Sam Walton, every mention
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every year anyone David Rosenthal 156Ben Gilbert 58David Senra 16Charlie Munger 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Sam Walton comes up
Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 52:56 Ben Gilbert You look at Ingvar, you look at Sam Walton, you look at Buffett.
- ▶ 3:38:28 David Rosenthal With Sam Walton, Henry Ford, with the very, very greatest American entrepreneurs of all time.
IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 13:33 David Rosenthal I mean, Sam Walton,
- ▶ 16:06 David Rosenthal I don't recall exactly like the Walmart story, but I mean, even that, I think Sam was like from family and banks and other folks taking money.
- ▶ 24:11 David Rosenthal He had been shopping the competition doing the Sam Walton thing.
- ▶ 2:56:25 David Rosenthal I think they're a merchant at heart, and Ingvar was a merchant at heart in the same way that Sam Walton and Jim Senegal and Saul Price and Jeff Bezos were and are.
Holiday Special 2023 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:55:46 David Senra Sam Walton, Jim Senegal, Jeff Bezos, Bernie Marcus.
Charlie Munger (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 29:01 David Rosenthal Did you know Sam?
- ▶ 29:03 David Rosenthal Walton?
- ▶ 29:04 Charlie Munger No, never met him.
Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 8:40 Ben Gilbert I do think he's top two, top three with Sam Walton, of course.
- ▶ 8:44 David Rosenthal Sam Walton actually wrote in Made in America
- ▶ 11:23 David Rosenthal When Saul gets out there to San Diego, in a parallel moment to Sam Walton's early life, Saul meets his future wife while he's in high school, and it turns out that
- ▶ 11:34 David Rosenthal Saul's future wife's first name is Helen, just like Sam's wife name is also Helen, and Sam's wife would be very influential on him, along with her family.
- ▶ 11:57 David Rosenthal Literally, that's what's about to happen here, just like 10 years before Sam and Walmart.
- ▶ 18:27 David Rosenthal So if Saul were Sam Walton,
- ▶ 18:36 David Rosenthal No, this is how Saul is different than Sam.
- ▶ 21:04 David Rosenthal I mean, Sam Walton talks about this in Made in America.
- ▶ 21:10 David Rosenthal They were expanding across the country, and he was like, oh great, we're gonna draft off the Fedmart brand, and it was the same thing with Kmart.
- ▶ 24:00 David Rosenthal First, he invents the discounter, which then Sam Walton, Kresge with Kmart, Dayton with Target, copy, and becomes the dominant retail form of America.
- ▶ 30:08 Ben Gilbert Sam Walton bragged about it in Made in America about we could get this, you know, incredible number of, I don't even remember what that thing was, but build a pyramid of them in the parking lot and blow them out to get people to come and…
- ▶ 34:46 David Rosenthal So they had so much more access to capital, certainly than FedMart, and even than Sam Walton and Walmart.
- ▶ 34:52 David Rosenthal You know, Sam had to fight bitterly, last mile by last mile, building out his distribution network to beat Kmart.
- ▶ 35:53 Ben Gilbert Remember Amazon's early Oracle database, or that Sam Walton built out a private satellite network to get real-time sales data?
- ▶ 1:05:08 David Rosenthal Also in 1982, Saul gets a call from his old buddy Sam Walton.
- ▶ 1:05:33 David Rosenthal I think he knows what Sam is up to, but he doesn't really care.
- ▶ 1:05:39 David Rosenthal So Sam and Helen come out, they all have a nice dinner in La Jolla.
- ▶ 1:05:48 David Rosenthal Sam, of course, goes back to Bentonville, and within 12 months, guess what pops up?
- ▶ 1:05:58 David Rosenthal And this is really the major difference here between Saul and Sam.
- ▶ 1:06:08 David Rosenthal There's this amazing story that Sam tells in Made in America, where a few years later, Sam is going around again to Price Club shopping his competitors with his tape recorder.
- ▶ 1:06:22 David Rosenthal And the security at the store confiscates Sam's tape recorder.
- ▶ 1:06:26 David Rosenthal Saul ends up just mailing it right back to Sam and he's like, keep your notes.
- ▶ 1:13:44 David Rosenthal So, Price Club was certainly doing fine, it wasn't declining, but Jim and Jeff at Costco, and certainly Sam at Walmart and Sam's Club, they are pedal to the metal, aggressively expanding, and that's not really Saul and Robert's MO.
Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 44:34 David Rosenthal Kelly Johnson is sort of like Sam Walton in his prop plane, scouting out for, you know, Walmart locations, flying sideways.
Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast) · Acquired
- ▶ 10:57 David Senra You mentioned it on the Walmart episode, where it's like, everybody says, oh, Sam Walton didn't start Walmart until he's 44.
- ▶ 13:01 David Senra You can't understand Jeff Bezos until you study Sam Walton.
- ▶ 13:03 David Senra You can't understand Sam Walton.
- ▶ 13:06 Ben Gilbert And even all these contemporaries, like the point that Walton always made was, I don't think my competitors are stupid.
- ▶ 14:51 David Senra And so what I'm looking at is like, when I'm reading about Sam Walton, right, it's just like,
- ▶ 14:55 David Senra Uh, the, the, the, the story we both hit on all the podcasts, cause I've done a bunch of podcasts on Sam too, where it's like, the guy's pissed off.
- ▶ 20:36 David Senra And, like, Sam Walton's book.
- ▶ 20:45 David Senra And then you could read it in a week, and then you could listen to Acquire's episodes, you can listen to David's episodes on Sam.
- ▶ 20:55 Ben Gilbert 90% of Sam's wisdom, or do you have .1% of Sam's wisdom after?
- ▶ 21:44 David Rosenthal And it's Sam Walton's wisdom.
- ▶ 25:28 David Senra And then you guys made the point in that, you know, Jeff Bezos took a lot of ideas from Sam.
- ▶ 37:21 David Senra Like, Sam Walton, when you tell the story where his, his landlord screws him over, and he goes, he goes, I'm not whipped, I, I found, I found this store, I'll do it again, right?
- ▶ 54:41 David Senra It's the combination of these ideas, like Sam Walton taking soul prices ideas and his competitor ideas and like, Hey, what about you guys are kind of ignoring these like 4000 person, uh, communities.
- ▶ 1:05:19 David Senra Sam Walton's career is repetition.
- ▶ 1:15:45 David Senra You know, Sam Walton is one of the rare guys where he gets to the end, he knows he's dying, because he's got cancer all over his body when he's writing that book
- ▶ 1:48:20 David Senra It's like they didn't, there's no way when you could interview Sam Walton when he's, his shoes, the bottom of his shoes has watermelon and donkey crap.
- ▶ 1:52:32 Ben Gilbert If, if the next Sam Walton has the opportunity to raise venture capital dollars and he's like, you know what?
- ▶ 2:32:45 David Senra So, but they're operating at a different level where it's like, oh, these influence and some founders, the smart ones don't let, uh, like Sam Walton, you know, he's like, don't give us
- ▶ 2:33:24 David Senra Because everything, his entire thing, the low cost structure thing, that's, that's not, that's a Walton thing.
Enron · Acquired
- ▶ 13:41 David Rosenthal Lay, like our first protagonist of this season, Sam Walton, Lay was born in rural Missouri in 1942, after Walton.
Qualcomm · Acquired
- ▶ 36:02 David Rosenthal Yeah, Sam wanted to broadcast out the, you know, the Saturday.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 11:22 David Rosenthal We didn't, you tweeted about it, but at the end of Made in America, Sam writes in 1992, literally as he lays dying, Sam Walton
- ▶ 1:11:08 David Rosenthal Also echoes of Sam Walton.
- ▶ 1:59:41 David Rosenthal They're like, no, like I, Sam is my hero.
- ▶ 3:25:01 David Rosenthal He's old school, he's got the Sol Price DNA, work for Sol Price, you know, new Sam Walton,
- ▶ 3:25:25 David Rosenthal Sam did this.
- ▶ 3:27:23 David Rosenthal You don't have to pay Sam any money to shop there.
- ▶ 4:05:55 David Rosenthal Entrepreneurs starting concurrently and before Sam Walton, but Saul Price, Sam Walton, Jim Senegal, Jeff Bezos.
- ▶ 4:06:11 David Rosenthal That Sam Walton quote that I just loved from, you know, Made in America of like, go shop our competitors, come back, don't tell me what they're doing wrong, tell me what they're doing right.
Walmart · Acquired
- ▶ 1:04 Ben Gilbert And in all of the research for today's episode, we learned that many of the mental models and quotes ascribed to Jeff Bezos were really the original thoughts of Sam Walton.
- ▶ 1:15 Ben Gilbert Also not entirely true either, since Sam Walton's greatest gift was the ability to digest, learn, adapt, test, and integrate new ideas from others.
- ▶ 1:27 Ben Gilbert Today, we explore Sam's creation, which ushered in a new era of American retail, and now global retail, from the post-World War II period all the way to today.
- ▶ 3:13 Ben Gilbert There are so many lessons that are totally applicable today, and every entrepreneur can learn from Sam Walton.
- ▶ 8:10 David Rosenthal Almost like Sam Walton.
- ▶ 8:28 David Rosenthal Well, we do have to thank the man, Sam Walton himself, and his co-author, John Huey, for his autobiography, Made in America, which is just amazing.
- ▶ 8:56 David Rosenthal Sam and the Walmart story is like the bridge between the business America that was John Rockefeller and Standard Oil and Amazon and Jeff Bezos.
- ▶ 9:10 Ben Gilbert In many ways, he was the last of the Rockefeller type tycoons, but the first of the sort of modern megacorp, not tech business, but almost tech business era founders.
- ▶ 9:25 David Rosenthal Reading the story is how much Walmart embraced technology and Sam embraced technology, and I think they were arguably the first corporation in America to embrace computing as a business paradigm.
- ▶ 10:50 David Rosenthal Well, anyway, back in March of 1918 in Kingfisher, one Samuel Moore Walton was born to Thomas Gibson Walton and Nancy Lee, their first oldest child.
- ▶ 11:39 David Rosenthal And speaking of brothers, in December, 19, 21, Sam gets one for himself, one James Lawrence Walton, Bud, better known as Bud.
- ▶ 12:18 David Rosenthal Unfortunately though for Sam and Bud, maybe fortunately for Walmart,
- ▶ 13:16 David Rosenthal Literally kick people out of their farms, out of their homes, and he would bring Sam and Bud along with him for this.
- ▶ 13:23 Ben Gilbert I remember reading in Made in America, I sort of thought that what Sam was gonna say is that his father worked with these farmers the best he could to help them save the business where they could, or cut a deal.
- ▶ 14:02 David Rosenthal But yeah, so all of this makes an impression on Sam, and Sam says in the book in his very Sam way, quote, all of this must have made an impression on me as a kid, although I don't ever remember saying anything to myself like, I'll never be…
- ▶ 14:30 Ben Gilbert All of Sam's future generations are worth a few hundred billion dollars, depending on the day that you look at Walmart's market cap, since it's nearly all invested in Walmart, but it's a multi-hundred billion dollar family.
- ▶ 14:47 David Rosenthal So, like many kids during the Depression, Sam and Bud, as they're growing up, they do all sorts of odd jobs around the house to help out the family.
- ▶ 15:08 David Rosenthal Sam starts selling magazine subscriptions.
- ▶ 15:45 David Rosenthal So besides all of these sort of proto entrepreneurial ventures that Sam is undertaking as a teenager, he also becomes at age 13, the youngest Eagle Scout ever certified in Missouri history.
- ▶ 16:24 Ben Gilbert So Sam got his Eagle at age 13.
- ▶ 16:45 David Rosenthal So the other thing, this is pretty crazy that young Sam as a teenager exhibits, he becomes the quarterback of the football team in his high school.
- ▶ 16:56 David Rosenthal Sam, if you've ever seen any photos or video, he's such an incredible folksy dude listening to his talks.
- ▶ 17:55 David Rosenthal And man, was that Sam Walton.
- ▶ 18:21 David Rosenthal Both of these forces shape Sam, right?
- ▶ 20:05 David Rosenthal And there's a great quote in the book from the circulation manager of the Missourian says we hired Sam to deliver newspapers.
- ▶ 20:14 David Rosenthal When school started, we had a drive to get the kids in the fraternities and sororities to subscribe, and Sam was the boy we had do that because he could sell more than anybody else.
- ▶ 20:34 Ben Gilbert Warren's is about understanding the value of compounding, and it's not that Sam didn't, but it's that Sam was a salesman.
- ▶ 21:02 David Rosenthal Sam is clearly this natural entrepreneur.
- ▶ 21:43 David Rosenthal And you know, and Sam is like, he really keeps it real in the book.
- ▶ 23:18 David Rosenthal And the story that Sam tells is JC shows him how to tie, you know, packages, merchandise that is sold with the least amount of twine and paper possible.
- ▶ 23:42 David Rosenthal And Sam had been in ROTC, he's commissioned, he's gonna join the army.
- ▶ 23:53 David Rosenthal You know, Sam thinks he's gonna go probably off to Europe.
- ▶ 24:04 David Rosenthal Bud's going off to join the Navy and Sam is going to stay home in America at a desk job.
- ▶ 24:56 David Rosenthal But her father LS Robson was unlike Sam's family, a very wealthy and successful businessman, financier, trader in the broader Tulsa area.
- ▶ 25:12 David Rosenthal And he ends up taking a big shine to Sam and would become hugely influential along with Helen because he marries Helen, of course.
- ▶ 25:20 David Rosenthal And Sam would say the Robsons were very smart about the way they handled
- ▶ 25:46 David Rosenthal And that partnership that Helen and Sam set up
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