Sam Zemurray (The Fish That Ate the Whale)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Sam Zemurray, the subject of this episode, may be the highest agency person that I've ever come across, and that's saying a lot because every single person that you and I study on Founders Podcast is high agency. The way I think about a high agency person is the world doesn't happen to them, they happen to the world. I made this episode over a year ago, and I wanted to republish it, so you can listen to it again. I think this story is that important, and I'll actually tell you what reminded me of Sam's incredible life story in a minute. First, I want to tell you about 8 Sleep, one of the most unique things about this podcast is that I know the founder of every company that advertises on founders. All of them listen to founders, so it makes building a relationship a lot easier. And the reason I do this is because I only want sponsors of the podcast that live and breathe their product. In every case, we share the same obsession for the quality of the products that we're making and the businesses that we are building. And so 8 Sleep is one of the sponsors of this episode, and the founder, Matteo, and I actually live in the same city. A few months after I started to use 8 Sleep, I randomly ran into Matteo at a restaurant. I went over to say hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me who I was talking to. And I said, oh, that's Matteo, the founder of 8 Sleep. And then my friend said the funniest thing ever. He replied, he goes, oh, he looks like he gets good sleep. Matteo is living and breathing his product. I never, before I had any sleep, ever, ever had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I got an 8 Sleep mattress. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my 8 Sleep ice cold. It is cold before I get in the bed. That one feature helps me fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That is feature alone, in my opinion, is worth 10 times the price. My wife and I were just away for a few nights at a wedding in rural Canada. They barely had wifi, so you know they didn't have any 8 Sleep. And she said on the way back, as we're flying back, she said, I cannot wait to get back to our 8 Sleep. 8 Sleep is such a game changer that you immediately notice its absence. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and 8 Sleep is one of them. You can get yours by going to 8sleep.com forward slash founders. You can get $150 off if you use that link. Go to 8sleep.com forward slash founders. I want to tell you about another product that several of my founder friends are also using, and that is Vesto. You can check out Vesto at getvesto.com. Vesto makes it easy for you to invest your business's idle cash. Vesto can help businesses of all sizes with their treasury management. When you own treasury bills, the US government actually guarantees your cash, and you earn interest on the cash. While it sits there, I have one founder friend who raised a bunch of venture capital money, and he uses Vesto as a way to extend his runway. And I have another founder friend who actually bootstrapped his company. And he uses Vesto to get a better rate of return than if his idle cash was just sitting in a bank account. If you are not already doing this, I highly recommend you go to getvesto.com and check out what they have to offer. I know the founder, Ben, I've spent a bunch of time with them. If you schedule a demo, if you go to getvesto.com and you schedule a demo, you actually speak directly to the founder, Ben. I think he's incredibly oppressive and I think if you speak to him, you'll be impressed too. Make sure you tell him that David from Founders sent you. Now back to Sam Zemurray, he was on my mind because I just was interviewed on Invest Like The Best for the second time. I assume that if you're listening to this, you already follow Invest Like The Best and your favorite podcast player. If you don't, make sure you go follow it. It's going to be, it's not out yet. I think it's coming out tomorrow. It's gonna be episode 343 of Invest Like The Best. I didn't know the questions that Patrick was gonna ask me in advance. And one question that he brought up, and this is why I wanted to republish this episode now, is because he talked about this very important concept of the high agency founder. And when he asked me that question, immediately Sam Zemurray comes to mind. And if you haven't listened to this episode or read the book yet, you'll clearly, by the end of the episode, you'll completely understand why he popped my mind. But essentially I told, retold like the outline of his story, what I learned from him and how Sam Zemurray has personally inspired me. And then after the podcast was over, I went through and reread all my past highlights of the book. That made me fall in love with the story all over. And that made me realize, hey, I should publish this. I should republish this to the podcast feed. I'm sure there's gonna be some people that are gonna listen to it twice and some people that miss it the first time. I think the story is incredible and I hope you enjoy this episode.