YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Ricketts

lines on the record: 89
first: 2019-11-28
most recent: 2019-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I am quite happy, said Finding a good company and buying it. That's the Graham and Dodd. And not trading all the time. The thing that you have to be careful with Grim and Dot is don't become enamored. Don't become emotionally involved with your investment or the company that you're looking at. Sometimes you'll find another company that you think might do better and you really got to say, oh, I need to sell this because you've got a limited amount of money no matter how much you have and put it over someplace else. So you got to really cause yourself to think deeply.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing I do is say, go off by yourself onto the mountain for a couple days and just be by yourself and think about what you want to do in your heart, in your psyche. What is the thing that makes your life worthwhile Then after you've come to that answer, see how you can fit it into a money-making aspect to allow you to live the lifestyle that you want. And it may not be financed. People may say, well, I want finance because I can make good wages. But they may find out, oh, you know, I'm going to play the piano. They'll be happier playing the piano, even though they probably won't make as much money.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if we can keep people's buying of stocks for free for no commissions off into a professional area so that it doesn't become a Las Vegas gambling space, we're fine. But we don't know that yet. That's got to play out.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do have a little hesitation. We don't want buying a stock to become similar to placing a bet on a football game. And that's a risk, I think, that's real that we have to be careful of The reality is the difference between absolutely free and paying $5. There's no change in utility. It's exactly the same.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm really not pessimistic about the world of online brokerage. I think the accumulation of data and the accumulation of information on the individual will kind of lead financial planners to be able to custom make software programs of financial planning for the individual customer. And I think that's very exciting.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My fun is my work. I have never found anything that was more fun for me to do than work except ride a motorcycle. And I came across that by accident.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, everybody uses it. But at the time, I had to pull information from different companies, and they were not too excited about letting me have their information. And I presented it to independent customers. Really, you need a financial planner. So there were two mistakes I made with it. But the thing... That is stuck with me as I went too far. I was so convinced I was right. I pushed it to $100 million and I should have stopped it at about 20 or 30. So I learned there, once you know that you've got something that's not working, pull the plug.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the biggest failures financially that I've had, I came up with a system called On Money, where a customer could take their brokerage account, their bank account, and their insurance coverage, put it all into one operation, one financial package run by the software. And when I would talk to people about that, everybody said they wanted it. So I put a huge amount of money, 100 million, and it never did take off.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My three boys love those Second World War stories, but I'm more interested in what he wrote about Americans' history. The undaunted courage really kind of led me into studying a lot about the beaver trade and how the West was opened and the characters that it took. My interest is really historical novels. I get excited about that.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Name for him, is that right? The city of Houston is named after him. Yeah. Very fascinating story when you get into the details. You know, I remember from history the high points. Right. But talking about those details is a lot of fun. I enjoyed undaunted courage immensely.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I just finished up that book by Brian Kilmeade called Sam Houston. Very interesting. There's more to Sam Houston than I ever thought. So I'm going to buy his, he's got three more books.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great time. And I wanted to make a lot of money. So I was willing to work hard. So I said, I think I want to go learn how to become a broker. So that's what set me off on that line.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I saw an advertisement. This is in about 1965-66 of a broker. And nice suit, shiny shoes, making a lot of money. Brokers at that time, market was good. Brokers were making a lot of money.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to say they're very United States values. Anyway, I think that formative time, seeing all of these successful people is what really put me off in the direction that I started to go. I didn't know that I wanted to own my own business, and then I did know it and I didn't have any money. So it was a matter of evolution.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Boy Scout leader, friends of the family, all of those people that I saw doing their own thing, having their own business, having their own interest, all of those people were important to me to let me know that really you determine what your life is by what you do and not what other people are going to be able to help you with. So I learned independence. That's very good.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very open. So there's really no secrets that I know of that I can say that... People don't know about. Everybody knows I have a website. I bear my soul.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So I haven't been on the board for almost 10 years, and I've been out of management for almost 20 years. But I still own a large part of the stock. I think I own 7% of the stock that's out there.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After a while I relinquished the chairman position. So I saw a lot of my friends start their own businesses, become very successful, sell them, and one day they're busy and the next day they're not. They turn out to be very unhappy. So I kind of paced myself to do it in pieces. So I was even ready to get off the board when I did.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It took years of developing the market for the individual investor and the next segment would be to bring in. Institutions These would not be the huge institutions that we know of, but financial planners that have their own businesses and do the execution and clearing for these firms. And that is something that really didn't excite me too much. So I brought another people to go down that road. And that's about the time that I retired as CEO and became chairman of the board and figured this is the time in my life when I really kind of deserved to do fun things. I found out the most fun thing to do was work. But anyway.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. We might take a jab at another person for a particular thought or idea, but we don't get into serious talks because it's not going to change anybody's mind. Right.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. To And I've got to say, Barry, I don't think it's much different than most families. You get a lot of, first of all, my wife and I brought our children up to be independent thinkers And so we've said to ourselves several times, we can't be unhappy if they don't agree with us. So even among the three boys that are conservative, they don't agree on the individual aspects of conservative. So there's a lot of disagreement regardless of which party or what ideology you may want to follow. But we all love each other. We respect each other.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very passionate about it. It's incredibly Good feeling. You'll change people's lives for the better. The people in Africa, we're giving them a chance to live in an environment where they don't have to go into the fields. In the United States, what we're opening up is an idea to students that don't get this at home. And so it's really, and of course there's large parts of our cities and our country where children need to have the opportunity to be able to get ahead to take advantage of the American dream. And then our education system, that's what we do. We take the kids from a poor neighborhood and say, here's what you can achieve. If you get a good education and we help them all the way through”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the kids then are in high school on campus with college kids, and it doesn't take them too long. They figure it out pretty quickly. I can do this, yeah. So it's not something foreign to them. You seem very passionate.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other school is in Omaha, Nebraska, and Bellevue. It's located on Bellevue University campus. And we learned, I structured them each differently, so we learn different lessons. So going forward, as we open more schools in the United States, we're concentrating on putting them on university campus because we bring kids out of families who have never gone to college. Nobody in their family has gone to college. And I like to go to disadvantaged neighborhoods.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh not well. I mean, no, some of the kids, you know, their homes were burnt. They had to relocate. They had to be out of school for a long time. The fires never got close to our school. But they certainly did influence the people that were concerned with our school. Both fires last year and this year. So it is something that we just had to live with and get along with.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, it's worked so well in Africa. I said we ought to try it in the United States. So I've got two schools in the United States, one in Santa Rosa, California and the other one in Omaha, Nebraska.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 11 countries, three of them are in Asia, India, Sri Lanka, and can't do. And then the rest of them are in the various countries in Africa. But the education department of the government of Tanzania saw what we were doing and they loved it. So they really kind of have sponsored us to be able to expand the secondary education schools in Tanzania. And so that's what we're concentrating on right now. So we have about 40 high schools in Tanzania and we add more every year to our system of education and it is changing their life significantly.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The DVD Became very popular. But when we got to secondary education in the ninth grade, this guy, Steve Jobs, came along with New ideas of how you use technology. Sure. So we said we're going to use that new technology. And in fact, we're going to stop assisting the schools. We're going to build the education programs into the iPad And then we can give the iPads to the schools and the students, and they can learn the same way kids in the United States learn. So that's how we got started off on the education system.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when he had that TV and the DVD player and showed what happens in America, there was a lot more interest from the neighborhood. And that really kind of grew. The next school wanted it and the next school wanted it. So we really started taking on one grade every year. And I went back to America. I was familiar with making commercials. We hired a studio. I put in a teacher and students and we filmed teachers giving educational courses, math and science and things like that.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just, yeah, and there wasn't anything in the room. There were nothing on the walls. There was no books. There was no pencils. There was no paper. There were three volunteer adults. that taught the kids ABCs and poems and things of that sort. So they were working really, really hard to give their kids a little bit of an education. So I said to his name was Shengy Wilson. I said, Shengi, I tell you what I'll do. They had electricity, no running water, but they had electricity. I'll buy you a TV. And when I go back to the United States, I will send you DVDs of programs that our kids see before they go to school. So he did that. Then I went back a year later. Now he's got 47 students. And they're all paying you a little bit.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said, who is that saying? He said, Oh, that's my name So he got it halfway. The government finally made him change the name take his name off of it. He couldn't call himself a saint because he started a school. But I said, hey, can we talk enough about it that I was really fascinated? I said, can we go see your school when we go back to Arusha before we get on the plane? And he said, oh, I'd be happy to have you come. So I said, well, let's go back to camp and talk to the rest of the people on the trip. And they all wanted to go. So we went to see a school. The school was a cement platform. A concrete brick walls with a tin roof. It's equatorial, so they didn't have to worry about cold.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he is bright, so he knows how to do the guide stuff, so I'm fascinated that somebody that is pretty close to illiterate starts a school said, why? He said, well, I didn't think my kids were getting a good enough education. So I said, how many students do you have? He said, I have 23. I said, do they pay a tuition? He said, oh, no, they can't afford it. They're poor. So how do you support the school? And he said, I take my check from the Safari Company, and I put it in the bank and I use that money to support the school. Now, Barry, I know this guy has nothing. I'm impressed by American standards this guy is a huge hero. So I said, what's the name of your school? He said it's, and it put his name in there. And I've gone to a Catholic school all my life. And so I know all the saints. I'd never heard of this saint before.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three of them Correct my daughter, my son Peter, and my son Todd. And I and we were with good friends and their family, and so it was a great time. But in climbing Killimanjaro, we became close to our guides because that's not an easy thing to do. So when we came off of Kilimanjaro, we had already developed a bond. So now I'm not driving down the road in the Serengeti, and we don't see any animals. And so I'm going to carry a conversation with the guy, the driver. I said, what do you do when you are not on Safari? He said, well, I run this school. I started this school. Now I'm quite sure this man cannot read or write.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me take a step back. In my early 50s, I've... Had done nothing but work. And I said, Well, you know, I'm rich enough now, and I can afford to travel. And travel was always one of my great attractions. I had Wonderlust. And I wanted to go to places like the Serengeti. I wanted to go where there was adventure. In my travel, and I was, my three kids, my two sons and a daughter and I went to climb Kilimanjaro with some friends. Really?”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he thought, you know, if they can get through this, they deserve to stay in business. But we did get through it. And but we came out of that as friends with the regulators because they understood that we were trying to do something good for the industry, which they did not understand when they walked in our door the first time.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was Frescary. I think the judge that gave us those penalties thought this is enough for them to close down, they just go away.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The dollars were not large. I can't remember. It was a small amount because we didn't have dollars. But they said you have to stop advertising. You have to stop your office in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Chicago, Illinois. And you. Cannot advertise for a long time until you get your books and records under control. I had to be out of the office for, I think, a month. I could not be around to manage things. So they were given us penalties that we had to accept in order to stay in business. So”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could have shut you down. They could have. And their idea, I'm sure when they came in, Barry was we got to shut these people down. They don't know what they're doing. Once we proved to them that we were honest, that we were not shills, that we were doing something that the customer wanted, that the investment public wanted, and that we could change this record-keeping system so simply and so easily. They said, well, we'll just give you a fine. How big?”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I need to give credit to Tim McReynolds, who was our attorney. And he was a young man that had a way in his imagination he pulled out an idea of how we should approach the securities next change commission. First of all, we didn't fight them. It wasn't a battle. We said, you are correct. We were recording option trades incorrectly. That was a violation of regulation, which caused our net cap chain reaction domino effect. So we said everything you say is correct. We didn't know They said, okay, instead of shutting you down, we'll give you a penalty.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Book that you understand. They were very old school and people really didn't. Understand that customers wanted to do their own thing. So even the regulators had this idea that the brokerage firm had to give research to the customer in order to make the customer want to make a decision. Whereas the customer could buy their own information and do their own thing. So it was really kind of hard to get it across. Now, when the regulators came into cause the first time in 1975, We deserved it. I'm sure they walked in with the idea that they were saying to themselves, these people are so stupid. They shouldn't be handling customer monies.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when we started in 1975, everybody thought we were fools. We talked to the regulators who said, why would you want to do this? brokerage firms that have been around for 100 years are going out of business. The market's not good. What makes you think you can be better? I mean, everybody threw cold water on us. And, you know, the simple idea was that, well, when the big firm Merrill Lynch decides to compete with you, they'll just stomp on you. And I said, they can't. They've got too much cost infrastructure that they can't change. Nobody understood that. So we were kind of ridiculed all the way along until we started showing the whole world that we were opening accounts so fast that we had captured the imagination of the customer to want the ease and convenience and the low cost that we were somebody to contend with.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it had never been done before. You really didn't know what you needed ahead of time. You did not know the size of the computer. You did not know the size of the storing capacity. You did not know what the volume of trades were going to be coming. So you were guessing at a lot of this stuff. And that's why a lot of it didn't work. But when we did find what it did work, we had the basis to correct it and it was easier going forward”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the fact that my father knew and understand that it was so important to their work that it made an impression on me how my father was reacting to this buzz saw. Now the idea is really quite simple. It's going to save them time because I saw the carpenters using their hands and arms to saw a piece of wood. Now they could just use this electric implement and cut it right away. So it was an easy idea for me to really kind of understand. But the appreciation and the happiness of my father is the emotions that really made me stick that idea in my mind and really never forget it.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then to take it to implementation was more exhilarating and to see it work was heaven. Now a lot of people would not feel those feelings that I just described to you. Maybe just an entrepreneur, but it took me back to my childhood days when I saw my dead and all of the people that he worked with, the electricians and the plumbers that had their own business, they were their own people. They were their own men that could decide whether they wanted to make their business successful or not. By the way, they deployed themselves. And this was a way for me to take different ideas, which was even more exciting because we were plowing a new field. We were going into the frontier. It was a lot of fun.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, that might be unique to an entrepreneur. But a lot of my time I spent alone just running thoughts and ideas through my head and then trying to carry them out. What if I did this? Where would it go? What would happen? And I'd carry it five or six steps into the future and then find a problem and I'd come back and restart all over again. That to me was very exhilarating. It's again like the artist. You put something on the paper. If you don't like that particular color or hue, you kind of change it.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a couple of reasons first of all I'm concerned that the number of new businesses getting started is too low relative to our total economy. So I wanted to encourage entrepreneurs to go ahead and start their business even though they didn't know all the answers, which I point out in a book, and to let them know it's okay to make a mistake. It's good to make a mistake because you learn from that mistake and you won't repeat it. When we were starting, I told my people, you know, all we have to do is be right 51% of the time. But as I got more experience, I came to understand, no, you could be right only 5% of the time or some small amount as long as you get rid of it.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was either take the risk and try to do that or sell. You ruined the company. So we took the risk and we did it. And knock on wood, it all worked and made us thrive.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our volume remained relatively steady, and So with the technology that we had put in place, we had gotten to the point where our volume could come down, our revenues could come down, and we could still make a profit.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as the business continued to grow, in market size with everybody having more accounts, we came to understand that size made a difference. And so if we could merge or buy a competitor, the better off we were, and Waterhouse was one of those people that fit into one of our targets. Now it was a big change for us because it would now take the rickets family from owning more than 50% to owning less than 50%. But it was one of those things where we didn't have time to accumulate the cash flow to buy the accounts through advertising. We had to get them all at once. So we merged with the brokerage firm Waterhouse. which came with the ownership of Toronto Dominion. So now Toronto Dominion Canadian Bank became the largest shareholder of Ameritrade.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and what we had done before and after we went public was buy other small companies, buy a lot of our competitors who could not afford and did not know how to put in their own clearing operation and their own data processing systems. And Waterhouse was in Manhattan and was a big competitor. And we had talked to them about merging or buying them. Those talks did not turn out to result in anything happening. But what did happen with Waterhouse is Toronto Dominion Bank in Canada bought Waterhouse securities.”
2019-11-28 · Masters in Business · Joe Ricketts Discusses Trade and Deregulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source