YouSaid · the spoken record

David Packard

lines on the record: 31
first: 2023-02-20
most recent: 2023-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“For discovery, far greater than anything we have seen in the 20th century. Exponential growth is based on the principle that the state of change is proportional to the level of effort expended. The level of effort will be far greater in the twenty first century than it has been in the twentieth century, just as it has in the past growth in the future will come from new products. By new products, I mean products that make real contributions to technology, not products that copy what someone else has done. This must be our standard in the future, just as it has been in the past. The 21st century will be an age in which many kinds of new products contribute to a better life for all the people in the world.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think of the phenomenal growth of the electronics industry over the last 50 years, I realize how fortunate Bill and I were to be in on the ground floor. But it reminds me of a story I like to tell on myself. In my sophomore year at Stanford, I took a course in American history and had the opportunity to study the westward movement beginning with the early pioneers and continuing throughout the nineteenth century. I remember lamenting that I had been born one hundred years too late, that all the frontiers had been conquered, and that my generation would be deprived of the pioneering opportunities offered our forebears. But in fact, we went on to make breathtaking advances in the twentieth century. In the twentieth century we have experienced dizzying progress.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is dedicated to quality. And one of the things I absolutely loved about David Packard's perspective is the fact he's writing this book when he's in his 80s, very close to the end of his life, and he is still relentlessly optimistic.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the state, I often help my father in looking up the records for those companies that had gone bankrupt. I noted that the bank simply foreclosed on firms that had mortgaged their assets, and these firms were left with nothing. Those firms that did not borrow money had a difficult time, but they ended up with their assets intact and survived during the Depression years that followed. So that is something like a main theme of this book. That experience he's having with his father. This idea is like, okay, well, who are the companies that actually went under during the Depression? Like, why did they fail and who are the ones that survived? I noted that the banks simply foreclose on the businesses that mortgage their assets and those businesses were left with nothing. The businesses that did not borrow money, they had a difficult time, but they ended up with their assets intact and they survived. From this experience, I decided our company should not incur any long-term debt for this reason. Bill and I determined we would operate the company as a pay.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is impossible to operate a business for long unless it generates a profit. The profit we generate from our operations is the ultimate source of funds we need to prosper and grow. It is the foundation of future opportunity and employment security, and then he states why he optimizes for growing for profit as opposed to like growing from debt. Sixty years ago, our country was in the depths of the Great Depression. Thousands of businesses had shut their doors. Bill and I were raised during that depression. We had observed its devastating effects on people, including many families and friends who were close to us. Matter of fact, when I got to the section, it made me realize, or made me remember that in one of the biographies I read on Warren Buffett, talks about the fact that he keeps newspapers from the Great Depression on his office wall to serve as a reminder about how bad things can get. So back to David. My father had been appointed as a bankruptcy referee.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steady, gentle pressure from the rear worked best. Eventually, one would decide to pass through the gate the rest would follow. Press them too hard, and they'll panic, scattering in all directions. Slack off entirely, and they just head back to their old grazing spots. This insight was useful through my management career. And so this is where he goes more into his company building philosophy, one theme that he repeats over and over again, the one I mentioned earlier, is his belief in the growing your company from profit. And he's going to tie this into his experience during the Great Depression. And so he goes into the fact, all companies, they have access to people, materials, facilities, money, and time. These are the resources available to us for conducting our business. By applying our skills, we turn these resources into useful products and services. And if we do a good job, customers will pay us more for our products than the sum of our costs in producing and distributing them. This difference, our profit, represents the value that we add to the resources that we utilize.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was an important factor in the ultimate success of our company. And so in addition to building a company with Bill, David and Bill also purchased ranches. And they actually, in their spare time, would actually act as full-on cattle ranchers. And so this is another example of what I mentioned earlier, the fact that a lot of the way that he's conveying these lessons to the reader, to you and I, is the fact that he tells these little stories of experiences that may not be directly related to business, but they're actually lessons he drew from these life experiences and applied them to his business. I've enjoyed many pleasures as a result of my experience as a rancher. I've learned a thing or two. Every season, we would round up the cattle from the range and drive them to the corral. Along the way, we'd come to a gate. The trick was to get them through the gate and not stampede them. I found, after much trial and error, that applying steady, gentle pressure from the rear worked best that is the most important sentence in the section.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Him and Billiton there, but they got so much value from their close relationship with Stanford University and all of the talent that came out of that school. And so this program that David and Bill are about to start with Fred Terman, you can actually think about what's happening here. It's like they're figuring out how to create an edge in hiring talent. And so they start this thing with the university called the Honors Cooperative Program. And this is what it is. It allowed qualified HP engineers to pursue advanced degrees at Stanford. This program made it possible for us to hire top-level young graduates from around the country with the promise that if they came to work for us and we thought it appropriate they could attend graduate school why on full HP salary the company would pay all of their tuition more than $400 HP engineers have obtained master's or doctor degrees through this program. It has enabled us to hire the top engineering graduates from universities all across the country for a number of years.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Designed to measure and test electronic equipment. That is their main focus in the early days of HP, measuring and testing electronic equipment. They reflected our strategy to concentrate on building a group of complementary products rather than becoming involved in a lot of unrelated things. I believe this decision to focus our efforts was extremely important. I felt that we should take on no more than we could reasonably handle building a solid base by doing what we did best, designing and manufacturing high quality instruments. And I think that's one of the main themes of the story that he's telling us is the fact that they were very methodical. They were not trying to rush their growth. It says we had built a good foundation on which to grow. So do you remember early in the book where David is talking to, I think it's the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, it's like, hey, it's pretty credible that you guys actually donated more to Stanford than the actual founders of Stanford. And part of that is because Packard felt he owed not only did, you know,”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine the demand for the war, their business is going to grow because they're selling a lot of their devices and electronic equipment to the U.S. government. But even then, even when they were selling them to companies, he talks about keeping the importance of keeping control of your costs. Obviously, a main theme of the history of entrepreneurship, but he's like, just because we're selling to the government doesn't mean like we can artificially inflate what these things cost. He says we had controlled our cost to the extent that the government could not get better products from anyone else at a lower price. And then they also did something very smart here. They're building products for the Naval Research Laboratory, the US government, and they just asked them, like, what else do you need us to make? What else do you guys want to buy? We were interested in selling them our standard products, but also interested in finding out what other instruments they might need. When I got to that section, I thought of Jeff Bezos in the early days of Amazon. He sent a thousand emails to some of a thousand early customers at Amazon. I was like, well, okay, you bought a book for me. Like, what else would you buy? One guy replied back. He's like,”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at this point in the company history, America gets pulled into World War II. Bill Hewlett gets called into service in the Army. So now David's got to run the company while Bill's gone. And it says Bill and I decided that we were going to reinvest our profits. This is something he repeats over and over again, grow from profits, grow from profits. He is very, because he grew up in the depression, which he goes into more detail, very wary of debt and growing way faster than you should. Bill and I decided we were going to reinvest our profits and not resort to long-term borrowing. I felt very strongly about this issue. We found we were clearly able to finance 100% growth per year by reinvesting our profits. And then we see an example of good guy David, the note I left myself when I read the sentence that he's about to describe here that you need to, it's really important to work with people that you like, admire, and trust. I kept my salary at a lower level than it should have been because I did not think it was fair for my salary to be higher than Bill's Army salary.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And happy relationship between us. When we finally grew to the point where our financing requirements went beyond the bank's legal limits, we went to Palo Alto National's Associate Bank, Wells Fargo. The Wells, this is this is so important. He's going to repeat, this is one of the greatest lines I've ever heard, but he's going to repeat this piece of advice that he gets from the gentleman at Wells Fargo a few times throughout the book. The Wells Fargo Bank sent a retired engineer to visit us. I spent a full afternoon with him and I remembered ever since some advice that he gave me. He said that more businesses die from indigestion than starvation. I have observed the truth of that advice many times since then. More businesses die from indigestion than starvation.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up at the end of the day. And so essentially, what he's describing there is this is a form of education. Many of the things I learned in this process were invaluable and not available in business schools. Cash flow was a frequent problem during those early days and he's going to give us advice that you need to shop around for your financing options. So he goes into the largest bank of California, largest bank in California at the time, his Bank of America. We tried to establish some credit with the Bank of America. They sent a man out to look us over. He was not impressed. So that's a no from Bank of America. So then David walks over to his little local bank, which is called Palo Alto National. And I introduced myself to its president, this guy named Judd Creary. I described our initial success and then I explained how we now needed a loan to expand our business. He listened carefully, asked some questions, and then wrote out a note for me to sign. That little leap of faith on Crary's part was the beginning of a long”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“R oscillator instead of general radios. And so David summarizes the advantage that his young company had and why he received Disney's money as opposed to general radios. We enabled Disney to buy a good product at a price considerably less than our competitors. And so one of the things I loved is David takes the history of the company is they grow, they need more space, and every time they need more space, it's like we can't possibly need more space than this. And so this is the first of many examples. He says by 1939, our business had grown to the point where we needed additional space. We set up an office in the front section of our new building while the back room held a few machine tools and assembly benches. It seemed as if we had all the space that we would ever need. In those early days, Bill and I had to be versatile. We had to tackle almost everything ourselves, from inventing and building products to pricing, packaging, and shipping them, from dealing with customers and sales reps to keeping the books, from writing the ads to sweet.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To take pictures of it and produced a two page sales for share that we sent to a list about 25 potential customers provided by Fred Terman. There's Fred again. We designated this first product the Model 200A. This made me laugh. We designated this first product the Model 200A because we thought that the name would make it look like we had been around for a while. We were afraid that if people knew we never actually developed, designed, and built a finished product, they'd be scared off. We weren't expecting much from our first mailing, but amazingly enough, in the first couple weeks, several orders came back and some were accompanied by checks. And so they don't have a bunch of money at this time, so this is where Charlie Linton does them another favor. He was a tremendous help in getting us started in production. He gave us access to his shop so we could do things we weren't able to accomplish in the garage on our own. And this is what I meant, that technically their competitors, but they're sharing information in their friends. Charlie Lytton and his equipment made an important difference during a period when time and money were very tight.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's go back to this book. There's several pages that go on. They're trying to figure out okay, we know we want to develop electronics. What do we want to build? They're not too sure. They're going to do a bunch of different things. They're going to do contract work just to pay the bills. Oh, interesting to note. HP was profitable from the very first year and it was profitable every year for 50 years after that. That's crazy. But the reason it's called HP is because that was a result of a coin flip. They couldn't decide, is it going to be Packard Hewlett or Hewlett-Packard? We flipped a coin to see whose name would come first in the company. Needless to say, Bill won. And so eventually they think they have an idea for a product. It is called an audio oscillator. And we see very, very humble beginnings to what is going to become a very valuable company. So it says the audio oscillator represented the first practical low-cost method of generating high quality audio frequencies. We built one model and then we took it to a radio engineers conference. The response was positive.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I bought a bulldozer and then helped build more than 20 miles of roads. And so I have no idea why, but when I got to that paragraph, I thought about this paragraph that I've never forgot since I read it four or five years ago whenever episode 40 came out. And I'm going to read it to you. And what's fascinating, now this is crazy how all these things fit together, right? So David Packard and Bill Hewlett are building their company at the exact same time in history that Edwin Land is building Polaroid. And back on page 437 of this giant biography, almost 500-page biography of Edwin Land that I read, there's this young guy named Ken Olson who's going to wind up being an entrepreneur. He was going to wind up founding DEC Digital Equipment Corporation. Now here's the crazy part. He is describing, actually, I'll tell you the crazy part after this. Let me read this paragraph from insisting on the impossible. It's Ken Olson who's generation younger than Packard and Edwin Land is. And he's describing just how different they were. Says Lands represented a generation of scientists that Olson”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he writes, I didn't formally resign from GE until nearly a year later. Lucille, which is his wife, always remembered the moment she dropped my letter of resignation in the mailbox. Mailing that letter cut our financial ties, but we were hopeful and excited about what the future had in store. And so this is his schedule at the very beginning of the company. He's also going to school and working. And so it says, Bill found a two-story house in Palo Alto. There was also a one-car garage, and that became our workshop. In 1989, so 50 years later, the state of California designated that garage as a California historical landmark and the birthplace of Silicon Valley. My schedule then was to go to classes at Stanford in the mornings, work with Bill, and also find time to study in the afternoon, and then go to Lytton Laboratories in the evening. And so this is his first mention of Charlie Lyton, who's actually he's working for, but it's also going to become a competitor in the future and really a friend.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That personal communication was often necessary to back up written instructions. That was the genesis of what became management by walking around at the Hewlett-Packard Company. And so after a few years, he's still talking to Bill, still talking to Fred, they still have this idea of like, hey, we should start our own company. So he's on like a break from General Electric. He drives all the way back across the country, back to Palo Alto, and he has what they consider the first official meeting of what's going to turn into HP. We had our first official business meeting. The minutes of the meeting are headed tentative organization plans and a tentative work program for a proposed business venture. Must be a riveting document to read. The product ideas we discuss included high frequency receivers and medical equipment, and it was noted that we should make every attempt to keep up on the newly announced technology of television. And so the reason that is important is because he's telling you, hey, we started a company before we knew what product we wanted to make. And so they decided.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The quality of the tubes are not good. A lot of them are failing. A lot of them are blowing up. And so this is how he figured out how to fix that. I learned everything I could about possible causes of failure, and I decided to spend most of my time on the factory floor to make sure every step was done properly. And so what he's going to realize is the engineering department where he's working, right? They're not communicating properly with the people that are actually making it, the factory people. It soon became apparent that the instructions the engineering department gave the factory people were not adequate to ensure that every step would be done properly. I found the factory people eager to do the job right. We worked together to conduct tests and identify every possible cause of failure, and as a result, every tube in the batch passed its final test without a single failure. That was a very important lesson for me. That personal communication was often necessary to back up written instructions.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be so it says on my first day I met with a Mr. Boring, who as you'll see is aptly named. He knew of my interest in electronics, his intense interest in electronics, but he told me there's no future for electronics at General Electric and recommended that I concentrate my work and interest on heavy components for public utility plants. And why was this conversation so important that David is telling us relaying it, you know, 40 years after it happened? I have often thought of the irony of Mr. Boring's advice because our electronics firm, HP, has become larger than the entire general electric company was at the time that he gave me this advice. And then the second important story about his time at HP is really this is how David is able to succeed where other people has failed and he's going to use this idea over and over again when he's building HP. The background here is he is responsible for quality control. They're producing general electrics is producing these things called mercury vapor rectifier tubes.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At HB, and he says largely because of Turman's classes, the four of us Bill, him, and these two other guys became fast friends. It is not a coincidence that a few years later this group would become the management team of HP. Many of them working for over 30 years in the company. Fred Terman's keen interest in radio engineering induced him to become acquainted with almost all the pioneers in that industry, many of whom were located in the Palo Alto area. Now why is that important? Fred becomes friends with all these early company founders. Then he takes his students on tours. He says course included visits to some of these firms. And Terman makes the point since this is the beginning of the industry a lot of these company founders it's not like you could be an expert in the field they're creating the field right so it's like what if you actually studied the field intently then what could you actually do if you if you founded your own firm i remember termin saying something like well as you can see most of these successful radio firms were built by people without much education adding that business opportunities would likely be greater for someone with”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so what David's referencing there is earlier in the book, he mentioned that he liked to experiment with explosives as well when he was young and that one of these experiments actually exploded in his hand and then he says the fact that he ever since that experiment he had lived his entire life with a distorted left thumb. And so when I said this is something that I can't really explain, what I'm referencing there is how many times this comes up in the early lives of these company founders, the fact that they like building bombs. This was front of mine because a few weeks ago, I think on episode 278, I just reread Peter Teal's book Zero to One. And there's a line in that book that talks about this. He says, of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school. And now we see with David Packard and Bill Hewlett, they did the same thing. But even younger than high school. So then David goes back to this idea where that HP likely not exists if him and Bill did not meet Professor Fred Terman. A lot of the people that he's going to actually meet in Terman's class are going to form, he says it's the nucleus of the management team.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leads him to going to Stanford, which then leads in turn to the founding of HP. Because when he's at Stanford, he is still pursuing this grade school interest in radio and electrical devices. It says Stanford had an amateur radio station. The radio station was near the laboratory of a new young professor named Fred Terman. Fred invited me into his office and suggested that I take his graduate course in radio engineering during my senior year. That was the beginning of a series of events that resulted in the establishment of the Hewlett-Packard Company. And so Stanford is also where David is going to meet his co-founder Bill Hewlett. He gives us a brief overview of Bill Hewlett and something that pops out that I can't really explain, and I'll tell you that in one minute says, as a youngster, Bill gave early evidence of what became a prominent trait, an insatiable curiosity. He wanted to know how things worked and why they did what they did, and he often conducted homemade experiments to find out. Some involved explosives, and like me, he was lucky to...”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Athletics and learned some lessons that were helpful in managing Hewlett-Packard. And so then he tells us a lesson that he learned from his coach, Mr. Porter. Mr. Porter said that many times two teams playing for a championship each have equally good players. In this case, teamwork becomes very important. Given equally good players and good teamwork, the team with the strongest will to win will prevail. I have remembered that advice, and it has been a guiding principle in developing and managing HP. Get the best people, stress the importance of teamwork, and get them fired up to win the game. And so we see another example of one of my favorite quotes, this idea that Jeff Bezos says that we don't choose our passions, they choose us. And so David Packard said, I had decided as far back as grade school that I wanted to be an engineer. And because of my interest in radio and electrical devices, I had narrowed that to electrical engineering. That's actually a really important sentence because this interests”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then, my father would hit him on the behind with a broom, and the horse would go out of the driveway at full gallop. The horse would spot a patch of alfalfa race up to it at full speed, and then plant his legs to stop and eat. I would go flying overhead and hit the ground. Remember, he's 11 years old when this is happening. He knew, the horse knew all the tricks to get rid of its rider, such as running next to a barbed wire fence to scrape him off. And this is the most important sentence in this section and describes the very important lesson that his father is teaching him. My father wouldn't let me quit, however, so I finally learned how to handle the horse. And so I think that's David's preferred method of teaching. He's going to tell you these little stories, those little anecdotes, and from there you'll infer the lessons that he's trying to impart to you. And so then he moves to Timeline 4 and he talks about what he learned from competing in high school sports. And we're going to see, again, another inclination that he's very determined individual.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he tells us a little bit about his childhood, the fact that his love of reading and experimenting was something that was present from a very early age. You'll see that he has HP is founded on the fact that they want to produce electronics. He was interested in electrical equipment since he was a little kid. He says, even as a young child, I spent hours curled up with the family world book encyclopedia. I got a thrill from looking at pictures of railroads, bridges, motors, generators, and other mechanical and electrical equipment. I tried to simulate some of these devices with small scale models in our backyard. So this idea where he's sitting down, he's reading the entire encyclopedia as a child and teaching himself about the world around him. We just saw this last week, a young Bill Gates did this exact same thing his mom in that book says, I think when he was like seven or eight years old, he read the entire collection of encyclopedias that the family owned. One of the things that you'll find if you read this book spread throughout the pages is there's these random hints that as polite and well thought out as he appears to the reader.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the only acceptable goal, and then the autobiography starts, and the first thing he does, the first page in the first chapter, he highlights an institution and a person that changed the course of his life. As we get older, we have the opportunity to look back over many years and see how certain events, seemingly unimportant at the time, had a profound effect in shaping our business and our professional careers. The first event that he's referencing is the fact that he was admitted into Stanford University. The second was who he met at Stanford. The second event was becoming acquainted with Professor Fred Terman at Stanford. It was Fred who sparked my interest in electronics and who later encouraged and helped Bill and me go into business for ourselves. His interest and faith in our abilities even at a young age and in the midst of the great depression gave us confidence and helped set a course for us.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“David Packard had done, which was to create a company that was so imbued with innovative creativity that the company would outlive them. And so if you think about the context around that paragraph in that biography, Steve has less than two years to live. He is so sick he cannot travel with his family on vacation. And one of the things on his mind is how much Bill Hewlett and David Packard influenced his building of Apple. I think that speaks to why you and I should learn from David Packard. So let's go back to the introduction, which in my opinion is just really several pages of, hey, you need to obsess over your customers. And I think David demonstrates the importance of that by some of the phrases that he uses. These are spread over multiple pages, but the theme is consistent. Do our products offer something unique? Are people's lives improve because of what we do? What can we contribute? And finally, customer satisfaction second to none.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Innovator in its field, take it public, and then take it into the Fortune 500, then take it into the Fortune 50, then become the spokesman for your industry, then go to Washington, and then become a historic global figure. Only Packard had accomplished all of this. He set the bar, and the Valley had honored his achievement by making him the unofficial mayor of Silicon Valley.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“David Packard rejected the idea that a company exists merely to maximize profits. I think many people assume wrongly that a company exists simply to make money, Packard said. While this is an important result of a company's existence, we have to go deeper to find the real reason for our being. Do our products offer something unique? Are people's lives improved because of what we do? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then Packard would deem HP a failure. Most entrepreneurs pursue the question, how can I succeed? From day one, Packard pursued a different question. What can we contribute? As a result, HP attained extraordinary success. This success, in turn, enabled them to invest more in making a contribution, which produced even greater success, which led to increased contribution, which created even greater success this virtuous cycle eventually enabled Packard and Hewlett.”
2023-02-20 · Founders · #291 David Packard (Founder of HP) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source