chunks of his autobiography in this book. So it's like Bugatti speaking directly to you and I, almost 80 years after he died. So I want to start in the preface of this book. It was actually written by an engineer who worked with Bugatti. So an idea that you and I have talked about over and over again, there's always a blueprint. All of the founders that were studying, they were inspired by founders or scientists or inventors or explorers that came before them. Obviously from the excerpt of Enzo Ferrari's biography, we see that in large part, the blueprint for Ferrari was Bugatti. And so these observations about Bugatti, the man made by the engineer that worked with him, you can clearly see why somebody like Enzo Ferrari would want to pattern much of his career after Bugatti. And so he says, car manufacturers at this time looked upon their products as parts of themselves. Bugatti was one of the last car manufacturers to keep the flag of the artistically built car flying high when the mass produced car invaded the scene. Bugatti maintained that quality production depended upon a small number of skilled workers and a small output. His character was too strong to change to new methods. So what they're talking about here is, this is the reason this came to mind is because Enzo Ferrari, he has this famous exchange with Henry Ford II. So that is Henry Ford's grandson, who was running Ford Motor Company in like the 1950s when this is happening. And Ford Motor Company had attempted to buy Ferrari. And Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari get into this argument. And Ferrari says that you make ugly little cars in an ugly factory. Ferrari, like Bugatti before him, were still hand building his cars. In fact, in that book that the Ford versus Ferrari movie that came out a few years ago, it's actually based on this book called Go Like Hell, which I also did a podcast on. There's this great line that talked about how the contrast between the cars that the Ford factory was producing and then these like hand built cars that Ferrari was making at the time. And so it says nothing like a Ferrari had ever graced American roads. They were cars built by Italian artisans, every detail down to the steering wheel, handcrafted using some of the same methods used to make Roman suits of armor and the royal carriages of the ancient kingdom.