The Mindset Behind Building Billion-Dollar Companies | Brad Jacobs

**Brad Jacobs** (0:00)
So I looked at that org chart and said, this is a messed up org chart, which is great for making money. If you can find something that's messed up and easy to un-mess up, boo-yah, there's your money. There's your opportunity to make a lot of money.

**Shane Parrish** (0:12)
You've made a few billion dollars. What lessons have you learned about money and spending money and living with money that you wish you knew sooner?

**Brad Jacobs** (0:22)
Essentially, you throw me off a little bit with the question because when you look at the numbers, the real growth has been through M&A, through acquisitions. What's been my secrets on acquisitions? Here's the gist. A lot of people have a rigid business plan that's spelled out for many years, and that's it, and it's very... That doesn't usually work. Why? Because life changes, markets change, economies change. And if you're rigid, if you're just rigid thinking, you're going to have things come your way to make money for shareholders and feel, well, it's nice, it's great, but it's really not our thing. That's a bad way of thinking.

**Shane Parrish** (0:52)
You said you can get a lot of things wrong if you get the big trend right. What major trend are you most interested in right now?

**Brad Jacobs** (1:00)
I'm most interested in...

**Shane Parrish** (1:02)
Listen, there is no conversation that's made me more money than this one. If you haven't heard it, now is the time. If you have, it's a classic and worth watching again. Brad Jacobs has started eight separate companies worth more than a billion dollars each. He's done about 500 acquisitions. So when he says that there is a way to make money that reduces the role of luck, it's worth listening to him. This interview lays out exactly how he does it. The most surprising advantage though doesn't come from business at all. It's something we can all learn. Let's get into it.
Ray Kurzweil, who wrote The Singularity, is one of your heroes and you recently met him.
I'm curious what you took away from that conversation and what it was like.

**Brad Jacobs** (1:48)
I did recently meet him and it was like meeting Albert Einstein or meeting Michelangelo because when you look at his context, his wide context, he's looking at the history of the universe going back 13 point something billion years and how we got here and then looking at those trends and where we're going. He identifies the most important trend of all, which is Homo sapiens have created technology, created tools, starting with stone pebbles over a couple of million years ago, and then fire, and then settlements. Over the last couple of hundred years, so much more, so much more in the last 20 years, accelerating, accelerating. Now with AI, it's accelerating even more. Where's that going? Where's that going is the tools that we've created, the technology we've created is becoming more capable than we are at certain of our traits.
We're able to outsource a lot of our activities to our own technology. And Ray predicts a singularity whereby technology becomes more intelligent, more capable than humans, and we merge with technology. That we use so much technology in our own bodies, with wearables and nanobots and so forth, that in AI and outsourcing our memory and sensory and so forth, that you really can't call it homo sapiens anymore because the traits, the characteristics have changed so much that we'll say homo sapiens has become extinct and there's a new species, I think he's probably right.

**Shane Parrish** (3:21)
What do you think the benefits of that are and what do you think the drawbacks are?

**Brad Jacobs** (3:24)
Well, the benefits are, we should be able to accomplish a lot more. If you look at us as a planet, eight billion people, there's a lot of things we do well, but there's a lot of things we don't do well, primarily get along with each other, and information sharing is not there, resource sharing is not there. I think with advances in technology, we will be able to distribute resources more intelligently and more abundantly, and have more resources for more people. I think medicine will be better, and science will be better, and we'll be able to live longer. We'll be able to be more in touch with the way we think, and to be able to think more constructively, because that's one of the places where it's an area of improvement for humans is we don't think rationally a lot of times.
I think with technology and AI advancements, that we will think more rationally. So it will be nonstop therapy, so to speak.