#7 Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

**David Senra** (0:08)
There's no talent here, this is hard work. This is an obsession. Talent does not exist. We are all equals as human beings. You could be anyone if you put in the time. You will reach the top, and that's that. So, I am not talented, I am obsessed.
Okay, so a little housekeeping before we get into today's book. I just recently redid the website for the podcast, so all show notes and links to the books that we cover are available at founderspodcast.com. The show is also on Instagram, at Founders Podcast. If you use Instagram, add the show at Founders Podcast. Once I get to a few thousand followers on Instagram, I think we're gonna live stream the podcast as I record it using Instagram Live. That way you can see the full podcast before any edits, mistakes and all.
Also, I want to tell you some of the entrepreneurs that I'm gonna be covering that are coming up soon. I just started reading The Last Tycoon, which is the story of Cornelius, or excuse me, The First Tycoon, which is the story of Cornelius Vanderbilt. It's an insane book so far. That one's gonna take me a little bit. It might take me a few weeks to get that up because the book's about 800 pages.
I also have a podcast coming up on the founders of Hewlett-Packard. And I got that idea by reading the Steve Jobs biography.
He kept referencing the respect and reverence he had for that company and the founders that created it. I also found, there's this great reading list if you guys use Medium by this guy. He's an investor named Keith Raboi, is I think how you pronounce his last name. But he put together a list, if you just search Keith Raboi on Medium, his last name is R-A-B-O-I-S. It's a list of maybe like 25 or 30 books. A lot of them centered around entrepreneurship, investing and business. And so, the Intel Trinity was on that list, and it's about the founding story of Intel. So I have that book, it just arrived a few days ago.
And I was also reading a blog post by WaitButWhy, and it's about Tesla and Elon Musk, and Elon kept bringing up Henry Ford. So I knew I was going to cover him at some point, so I just decided to order his autobiography, and I just got to receive that today. So Henry Ford will be coming soon, the founders of Hewlett Packard, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the guys that started Intel. Those are just the books I'm working on now, and they'll keep adding to the list, as I probably have 25 to 50 so far, and that number is only going to keep growing.
So, and finally, as a reminder, founders, this podcast is ad-free and independent due to patron support. So patrons receive exclusive access to patron-only episodes. Every other episode I do is for patrons only, and patrons also get every episode early. So this is a free episode for everybody, but the patrons will get it a few days early. Sometimes it's a few days. In some cases, it's been over a week early. It just depends on how fast I'm able to read and then prepare for the podcast. So if you like what I'm doing here, please become a patron. That's the best way to directly support this podcast. Your support helps me create more podcasts on history's greatest entrepreneurs, and it's about for the price of a latte every month. So to me, it's a no-brainer. So I want to get into today's book. It's called Grinding It Out, The Making of McDonald's. And it's an autobiography by Ray Kroc. And we're going to deviate a little bit. I know we've been covering mostly technology entrepreneurs, and that's an interest of mine, so I'm obviously going to keep exploring that path as much as possible, but I do want to widen a little bit, and I'm going to cover entrepreneurs from all industries.
And I found this book because I saw a preview of the movie called Founder. And the autobiography I have in my hand is the text they used for the movie. So I read the book first, and then I thought it was my duty to watch the movie before I recorded the podcast in case I missed anything. The book is way better than the movie. The movie is not bad. I don't know if I'd watch it again, but the book I'd read again.
And it reminds me a lot of how Sam Walton's autobiography is written. It's in very plain language, very short. This one's shorter than the Sam Walton one. And I probably have, I don't know, 30 different Post-It notes in here, so there's some good information. It's completely different than any other story we've covered so far. We've talked about it so far in the podcast. And when I'm using the word we, there's not just me over here doing it, I'm talking about me and you, is the we.