#326 Anna Wintour

**David Senra** (0:00)
Okay, so I just have three things I want to talk to you about before we jump into this episode. First was that I was invited to go speak at Notre Dame. There's a class at Notre Dame called Art of Investing. It's run by these two guys named Rick and Paul. I've become friends with Rick and Paul through the podcast. They're huge fans of Founders, actually both Harvard MBAs. And they say outrageous things, like they've learned more from founders than they did when they got their MBA at Harvard. Just don't tell Harvard that.
But anyways, they invited me to come speak to their students. And we actually recorded it. And you can listen to the entire thing. The conversation we had lasted about 90 minutes. So whatever you're listening to this, however you're listening to this right now, if you just search in your podcast player, Art of Investing, it's a new podcast. I'm episode, I think number four. So search for Art of Investing and then David Senra, you'll see it. I think it's episode number four, if you want to listen to the entire talk that I gave at Notre Dame. I've heard from a lot of people that heard it so far, they said it's very, very inspiring. So that's very encouraging. The second thing is, I want to tell you about the first person I ever met that listened to Founders. So my friend, Mitchell Baldridge, was listening to Founders like years ago.
Five, six years ago, nobody was listening. Maybe a couple hundred people, maybe like a thousand, two thousand people were listening at the time when Mitchell sends me a message saying he loved the podcast, he loved to meet, just so happens he was asking where I lived. And I was like, oh, I live in Miami. And he's like, oh, I'm actually here for a conference. You want to meet for coffee the next morning. And so that is the very first person I ever met in person through the podcast. And the very first thing, I meet Mitchell, he doesn't say, hey, nice to meet you. Hey, I love your podcast. He looks at me, he goes, why isn't your podcast more well-known? He's like the quality of the podcast and the fact that no one knows about it. Like this doesn't make any sense to me. Like what's happening here? And so we went to becoming friends. Mitchell is very well-known. He got very well-known as like an authority on, he's an accountant. He actually has and still has a boutique custom CPA practice that specializes with ultra high net worth individuals. So tens of millions of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars in net worth individuals that he does tax and accounting for. But you might've heard of him because he shared all of the knowledge that he has, especially around entrepreneurs and tax savings for free on Twitter. He became a domain expert. And so as a result, there's a bunch of founders that actually listen to this podcast that I'm friends with that actually are clients of Mitchell's because of the teaching that he was doing on Twitter. So the reason I'm telling you all this now is because he, over the last year, he's been developing a product called Better Bookkeeping. And you can actually check it out by going to betterbookkeeping.com forward slash founders. And so what he wanted to do is apply all this information and knowledge that he has from servicing these ultra high net worth entrepreneurs and utilize and actually build a product that is more applicable to the millions and millions of small businesses out there. And I hate even calling them small businesses because that sounds like a pejorative. The millions and millions of businesses that don't need their own, essentially like their own custom tax planning. So these are the millions of businesses that need help with bookkeeping and saving as much money as possible legally on their tax bill. And that's exactly what Mitchell and his team have built at betterbookkeeping.com forward slash founders. And one of the many things I love about Mitchell is the fact that he's obsessed. He's obsessed with figuring out ways to save entrepreneurs money on taxes. That is a main theme of the history of entrepreneurship. If I had to say the two most important lessons that you and I talk about over and over again, one is the importance of focus. It's the fact that these people that you and I study are incredibly focused. They have superhuman levels of focus compared to I feel the majority of people that are alive today. And two, they are all obsessed with watching their expenses. They build unbelievable competitive advantages because they have a lower cost structure than almost anybody else in their industry, any of the other competitors that they have. That is Mitchell's expertise. That is Mitchell's obsession. In fact, there's a funny line. I hope you go check out betterbookkeeping.com for founders because it says, it's like having a full-time CFO and a super cheap grandpa sitting on your shoulder. And so that was the second thing I wanted to talk to you about. I am going to try to find deeper ways to integrate with Mitchell because I do trust him. I spend a lot of time with him and I know he's really good at what he does. The third and final thing before we jump into this incredible episode on Anna Wintour, which you'll see how much information I went over just to get you what I feel is like a really good understanding of how she built her business, but more importantly, wait till you get like 30, 40 minutes into this episode. Like the way she thought about, not only like, not just building her personal brand, not just building Vogue, but building up her entire industry. It's fascinating how she did this. Cause she's been the editor in chief of Vogue since I think 1988 She's in her seventies and she's still going at it. And she's been accruing more and more power and influence year by year. So I think it's fascinating. And so the third and final thing I want to tell you about before we jump into the episode is Vesto. Vesto makes it easy for you to invest your business's idle cash. I've actually had a bunch of people reach out. They couldn't understand what I was saying. So I want to spell it. It is Vesto, V as in Victor, E as in egg, S as in Senra, T as in Tom, O as in octopus, vesto.com. Vesto helps businesses of all sizes invest their cash in US treasuries. You want to do that because when your business owns treasuries, then that cash is actually backed by the US government and it earns interest while it sits there. And so this is another product that a bunch of founders listeners are using.