#385 Michael Dell

**David Senra** (0:00)
There's a book that Ken Griffin recommends reading. It's called Hardball, and the subtitle of that book is Are You Playing to Play or Are You Playing to Win? It is a book about extreme winners and some of the best operators in business. There is a line in that book that sounds like it could have been written by any of the almost 400 founders that you and I have studied on the podcast so far. And the line says, If you have not examined your cost in detail, it is very likely that there exists, lurking somewhere in your cost structure, a major opportunity to improve your profits, weaken your competitors, and expand your influence. The first move is to drive down your costs faster than your competitors can and use that cost savings to upset their strategy. That sounds like the author was describing Dell. As you will hear me mention, in his autobiography, Michael Dell says that one of the ways he was able to out-compete his better funded competitor, Compaq, was with a structural cost advantage. Compaq's operating costs were 36% of their revenue, compared to Dell's 18% of their revenue. 40 years later, Dell is thriving and Compaq no longer exists. There is something that history's greatest founders have in common. They know their business from A to Z, and their costs down to the penny. Ramp makes doing this effortless. Ramp gives your business easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control all on a single platform. Ramp's corporate cards are fully programmable. That means you can set limits so the spending of your team never gets out of hand. Most companies only find out about excessive spending after the fact. With Ramp, you can stop it before it happens. Matt Paulson, who listens to founders and is the founder of MarketBeat, recently switched to Ramp, and this is what he said about it. Ramp is the best. The amount of money that you will save from unwanted renewals and employees who think company credit card equals buy whatever you want will far exceed the best credit card rewards program. Matt is talking about the importance of cost control. There's a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography that says cost control became nearly an obsession. Ramp helps you make it an obsession. If Andrew Carnegie was alive today, he'd be running his business on Ramp. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com and you will see why many of the world's top founders today are running their company on Ramp. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. One other thing that you will hear me mention this episode is that all of history's greatest founders studied history's greatest founders. And one way to help you do this is by subscribing to Founders Notes for seven years. I've been adding all of my notes and highlights about history's greatest founders to a giant searchable database. There's over 20,000 notes in Founders Notes now. If you subscribe to Founders Notes, you get access to all of my notes and you can search for them by keyword or you can have the AI assistant that I built for Founders Notes, which I call Sage, read everything and summarize it for you. I use Sage almost every day. This is a tool that I built for myself that you can use too. The same exact version of Founders Notes that I use is the one that you use if you subscribe. Jensen Wong, the founder of NVIDIA, said that in the future, everyone will have a virtual assistant, almost like a brilliant intern with near-perfect memory, capable of instantly recalling any piece of knowledge. Sage is that now, except Sage is hyper-focused on the collective knowledge of history's greatest founders. If you have access to Sage, you now have access to all that collective knowledge on demand. I really believe you should be using it to supplement the decisions that you make in your work. You can do that by going to foundersnotes.com. That link is down below, and it's also available at founderspodcast.com. I put a lot of time and effort into making this episode. It took me about twice as long as a normal episode. I think this story is very important, and I hope you enjoy it. Carl Icahn was trying to take my company away from me. I was sitting at Carl Icahn's dining room table with Icahn and his wife eating Mrs. Icahn's meatloaf. That evening was almost the precise midpoint in a nine month drama in which the personal computing company I started in my freshman dorm room at the University of Texas in 1984 The company with my name on it almost slipped away from me and then changed forever, changing me along with it.