#386 Akio Morita: Founder of Sony

Akio is a great example of this Maxim that all of history's greatest founders studied history's greatest founders, Phil Knight, the founder of Nike studied Akio as did James Dyson as did Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. And a few months ago, I was spending time with John Mackey, who's the founder of Whole Foods. John also relentlessly studies the great founders that came before him. And it was during one of our conversations that John told me one of the craziest things that anyone has ever said about the podcast. He had listened to over a 100 episodes before we met and he told me that if founders existed when he was young, that whole foods would still be an independent company that since the podcast and all of history's greatest founders constantly emphasized the importance of controlling expenses that he would have actually put more of a priority on it, especially during good times, during boom times. I think it's very natural for a company and for human nature to just not watch your costs as closely because everything is going so well. This is actually something that Andrew Carnegie noticed over one hundred and thirty years ago. Carnegie would repeat this mantra over and over again. He said, profits and prices are cyclical subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace costs. However, could be strictly controlled and any savings achieved in costs were permanent. This This is something that I was talking about with my friend, Eric, who's the cofounder and CEO of ramp. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the cofounders of ramp and I spent a ton of time with them. They all listen to the podcast and they've picked up on the fact that the main theme from the podcast is on the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend and how doing so can give you a massive competitive advantage. Akio said that this is something he did naturally, that he was taught that wasting resources was a sin. He starts Sony in a burned out department store in war torn Tokyo. They actually have to buy the materials they need to make their first products on the black market. They had very little funding. And so they were forced to watch every single penny. That is a main theme for ramp. The reason that ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend ramp gives you everything you need to control your costs. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team. Automated expense reporting and cost control. There is a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography that says cost control became nearly an obsession. Sam Walton believed that this was fundamental to his success in building Walmart. In fact, in his autobiography, Sam wrote our money was made by controlling expenses. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover. If …