#405 How Rockefeller Worked

第405期 如何洛克菲勒工作

Founders

2025-11-17

58 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

This episode covers the insanely valuable company-building principles of John D. Rockefeller—and nothing else. I spent over 40 hours reading (and rereading) this obscure biography of Rockefeller that costs $1,000 I then spent several days editing down 25 pages of notes from the book. I deleted everything that was not How Rockefeller Works Episode sponsors: ⁠ 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.⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ 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. ⁠⁠⁠https://www.vanta.com/founders⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ Collateral⁠⁠ transforms your complex ideas into compelling narratives. Collateral crafts institutional grade marketing collateral for private equity, private credit, real estate, venture capital, family offices, hedge funds, oil & gas companies, and all kinds of corporations. Storytelling is one of the highest forms of leverage and you should invest heavily in it. You can do that by going to ⁠⁠https://collateral.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
更多

单集文稿 ...

  • So I have a collection of these obscure Rockefeller biographies.

  • Probably have like 10 of them.

  • Many of them were published decades ago.

  • But I just recently reread what I feel is the best, the single best biography of Rockefeller.

  • It's called John D.

  • The Founding Fathers of the Rockefellers, written by David Freeman Hawk,

  • and was published all the way back in 1980.

  • The reason I think this is the best biography of Rockefellers is

  • because it has the most concise description of how he actually built standard oil,

  • which is what you and I are actually interested in.

  • So I just recently reread it.

  • I stripped away all the biographical details and made a list of about a hundred different ideas that Rockefeller used to build what Charlie Munger said was the greatest company ever created.

  • And so this episode is going to be really simple.

  • I'm just going to run through these ideas with you.

  • The first idea to Rockefeller business resembled a form of war.

  • It was very natural for him to start a letter with the words,

  • I'm in the midst of a hard battle today.

  • He would transmit all of his messages in code,

  • and he would cover his entire operations with secrecy.

  • And when he was much older, he admitted this.