The Invisible Billionaire: Daniel Ludwig

I read two books this week, one I hated and one I loved, and neither would make a good episode. So I wanted to republish one of my favorite episodes on one of my favorite books and one of my favorite founders, which is Daniel Ludwig, who at the one time was the richest person in the world, and no one even knew his name. He started his company when he was 19, and he worked well into his nineties. And Ludwig built this massive conglomerate of 200 companies in 50 different countries. So he had this obsessive focus on efficiency and cost control. He was notorious for eliminating any expense that didn't directly contribute to his profits, and that's how you know that if he was alive today, he'd be running his business on ramp. Let me give you one example. He designed his ships with thinner decks than the industry standard so he could reduce weight and fuel costs, and then he famously snapped when someone asked why he didn't put grand pianos on his ships, like his Greek competitors. He said, you can't carry oil in a grand piano. So one thing is very, very clear from studying hundreds of history's greatest entrepreneurs, anyone who's committed to being great at building their business is obsessed with watching their costs and building an efficient company. They did that because they understood that by doing so gives you a massive competitive advantage, and Ramp helps you do so. So using Ramp becomes a competitive advantage. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control all on a single platform. As you're about to hear, Daniel Ludwig was constantly innovating in his industry. Ramp is doing the same in their industry. 54% of their payroll goes to new product development and r and d. The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. This is very, very important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. I read a Ramp customer review that sums this up perfectly. It said Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check-in on because they have it handled. Ramp's website is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. One more thing I wanna tell you about, there's now a monthly option for founder's notes, and I brought back the lifetime option by popular request. So founder's notes, if you access founder's notes, if you subscribe to founder's notes, it means you get access to all of my notes and highlights. That's over 20,000 notes and highlights on history's greatest founders that have been accumulating, collecting, and …