#94 Henry Singleton (The Outsiders)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. According to Warren Buffett, if you took the top 100 business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as that of Singleton, who incidentally was trained as a scientist, not an MBA. Here's a direct quote from Buffett. The failure of business schools to study men like Singleton is a crime. Buffett has also said that Henry Singleton has had the best operating and capital deployment record in American business.
Charlie Munger has said Singleton's financial returns were a mile higher than anyone else. Utterly ridiculous.
Okay, so starting today's podcast, a little different than I normally do.
There's not a lot of information written about Henry Singleton. So I just start with some quotes that I found. For today's podcast, I've gathered a number of different resources to use as a blueprint for us to study Henry Singleton. One of those is a book. It's called The Outsiders, Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success. And it was written by William Thorndike. One of those eight is Henry Singleton. And I'm going to quote heavily from that chapter. And then I'm also going to go back to this Forbes article. One thing to know about Henry Singleton is he gave very few... They call him the Sphinx, because he wouldn't talk to reporters or anybody else. So he gave very few interviews. But he did give one to Forbes in 1979, and I was able to go back in the archives and find it. And it's called The Singular Henry Singleton. So before I jump into that, I want to tell you why I wanted to study him. So this whole, the series that I've been doing the past few weeks started when I read 54 years of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. And in that shareholder letter, he talks about people he admires. And so just as a basic operating, like a basic MO for this podcast, is if somebody I admire mentions people they admire, then I think that's automatically telling me, hey, let me go study this person too. And now that I've done about a week's worth of research on Henry, I'm so happy that I did that. I'm going to have a hard time hiding like my biases and my excitement today because I'm in love with the way this guy thought and acted and his insights, his counterintuitive insights on business. So without any further ado, let me go ahead and jump into... First, I'm going to start with what comes at the very end of this chapter in The Outsiders that William wrote on Singleton. And it's called, Buffett and Singleton, Separated at Birth. And it's interesting because once I got... The whole time I'm reading the chapter, I'm like, Oh my God, that sounds like Buffett. Oh my God, that sounds like Buffett. Wait, who said that? Singleton said that? Because that could have been Buffett. It was very, very obvious after you read or warn Buffett's shareholder letters or just study them in general.
I'm reminded of something I accidentally discovered when I started studying Steve Jobs. I've read like, I don't know, three or four biographies on them. And a lot of the ideas that I admired that Steve Jobs said, in turn, I realized they weren't actually originated from him. They came from, in large part, to Edwin Land and also Bob Noyce. So Edwin Land is the founder of Polaroid. Bob Noyce, the founder, one of the co-founders of Intel, and then the founders of HP. So this is why the author here is saying, you know, where they separated at birth, what's going on here? And what I realize is that just as we were trying to study and learn from Warren Buffett, Warren Buffett studied and learned from Henry Singleton. And the reason I bring that up is because that, like, I think it's fundamentally a good idea to learn from entrepreneurs that come before you, and that's why the podcast is structured as it is. But it's good, like, when other people identify with that through their actions. Like, that's an idea I think is exactly true, right? But it's even more confirming that I'm on the right path with what I'm doing. When you realize that Buffett's doing it too, Jobs did it, Bezos did it, Elon Musk did it, Henry Ford did it, all these other people realize, hey, what I'm doing is really hard. Creating a, building a successful business is unbelievably difficult. There's some benefit to going back and seeing what other people have figured out through decades of trying to do the same thing.