Michael Dell

“That year, Michael Dell famously said of Apple, what would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to shareholders.”

“Being detached from the customer is the ultimate death, and a lot of these guys, they think their customer is the dealer, which is still amazing to me.”

“So my senior year of high school, I went to my parents. I went with my parents to a BMW dealership. When it came time to pay, the salesman naturally looked at my mom and dad. I got to enjoy the shock on the guy's face when I took out a cashier's check for 15,0…”

“To acquire a company has been number six or seven in its field and to take it to number two or three, or even vaulted to the number one was almost impossible. Companies with leadership positions, if they continue to invest and serve their customers well, Are h…”

“The value of our equity in the eight years since the announcement of the go private increased by over 625% and our enterprise value increased to over a hundred billion dollars.”

“We didn't start building to the customer's order because we saw some massive paradigm in the future. We started that way because we didn't have the capital to mass produce. It turned out to be a pretty lucky handicap.”

“At the IPO, I think Michael owned 70, over 73, around 73% of Dell when it went public in 1988.”

“Dell generated over six million dollars in sales in our first nine months of operation. That number would turn to thirty three million at the end of our first full year.”

“And the beautiful part about that was I could pay for it out of my own savings. He is He's 13 years old.”

“Dell's revenue during our first 16 years. Okay, so it's going to start in 1984 at six million. It's going to end in 1999 at 25 Billion.”

“You really can have it all. You can have a wildly successful career doing something you love doing it better in any way else in the world. And. Be a good father and a good husband.”

“I started bidding on these and winning these contracts soon. I was racking up revenues. Between 50 and 80,000 a month.”

“We introduced our first brand name computer. So now he's not just souping up other machines. He's making his own. Okay. It was 795 dollars. If you got the same configuration from IBM, you would have to pay between 1525 hundred dollars.”

“Michael Dell starts to come with a thousand dollars. Compact starts at twenty five million. And then they raised, I think another seventy five million.”

“I made a little over 18,000 dollars that summer.”

“I owned a hundred percent of the stock of the company. There were no other founders. There was no venture capitalists or no other board of directors.”

“Was I a little full of myself at 19? Sure I was. I think you have to be to do anything important.”

“Was I a little full of myself at 19? Sure I was. I think you have to be to do anything important.”

“Michael Dell told me in the episode I did with him and on the David center feed in our conversation, he says, if you don't have a crisis, make one, you get people excited, motivated, and you drive the necessary change that you need in your business.”