#368 Rockefeller's Autobiography

**David Senra** (0:00)
One of the best things about this book is that Rockefeller is constantly talking about the way that him and his partners built their business, and he would compare and contrast the methods that they would use, compared to some of his quote unquote unintelligent competition, which is the word and the phrase that he uses. And his description of unintelligent competition was the type of person who never really knew all the facts about their own business, that they kept their books in such a way that they did not actually know when they were making money or when they were losing money. And he has a great phrase for this where he says, this casual way of conducting affairs did not appeal to me. And even when years before he founded Standard Oil, when he was working for other people, when he was 16 years old, he said, I learned to have great respect for figures and facts no matter how small they were. The importance that Rockefeller put on cost control jumps off the pages and he repeats it over and over and over again. This obsession with cost control is something that Rockefeller had in common with Andrew Carnegie. In fact, Andrew Carnegie has mentioned multiple times in Rockefeller's Autobiography. There's a great line in one of Carnegie's biographies that I read that said, Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again. Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled. And in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in costs were permanent. This shared obsession is something that I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is now a partner of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp and have spent a ton of time with them over the last year or two. They all listened to the podcast and they picked up on the fact that the main theme from the podcast is on the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend and how doing so gives you a massive competitive advantage over your quote-unquote unintelligent competition in Rockefeller's words. That is a main theme for Ramp. The reason that Ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your costs. In this book, Rockefeller lays out a blueprint for success in any endeavor and on his list, two of the things that are on his list, is control expenses and invest in technology that helps you become more efficient. That sounds like Rockefeller is describing Ramp. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control. Ramp can completely automate all of your expense management. If you've read a bunch of biographies of History's Greatest Entrepreneurs or if you've listened to a bunch of episodes of this podcast, you know that watching your cost is not optional. It's exactly what Sam Walton said in his autobiography. He said, our money was made by controlling expenses. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. Ramp is everything you need to control spend and optimize your financial operations on a single platform. Ramp's website is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud and dominate your unintelligent competition by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business control costs. That is ramp.com.
The book that I want to talk to you about today was published all the way back in 1909, when John D. Rockefeller was 70 years old. It's called Random Reminiscences of Men and Events. In his own words, Advice and Perspective from the Wealthiest Man in History, written by John D. Rockefeller. He wrote the book with the intention that the only readers would be his friends and family. He actually talks about this. There's a very short preface in the book. He says, it has not been my custom to press my affairs forward into public gaze. That is the understatement of the century. Rockefeller loved secrecy. But I have come to see that if my family and friends want some record of things, which might shed light on matters, it is right that I should yield to their advice and in this informal way go over again some of the events which have made my life interesting to me. So he talks about like, why did he name it Random Reminiscences of Men and Events? Because that's exactly what it is. When these reminiscences were begun, there was no thought that they should ever go so far as to appear between the covers of a book. They were not prepared with the idea of even an informal autobiography. There was little idea of order or sequence and no thought whatsoever of completeness. The book really does function as if you had a conversation with Rockefeller. In that conversation, he's just talking about the most vivid memories from his life and the lessons and perspectives that he gained from those experiences. Before I move on to the first chapter, I just want to go back to what he said in the preface, that it has not been my custom to press my affairs forward into public gaze. There's a maxim that reappears over and over again in the history of entrepreneurship. I call it bad boys move in silence. Sometimes this is stated, sometimes just implied through their actions, but when you find something, the advice I think that you would derive from the history of entrepreneurship is that once you find something that's working, shut up about it. And in fact, I heard a great story about this. So I have to be intentionally vague here. I can't say who this is, but a friend of mine just had a meeting and a conversation with a person that I've made an episode about in the past. That unnamed founder told my friend, hey, what you have is working, so shut up about it. And he went on to tell my friend that all the attention that he got when his thing was working over the past few decades created a lot of unwanted competition for him.