#60 Yvon Chouinard: What We've Learned from Patagonia's First 40 Years

What I learned from reading The Responsible Company: What We've Learned From Patagonia's First 40 Years by Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley. ---- When I die and go to hell, the devil is going to make me the marketing director for a cola company. I’ll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can’t be sold on its merits. (0:01) What Patagonia was meant to be (8:25) Everyone wants to feel useful (11:00) a short history of companies (14:30) the definition of meaningful work (26:00) more human, less corporate (40:30) Yvon's ancestors and their working conditions (46:00) the benefits of long term thinking (49:00) build something useful and don't bullshit (57:00) Don't do things that have no useful purpose / being bold can lead to new discoveries / we need more small businesses (1:04:00) ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  When I die and go to hell, the devil's gonna make me the marketing director for a cola company. I'll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can't be sold on its merits. I'd be competing head-on in the cola wars, on price, distribution, advertising, and promotion, which would indeed be hell for me. So that is a quote from the founder that we're gonna talk about today, and that's Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, and his book, The Responsible Company: What We've Learned from Patagonia's First Forty Years. So before I get into that, if this is your first time listening to Founders, welcome.

• 0:45David Senra?

  The concept of this podcast is very straightforward. Every week, I read a biography, or an autobiography, or a book about a founder, and then just pull out ideas that are useful for our lives. So after last week, when we studied Howard Hughes, I pushed... So I've had The Responsible Company on my bookshelf for a few weeks now, and I knew I was eventually gonna read it. And I decided, after finishing that Howard Hughes podcast, to push this one up to the top of the queue. Because the main reason I did that is because I felt that I learned, basically, all the things not to do from Howard Hughes.

• 1:28David Senra?

  And according to my calculations, I've read 57 books, different books, so far for this podcast. And in my top five easily, out of all those 57 books, is the book I covered on Founders 18, which was Yvon Chouinard's book about the founding of Patagonia. It's called Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. I'd recommend this to any entrepreneur, anybody making anything, to definitely read it, because I just feel this guy is... He's basically the opposite of Howard Hughes, where I feel like we can learn everything not to do with Howard Hughes, I feel Yvon's teaching us everything to do. And he's just got a lot of old-school knowledge from running a company.

• 2:10David Senra?

  For 46 years and I think we can benefit from his experience. So if you haven't listened to that founders episode founders number 18 I definitely would would do so and then I'd order the book and and read it because I think it's fantastic. And before I get into the responsible company book, I'm just going to read some quotes from Yvonne and you'll see why I mean the quote I just opened the podcast with why you could I think you could tell why I love somebody like this that talks that way and that thinks that way. So these are just some some quotes I collected just want to read them to you. It says, "The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life. It is so easy to make it complex." I'm in that same vein is another quote I

• 2:50David Senra?

  love. "The more you know, the less you need." And I think this next quote is is hugely important and it's part of the reason why I'm doing this podcast. And it says, "The secret to happiness is to be working at your passion. If you want to be miserable, lead a desperate life like everybody else where they drag their asses to work every day because and because they hate their job."

• 3:15David Senra?

  So this is another quote that I talked about in the first podcast I did Yvonne, which stuck out to my mind even to this day. "If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, 'This sucks, I'm gonna go do my own thing.'" He's got some hiring advice or basically a way to access undiscovered talent for us. "Hiring people with diverse backgrounds brings in a flexibility of thought and openness to new ways of doing things, as opposed to hiring clones from business schools who have been taught a codified way of doing business." We'll actually talk more about this in the podcast because he

• 3:58David Senra?

  essentially built a massively successful business from a talent pool of misfits, which I obviously love. "Remember, I'm the kid who couldn't play competitive games," meaning sports, that's why he got into mountain climbing and surfing. "I'd much rather design and sell products so good and unique that they have no competition." That kind of echoes something I talked about on the first podcast with him, that he has one of his fundamental distribution strategies is just quality, quality of your product. This is something especially important. Nature doesn't like empires. It doesn't like accumulation in one place. It doesn't like monoculture. It's always trying to make diverse species. It wants to spread everything out.

• 4:42David Senra?

  And we're constantly trying to hold everything in. The reason I included that quote is because something I've talked about a lot is my advocacy for more small businesses, for more people that are employees to turn into entrepreneurs, and less centralization. And this is not a, you know, a unique or new idea by any means. But it's something extremely important to me. I mean, the reason I say it's not new is because we've talked about it ad nauseam. That Edwin Land had talked about this a long time ago about instead of having one giant corporation of Polaroid, it would be much better if he had like a thousand separate companies.

• 5:14David Senra?

  And, you know, the goal there is you find more diversity of thought. You have a better basis for more unique thinking that leads to better products, products that wouldn't come, are more likely to come about in like a monoculture. But the reason I bring it up is because in the United States, like every single metric for entrepreneurship, from new business formation and all the other like different data points is going in the opposite direction. It's like, I was just listening to the founder of Shopify on a podcast talk about, because that's what he's trying to do. He's trying to make entrepreneurship easier by letting, by making it easier for people to sell things. That's why Shopify exists.

• 5:56David Senra?

  And he's talking about like, most people don't even know that new business creation in the United States is the lowest it's ever been. So I, that quote, I think what Yvonne is saying there is like, you know, nature doesn't like empires. And you're not going to just see a consolidation into a few massive companies. Like, that's not actually good. Because we're seeing that now. More centralization leads to less new business creation. And then, he's got another great quote here. "It's the same with business. If you focus on the goal and not the process, you inevitably compromise. Businessmen who focus on profits wind up in the hole. For me, profit is what happens when you do everything else right."

• 6:38David Senra?

  And like, I don't think that many people know, at least I didn't know before I started reading his books. Like Patagonia is a privately held company. It's been around for 40 plus years. It's does close to a billion dollars in sales. And it's owned by his family. It's made him incredibly wealthy, but he never optimized for that. He just optimized, as we're gonna also hear in the book. You know, he started out making climbing equipment. And the equipment, he found the climbing equipment, the reason he didn't even want to make it. He just was using other people's equipment to climb mountains and realized they were what he called like shit quality. And in his case, he realized the need, like it's a life.

• 7:19David Senra?

  He had to make the best product possible because in he was one of the rare product categories where if his product wasn't as best as it could be, people could literally die. And so then when he started making clothes, he kind of just kept that high bar of quality. And then one other quote before we jump into the book. "Once you educate yourself, you're left with choices." Okay, so I'm gonna jump right into the very beginning. They're gonna tell us. So he's writing this book with Vincent Stanley, who's worked on and off at Patagonia for a few decades. And he's also an author and a poet in his own right, but I think his title at Patagonia was like Chief Storyteller.

• 8:04David Senra?

  Okay, so it says, "This book is for anyone who works, not just business leaders and managers. It is also for business students and other young people who want to engage their best, deepest self in the working life that stretches ahead." Okay, so this is them just talking about like what Patagonia was meant to be and how they kind of stumbled upon this business of theirs. You should know that at its beginning, Patagonia was meant to not, to be not a risk-taking, environment-obsessed, naval-gazing company, but an easy-to-milk cash cow. Yvonne created Patagonia as an offshoot of the Chouinard Equipment Company, which made

• 8:46David Senra?

  excellent mountain-climbing gear recognized as the best in the world, but made very little money. Patagonia was intended to be a clean and easy company, desk jockeys' work, in contrast to the 10 hours a day sweat and toil of hammering out pitons with a coal-fired forge or drilling and cutting chocks from extruded aluminum. The clothing business required no expensive dyes to amortize and had a much broader customer base than a few dirtbag climbers. At Chouinard Equipment, we were used to life-or-death standard of product quality. You did not sell an ice axe without checking it closely for a hairline fracture or for

• 9:30David Senra?

  any other fault. Although we applied the same standard to rugby shirts, they had to be thick and tough to survive the skin-shredding sport of rock climbing, we knew that seam failure was unlikely to kill anyone. Patagonia was to be our irresponsible company, bringing in easy money, a softer life, and enough profits to keep Chouinard Equipment in the black. Okay, next page. Patagonia may seem different because its owners are committed to social and environmental change, and our company is privately held, not publicly traded, so we could take on greater risks. But our management requires the same set of skills, pursues the same opportunities, and faces the same competition and constraints as any other business.

• 10:15David Senra?

  It turns out, we were not unique in our desire to become a more responsible business, for saying, "Hey, we're, uh, we may close so you can get outdoors and you can climb mountains, you can hike, you can surf, so conserving the environment is especially important to us, and as it should be anybody that wants clean air and water." But these principles also can be applied to any, uh, any kind of business that you do.

• 10:46David Senra?

  Okay, so he's just picking up on some just basic human nature here that everyone wants to feel useful. And he says, "To earn employee commitment and trust begs more of a company than providing competitive pay and benefits and enacting humane environmental policies. Not everyone can satisfy his heart's desire working for your company, but everyone does want to feel useful at, or better yet, enlivened by what they do all day long. No one wants to be ashamed to name the company he works for. No one wants to leave her values at home when she leaves for work in the morning." So this whole, he's gonna hit on this idea over and over again throughout the book, that doing good is actually good business. "People argue over what makes the world a better place to live

• 11:31David Senra?

  and over what each of us would like to see more of and less of in the world. It is hard to imagine anyone rejoicing over the generally accepted landscape of only a decade ago." And he's describing what's taking place in his opinion. "A suburban monoculture of tilt-up malls, cracker-crumb housing, pandemic obesity, cheap distractions, and expensive services. All at the expense of nature. It's as though we've handed Satan a hard hat and asked him to refashion our earth according to his plan." So this, we always talk about the idea that the best businesses in the world, they have a point of view. And by reading this book and then "Let My People Go Surfing",

• 12:14David Senra?

  Yvonne is clear, I mean, they're, they're, the reason for writing the book is he's telling you his point of view. He's, he's looking at how we do things and in the case, in many cases, like how businesses do things. And he's like, "This is just stupid. Like, why are we doing this?" So I like this idea about things being stupid, brutal, and imprecise. And it says, "Globalization, a man-made but not humanly controlled process, is largely responsible for the current speed at which life turns to sand. Globalization moves with great speed to identify, then harvest resources for human needs, but crawls slowly to repair the devastation it has left in its wake. It is fast, but stupid, brutal, and imprecise.

• 12:58David Senra?

  To cull a tree, it takes out a forest." Okay, and then this is, now, they're gonna, the authors are gonna explicitly tell us what they want us to get from, from the book. The authors hope that those coming into their own now will, all their lives, pursue meaningful work and do the right thing, which is to say be responsible to other people and to nature. The authors hope they reject the official story told by governments and corporations, that a healthy economy relies on the suppression of social, ecological, and individual health.

• 13:35David Senra?

  And he's just gonna talk a lot about that, like, you know, there's tons of opportunity for, especially for a privately-held company, to just continue to just enrich the family that owns the company. But he's saying, like, for us to continue to do so at such drastic levels, like, that takes away from our employees, and that takes away, like, what if we can probably, for, we can cut quality, maybe our customers won't, like, notice immediately, but long-term, this is actually damaging. And it just goes back to the reason that he feels the Patagonia is successful is because they put his need, they put the needs of the customer and the employees before their needs of their own. And that's like a virtuous cycle that kind of feeds on itself and builds over 46 years to a billion dollars in sales.

• 14:22David Senra?

  Okay, so, he's, what I really liked about this is, he's gonna give us a short history of companies as he sees it. So I wanna read a bunch from this section, cuz I find it interesting. "How is a company responsible? Should a profit its shareholders, provide for the well-being of its employees, make excellent products, be a good force in the community, and protect nature? We think that a responsible company bears all of these obligations. It would help to understand, to better understand how a company's responsibilities differs today from 50 or 150 years ago. The responsible company of 1860 was one that paid a return to its shareholders, honored its commitments, and kept honest books. A hundred years later, that picture had become far more complex.

• 15:07David Senra?

  In 1860, only 5% of all work was done by machines. 95% was done by humans and animals."

• 15:18David Senra?

  It's interesting, just a side note, I finished reading that book Unscaled, I've been talking about the last few podcasts. So he's, this, so right here, Yvonne's talking about the difference between 1860 and 1960. So you go from 5% of work done by a machine to 95% of work. I wonder what the next 50 to 100 years is going to look like. What's the, what's the percentage of works done by computers specifically now compared to what it would be in the future? I'm recording that podcast, I probably, by the time you hear this podcast, it's already, probably already been out, but I'll, I'll tell you more about how to access that at the end of the podcast. Okay, so it says 95% of work was done by humans and animals. By 1960, the figure reversed, 95% of all work was performed by machines.

• 15:58David Senra?

  It would take, if it were possible, the muscle power of 700,000 people to power the flight of a jet. Machines made us capable of doing far more work than we and our animals could have ever done on our own. The big responsible company of 1960 was rich and international and going global. It kept honest books, hated to bribe officials, and paid its people decently. It maintained substantial training and education programs and promoted from within. So this is a huge idea that he hits on constantly. He, there's like checklist at the back of the book, and you, I think you can download them for free online by just Googling the responsible company checklist.

• 16:42David Senra?

  But he talks about like, you, something is seriously wrong with your company if you have to, if you have to, when there's new opportunities for promotions, if you're constantly hiring externally. So that's just a little preview of what he'll talk about. So it says, "It maintained substantial training and education programs and promoted from within. Operated programs to increase safety in the workplace and supported community hospitals, schools, and non-professional sports activities. The management philosophy in such a company derived from the West's earlier models for organizing large numbers of people through command and control."

• 17:17David Senra?

  So he's saying that they learned this from the military and the Roman Catholic Church, among other institutions. With new contributions from manufacturer Henry Ford and efficiency consultant Frederick Winslow Taylor. I gotta Google him. I gotta find out who that guy was. Maybe I know what his efficiency ideas were, but I don't recall his name right now. Or hearing it before, rather. The standard of living for less well-educated, lower salaried and wage-earning employees was higher than now. A big company was likely to be industrial, not financial. So now he's gonna tell us a little about what he sees as the wrong direction we went in.

• 18:00David Senra?

  As of this writing, 2/3 of the US economy relies on consumer spending. This is more, you know, gives you an idea of his personality. Poke your nose in any store in the mall and look around. Much of what we produce to sell to each other to earn our living is crap. Either ever more luxurious specialized goods like electronic temple massagers and personal oxygen bars are cheap, salty junk food and disposable clothing. Every piece of crap, because it was manufactured, and this is such an interesting point and I would have never thought of on my own.

• 18:41David Senra?

  Every piece of crap, because it was manufactured, contains within it something of the priceless applied human intelligence. So this idea of like where you have something, we're making something that's completely disposable and that we can make, you know, millions of, which is this crappy products. Yeah, we're using up something that's priceless, which is our applied human intelligence. And on an individual level, finite, right? It's an interesting thought. So let me read this whole sentence, because I stopped myself there. Every piece of crap, because it was manufactured, contains within it something of the priceless applied human intelligence for one, natural capital for another.

• 19:24David Senra?

  And natural capital, something taken from the forest or a river or soil that cannot be replaced faster than we deplete it. We're wasting our brains and our only world on the design, production, and consumption of things we don't need and that aren't good for us.

• 19:42David Senra?

  Something I found really admirable from Patagonia. Um, I, well, I was just researching before I started this podcast, before I recorded the podcast, rather, and um, they have this thing where like, let's say you buy a Patagonia, first of all, they'll repair, repair anything you buy forever, right? But let's say you bought a, I don't know, a jacket, uh, five years ago. You can go back in the store today and get a credit for a new item to replace it. And then they take your old jacket, they refurbish it, and then they sell it online. I think they have an online store called like WellWorn or something like this. Um, and again, that's just, that costs the company money, but it's something that like,

• 20:24David Senra?

  the idea we have to hammer to every single person that we know that's building a product or service, like you have got to put your customer first. That is better for the customer, not better for the company. And so this whole idea about how like these large, we always pick on these large companies that are usually not run by their founders anymore, and how just silly they are. I had an experience recently, I bought a pair of shoes, uh, took them out of the store. The next day I came back, cause I was like, oh, they're like, I bought the size I normally buy, but for this brand, they um, like, it's too, like, it hurts my feet. Can I just exchange them? Like, I don't want my money back, I just want, you know, one size up because it's hurting my toe. And like, no, you wore them. And I was like, okay, well, like, are you sure? Like, like, I don't want money back, I just want the right size.

• 21:08David Senra?

  No, you, you, as soon as you wear them, you can wear them for a minute and we couldn't, we couldn't take it back. And so like, compare and contrast that to Patagonia, like, this is how stupid these, these, these companies are. Because I'll never shop at that, that large company again. On an individual basis, that doesn't matter to them. But what are their customer acquisition costs? Like, and what is the lifetime value of a happy customer that keeps coming back? Much more than a, than a cheap pair of sneakers, of running shoes. It's just that they're so short sighted, as opposed to like a company, like if, if the founder was still in charge of that company, like there's zero, not zero chance, there's a lot less likely chance that they'd have such a silly, um, and, you know, self detriment. Policy.

• 21:54David Senra?

  So I don't know, I just love examples of companies that actually say, hey, I'm yeah, I'm going to take back this shirt that you had, like this jacket that's been five years old. And I'm going to make sure it gets recycled and somebody like it can benefit somebody else and hopefully spark joy in somebody else's life. And what's going to happen like the cost, what's the outcome of that? The customer's like, wow, these people are amazing. I'm going to keep shopping here. And then not only that, I'm now like, I'm not going to tell you the company that, you know, because I don't want to trash them, even though I guess I should, but it doesn't matter. But the the alternative is, you know, somebody that that Patagonia made happy and they felt good in that transaction, there was a good response to that is now going to tell their friends, hey, can you believe that Patagonia, I wore this jacket for years and they just

• 22:38David Senra?

  gave me a new credit so I can get a new jacket? And what like that, that word of mouth advertising is worth way more than a jacket and see, doesn't that seem like an obvious idea? Yet, when you, when you, we get around these large, you know, companies, they somehow they lose sight of this. It's a, I don't know, it befuddles me. Okay, so he's talking about some issues with, he's still going into like, what it means to be a responsible company over time. So this is in, it's broken down into a bunch of different things, like how to think about your stockholders, governments, and but this section about employees, I think is important. There's been a 50 year trend towards automation, moving jobs offshore, improvement in wages

• 23:21David Senra?

  in developing countries, and a flattening of wages in advanced countries. The next 50 years will be marked by pressure to restore the living wage. It was assumed as late as the 1960s that the annual pay of one wage earner should support his family. The new, more modest goal has a worker paid one half of what it takes to support the family of four. So he's talking, I do think like there's an, there's an obvious issue, if you look at the data from the United States. If you adjust for inflation, like the average income of a wage earner is just flat. It's been flat, I think, since the 1970s.

• 23:59David Senra?

  So, he's saying, "Hey, why don't we encourage companies to be more responsible to pay as much as they can to their employees?" Right? I am an advocate of that point of view, but I don't think that's the answer. My answer here is more entrepreneurship, because nobody's gonna care about your wage as much as you will. And entrepreneurs are able to capture the economic value that maybe a job, like, you know, that the market... The job doesn't pay. So, I don't know... I'd have to go back and look, like, is there examples in history where, like, this trend? This stagnation trend is reversed?

• 24:44David Senra?

  So, I don't know if that's even possible, or if we've seen it before. But I do think that just making entrepreneurship more easy to do allows people to capture more of the value they produce, as opposed to selling your time to, you know, an employer, like... I mean, I don't know if, like, I don't know if people think this, but, I mean, it seems rather obvious that, like, "Well, if your employer is willing to pay you X amount, like, they're clearly making X plus Y. So, why don't you just try to capture X plus Y yourself?" And I think a lot of people don't do that, it's because, you know, it seems to be like some kind of mythical process, or like, too complex process to do so. So, I think if we can make, if we share information that kind of, like, opens the, like, the secrets, if you will,

• 25:29David Senra?

  for lack of a better word, like, I think that's a, that's a good use of our time.

• 25:34David Senra?

  And then, this is something he talks about a lot, which is quality is strategy. This is just one sentence. The context here, he's talking about, you know, "Don't make a bad product. Don't waste your time making cigarettes, or sugary junk, or stuff like that." So, he says, "To make a bad product is to do bad business." And he's talking about bad product, not only a product that's bad for you, but also like poorly made. Okay, so now we got to the chapter all about meaningful work. So let's go into what they define that as. At its heart, to have meaningful work is to do something you love to do and are good at, and are good at doing for a living. Most people don't know at first what they love best. What they become best at develops by trial and error or by accident.

• 26:19David Senra?

  We are all good at something with words or numbers, or we work with our hands well, or we work best outside. One of the authors of this book, Yvonne, would rather spend his day picking apricots or hoeing his garden than sit at a desk and stare into a computer screen. Repetitive rhythmic work need not be numbing as anyone who has spent all day hammering pythons at the forge knows. It can be enlightening. Or joyous as the scene in Anna Karina, I should know how to pronounce that book by now, Anna Karina, where the aristocrat Levin size wheat with his peasants.

• 27:01David Senra?

  He can't keep up with them until he learns how to fall into a rhythm. The other author, Vincent, who once spent a muddy October picking grapes for his living, would rather spend his day at the keyboard than tending his garden. So I think what they're saying here is that we want to encourage a discussion about meaningful work, but no one can tell you what meaningful work is. It's something that you're gonna have to find out, and in their opinion, you have to find out through trial and error. Meaningful work is doing things you love to do often, though not always with other people. No responsible company can function well without a lot of different people doing things they love to do in concert with others. Doing what you love to do makes work meaningful.

• 27:46David Senra?

  Doing the right thing with others makes work meaningful.

• 27:55David Senra?

  Okay, so this is the part I was talking about earlier about

• 28:01David Senra?

  Patagonia attracting misfits. And I think independently, this story is important, this idea is important. Because it just shows, like, there's not like a

• 28:15David Senra?

  like a set set of talent that you can build a really great company with. Like, the configurations or the options are nearly limitless. So it says, "In the early days, Patagonia attracted the disaffected, people who loved climbing and surfing or vagabonding, and would come back to Ventura to pick up work for a few months at a time. Or people who had a degree in physics or biology, but for one reason or another, usually the inability or unwillingness to fit into academic culture, changed course. They would find a home at Patagonia because they found the culture congenially filled with other outsiders, misfits. A guidance counselor at St. Paula High School told Christine Tompkins'

• 28:59David Senra?

  told Christine Tompkins' mother not to waste her money sending her daughter to college. Christine, the unmotivated and indifferent student, would at age 30 become Patagonia's fast-learning CEO during its critical early days." It just tells you, like, intelligence does not always look the same. "We do not bristle with overachievers who would find reward in what we saw as the real world. Instead, we attracted bright, restless, unconventional people like Christine, who hadn't felt the call toward a vocation, and others who had sought and then abandoned one, or had pursued one that couldn't provide a living.

• 29:43David Senra?

  Many Patagonia employees turned out to have a vocation working for a small, quirky company, where no one knew what they couldn't do, so ended up doing things that they had no idea they could do in the company of others doing the same thing." So he's obviously talking about his own company there. "Doing something as silly as working..." Working in the clothing business turned out to engage the intelligence, imagination, and social needs for our unconventional anti-establishment employees. So in other words, talent that other people were overlooking, he just needed, they just needed the right environment and they needed people that were like them. This reminded me, for people that have subscribed to Founder's Notes, well, I know this, but

• 30:28David Senra?

  in Founder's Notes 23, I was taking notes on this podcast with the founder of WordPress, Matt Millenwig, and he's just got a, I read the book, I think it's called The Year, The Year Without Pants, which is, this journalist went to work for WordPress for like two years and then wrote a book about his experience. I might actually turn that into a Founder's episode or something in the future because I find it interesting. But I like the way Matt thinks a lot, and he's got a lot of just unconventional ideas that are not, again, he just, he uncovers these ideas just by questioning, like, well, are we sure this is like, this is the way what work has been done for such a long time? Like, are we sure that's the best way?

• 31:11David Senra?

  Have we actually asked ourselves, like, is there a better way? Are we thinking from first principles? And so that when I read that, those few paragraphs in The Responsible Company made me think of what he was saying, that WordPress has, I don't even know, like 500, I don't even know how many employees, but they're all remote. And his whole thing is about like, you know, distributed companies is clearly the future. Working in collaboration with people all over the world through the mechanism of the internet is clearly better than what we're doing now. I think he said something like, let me see if I can find it. So there's two quotes I want to read to you. He says, "We take so much about work for granted. We do things a certain way because that's how we did it in a previous job.

• 31:52David Senra?

  How much could we impact the world if we just got better at some of these things? Most companies just keep doing things the same way. We are like buggy whip makers riding around on horses." So he's saying like, we barely even touch the, like, we barely even scrape the surface for what, like, how we can rethink work. He also says that, you know, it's not distributed workforce and remote work is not for everybody. But the reason I bring that up is because, you know, he gets a lot of, they're like, you know, you're not going to build WordPress into a successful company doing this because we know how other successful companies in the past have done this. And so he questioned that assumption. He says, "A common criticism of remote work is to look at great tech companies of the past, like Oracle, Microsoft, things like that." And then people say, "What do you know that they don't?"

• 32:38David Senra?

  And he says, "My answer is that distributed companies are being built with a different set of talent." People went from Microsoft, then Google, and they did everything all over again. And then they went from Google to Facebook and did it all over again. They're repeating the same playbook. And you see this on resumes. So he gets a lot of people, obviously, apply to WordPress and you see that just the same group of people going from company to company. It's people bouncing from a small set of companies in the same few cities. Distributed companies are drawing from worldwide talent that hasn't worked at these companies before. And then he says, "You can fish in the same small pond of the Bay Area or in the ocean that is the rest of the world."

• 33:21David Senra?

  Okay, so back to the book. He says, "Today, Patagonia does employ a lot of people who found their vocation early and answered it. They were drawn to color from infancy, or started sewing clothes of their own design when they were 10, or earned a graduate degree in textile chemistry, or always drew and went to art school. We have more than we care to admit, several MBAs working in the company, some of whom really love business for itself, others who earned the degree to help them do well in life. We're not awash in entrepreneurs who by definition would rather be working for themselves. Patagonia also has bright locals who grew up in the area, feel at home here, don't want to leave, and find our company the most interesting place to work in town.

• 34:07David Senra?

  It's the best place in town for women to work. Conversely, we have some top executives who don't want to live in Ventura because they don't like it, or their families are settled elsewhere and they can afford to commute and do."

• 34:21David Senra?

  And continuing this, "And a number of people work for Patagonia and seek to come to Patagonia because they think the company's values coincide with their own." So what he's telling you, he's like, "Listen, there's not like, there's not a prototypical, there's not a prototypical Patagonia employee." So it says, "They come to work at Patagonia because they like our values and they think they coincide with their own." "That deep sympathy provides the extra motivation it takes to stay level-headed and alert when a workday gets difficult. It keeps people engaged when they have to figure out a new fabric source because the old one is found to have a toxic dye, or when they have to negotiate with a factory to invest in ventilation because someone from our sourcing department smelled something disturbing during a visit.

• 35:05David Senra?

  Doing the right thing motivates us to work past the point where we might otherwise give up. Meaningful work, it turns out, is not only doing what we love, but also giving back to the world. The two combined create the ground for a kind of ordinary human excellence that any business can treasure. Every company has to encourage and cultivate this ordinary human excellence if it is to become more nimble, responsive, and responsible. Every time people in the company do something new that was formerly thought impossible, they contribute significantly to the company's culture and to the sense that much is possible in the future."

• 35:45David Senra?

  So I want to skip ahead to this idea, something you don't see very commonly, is a company that creates a better product than its existing best-selling product. I mean, it's so uncommon that they wrote an entire book on it called "The Innovator's Dilemma," and it's something Yvonne did because he thought it was the right thing to do. That's, you know, probably easier because it was a small company at the time, but it's still something that he did and I think we can learn from. And here's the story. "By 1972, Chouinard Equipment was still a small company, doing about $400,000 a year in sales, but it had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States.

• 36:26David Senra?

  With the increased popularity of climbing and its concentration on the same well-tried routes..."

• 36:33David Senra?

  Our reusable hard steel pythons had become environmental villains. The same fragile cracks that had to endure repeated hammering of pythons during both replacement and removal were disfiguring. Okay, let me read that again. "The same fragile cracks had to endure repeated hammering of pythons during both replacement and removal, and the disfiguring was severe. After an ascent on the degraded nose route on El Capitan, which had been pristine a few summers earlier, Yvonne and his climbing partner Tom Frost decided to phase out the python business. It was a huge risk.

• 37:15David Senra?

  Pythons were the mainstay of the business, but the change had to be made for reasons both moral and practical. The routes were beautiful and satisfying and shouldn't be ruined, and to ruin them would put an end to or greatly reduce the possibilities for climbing in the most popular areas, and thus eventually hurt our business." So, they're gonna kill off their most profitable product, and they do so at a great risk, but the way they hedge that risk is, to me, like an understanding of human nature. Your customers are not morons. If you just tell them, "Hey, here's the problem we realized by using our own equipment. Here's what we're doing about it, and here's why."

• 38:00David Senra?

  They usually respond positively. Like, this whole idea of, I can't even believe it's like something that large companies lose sight of, it's just like, there's no such thing as a company. Like, it's just a collection of people, and your customers are a collection of people. So if you're two collections of people, you should treat each other humanely, and just realize that they're humans, and they most likely respond just like you do. So they write this long, it's a 14-page essay about why they're doing what they're doing, and they put it in their catalog, and here's their response. "So the catalog opened with an editorial from the owners of the environment, from the owners, on the environmental hazards of pythons.

• 38:40David Senra?

  A 14-page essay by Sierra climber Doug Robinson on how to use chocks began with a powerful paragraph." So chocks is what they're replacing with. There is a word for it, now I'm quoting from his, the first paragraph of this 14-page essay. There is a word for it, and the word is clean. Climbing with only nuts and runners for protection is clean climbing. Clean because the rock is left unaltered by the passing climber. Clean because nothing is hammered into the rock and then hammered back out, leaving the rock scarred and the next climber's experience less natural. Clean because the climber's protection leaves little traces of his ascension. Clean is climbing the rock without changing it.

• 39:23David Senra?

  A step closer to organic climbing for the natural man. So it says, this is the result. "Within a few months of the catalog's mailing, the python business had atrophied. Chalk sold faster than they could be made. At Chouinard Equipment, we learned that we can inspire our customers to do less harm simply by making them aware of the problem and then offering a solution. We also learned that by addressing the problem, we had forced ourselves to make a better product. Chalks were lighter than pythons and more secure." "We might not have risked the obsolescence of our python business just to sell something new, but doing the right thing motivated us, and it turned out to be good business."

• 40:06David Senra?

  So there's his premise again.

• 40:11David Senra?

  Okay, so a few pages later, I think this is a really good idea. And again, it's just more human and less corporate.

• 40:22David Senra?

  And what's good for people is good for business. So this has to do with kids. And keep in mind, what he's describing here may be, I don't even know if it's common now, but it's certainly more common than when he was doing it a few decades ago. "During the early 70s, one of the co-owners of Chouinard Equipment was Doreen Frost. She used to bring her daughter Marina to work, and no one minded. After the Chouinard's son Fletcher was born, Melinda, that's Yvonne's wife, brought him in as well. Then the other workers, as they had babies, brought them in as well, and so on. By the early 80s, you could find baby blankets draped over computer monitors,

• 41:04David Senra?

  and rattles, and toy trains littered the floor. And of course, kids cried."

• 41:12David Senra?

  The noise prompted a discussion about providing daycare. Um, not as a progressive measure, but child, uh, childcare in the workplace in those days was so rare, we didn't even know it was progressive. The mothers who worked for us simply wanted to be near their babies to breastfeed or comfort, comfort them when they need, when they were needed. The men at the company, including the co-authors and the women without kids, including the CEO, didn't agree that Patagonia should devote its scarce cash or space to running a nursery school. But backed by the moms, Melinda doggedly pursued her cause and eventually won out. This is what I mean, like Yvonne is not shy about hiding his, um, like his mistakes.

• 41:56David Senra?

  Or that like the, the, the feeding into this myth that like, there's such thing as a perfect person. He's like, no, I don't want kids here. Like I don't want to spend time or money that, that could be otherwise used for the business, taking care of kids. But slowly but surely, like he was, he was persuaded that this was actually better for his employees. And if it's better for his employees, it's better for the customers that they're serving. So, and it helps that his, his wife is doggedly, as he said, doggedly pursuing her cause. The kids stayed and they have made a difference to the quality of our workday. So now he's going to talk about like, what does that mean? For the sight and sound of children playing in the yard makes the place feel more human and less corporate.

• 42:38David Senra?

  Second, the presence of children makes adult conscious of their responsibilities as mammals. Grownups first, employees second. Third, our children care, our, our childcare, maternal and paternal leave and flex time policies allow women to advance in the company. Moreover, Anita Furtow, who has run the childcare center for two decades, knows a lot about raising children. New parents have been grateful for her advice and the quality of the care she and her staff provide. The kids grow up well and we're proud and we're, we're as proud of that as we are of the clothes that we produce. So he's talking about, okay, they, they had this idea that just kind of naturally evolved.

• 43:22David Senra?

  Then it got out of hand. So we had, we have this initial human instinct we have to overcome to, oh no, now we need a rule. Nope, can't have kids. Then, um, then we had to learn by talking to not only his wife, but other women, like why, why this is important to them. And for the dads too, like I would love to spend all day with my daughter if I could.

• 43:42David Senra?

  And then what happens, so then the, they're like, "Okay, we're gonna continue this, we're gonna dedicate resources to this." Then we find out the benefits, that like, you're gonna have less retention. He talks about like, how, oh, actually, let me, let me, let me stop my thought and then finish this sentence and then, so I don't run over what I was about to read.

• 44:02David Senra?

  "We have a very low employee turnover rate, especially among parents of school-aged children. The presence of kids and the introduction of childcare taught us that if there's some quality about the workplace you love and don't want to lose it, don't. It costs Patagonia roughly $50,000 on average to recruit, train, and get up to speed a new employee. If we want to make any money, it's a good idea to keep the ones we have happy and fully engaged." So what I was about to say was, not only like, you see that, like, the sequence I was just describing, but then there's all these positive externalities that you couldn't have predicted. The fact that, "Hey, this is gonna drop retention. If the higher the retention goes, the more money that the company's paying on to recruit, train, and, um, to recruit and train new employees."

• 44:46David Senra?

  But secondly, then you have, like, decades of experience, right? With this person that's running it, Anita Furtall, who's running this perk, or whatever you want to call it, for the company. And the benefit is, she can then pass on a couple decades of helping raise kids to new parents. And then now you have your employees feeling like, "Not only am I getting benefit because I'm working on a place that I like, I like their products, I get paid well, but there's, like, they actually care enough about me that they're helping me with like, a fundamental human experience, which is the raising of children." So, um, I don't know, I just think that, again, seems completely obvious to me, but when you interact with companies, it's like, "Why are you so corporate and not human?" Like, your customers are not corporations.

• 45:31David Senra?

  They're people. Even if you're selling to businesses, you're still selling to people. So, again, I just think that's a good idea that Yvonne is trying to share with us. Okay. Okay, so, something, really helpful.

• 45:47David Senra?

  When understanding like how, like why this guy thinks the way he does is to just understand the background. So there's a couple paragraphs here, the background that, that tell us the background of Yvonne's family and their working conditions. So I think is extremely important to understand why this guy is so unique. It says, "By the end of the 19th century, the factory labor base had shifted from farm girls to immigrant families. Our own family took part in this history. They sold their farm in Quebec to emigrate south to work the looms of the cotton and woolen mills along the Adrose-Scoggin River. The system was efficient. In 1908, in the company of his

• 46:28David Senra?

  parents and ten siblings, Yvonne's nine-year-old father took the train to Lewiston, Maine. The Grand Truck Railroad, the Grand Trunk Railroad Depot stood opposite the Bates Manufacturing Company's hiring hall. Behind the hall lay sprawl of four-decker wooden tenements known as Petite Canada. A family could arrive at the station and secure jobs for everyone who could physically work from ages six on up," so that means his nine-year-old dad at the time, "then walk half a block to rent their rooms. The French Canadians," which is Yvonne's background, "took work that all, the French Canadians took work that all

• 47:08David Senra?

  Yankees by then, including girls and women, regarded as beneath them. Was it meaningful work? Such a term wouldn't have occurred to our immigrant relatives. They were of the generation in transition from meaningful but hardscrabble life, bound to the land, to an industrial life of low-paid work for long hours in uncomfortable, if not unsafe conditions. They were no longer peasants. They become essentially industrial soldiers with no independent control over most of their waking hours. Their new life met their basic needs for food and shelter, as well as their social needs. Their friends worked alongside them. According to the view of psychologist Abraham Maslow, however, our

• 47:52David Senra?

  family members had yet to meet the two highest, most complex requirements in the hierarchy of needs, that being a sense of worth and self-fulfillment. It was Maslow's view that needs must be met in the order of their importance for survival, basics first, self-fulfillment last."

• 48:12David Senra?

  We suspect that as our family members advanced their basic needs, they lost hefty measures of self-worth and self-fulfillment. When they left the farm for the mill, they gained a regular income, which made life easier. But as overworked laborers in a deafening workspace, they lost their autonomy, sense of purpose, and their connection to nature. Farm life had been harsh, and in bad years, dangerous, but not demeaning in this new way. A few pages later, there's an example of long-term thinking, which may seem counterintuitive, but he's encouraging his own customers to buy less of their product. And, you know, that statement on its face, like, "Oh, this is crazy." And then he's gonna talk about it's actually benefits them,

• 48:56David Senra?

  because it actually helps attract more clients. More customers, rather. Okay, "We ask customers to pledge not to buy what they don't need or what won't last. If it's poorly made or likely to be fashionable, or to be fashionably wearable for only a season. We promise in turn to redouble our efforts to make useful, long-lasting products. We ask customers to pledge to repair first before discarding or replacing what breaks. In turn, we upsize our repair department staff to get the work done, to get the work done and turn around more quickly. We ask customers to pledge to reuse or recirculate what they no longer wore. We set up a program with eBay to make it easier for our customers to resell products and introduce used products for sale on our website.

• 49:40David Senra?

  Would we lose business as a result? We wagered that if our customers were to buy more thoughtfully, and if we were to do our job well and make useful, high-quality products, they would continue to buy from us, and we'd gain new customers who shared our commitment." And now we're gonna wrap up this chapter on meaningful work. And it says, "Meaningful work. What is it exactly? Regardless of our talent, our education, our preference for working with words, numbers, or our hands, our ability to cut pattern, lay out an ad, or negotiate with a supplier, we have meaningful work at Patagonia because our company does its best to be responsible

• 50:21David Senra?

  to people and nature. Our daily gestures, on one hand, mundane and often tedious, are, on the other hand, infused with the effort to give something useful and enjoyable to society without bringing undue harm to nature, the commons, or other workers." This is a really important part, because nothing is really exciting if you think about running a company. It says, "Tedium is easier to take when it has meaning." I read that sentence and it made me think. They have like, these like, I don't know what you would call them, like, hybrid reality shows about like entrepreneurship, like The Planet of the Apps was one of them, or Shark Tank, or all these other, these just shows. And they're like, uh, somebody, I saw a quote on, or tweet on Twitter, they're

• 51:06David Senra?

  just like, like, there could never be a show about entrepreneurship, because it'd be just, it'd be boring. Like, entrepreneurship may seem exciting from the outside, but like, you know, a lot of the stuff you have to do is just mundane. Um, but I like the idea that "tedium is easier to take when it has meaning." "To take one step toward responsibility, learn something, take another step, and let self-examination build on itself has engaged everyone at Patagonia. Many of our suppliers and customers are equally invested in this process of improvement. What engages us most deeply enlivens us. Lively, gratified workers make good business possible, and they make it thrive."

• 51:56David Senra?

  Now he's just got some, uh, let's see, this is...

• 52:02David Senra?

  Okay, so this is, uh, so he kinda expounds on this idea he was just talking about now, like, uh, you take little, small improvements over a long period of time is like how to make progress. And so how do you, how do you get started? He says, "Address first what you suspect you know already. Tease it out. What nags at you most whenever you hear about it or see its consequences? What is it you think you can do something about that your company will be good at getting done? Keep going, here's what will happen. The company will get smarter and more people will start to care deeply about creating a better quality business through improving its own social and environmental performance. In doing so, your people will have to pay better attention to all the business fundamentals.

• 52:46David Senra?

  And this boost in applied intelligence will result in a more fluid, less wasteful organization. You will spot money leaks you could not see before and you will gain the confidence to recognize and go after opportunities that a company bound by traditional corporate "see no evil" politeness cannot begin to address. Success motivates people, including your strays. Doing good creates better business."

• 53:14David Senra?

  So this section I'm in is actually, um, just like what's your response, like what's your responsibility to your workers? Like what's a responsible company supposed to do for workers? Um, so he's continuing to give us just some ideas about how to organize and, um, and basically manage your company. "To fully engage the minds and hearts of employees and minimize both the bulk and bulk associated with bureaucracy, larger companies have to figure out how to best organize productive working groups of different sizes for different ends. 12 is a good number for a small group to bond and work in concert to achieve a specific task with minimum hierarchy. Think of a jury, a tribal hunting party, or an army squad."

• 53:53David Senra?

  Anthropologist Robin Dunbar cites 150 as the magic number for community cohesion based on the number of human relationships the human brain can handle. When it builds a new plant, the manufacturer W.L. Gore puts in 150 parking spaces. When the plant exceeds that capacity, the company builds a new one. Microsoft and Intel also limit the number of employees per building to 150, though they both run plants with multiple buildings. Along the same lines, a military company comprises between 80 and 225 people. Chouinard Equipment, Patagonia's predecessor, was, as we mentioned, curiously pre-industrial revolution.

• 54:35David Senra?

  "Our tin sheds held equipment: a drop hammer forge, an anvil, a coal forge, jigs for drilling aluminum chocks, but no time clocks or assembly lines. Everyone was poor and most lived marginal, if well-traveled, lives. For a while, we paid a 10% bonus to anyone who had the initiative to work 40 hours a week, a practice that turned out to be illegal. We were busted and required to stop." That's interesting, I never knew that before. "We partied heartily. The shed faced a courtyard where we celebrated almost any event with a barbecued lamb and a keg."

• 55:17David Senra?

  "When we became a clothing company and as sales increased, we had to become more professional, a process that at first consisted of throwing bright, inexperienced young people into new jobs to see if they could learn what we needed to know how to do. We paid fairly well, considering the inexperience of our employees. Early on, we provided health care, although we did not have to. We have told the story of how we introduced childcare and parental leave. We never made anyone dress for work, though those coming into the company from the workday world had to relearn how to dress casually in order to fit in. People were free to take long break midday to go surf or run, with the understanding that they came in early or stayed late, or at any rate, they just got the work done."

• 56:02David Senra?

  Our worst day as an employer came in 1991 when we laid off 150 employees. For two years, now he's gonna talk about his mistakes, or a mistake, rather. For two years, we had managed the company too carelessly, bought too much inventory, sold too little of it, hired too many people, and salted away too little money to pay for an expansion that our bank cheerfully financed until they got into troubles of their own and pulled the plug. Costs had to go down and fast. We should note the bracing fact that in 1991, after the layoffs, morale improved among the workers still with us.

• 56:43David Senra?

  The hovering axe had fallen. Those of us left still had our necks. We were a much soberer lot, absent the intoxication of growth, meaning just don't grow for growth's sake, and more focused. We knew what we had to do to bring the business back to financial health, and we did. So now he's gonna get into like, what is your responsibility to your customers? He's got some good advice here. The Noe left myself, I would say is a six-word summary of this entire section, and it's "Build something useful and don't bullshit." So it starts out with a question. "How to gain a customer and keep one? First, make something or offer a service someone can use for which satisfaction endures.

• 57:26David Senra?

  Second, your company should romance, but not bullshit, the people whose business it solicits." Paul Hawken, when he was still running his Smith and Hawken Gardening Supplies Company, told us that he didn't like to advertise because he didn't want that kind of relationship with his customer. He was referring to the alternate reality environment of the magazine ad, wherein a business bullhorns its message in the same space as other unrelated voices, all barking their own individual messages. Like a bizarre, but without the smell of spices, or the dance of a charmed snake. Since the mid 1980s, when Hawken made his comment, "Commercial space has much expanded and grown ever more noisy.

• 58:09David Senra?

  More products have become more disposable, more customers experience more frustration." I agree with that 100%. "When a flimsy product fails and they have to deal with the customer service person on the scratchy line from the offshore call center, who has no authority to correct a problem and, instead, repeats the company's rules." "If the chase for cheaper labor is playing out to its conclusion, so is the race to attract customers on price alone." This is an important idea he has here. So let me start from the beginning. "If the chase for cheaper labor is playing out to its conclusion,

• 58:52David Senra?

  so is the race to attract customers on price alone. When the product in question won't last and the service won't deliver. Any customer can go online and find the cheapest price for anything, anywhere in the world. The strongest thing your company can do is something no one else will do or will do well." "To turn for a moment to romance. Selling and marketing seek to incite desire, but a company has to love to sell something its customer loves to buy. For both ethical and practical reasons, the selling story," to paraphrase Mark Twain, "has to be mostly true. A company needs to present itself well to the customer.

• 59:37David Senra?

  It may even preen a little, the way a lover might take care to dress for a date. A life story or product story told just the side of myth-making is okay when it fairly represents the real. But beware of conjuring a false image of your company's goods or services. Mystification will no longer work in a world where stage fog can quickly be dispersed by a competitor, activist, or regulator."

• 1:00:06David Senra?

  If you are responsible for a company's advertising and marketing, be truthful. The anonymous talking head doesn't really represent your brand or product. Neither does Tiger Woods. Most people under 40 don't watch the ads placed on TV at such great expense. They fast forward through the boring bits when they watch the show after airtime on a laptop. Before I continue his line of thought here, that's something else that I just learned from taking notes on the podcast with Toby, I think it's Lukey. He's the founder of Shopify.

• 1:00:46David Senra?

  And he's like, why doesn't every single product have a video of the founder explaining why the product was made, like why it needed to exist? He's like, because he spends a lot of time, you know, talking about the founding myth or the founding story of Shopify. How he was just starting online, trying to sell snowboards. And he didn't like any of the tools, it was a pain in the ass to sell snowboards. So that, what his point is, is like when customers, again, they're just people and we're by nature tool builders and storytellers. And so when a customer knows why you made the product, like what problem you're trying to solve, how you think about it, that makes that product more valuable. It's more, they actually get an increased utility out of that product long-term.

• 1:01:31David Senra?

  I love that idea. Okay, so continuing this, says customers are expensive to find and to replace. They will become more so. You also see, he's also right about this. He wrote this book, I think, first publication, I think it was in 2012, and I think they updated in 2016, but I just saw data online that customer acquisition costs are going, are increasing to the point where a lot of direct-to-consumer brands are finding it actually cheaper to go the old-school route of having physical stores where rent is your new customer acquisition cost as opposed to just continuing to dump money into like a digital advertising duopoly. Okay, so customers are expensive to find and replace and will become more so, 100%. The responsible company has to treat the customer as, if not a friend, a neighbor

• 1:02:14David Senra?

  or colleague who shares a love for what the company offers. Say a particular kind of clothing, food, shelter, education, art, sport, or entertainment. The wooing of customers can be assigned a cost per thousand exposures, scaled, tested, subjected to strategy. But the relationship, once sealed, is intimate and cannot be abstracted or reduced to a transaction. It's kind of that kind of thinking when you hear a sentence like that from Yvonne. Kind of makes sense why he's going to take something he sold you five years ago and replace it, repair it for free, or replace it for free as well. Because he does not looking at it as an individual transaction. Yes, and in that individual transaction, yes, the company's losing money. Over the long term, they're definitely not. Okay, someone will be happy to get your company's email, or he may wince.

• 1:02:59David Senra?

  She will order from your catalog, or use it as kindling. It says, "The responsible company has to continue to state its case, provide the best information it can on why its products or services meet a need, how those products are made, how long they'll last, and what the customer has to do to make them last longer. And finally, what to do with them when they reach their end, the end of their, the end of their useful life." But you see why at the beginning I talked about like, I'm completely biased to Yvonne. I just think that it's just straightforward, no BS, good ideas. And communicate, and just like a really easy to understand.

• 1:03:43David Senra?

  I just, I please, I appreciate like the simplicity of the way he thinks and just again, like it's just good common sense. And in common sense, I think backed up by, you know, 40 plus years of experience. Okay, so this, this last section is, "Don't do things that have no, no useful purpose. Being bold can lead to new discovery, and we need more small businesses." And he's going to communicate a lot in a very few sentences. "Companies that recognize the opportunity to use the intelligence and creative capacity of their people to do less harm, certainly less harm that serves no useful purpose, will benefit. We advocate a combination of steady improvements with the occasional,

• 1:04:27David Senra?

  breathtakingly bold move to keep everyone awake and motivated, to show leadership that reflects well on everyone in the company. Bold moves that disrupt accepted practices are more likely to lead to the discovery of a new, more environmentally responsible product or service you can offer."

• 1:04:48David Senra?

  The advanced industrial economies no longer create enough well-paying jobs. The job base no longer underpins with any stability the economy. Hence why I said we need more small businesses. We need a new economy built on smaller scale enterprise. I guess he says it too. That wasn't even my idea. I just took his idea and said it was my own, sorry. There is much to be done and much we can do. Start where you get the least resistance and most cooperation and go from there.

• 1:05:19David Senra?

  Alright, so that's where I'm gonna leave this book. If you wanna buy the book, I leave a link in the show notes and everyone. I also, um, if you wanna see the book I'm gonna do next, I still have that. If you go to founderspodcast.com, you'll now see in the header, they have like a little A with a smiley face. That is a collection of every single book. There's 57 of them so far, and by the time you hear this, I'll have 58 up there, so you know which one I'm working on that week. And if you buy it from there, it obviously benefits the podcast, because Amazon sells me a small percentage of the sale. It's like tipping me a dollar or something like that, a little less. I think it's like 80 cents, something like that. But, at this point, if you do give value from my work and you do wanna support this podcast, I just have one thing to ask from you.

• 1:06:02David Senra?

  As you just saw, I presented the entire podcast interruption-free, no ads. So the one thing I have to ask for you is just subscribe to Founder's Notes. It's a project I'm extremely passionate about. I'm archiving all the entrepreneurial knowledge that appears in podcasts and taking it out into easily digestible forms to accelerate the learning from one entrepreneur to another. So, basically Founder's Notes lets you know what other founders are thinking. I listen to podcasts with entrepreneurs, I write down their key ideas, and I email them to you once a week. Every week, you're gonna receive ideas from seven founders. And when you subscribe, you also unlock the entire archive, which at the time of this recording contains ideas from 150-plus different founders.

• 1:06:47David Senra?

  So it's, um, last I counted, it's basically, because all my notes are in like bullet form, no fluff, no bullshit, none of that. I don't ever wanna waste any of your time. It's the exact opposite of what I'm gonna do, actually. But, yeah, imagine, it's basically like if you read a book and a half. I think the average book now is like 60,000 words, nonfiction books, something like that. So, I think I'm well over that. And it's, imagine reading a book in bullet form, if you wanna read the entire archive, which I'd recommend doing. Maybe not all at once.

• 1:07:18David Senra?

  Of just great ideas from one entrepreneur to another. So you can get all this. I make it, even though I think it's more valuable for founders, I know there's some people that subscribe to the list that aren't founders yet and want to be. So I keep it affordable for everybody. I just ask $10 a month or $100 a year. So if you enjoy my podcast and all the time and effort I put into this and you want to support me, that's the way to do it. Subscribe to Founders Notes, $10 a month, $100 a year, and you're definitely doing your part. Not only are you going to get all my notes, but you help me keep this podcast going and free for everybody. And one other thing, I'm not going to belabor at this point, but I do have a private podcast feed. And if you want access to that feed, I make it free for everybody.

• 1:08:02David Senra?

  And if you want access to that feed, all you have to do is leave a review, take a screenshot of the review and email it to me at foundersreviews@gmail. So founders, just like the name of the podcast, plural, founders, reviews, plural again, at gmail.com. Send me a screenshot. I reply back to each email personally with a link to the private podcast feed and instructions on how to add it. Takes you between leaving the review, taking the screenshot, emailing me and adding the private podcast link. You're talking two, maybe three minutes of your time. And in return, I continue to produce podcasts that are available nowhere else. By the time you're listening to, I already have four done. I'm recording the fifth one tomorrow. So by the time you hear this, the fifth one should already be out.

• 1:08:49David Senra?

  And not only that, for two or three minutes of your time and helping me out, as I continue to add to this private podcast feed, which I plan on doing one to two a month, if not more, or

• 1:09:03David Senra?

  let me not overpromise, one to two a month, because I do books, I do entire books.

• 1:09:09David Senra?

  But anyways, what I'm saying is that that feed will continue to update. You don't have to do anything else after you leave that review. So for two or three minutes of your time, you're literally going to wind up getting hundreds of hours of work from me. And again, I just think it's a, it's very important to incentivize you to help me out because leaving those reviews is very helpful. You know, it's helpful because every single podcast you listen to, they ask, ask you to do this. As far as I know, I listen to a lot of podcasts, no one else has a dedicated reviewer only feed. I'm sure once people hear about this, they'll start doing it because I think it's a great idea. I think it's a really good transaction for both of us. So please do that. Oh, and if you're listening on Overcast, Breaker, any other places, I just found out

• 1:09:51David Senra?

  this week, there's some, I think it's Pocket Casts, which doesn't let you. So anyways, let me, before I get there, if you're listening to things on like Overcast and Breaker, Overcast is a really popular podcast app for, for my listeners. They have a thing where you can press like the star or the heart. So just press that, it changes color, take a screenshot. And what you're doing is you're, you're, you're, you're telling people in your network, hey, I like this, this episode. And so it'll show up to when other people are searching like specific categories like business podcasts and such. Anyways, you can screenshot that to me and I'll, same thing, I'll send you that link. It's the same thing. If you're on a podcast like Pocket Casts and other ones where they don't have any kind of heart recommendation review feature, you can just post about this podcast on social

• 1:10:34David Senra?

  media, take a screenshot of that and send it to me. Obviously I want to optimize first for reviews on podcasts. So please only do this if your podcast, if your podcast player of choice doesn't have a review function because that's most important. But I also don't want people like that are on Pocket Casts or any other ones not to, not to have the opportunity to help spread the word about the podcast and, and get access to this feed. Because again, I think these ideas are very valuable and I want them to spread far and wide because I want to see more people become entrepreneurs. I want to see more people do, have meaningful work. And I think we all benefit from the experience of, of all these entrepreneurs, even if we're, we're not running our own company. They have good ideas that we can use in our work. And if we're going to be spending almost half of our time, waking moments working, like we might as well be best and optimized for that. So in any event, uh, thank you very much for listening.

• 1:11:19David Senra?

  Please tell your friends about it and I will be back next week. I'm pretty sure, well.

• 1:11:26David Senra?

  We're either gonna... I'm actually not sure which book I'm gonna do. I have a stack, so I have to look for it. But anyways, by the time you hear this podcast, if you want to know what book I'm doing, go to amazon.com/forshop/forfounderspodcast and you'll see the book on there. They're in reverse chronological order, or you just go to founderspodcast and you click that little Amazon thing in the header. Anyways, thank you very much for your support and I'll talk to you next week.