#362 Li Lu

A few weeks ago I was talking to John Mackie, the founder of Whole Foods, and he told me one of the craziest things anyone has ever said about the podcast. He had listened to over a hundred episodes before he met, and he told me that if founders existed when he was younger, that Whole Foods would still be an independent company. He said that since the podcast and all of history's greatest entrepreneurs constantly emphasize the importance of controlling your expenses. he would have put more of a priority on it, especially during good times. It is

natural for a company and I think for human nature. to just not watch your costs as closely because everything is going so well. Andrew Carnegie had one of the best ways to describe why this is so important, because he would actually repeat this mantra time and time again. He would say, Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces on the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in the cost were permanent.

That quote from Carnegie is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is now a partner of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co founders of Ramp and have spent a ton of time with them. Over the last year or two. They all listened to the podcast and they picked up on the fact that the main theme from the podcast is on the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.