#377 Expanding A Family Dynasty: Marcus Wallenberg Jr.

**David Senra** (0:00)
There's two ideas in this book that are repeated. Marcus Wallenberg Jr prioritized investing in technology and surrounding yourself with great people. That is actually something that multiple generations of the Wallenbergs would repeat. And I've been telling you lately that there's a lot of similarities that I noticed between people like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos and Jensen Wong last week, and now I would add Marcus Wallenberg Jr to that list as well. And it starts with Jeff Bezos' very first shareholder, where Jeff Bezos emphasizes the importance of having the very best team. He wrote, Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon's success. You will hear Marcus Wallenberg Jr say something very similar to that. Jeff's focus on talent is very similar to this quote that I actually found that Steve Jobs gave in an interview that very same year in 1997 This is what Steve said. He says, I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people are to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed the dynamic range between what the average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one. Given that, you are well advised to go after the cream of the cream. You want to build a team that pursues the A plus players. That is exactly what Ramp did. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, they hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. When you use Ramp, it means you have the top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24-7 to automate and improve all of your business' financial operations. And they do this all on a single platform. That means the longer that you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. In the end of that interview, Steve Jobs added one thing. He said, a small team of A-plus players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. From a customer's perspective, what does a team of A-plus players sound like? It sounds like this customer review that I read, which says that Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it handled. As you're about to hear, Marcus Wallenberg Jr pushes all of his companies to invest in technology that provide massive productivity gains. If he was alive today, he would use Ramp. Ramp's website is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. 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 them. We spent a bunch of time together. We've had dinner, we've gone on walks, and I've offered to help them by introducing them to some of my other friends that I thought would benefit from using Vesto. So I called one of my friends and he said, Listen, David, I will meet anyone that you want me to, but I will tell you, I have to tell you that we say no to over 90% of the software that were pitched. And yet a week later, I hear back and he said that Ben and Vesto are great and that they signed up. So I asked him, can you please ask your team to explain the benefits that they get from Vesto in their own words? So I'm going to read this text message exchange where his team now in his own words, or in their own words rather, are telling me and you what the benefit is that they get from Vesto. And 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 text back, what do they do before Vesto? And this was the response. We have 20 plus different bank logins across five accountants. We literally use 21 banks. So every bank has an account and a loan that multiple people need access and views to. Just to log in and see everything would take hours and 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. Now let's get to the episode. Daniel Eck, the founder of Spotify, was kind enough to invite me to come to Sweden. Since I was going to go to Sweden, I figured I'd want to read and learn more about the most powerful family in Sweden. It's the Wallenberg family. It's actually 170-year-old family dynasty. So the book that I want to talk to you about today is called Furthering A Fortune, Marcus Wallenberg Swedish Banker and Industrialist, and it was written by Ulf Olsson. So Marcus Wallenberg Jr was known as MW. So that's what I'm going to refer to him throughout the entire conversation that you and I are going to have. I do want to jump right into his life. I do think there's a few things I should, some background I should give you about the Wallenberg family, because he's the third generation. There's just a couple of ideas that I think were laid, like the foundation laid very early in the very early days of the family dynasty. That Marcus definitely built upon, although as you see, he was fine with the responsibility of continuing the tradition and expanding the dynasty, but he was much more of an innovator than an administrator. As somebody born wealthy, you might suspect that, okay, we're already rich, we're just going to maintain it. He was not interested in that. He was interested in technology, innovation, and drastically expanding the family fortune. Now, there is a couple of ideas that he never deviated from. So, there's a line at the very beginning of the book where his actual uncle says, long experience in this bank has taught us that we must almost exclusively put our trust in ourselves. So, the Wallenbergs, and this is mentioned multiple times throughout the book, they always had more liquidity than other banks, and they never wanted to put themselves or find themselves in a position where they had to rely on the kindness of outsiders. I don't think you survive and thrive, really, for 170 years without being relatively conservative and having like this financial fortress. Remember this for later on because when MW is a young man, his job, one of the jobs in the bank, in the family bank, is the fact that he was handling all the loans for Ivar Kruger, which I covered all the way back on episode 348, which was the biggest, one of the biggest, maybe the biggest financial scandal and financial collapse, definitely in Sweden's history, but in economic history in general, and it is due to the conservative and prudent nature of the Wallenbergs and what they taught the third generation, that they wind up, I'll tell you about this later, but it's pretty crazy, they actually held more collateral from Kruger than liabilities, where a lot of other banks and the main competitor for the Wallenberg family was actually his life and work was destroyed by his association with Ivar Kruger. So this idea is like, hey, you want to have a ton of liquidity, more liquidity than the other banks and you don't want to put yourself in a position where you have to rely on the kindness of outsiders. Another thing that is in the book, and I also got to meet while I was in Sweden, some people that had worked with the Wallenbergs for many, many years. And this came up over and over again, the fact that the family rarely, if ever sold, in many cases, there's a bunch of problems in the businesses that they own or they invest in, and they wound up owning these for decades, in some cases over a century. And what they found is like in time, a lot of these problems can be solved or work themselves out. So it says the bank did not content itself. And when you hear the bank, you really have to think of the family, which again, there was no difference between the way Marcus thought about it, the way his father, the rest of the family thought about it. There's no difference between the bank and the family, the business and the family. The family is a business, the business is a family. The bank did not content itself with writing off the lending losses but continued to maintain its interest in its debtor companies in an attempt to rescue them and at some future date recover as much of the bad debts as possible. So again, I wanted to bring that up right up because they did this before MW was born and you'll see MW does this and he actually carries on the tradition and really rescues, restructures, combines a bunch of companies that the family owned for an extremely long period of time.