#394 An Orphan Who Built An Empire: Leonardo Del Vecchio and The Founding of Luxottica

第394章 一个孤儿创建的帝国:莱昂纳多·德尔·维基奥与Luxottica的创立

Founders

2025-07-13

1 小时 8 分钟
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单集简介 ...

Your dad dies before you’re born. Your mom can’t afford to take care of you. You grow up without a family and in an institution. You learn a trade and start working full time at the age of 14. You work all day and go to school at night. You’re precise, meticulous, restless, and work circles around everyone. You’re promoted to run the factory at 18 but the thought of working for anyone else terrifies you. For your entire life you’ll be obsessed with control. You’ll do whatever it takes to escape the harshness of poverty and the pangs of hunger. You organize your life around a simple principle: "I want to be the best at everything I do.” You start your own workshop, create the best product, and your biggest customer wants to become your partner. They underestimate you and abuse you. You destroy them. You take all of their customers. You’re not satisfied with being a subcontractor. You want everything. You make your own glasses, you buy your distributor, you list your company on the New York Stock Exchange, you complete hostile takeovers of much larger companies, you buy entire retail chains, and control everything about your product: from the raw materials to the relationship with the customer. Your competitors call you the hawk because you circle, wait, and then strike. You work 20 hours a day and fuse yourself with the factory. You get married four times, to three different women, and have six kids. You don’t look back, you don’t rest on your laurels, and you don’t go to sleep on wins. You make something great, then you do it again. Your biggest deal comes 60 years into your career. The only thing that could stop you was death.  You are Leonardo Del Vecchio.  This episode is what I learned from reading Leonardo Del Vecchio by Thomas Ebhardt and The Spectacle of Big Lens: How One Giant Company Will Dominate How the World Sees by Sam Knight. ------ ⁠Ramp⁠ gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud ⁠by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money.⁠ ----- Automate compliance, security, and trust with Vanta. Vanta helps you win trust, close deals, and stay secure—faster and with less effort. ⁠Find out how increased security leads to more customers by going to Vanta⁠. Tell them David from Founders sent you and you'll get $1000 off. ----- Join my free email newsletter to⁠ get my top 10 highlights from every book⁠ ----
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单集文稿 ...

  • It's amazing to me how across the last three episodes, you had world-class founders,

  • founders that build the leading companies in their industries,

  • and they all share the same obsession, and that is investing heavily in technology.

  • It didn't matter if they were making eyeglasses, like Del Vecchio,

  • or tires, or some of the best chocolate in the world.

  • They all had the same obsession that founders like Andrew Carnegie had,

  • that John D. Rockefeller had as well.

  • If you read Andrew Carnegie's autobiography,

  • you'll see one of the main ideas in that book is invest in technology.

  • Because the savings compound,

  • it gives you an advantage over your slower moving competitors and can be the difference between a profit and a loss.

  • Leonardo Delvecchio builds the most dominant business in his industry by far,

  • one that is still thriving today.

  • And in his biography, it says, his profits must first be reinvested in the heart of his own company.

  • In research and development, in automation and technology,

  • never skimp when it comes to spending to be at the cutting edge.

  • It has always been like this.

  • If there's a new machine to buy, he wants it immediately.

  • This heavy investment in research and development and the latest technology is exactly what using Ramp for your business is like.

  • Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast and Ramp is a guaranteed time and money saver.