The Autobiography of Christian Dior

“Without this financial disaster, Dior would probably have spent his life as a middle ranking art dealer and died unknown.”

“His first collection turned out to be the most successful in fashion history.”

“During this decade, Dior sold over a 100,000 dresses made from 16,000 design sketches and using a thousand miles of fabric.”

“His great-great-grandfather was one of the first people in France to ever import bat guano, which is just bat shit. He's, his great-great-grandfather, I think, in 1832, is, was the first person in France to import bat shit from Chile and use it as fertilizer i…”

“And so what Christian Dior has at his core is imposter syndrome. And the way he got around this is he literally invented a character, an alter ego.”

“In short, it's the impossibility of making something new out of something old in a trade where novelty is all important.”

“And we have copies of Churchill's, the letters he's writing to his wife, and he talks about meeting Coco Chanel for the first time. And he says this in 1927 about her. And he said that Coco Chanel was fit to rule a man or an empire.”

“Genuinely with people that get excessively good at what they do. We see that theme over and over again.”

“It is widely and quite erroneously believed that when the house of Christian Dior was launched, enormous sums were spent on publicity. On the contrary, not a single penny was allotted to it.”

“His biggest customers by far were not the French. They were not the Europeans. They were the Americans.”

“He made more money in his advertising agency than any other advertising agency founder ever did.”

“Research cannot help you much in this domain because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea.”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three, three of the 10 were not so great, why would you s…”

“Taking for granted the growth of his empire, he hired talented people as found, not as needed.”

“He is the most important American ever. In the history in terms of connecting the scientific field, private enterprise, and the government. The most important person to keep alive for the American war effort was FDR. The second one was Vannevar Bush.”

“Obviously they move fast, but they prioritize speed over everything else except in one area, recruiting. Max Ludgen kept the bar for talent exceedingly high, even if that came at the expense of speedy staffing.”

“Partner with world famous chefs, people come into your restaurant that's in the hotel. Because the world's famous chef, and now they know about your hotel that leads to more activity in your restaurant that you own, but also leads to more brand recognition of …”

“To solve this problem, Musk had called his friend Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. The engineer sat in stunned silence for a moment, but then he replied, given all that, he would come to work at SpaceX.”

“In our 34 years of business, we have never hired a manager from the outside. Every single one of our more than 250 managers and assistant managers started at the bottom changing tires. They have all earned their management job by working up.”

“Really, the way I think about a founder is like, you're developing skills that you can't hire for. You, you're going to hire for everything else, but you shouldn't be hireable.”

“If there was a single characteristic that separates Steve Jobs from the mass of employees, it was his passionate enthusiasm. Steve had one full, one speed, full blast. This was the primary reason we hired him.”

“He interviewed the first 3000 employees at SpaceX. That's how important it was.”