#375 The Single Biggest Individual Financier In The World. The Richest Woman In America: Hetty Green

**David Senra** (0:00)
All of history's greatest entrepreneurs studied history's greatest entrepreneurs. Hetty Green was the smartest woman on Wall Street, she was a financial genius, and the single largest individual financier in the world. And yet she made it a point to learn from people like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller, JP Morgan and Jay Gold. And one thing that she had in common with them was that she had the habit of keeping track of every cent and making sure that she's getting the most value for every single dollar that she's spent. One thing is clear from studying hundreds of history's greatest entrepreneurs. Anyone who's committed to being great at building their business is obsessed with watching their costs. This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric. My friend Eric is the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is now the presenting sponsor of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp and I've spent a bunch of time with them over the last year or two. They all listened to the podcast and they all 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. That is the reason that Ramp exists. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your spend. Ramp exists to give you everything you need to make cost control an obsession. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. I read a Ramp customer review that sums this up perfectly. It said, Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it handled. Warren Buffett, who has a lot in common with Hetty Green, said that a good manager must be a demon on cost. Ramp makes it easy for you to be a demon on cost and make your business more efficient. Ramp's website is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to find out how they can help you make your business more efficient and make cost control an obsession. That is ramp.com. One more thing I want to tell you about before we jump into this episode is Vesto. A lot of my friends are using Vesto to see all of their company accounts in one view. So Vesto helps you connect and control all of your business bank accounts from one dashboard. I know the founder, Ben, I'm friends with him. We spent a bunch of time together. We've had dinner, we've gone on walks, and I've offered to help him by introducing him to some of my friends that could benefit from using Vesto. So I called one of my friends and he said, listen, David, I will meet with anyone that you want me to, but I must tell you that we say no to over 90% of the software we were pitched. And yet a week later, I hear back from him and he told me that Ben and Vesto are great and that they signed up. So I asked him to ask his team to explain the benefit that they get from Vesto in their own words. So I'm going to read the text message exchange where his team is now, in their own words, telling what the benefit they got from Vesto. It says, it provides us the ability to view all of our bank accounts and loan accounts on one platform with a single sign-on. It makes it much easier to grant access to users in one place as opposed to 20 different banks. So I respond, what did they do before Vesto? They said they had 20 different bank bank logins across five accountants. We literally used 21 banks, so every bank had an account and a loan that multiple people need access and views to. Just to log in and see everything would take hours and would all be in different tabs. So if you have multiple businesses, if you have multiple accounts, go to vesto.com and schedule a demo with the founder Ben and tell him David sent you. That is Vesto with a V, vesto.com. The link will also be down in the show notes. And now let's get to the episode. I hope you enjoy the episode on the one and only Hetty Green. I want to talk to you about two books today, the two biographies of Hetty Green that I read. The first is Hetty, The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon, is written by Charles Slack. And the second is The Richest Woman in America, Hetty Green in the Gilded Age by Janet Wallach. So you may not know who Hetty Green is, but in her day, she was one of the most famous and infamous financiers, investors, and entrepreneurs. She was by far the smartest woman on Wall Street. She's a financial genius, a railroad magnet, a real estate mogul, and she was also described as a gilded age renegade, which you and I will talk a lot about today. It's one of my favorite things about her. And shockingly, this is one of the things that blew my mind the most, is she was a reliable source of funds for city government. So on more than one occasion, Hetty, as a single individual, bailed out the city of New York. And the reason I think it was important to read two books on her is because we're dealing with a very singular individual here. You have to keep in mind, at a time when women weren't even allowed to vote, Hetty was the single biggest individual financier in the world. And so I just want to give you a brief overview before I go into her childhood, because I thought her childhood and the education she received from her family was very fascinating. She refused, one of my favorite things about her, this is mentioned in both books multiple times, is she refused to comply with any type of stereotype. There was a description of Hetty by another person that I absolutely loved. They said, Hetty was defiantly independent, that she made her own rules and lived by them. In fact, when I read that part, maybe think when I got to have dinner with Charlie Munger, I asked him what he thought of Jeff Bezos, and Munger described Bezos, one of the best ways I've heard anybody described. He says that Jeff was ferociously intelligent. And so this idea of combining ferocious intelligence with being defiantly independent, I absolutely loved. And this is a great quote that will give you a sense of Hetty's personality. And she said, I've had fights with some of the greatest financial men in the country. Did you ever hear of any of them getting ahead of Hetty Green? And she had a personal motto that she lived by. She says, I go my own way, I take no partners and I risk nobody else's fortune. Again, she was the single biggest individual financier in the world when she was alive.