Fred Smith: The Story of FedEx [Outliers]

It's July. Nineteen seventy four. Fred Smith is sitting at a blackjack table in Las Vegas at three AM. He's playing with the last five thousand dollars his company has left. Literally the entire bank account of FedEx. Back in Memphis, fourteen jets sit on the tarmac. They need twenty four thousand dollars worth of fuel by Monday morning.

Or Federal Express dies. Smith's already been turned down by every investor. He's personally guaranteed millions in loans. His house, his inheritance, everything he owns is on the line. General dynamics an early investor in FedEx just told him no for the third time. Sorry, Fred, we can't invest any more in FedEx. The company is burning a million dollars a month with no planned profitability. Most founders would have given up.

But Fred Smith isn't most founders. He went to Vegas instead. By sunrise, he's turned that five thousand dollars into twenty seven thousand dollars. Just enough to fuel the planes for two more weeks. That bought him the time to raise eleven million and save the company. Five decades later, that desperate gamble has become an eighty eight billion dollar empire that moves seventeen million packages a day. But here's what matters.

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