The Exchanges

Q How many things at any given time are you having to focus on?

A A fair amount. So if you're CEO, you're, you're managing, You know, 15, 20 different things always. You're managing people. You manage technology. You're managing budgets. You're managing investors. You're managing, uh, infrastructure. You're managing transportation. You're managing logistics. You're managing pricing. You're managing procurement with the vendors. You're managing customer relations. You're managing sales. You're managing Salesforce excellence. I mean, it's just, there's about 20 things that are your life. Like, that's what a C, that's what a good CEO does. The problem with a lot of CEOs is they've come up through just Sales or operations, and they're good at that, but they kind of just delegate the other 15 things. That's, that's really part of the CEO job. You look at the great CEOs. The CEOs have created a lot of alpha, a lot of shareholder value. They've been in each one of those 20 or so things. You talk to a Dave Cody, you talk to an Ed Breen, you talk to a Larry Culp. You can talk about any of those 20 things, and they haven't, they have things to say, and you can learn from them. You talk to CEOs who haven't created a lot of value, who are not really good at this game, They'll know four or five or six or even half of those 20 things, but they don't do the other. They don't do the other part. You gotta be in all of them. But, but you're not in all those th…

AI assessment note: “you're managing, You know, 15, 20 different things always.”

Q know, he made all this money for the pension fund that we were on and everything else. And like the stories that I've heard at the party. And then since I released the episode, it was just like, you have a fantastic long-term reputation. Do you have any advice on how you were able to maintain that and how important it was for other people to do the same thing?

A Reputation is really important. Your, your personal brand is extremely important because based on that, people are going to want to do business with you or they're going to want to not do business with you. So every day you're in the office and doing stuff, you're either raising your brand or you're lowering your brand. And that's the main thing you got to work on. You got to make sure that your brand reflects integrity and honesty and dependability and stability and people can count on you. This goes back to Mr. Jesseson. So Philip Brothers, this is before email. This is before, actually it was even before faxes. It was more Twix's and Telex's, so, which took a few days to go through when they went through. So you could do a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars on a handshake or on a phone call. There's no written confirmation of that for like days. In the meantime, maybe the price of whatever you were trading, oil or copper, had gone up a lot. You still had to have a deal. Otherwise, you know, the whole system doesn't work. So dependability is so, so, trust is so, so important to do.

AI assessment note: “you got to make sure that your brand reflects integrity and honesty and dependability”

Q When did you, you kept repeating that, when did you understand the power of incentives? Because you talk about compensation incentives a lot.

A Very, very early, very early in the oil brokerage days, because I used to have, we had tables, like, 10 brokers at a table, and every month could pay people monthly. I'd meet with everyone and say, look, we made so much this month in the bonus pool. What percent do you think you contributed to it? And then I would add it up. It would always come to like 300%. Never added up to a hundred percent. So I had to have these difficult conversations that people said, look, you know, you think you're inflated with how much of these other than that. But I, I, what I realized very early on is people are coming to work not because they love me, They might love me, I might love them, but that's not their main motivation. The main motivation why they're coming to work is to make money, and make money for themselves, and more often to make money for others, to make money for their families, for their spouses, their kids, or whoever. And that's important to understand the motivation of the other person is really, really important. It's called theory of mind, where you understand, and a child gets that after a few years, they don't have it at first. And there's been a lot of psychological studies done on that. It's important to, to look at things from what's motivating the other person, what's driving the other person, what's important to that other person. That's good at deal making. That's go…

AI assessment note: “Very, very early, very early in the oil brokerage days”

Q Valley is what you're doing over here. You pick your co-founder. You should think long and hard about that. Your co-founder is 50% of the company at that point. Right. And then he goes, and then he goes, but it still goes out. Now you have to pick the 10th person. That person's 10% of your company, and you're saying you don't have time? Like, what else are you doing?

A It's all about the people. It's all about the people. You know, systems and tech and budgets and customers and sales, all these things are really, really important But you can't achieve excellence in those things without fantastic people, without fantastic leaders. And I spend a lot of time, especially on the top few dozen people. I want to make sure everybody's in it to win it. Everybody is fully, fully engaged. And I do a mental exercise where I picture the person coming into my office and saying, Brad, I quit. Like, this is not a conversation about you making me a counteroffer. I'm done. I've already moved and it's over with. This is about a conversation about how do we make an orderly transition? Cause I respect you and I don't want to leave you high and dry. And then I try to feel and visualize what would be my reaction if that person came in to me and quit. If my reaction to that is,

AI assessment note: “It's all about the people. You know, systems and tech and budgets”

Q When you were in your twenties, though, you said, hey, I wanted to be perfect. Not only do I want to be perfect, I want everybody around me to be perfect. I wanted the universe to be perfect. Like, how long did it take for you to learn what you just explained?

A So when I stepped down From United Rentals. See, I still stayed as chairman. When I stepped down as CEO of United Rentals, had done it for about 10 years, and I wanted to do my next big thing. I wanted to do another startup from the beginning. You know, I was running a big company. I wanted to start it from scratch. And there was a period of a couple of years where I was trying to figure out what I was going to do, and, and I didn't find it, and then a great financial crisis came, and I was kind of lost. I was kind of, it was kind of, it was probably the only time in my life that I was depressed. I'm just not depressed, but that period of time, I was actually clinically depressed. I took the Beck Depression Inventory, and I came up, yep, depressed.

AI assessment note: “when I stepped down From United Rentals. See, I still stayed as chairman.”