#391 Jimmy Iovine

**David Senra** (0:00)
Jimmy Iovine spent his career working with the very best people he can. People like John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Bono, Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor, Eminem. And Jimmy knew, just like Steve Jobs knew, just like Jeff Bezos knew, that you always bet on talent. In fact, Steve Jobs said that you must find the extraordinary people, that a small group of A-plus players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. And Jeff Bezos set the tone from his very first shareholder letter when he said that 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 must build a team that pursues the A-plus players. That is exactly what Jimmy Iovine did, and that is exactly what Ramp did. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible.
In the last 12 months, they have hired only 0.23% of the people that have applied. This means that when you use Ramp, you now have top-tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24-7 to automate and improve all of your businesses' financial operations, and they do this on a single platform. Ramp gives your business easy-to-use corporate credit cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. What kind of products can a team of A-plus players build? A product that creates so much value for their customers that the customers never leave. Ramp is an example of that. Last year, 12,059 businesses signed up for Ramp, and only eight of the 12,059 businesses decided Ramp wasn't for them. I run my business on Ramp, and so do most of the other top founders and CEOs I know. I hear from people that listen to this podcast every day that have switched to Ramp and have raved about the quality of the product. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com.
I've been wanting to make an episode on Jimmy Iovine for years. If you were to ask me, who would you most like to meet and have a conversation with? He's towards the top of the list of people that I'd love to meet and have a conversation with. The four-part documentary on his life in partnership with Dr. Dre, The Defiant Ones, is one of my favorite documentaries of all time. I re-watch it all the time. I've probably seen it more than ten times, and there's certain parts and clips from it that I've seen over a hundred. And what is fascinating to me is, if you go and search for Defiant Ones, you can read the description of the documentary. It would say something like, The Defiant Ones tells of the unbreakable bond of trust and friendship between music legends Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, two street smart men from different worlds who together defied traditional wisdom and transformed contemporary culture in the process. Yes, it is undoubtedly about the life and the partnership of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre over multiple, multiple decades. But what I really think The Defiant Ones is about, it is really a documentary about entrepreneurship. So to make this episode for you, I rewatched all the Defiant Ones and listened to every interview I could find by Jimmy. And because there's no biographies, there's no autobiographies of Jimmy Iovine yet. I hope you, I would love if he wrote an autobiography. And so then what I did is took notes on all this, combine this into one outline, and that's what I want to talk to you about. And just before we jump in, it's like, one of the reasons he's really special is like, he's one of these, Jimmy's one of these super talented people that the general population probably don't really know. They're most likely not familiar with him at all. But the top people in his industry know and admire him. Going way back from like John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Dr. Dre, Eminem, David Geffen, countless other music executives. And so hopefully by the end of this, you'll see why those people and me admire and study and learn from Jimmy Iovine. He's got two of my favorite ideas that I've ever heard, which I'll point out to you as we go through this. And I want to start with the fact that he was born in Brooklyn, and his dad, when he graduated high school, the plan was like his dad set him up to get him a job at the docks. So Jimmy's dad was a longshoreman. These are the people that obviously moved the cargo from the ships to the port and back and forth. And Jimmy didn't want to be a longshoreman. He actually does something. Jimmy does something, right, from a very young age, that's really smart, that would actually make Charlie Munger proud. Charlie Munger would always say, invert, always invert. And so Jimmy says, I was thinking not what I was going to do. I was thinking what I wasn't going to do. I wanted to do something that was special. He did not want to have a normal life, just having a normal job. He admired his dad. His dad was his best friend. We'll talk a lot about that. But he didn't want to be a longshoreman. And he didn't have a lot of interests. But one thing that he was interested in from a very young age is the fact that he would sit in his room and listen to music for hours. He wouldn't just listen. He would study it. He says in the documentary that he would read the back of album covers. And so his family at the time says that Jimmy has a skill that actually come in really handy later on in his life and career is that he was able to make you a super fan of whatever he was a fan of. And at this time it was just the people, the music that he was listening to. So through a family member he winds up meeting this young talented singer-songwriter named Ellie Greenwich and it was Ellie Greenwich who got him his first two jobs in the music business and really that's a stretch to say he was in the music business because his first job in the music business was sweeping up in the recording studio. Somehow he managed to get fired from that job. She gets him another job in a recording studio. This job comes with a 90-day trial period. Jimmy gets fired on the 89th day and so he's walking home after getting fired. He calls Ellie and he's crying and Ellie gets him another job. This one, she got him a job at what will become a famous recording studio called The Record Plant. What I love about Jimmy's ability to tell stories, he will talk about what happened, outline his career and what happened to when he was younger and then he'll tell you what the important lesson from that was. And his point was like, hey, when you're in a position to help somebody, you should help them. If you feel they deserve help and they deserve a break, you should do whatever you can to help them, because he was really talking about Ellie. What would have his life have been if the second time he got fired from a recording studio, she decided not to try to help him get another job. That one act by her changed the entire trajectory of Jimmy's life. And it winds up being his first big break, because at the record plant is where he meets Roy Ciccalla. Roy Ciccalla is a legendary engineer and producer, winds up becoming Jimmy's mentor. Jimmy talks about this. He says, When I was younger, I was scared to death. I didn't know where my life was going to go. And then I met Roy Ciccalla and John Lennon, and they gave me a shot. And then I worked with Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith, and that was my college education. I felt freedom, freedom from what I didn't know. And one of the best things that Roy Ciccalla did, he's a legendary engineer and producer, he would teach you by working through you. And so what working through you means, he would literally sit Jimmy down at the board and say, hey, hit that button, push down that lever, see how the sound changes when you do that? Now do this. Now when you do that, do this at the same time. By working through Jimmy, it gave Jimmy a feel on how to actually make a record. He says, Roy gave me my skills.