Founders

#66 Henry Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West

What I learned from reading <a href="https://amzn.to/2G5FaLP">Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West</a> by Mark Foster. He built giant businesses in roads, bridges, dams, housing, cement, aluminum, chemicals, steel, health care, and tourism. (0:01) starting a joint venture with Howard Hughes (6:40)learning how not to run a business (12:00)how Kaiser was able to start his own business with no money (18:00)I decided to pick one fellow I wanted most to work for and concentrate on him. (23:15)how Henry Kaiser used passion and enthusiasm to start a construction company in Vancouver (30:00)using the leverage that technology provides or how to make big jobs small (44:00)very difficult work + fewer people willing to do it = opportunity (50:40) how Kaiser goes from never building ships to having 200,000 employees building ships (1:00:00), Kaiser promoted himself as an industrialist populist (1:13:00)Kaiser's managerial style (1:15:00)

Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work. This quote explains why: "There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, new ways to manage etc. They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book. For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize. You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before and you learn every time." —Marc Andreessen