#348 The Financial Genius Behind A Century of Wall Street Scandals: Ivar Kreuger

**David Senra** (0:00)
At the beginning of this episode, I give a recap of the first Founders Conference and announce two more events. If you're not interested, you want to get right to the episode, skip ahead by about seven minutes, but I do think the story is interesting and worth hearing. I had an absolutely incredible experience a few weeks ago. I flew to New York to have dinner with Daniel Eck, the founder of Spotify. Daniel is a remarkable person, and without a doubt, one of the best founders alive. And out of that conversation, not only did I get some great advice, but I left with a ton of inspiration, a ton of energy, but I also got a very unique book recommendation. And so this episode is on the book that Daniel told me about, and I don't think I've ever read, I can't think of another story that I've read like this. It will blow your mind. Before we jump into that, I need to tell you about something that is time sensitive. I am announcing two new founders conferences that are taking place this year, July 29th through the 31st in Scotts Valley, California. That's about an hour outside of San Francisco. And September 27th through the 29th in Austin, Texas. I am doing each event in partnership. So the Scotts Valley, California event is in partnership with Rick Burnham and Paul Buser. They're the founders of Sater Grove, which is this $500 million holding company. And they're the hosts of the Art of Investing podcast. That event is going to be limited to around 130 people. The Austin event is in partnership with Matt Russell, who's an investor, the CEO of Colossus and host of Business Breakdowns. That event will be limited to around 150 people. You can find all the details at founderspodcast.com forward slash events. But the reason these events exist, the reason I'm doing it, there's only one reason. And that's to help you build relationships with other founders, investors and high value people. And that's exactly what happened at the last event I did a few months ago. I'm going to give you some details on that. But really there's a backstory here that I think is very important. Number one, for years, people have been asking me like to build a community, to find ways to connect other people to listen. They wanted to be connected to other people listen to founders. And so that idea just stayed in the back of my mind. I went to this private invite only event in Texas last year. And there was a guy there who actually worked for a very wealthy family office in Texas. And his job was to do these in-person events for other family offices. In other words, helping people inside of these family offices to build relationships with each other. And they were putting a ton of time and energy and money and resources behind this. And I was asking why, and he had a great line to describe why they were doing this. He says, because relationships between these two kinds of people, these like investor types, these founder types, relationships between these two type of people produce nonlinear returns.
This is something that we see in the books that you and I study over and over again. Relationships run the world. When I got to speak to both Sam Zell and Charlie Munger before they passed away, they said it in different ways, but the idea behind what they were telling me, the idea, the advice they were giving me was the same. Invest heavily in relationships, build a seamless web of trust, find the most talented people you possibly can and work with them forever because relationships run the world. And so that was the thesis behind the first event I did. And the result of that event, I'm gonna give you a list of these things that have just, I haven't even asked for them. This is just people sending me messages, in some cases calling me and telling me what happened as a result. So I obviously not gonna say any names, but one founder told me, he's like, listen, this one relationship with this person that he met at the event, that he did not know beforehand, he goes, David, that is worth 20 times what I paid. The person he met there is now advising him, they're working on this deal together on how to buy out existing shareholders in a private company. He's helping them think through how to do this and potentially helping them secure the capital to do so. But they also genuinely like each other. They've become friends, they talk on the phone, they have visited each other. This is the craziest thing, which I'll tell you about, is how many people met in, the last event was in Austin in March too. And how many people met there and now have flown all over the country, in some cases all over the world, to spend more time in person. And that was another example that I was given, where these two people met, they did not know before, they did not know each other before the conference, the first conference. One of them visits the other. They're having this random walk, right? There's not like this agenda that they went into this, they spent two days together. They didn't go into this with an agenda, and so they're having this talk. And one of the guys has investments in a bunch of different companies, and he says one of their biggest holdings is having a problem. The person he's talking to just happens to have a ton of experience and connections in that industry, became an advisor and a board member to that other person's largest holding. And what the guy told me after was fascinating. He goes, in person is the way you seed relationships. You can get more done in an hour in person than hours on Zoom. There is no way we could have got to this level this quickly without being in person first.