Evidence receipt / recommendation
Published · transcript-backedRecommends Les Schwab's autobiography.
29 Mar 2023 Acquired Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast)
“The best thing, and this relates to what all we do for a living now which I could have never predicted, is there was a guy that—Charlie Munger says, you should read if you want to learn about incentives in a really difficult business, read Les Schwab's autobiography, which I did because Charlie told me to.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- David Senra
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 29 Mar 2023
- Publisher
- Acquired
Transcript context
…Not with my parents. My parents never said the word college to me once, not one time, because they're both high school dropouts. I was one of the only kids in high school that didn't have a curfew. My parents knew I was independent. That's the best thing they did. It's like, you don't need to take care of yourself. My mom told me, I just thought you were a lot smarter than everybody else in our family. I was driven too. You have to understand, being smart in this family is like, the bar is low in the sense that they're both coming from multiple generations of people that did not prioritize education or self-improvement. That's why I'm ferocious in this because I didn't see that. This demonstrated when my mom was dying of cancer. HIPAA has this thing, where they're not going to share paperwork or information, unless it gets permission from the person. My mom could choose whoever she wanted to. She could have chosen her husband. They had a bad relationship. They got divorced and then remarried. They should have stayed divorced or whatever. You see that with actions. We said that actions express priority. She's like, we're in there, who do you want the paperwork with? Who do you want us to communicate with? She's like, David. Not her other kids, not her husband, not her sister. She trusted me implicitly. Essentially, they never went to college, so I just kept this routine. People are like, what do you want to do for a living? I remember watching TV when I was younger. I was like, well, I want to be rich. You think when you're younger, you know anything like, who's rich on TV? I liked the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I was like, I'm going to be a judge or a doctor. I was like, oh, I can't see blood, that freaks me out, so I'm going to be an attorney. I went to school, and I worked full time. I was trying to hustle anything I could do. The idea was, okay, I'm just going to go to undergrad for business because I'm interested in business anyway, but I'm only doing that till I go to law school. The point of the story was not to code on this deviation, but I was in the entrepreneurship program, that pilot one, because I was already interested in trying to make money in any way possible. This is how bad entrepreneurship was. This is why I'm jealous of these young kids, where now you actually have an entrepreneurship industry, and there is stuff you can learn from. The main subject is Entrepreneurship 101. There are all these other classes, but Entrepreneurship 101 runs the teacher. What are her credentials? Her dad started an AC company in Florida, you're going to make a lot of money. He died on the job because he got electrocuted to death. She inherited the company and then she ran it. She's the teacher. The curriculum was terrible. It was terrible. e going to make a lot of money. He died on the job because he got electrocuted to death. She inherited the company and then she ran it. She's the teacher. The curriculum was terrible. It was terrible. The best thing, and this relates to what all we do for a living now which I could have never predicted, is there was a guy that—Charlie Munger says, you should read if you want to learn about incentives in a really difficult business, read Les Schwab's autobiography, which I did because Charlie told me to. I did an episode a long time ago. He's like, this guy made a ton of money in a really hard business, which is tires, oil changes, and stuff like that. The guy was coming into the class. He was going to donate like $3 million or $5 million to have a building named after him. He had one prerequisite. He goes, I want to talk to entrepreneurship students before I give you this money. I learned more in one hour from that dude than I did in two years on entrepreneurship because he would talk for 20 minutes and he's like, open up your questions. I lit them up with question after question after question. I remember it to this day just like the simple way. He was building his business in a private 80s and 90s. He's like, how did you know where to expand? He's like, we would pull the car registration data from the DMVs, and we would know how many car owners there were in this specific radius. Let's say we need 40,000 car owners in a three mile radius. Are there any other stores? Put a store right there, and they did that over and over and over and over again. He had ideas like that. Again, you learn through experience. That guy could teach us way more because he actually did this. I think, probably all three of us have an unintended impact on college entrepreneurship programs.…
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