YouSaid · the spoken record

Ken Langone

lines on the record: 77
first: 2018-11-13
most recent: 2018-11-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So he's got basically this blue ocean that he's trying to bring in business back to Pressbridge that no other salesperson or no other department is doing. And he has a few big breaks in his life. And his first big break is this tiny little company out of Cincinnati. And here's how he discovered it. And he says, one night over Christmas, just before that first trip to Cincinnati, I'd been putting away the kids' toys when I noticed something. My in-laws had given the baby some Flintstone's building blocks, and on the blocks was stamped Kenner Products. This intrigued me because the Flintstones TV show was very big back then. There was Flintstones marketing all over the place. My natural curiosity about supply and demand made me wonder how big a piece of the pie this Kenner products was getting.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the salesman, that's what he's doing. He becomes a salesman that's trying to sell the opinions of analysts for people that are looking for ideas to invest in. So he said, I had scheduled meetings with the analysts in the bank trust department. These are the people who are looking for investment ideas. And he'd say, look, we like U.S. steel and here's why we like it. My research background from Equitable plus the fact that I was teaching at NYU put me a few cuts ahead of the typical salesman because I could talk quite knowledgeably about what I was selling. As I'd requested, these were accounts that nobody had been doing business with. And this is a super important point, which meant that whatever business I did was brand new. I would make more money because I wasn't competing with anyone else. I didn't give a damn about the size of the accounts. And I worked my ass off.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Jack Agrees to that, and that part is actually really important because this is how he starts growing a business within the firm. And he's talking about starting out at Press Bitch. And he said, the firm had a research department that covered every industry, retail, consumer products, steel, chemicals, so on. For any stock that was listed, the research department would have an analyst who made it his business to know about the fundamentals of that industry. And then all the research analysts had investment recommendations like buyGM or CELFORD, et cetera. And he says the model on Wall Street was that analysts would give their recommendations to the salesmen and the salesman would try to sell the idea to institutional investors in what was known as the carriage trade. Now carriage trade is just a weird euphemism for rich people.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he said, I said to the receptionist, Could I go see him again for a minute? And Jack came out. Did you forget something? He asked. No, I said, can we talk again? We went to a little conference room and I said, how much do you pay a secretary? About $150 a week. Pay me what you pay a secretary, I said, and I'll come work for you. You can't make ends meet on that, Jack said. Yes, I can. I'm teaching at NYU at night. Believe me, I'll make ends meet. That's not my problem, not yours. Finally he said, I'll do it. Jack, there's only one condition, I said. Now he smiled. You have a condition. You have to give me every account you're not doing business with, I said. If you're not doing business with an account, I have the right to call on them.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as you could expect, no one is hiring on Wall Street. So he has to get creative to get a job. And he actually does something really smart here. So he's interviewing in a place called Pressbridge. And he said, and they're actually on Wall Street. He said, we talked for a little while longer. And then he said, I'd like to hire you, but I just can't. But I know I'm going to hear a lot more about you. So good luck and all the best. I took the elevator down to the lobby and suddenly I stopped where I stood. Wait a minute, I said to myself. I got back in the elevator and went upstairs. I just met Mr. Cullen. Remember, this guy's name is Jack Cullen. He's going to appear in a story in a few minutes from now.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And here is the problem with his plan. And he says, now I knew that nobody on Wall Street would talk to me as long as I was still at equitable life. Many investment banks did business with equitable life, and if one hired me away, it would risk retribution. I had to quit before I got a new position, not after. I had to step out into the void. Let's just take a moment and see where we're at in his life. He's in his mid twenties. He is making a good living. He's got to support his wife and two kids, one on the way. The place he wants to work at Wall Street just had its biggest crash in 40 years. And Ken thinks this is a good idea, a good time to quit with no safety net and then go try to get a job in the industry. How many of us would make that same decision?”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father-in-law disagreed to put it mildly. His father-in-law worked on Wall Street. Elaine's dad was really upset. Here his beloved daughter living in a little rented cottage out in Brookville with a toddler and another baby on the way and his crazy son in law wants to quit a secure position with solid benefits and a good salary. Does seem crazy when you describe it that way. I was making almost $10,000 a year at Equitable Life, and this is the important part. The equivalent of about 80 grand today, and he's still in his 20s. He said, Look, you've got a great job. You've got a family. Please don't do this. And this is Ken's response. I have to go to Wall Street. It's what I've always wanted.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In love with this idea of this fake future. So the reason I bring that up is because Well, this is what he says. I remember that when I graduated from Bucknell, my dream was to earn $10,000 a year. So he already accomplishes that. There is a heavy influence at Equitable Life that he needs to serve his country in the military. So he joins the reservists.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's hardworking, and by this time he has his MBA. He's still working at Equitable Life, and he's teaching, remember, he cannot just do one job at one time. So he picks up a job to teach at NYU at night. So he says, I was feeling pretty good about life. I'd gotten a couple raises and now I was making $9,000 a year at Equitable Life. Together with my income from teaching, I was making between $12,000 and $13,000 a year. And this is the amazing thing. It's a positive thing in the sense that it can propel you forward, but it also can make you miserable. It's the idea of hedonic adaptation, which is you could set a goal. And once you get there, you might be pleased for a few moments. And then usually human nature is you look forward and you set a new further away goal, which there's nothing wrong with trying to do your best. But if you're never appreciative for your present, you're going to spend your entire life just”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I just want to give you a description so you're caught up of his life at the time, early 20s, trying to make his way in New York. He says, I live in a little one-bedroom apartment with his wife in Auburn Dale, Queens for $128 a month. Now remember that $128 a month in a few years from now before he's out of his early 20s. He's going to be buying a house for a lot more than that. And he says Christ we struggled. But my in-laws and parents were good to us. We had a lot of hand-me-down furniture. We bought a secondhand China closet. I cut the legs off at the bottom and painted it blue over the mahogany. I remember we had an aluminum outdoor chase lounge in our living room for a sofa. But what the hell you could sit on it? We didn't plan to be poor. We just were.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went to work, which is one of the great joys in life I found. And this is a theme that he will talk about over and over again in the book. And I think he's trying to tell. Remember, he's writing this in his 80s. He's saying the advice I'm giving to kids. He doesn't mean children. He calls anybody younger than him kids. You could be 50 years old and he's going to call you a kid. And the advice that he's giving to kids in that context is fine. If you really want to be great at something, you've got to find something you love doing it and then just channel your passion into it.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's just the guy from the beginning of the podcast. And he says, White Knight told me that they were just starting a new program to hire trainees in the investment department. So that's the department that Ken really wants to get into. But they were only looking at people with MBAs. I said, how about if I go about if I go at night to get an MBA? And he asked, would you really want to do that? It'd be a lot on your plate. And I said, sure, I'd do it. I suppose I pray at the feet of hard work. And I really was excited about the securities industry. I was just thrilled by the notion of financing buildings and railroads and raising money to buy and sell businesses. I loved every part of it. It was meaningless shit, but I was learning and I was knee-deep in annual reports and proxy statements, all the stuff I loved. And this is such an important part. The truth is that I loved what I was doing from the day.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All I knew about Wall Street was that that was where you bought and sold stocks and bonds. In other words, I knew nothing. But I read Fortune Magazine religiously every month in the library at Bucknell. I was intrigued by mergers, I was intrigued by companies growing and how they financed their growth. I don't know why I was so fascinated by Wall Street. I wasn't from an Ivy League school. I really had no family connections. It was all just exciting to me in a way I couldn't put my finger on yet.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amongst all his other different side jobs and all the ways, different ways he's trying to make money. And so now he's getting out after school and he's going to look for work and he wants to find excitement. And when he was in a senior, well, we're going to talk about this. He gets married. So he says, Elaine, that's his wife. Elaine and I got married in September 1956, the beginning of my senior year at Bucknell. And we were poor as church mice. At that point in my life, all I knew was that I wanted to make money. And where did you make money? Wall Street.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Away. And here's why. Within two weeks after they got to school, they'd forgotten their friends at home, they'd made new friends, and they were going to rush a fraternity, writing letters was the last thing on their minds. Suddenly, supply and demand was more than a theory to me. And his further adventures in entrepreneurship continues. And he says, everybody at Bucknell had to wear a tie and a jacket at dinner in those days. I used to buy a box of 100 ties, all different colors, bring them back to Bucknall on Sunday night, and then on Monday I'd hit the freshman dorms and sell them for a buck 50, a buck 75 apiece. I could make 50 to 75 bucks on a box. So he somehow finds time to study.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Freshman Orientation First couple of days, you there, you haven't met anybody, and you're melancholy. You miss your high school friends, and they've all gone someplace else. I thought this would be my moment to strike. So he contacts a company that produces custom stationery, and he convinces them to send him samples. So he says, before I started my sophomore year, I got them to send me samples and I put the samples on a piece of cardboard. As soon as the freshman arrived, I'd go into their dorm rooms with my sample board and say, look, you're going to be writing a lot to your friends. I'd remind them that a long distance phone call was 65 cents for three minutes. That was a lot of money then. I'd say, let's see, you have how many friends? Ten? You're going to write them two, three times a week. And they're nodding. I can see their homestick in blue, and I'd say, okay, here's what you'll need for your freshman year, but you'll get a price break if you order enough. I made damn sure I got their check or money order right now.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so skipping a little bit ahead, he has, well, this is how he learns supply and demand. So this whole trend from trying to have these side businesses and other jobs when he was in high school continues in college. And so I want to talk to you about a few of the first little ways he was making money and just some of his adventures in early entrepreneurship. So he said, supply and demand goes through everything in life. Early on, I caught the fact that if you have a special talent or if you have something unique that provokes people to do something that you can make a profit on, that that's a good thing. Late in my freshman year, I hit on an idea. I remembered that as soon as they'd get to Bucknell as freshman, a lot of the rich kids, and he says practically anybody who wasn't me was rich, were buying stationary with their names printed on it, or the Bucknail seal on it. I thought, how could I make money selling stationary? Then the light bulb went off.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the amount of drive that he has, but he's like, there was another piece to it, an uncomfortable piece. I would drink beer and laugh with my new friends, but when the parties were over, I felt alone, more left out than any time before in my life. Buck now was full of waspy kids with money. The sons of doctors and lawyers and business executives. And here I was an Italian-American kid from the wrong side of the tracks, the son of a plumber and a cafeteria worker. I can remember being uneasy telling people what my mother and father did, ashamed, inferior.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once he finds something he really loves, he is unbelievably curious and applies itself to the extreme. And I think that's where my one critique of school, at least in the country I live in, it's just a one-size-fits-all. doesn't make any sense, especially for since we live in the age of the internet. And I think we're going to see the great unbundling of that. At least I hope I see it over my lifetime. So it says, I did the absolute minimum. I was too busy having fun and working at all my various jobs. So he winds up, like I just said before, he winds up getting into Bucknell. So he's enjoying the freedom of college, but something feels off. He's talking about internally, and I think this obviously leads to.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our kids in whatever endeavor, as long as they're not harming themselves, it's their life. They have to be able to pursue it as they see fit. And that's something that he got from his parents. Now, one prerequisite they did have is they really try to nudge him to go to college. So he said, they just wanted me to go to school. And they had one dream that I would go to college. And here's a problem that he has that I think we've talked about many, many times that a lot of these kind of self-starting rebels, these eccentrics, they don't do well in these uniform, like organized environments, like organized schooling. So he says, but the problem was that even though I was a bright kid, I wasn't a good student. I was never academically curious in high school. I didn't apply myself at all. So not being curious and not applying himself. Once he finds, remember at the opening he was talking about, it's so important to find work that you love.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that a kid needs more than anything else unconditional love. When I read that paragraph, it reminded me of when we discussed, when you and I were talking about Paul Allen, and he talks about that even if his parents disagreed, remember his dad in the story was like, why are you obsessed with computers? Like, I think programming is a distraction, but you're into it, so I'm going to support your decision. Where, you know, there's a lot of parents would be like, no, you have to do what I say. You have to have the career I say. So just a reminder, like, we don't get to choose the parents we have, but we can choose, for those of you that have kids, like you can choose the parent, the kind of parent you're going to be. And we just need to be good parents. Like, we have to support.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's going to go to college. He doesn't really want to go to college. At first, he doesn't go to college. And it's not till he's visiting other friends that he knew from high school, they invited him up to this place called Bucknell. And he's going to these parties. And then one day, one of his friends is like, hey, why don't you just come here? Like you're here all the time partying anyways. So he just drops by the admissions office and long story short, he winds up getting in. Before this, we're going to talk about why going to college was important to his family. And you see this a lot with a lot of lower class or poorer families where they see that, and rightfully so at this time. Maybe you could make the argument against it at this day and age, but at the time he's living, you know, it was seen as like a ticket to the middle class. So he says, when I say I had the most wonderful childhood in the world, I mean every word. My parents gave me the”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This pattern he's discussing right now, you see the echoes from his childhood later in his life. He never worked on one thing. He was always involved in an insane number of businesses and different projects. And so he's doing this now where he's carrying on maybe three or four different jobs in addition to going to school. But he does that later in his life as well. And I found that really interesting. So he says, when I got bigger and stronger at 16, I got a summer job as a day laborer in road construction. I was a hardworking little bastard. As long as I'd get that money in my pocket, I was okay. So we're seeing his drive. And later in the book, he says something like he prays at the feet of hard work or the altar of hard work. And reading the book, you definitely get that impression.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're going to go over some more of his first few jobs. He says, I had an after school job in the butcher shop. And after work every night from six to seven, I'd go to work in a little store that made rotisserie chickens, cleaning up the grease from the rotisserie spits. The guy who owned the butcher shop didn't know I was helping the chicken guy because he thought they were competitors. When I was fifteen, a supermarket opened. And doing all this work while I was working at the butcher shop as well. At the same time, I caddied at the golf course. I started my own landscaping business, cutting lawns. So the note I was just jotting down, what I realized after the fact was,”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dozen. I then went door to door, and I charged a buck fifty for the Reese and netted a nice little profit. So, in the interim, he goes on, and I'm going to share with you some of the other first jobs he had. But I realized there's this great paragraph in here that some of you who also grew up in Humble circumstances probably empathize with this point. I definitely had experiences like this when I was a kid. And he says, in Rosalind Heights, there was a section called Rosalind Estates, where the rich people lived. So he's talking about every Sunday they'd have to drive through from their poor neighborhood through a rich neighborhood to get to church. And he says, and every time we drove through Rosalind States on a Sunday, my mother would say to me, would you like to live here one day? And I'd say yes. And then she'd say, well, then you've got to work hard and get an education. I listened. I knew damn well I didn't want to be poor. I wanted to be rich.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm saying to a kid, I learned that ex post facto you should learn it up front. Yes, I've been lucky and you can't learn good luck. My old man used to say to me, You could fall in a bucket of shit and come up with a gold watch and chain, but we all fall in that bucket from time to time. What distinguishes the winners from the losers is the ability to turn adversity around through resilience and creativity. I still love my work today, all of it. At eighty two years old I'm still excited to get out of the bed in the morning, still charged up about what the next deal might bring. And though the money my enthusiasms have brought me has enabled me to live well and help others, I can honestly say that if it came down to it, I would pay to go to work every day. How many people can say that?”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there's one lesson I could pass along to kids today, it's this opportunities today are the very best they've ever been. You might have to look for them harder than in my day, but they're there. Boy do I wish I was twenty one again and just starting out. Like so many college kids today, I wanted to go to Wall Street and get rich That's a good way to make a lot of money, but it's also a way to fail big not to mention burn out fast I learned early how essential it was to love the work I was doing. Sometimes I look back and wonder how did this all happen? And then the answer comes I was at a place where I was having the time of my life I still remember what Hudson White Knight said to me sixty years ago You really love your work as much as I think you're going to, you're going to be a big success.”
2018-11-13 · Founders · #46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source