YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Dell

lines on the record: 147
first: 2025-10-13
most recent: 2025-10-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really. No, what you want to do is sort of be incremental. And again, it's back to iterating. It's like, okay, we're not sure if this is a good idea. Let's try it, right? Let's experiment. Let's get started. We'll figure it out. And we're not betting the whole company on this decision. We're just experimenting. And if it doesn't work, great. We learn something, we move on.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally, 100%. Yeah, you don't want to fail. Although failing is how you learn, pain is the best teacher. And so you have to have some little failures along the way. That fear of you can't have it paralyze you where you don't want to make any decisions because you're afraid to fail.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. That's actually the last thing I want to talk to you about. When we, one of the first things when we saw each other last month, we talked about, we were like walking around Zach's office. And I don't know how it came up, but it came up almost immediately. And it wasn't surprised to me because I feel the exact same way. But fear of failure, in my experience from setting all these histories to get entrepreneurs, but I think you said the same. It's just like the fear of failure to this day is a bigger motivator than like the love of success.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing business as PC is limited. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But then you realize, why don't we just do Dell? And then that's when I thought of the Osborne thing, because you're like, wait a minute, this guy, he named his company after that. Like, there's, but it's interesting because you just said it's like, yeah, I have a lot of confidence I'm going to do this, but the doubt.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a perfect illustration of that would be your reluctance, initial reluctance to name the company after you because it was PCs limited, right? At the very beginning”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What if it doesn't work? And what about this? What about this? And so you never want to sort of assume, okay, this is absolutely going to work no matter what, because then you're going to ignore those little voices about, well, what about this? What about this? So, yeah, it's sort of. I think a combination of naivete. Being real here and confidence.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a combination of naivete, which is an important element. It's like you don't know enough to know that maybe this won't work. Okay. And confidence, but you never sort of want to go over into the arrogant zone because that's really, I think, a dangerous place to be. So it's like, okay. I have not been in this industry for a long time. And so all these reasons why it won't work are unknown to me. Okay. So that's the naive part, right? And that can actually be sometimes a good thing because you're not sort of bound by those conventional thinking that maybe are no longer as relevant. Or maybe you come up with some clever new way of doing it. And then the confidence piece is. All right, I'm going to go. Make it work. I'm going to go figure it out. You know, there's always that little voice in your head. It's like”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no test at the end. Sit with the ideas and really think about what's happening on this page. And I think it's one of the most important pages in the book. I can actually see the page in front of me. And what you realize, you say on that page where it's just like, was I a little full? You know, the idea is like, I have $1,000, I'm in UT dorm room, I'm going to take on the biggest company in the world. And you said, was I a little full of myself at 19? Sure I was. I think you have to be to do anything important. Can you explain that mindset?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One final thing that I want to talk to you about that I think is like one of the most important ideas in your book, especially when you're Trying to like push these stories down the generations. So I see it in a lot of the biographies. And I think it's like another misconception how we just talked about the misconception between entrepreneurs, no, be wary of experts and like how they can kill new ideas where a normal person would revere them, right? So there's like this difference of understanding between that. Another one though I would say is like the importance of ego and self-belief and self-confidence. And my general society might say You should generate evidence and then be confident. And I hear this a lot, which is perplexing to me because in the books, this is now you have that direct completely backwards. Belief comes before ability. And so I would go back to this part in your book that I think is super important when you're 19 years old and your dad's like, what do you want to do in your life? And you're like, I want to compete with IBM. And you sit there and like, again, I don't think you should be reading these books quickly.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so it's sort of like doctors and dentists, right? Lawyers are some of your first, but they were using it for business purposes.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then people were surprised when people started ordering computers online. And I remember we sold like a server for $50,000 online. People were like, no way. It didn't happen as fast as some of the things that are happening now. Obviously, for a business that was selling directly to businesses and individuals all over the world, it was just total rocket fuel”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we didn't do it like that, but we're more targeted. You wanted to make it easy for the customer to understand your offerings and then the World Wide Web just made that kind of infinitely accessible to anyone.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did you So you just kind of like what remember AOL, they just essentially carpet bomb the entire country? Yeah, we didn't do it”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had experimented with how do you create an electronic version of the catalog, even like we're going to send you a floppy disk or a CD-ROM and you put it in your computer and you load it up and the catalog is there. Those are some of the ridiculous things that happened before the internet, before the World Wide Web. Did you ship that? Yeah, yeah, we did”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“95, 96. You could build all the stuff Yeah, it's funny. I forgot about the fact that Dale.com is on the bottom of every page. But what's fascinating is if you read Bezos' shareholder letters, he never refers to it as Amazon. Every single shareholder letter up until you don't have to do it anymore. And then every single interview, it's Amazon.com. Amazon.com. How novel it was. But you kind of saw right away, we should just do this because it's cool.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the day So, how the hell do you even build a store? Like, you were collecting. Do they have to call a number in? Because I remember taking credit cards online. Maybe not 90. If you were doing, do you remember what year you launched the site? 97 probably, 96?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember when you could go to all the websites. Like in the whole world, I'm done for the day. Like, there's no more websites. It sounds crazy now, but there used to be not that many websites. You could like go to them and like, okay, I'm done. There's nothing else to see that obviously changed quickly.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, so we were selling direct people would call us on the phone and we used to have these rooms with like a gazillion fax machines and they would send us the orders on faxes. It was crazy. And they had catalogs, right? And so then the World Wide Web comes along, websites, you know, like, oh, you mean we can create a website and people can go on there and like the catalog is there and they get like press a button order the thing That's the coolest thing ever we got to do that right and so In my first book, you notice on every page at the bottom it said www.dell.com. I read that book too. Like obsessed with.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you just made realize something that I didn't understand when I read the book when you were talking about how important it is to not squash ideas and that ideas can come from anywhere and they can seem small to the kind of huge impact. I think Dell is like one of the first Companies to sell on the internet, right?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's sort of like a stereotype. It's like, oh, you can dismiss it because it's a mail order company, right? All the press for years, they were like mail order company Dell order company Dell introduces server. It's like, okay, we have 30,000 patents. When are we not a mail order? What is this mail order thing? So, anyway, we had to get rid of that.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was sort of like as we were establishing our brand You know, sort of the conventional wisdom was mail order company, which was sort of like a Like an insult. It's like, okay, it's a mail order company”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. I think it's still He has that great line where he's like expensive solutions to any problem or signs of mediocrity. So he was like. Have to be more creative.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When he had his own banana plantations. Just like that idea. It's like it starts out with this little nugget of, oh, this is like an interesting opportunity, and now understanding as you pull and pull and pull and pull, it gets more and more like you keep stacking these advantages one on top of another. Yeah, I gotta find, I should organize and look into more examples of like, is there another example of what you had at the beginning of Dell? Because I think that's the key. Like, I think to some degree it's like the easier, more path is just go and like sell part of the company or raise more money or find essentially like solve the problem with money where you solve it with like creativity and hustle and like intelligence, those ideas are like excessively fascinating to me. IKEA is another one where he you know same thing where he was just selling mail order. He's a mail order company and he has a great line in there.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the other one that came to mind was Sam Zamurray, the banana king. He essentially builds the second largest banana empire. And at the time, then later on overtakes the first largest, which is United Food Company. But I guess one thing that he figured out, and he was actually your same age, he was 19 years old. He had no money, and he was trying to figure out a product to sell. And so what he did, he's just like, well, I was working the docs down, I think, in Alabama at the time. He's like all these fruit companies, they have these things called ripes, which are the bananas that are going to go bad in like two days from now. And they just take them off the boat and throw them in the garbage because they can't get it fast enough to the store. And his idea is like, well, I can use this new technology today, which is the railroad. And I can buy this for almost nothing because they're not getting anything anyways. And I'm going to put their ripes and get on the road with it and then sell it at every single stop. And then he was generating so much cash and then he could start working down the line all the way to.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's actually an interesting area to go down where it's like, who else you figured out by accident? Like, necessity as the mother of all mentions. Like, I don't have capital. So how do I get money? Well, I'll just ask my customers for the money. And then you accidentally discovered all these advantages and had a deeper understanding as you went along. Are there any other examples of like entrepreneurs or businesses that you've studied where it's like, wow, that's like a really clever way to do something effectively inexpensively?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're dead. I'm like, I don't I don't think, you know, like I was saying earlier, I don't think there are ever these absolutes. I think you always have to hold out the possibility that somebody is going to figure out some clever, interesting way to do something that nobody's ever thought of that is different and that's just going to happen.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's where I think the generic advice is you have to do this, or you're dead. I'm like, I don't, I'm pretty sure that's not the case.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And still caring about the company, even from the grave It's a common, I think, misconception. I'm curious to get your take on this, where people are like, well, you know, if you don't raise all the money at the beginning and your competitor does. Compact raised 75, 100 million, and you had $1,000 in a dorm room. Do you feel that it is actually different today? Like if you were advising like a younger entrepreneur.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it was just like, okay, wow, this is going to be a multiplier for us because they underestimate us. They don't understand what we're doing. And so they didn't see us coming because they were underestimating us. I think the CEO of Compaq would refer to us as a mail order company or garage operation or whatever. And you'd hear that and you'd go, oh, wow, this is great. They have no idea what we're doing. All that was motivating. Anytime You know, there were sort of a setback and the conventional wisdom or even whatever interpretation was, okay, they're going to fail. They're going to go out of business. All that incredibly motivating.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we were just talking about the fact that Compact and IBM They were almost like essentially you got fuel from being underestimated. You've mentioned in the book that like you found it, I think you said something that's like a powerful motivate motivating force. You recall why you felt that way.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and you're taking our chips and analyzing, oh, I have a 90 days advantage over here. And I'm not worried about the capital markets because we're just going to keep serving our customers. And like eventually that is going to change. It's not going to be a depression forever. So what can I focus on? And can I just focus on understanding what I'm working on, what's in front of me, and then following this deep curiosity and actually taking the curiosity that comes from your head into like an actual product that makes somebody else's life better.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that there's no end to like, you can't get to the end of what they're interested in. You think you use the analogy of like a cup. You just pour and pour and pour. It just keeps going. Like they can never get to the end of their curiosity. And I think you're a perfect example of that, where if you look at other founders that are doing things for fame or status or whatever the case is, it's like Jerry Seinfeld has a great line. He goes, if you just do it for the money, you're only going to go so far.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what you do. Exactly. I think that's the biggest thing, man. It's like it's an unfair advantage if you can direct your energy at something that you, there's no, we talked about this at dinner. We have a mutual friend and Sam Hinke. And one of the things that's interesting about Sam is if you analyze who he keeps around him, they have different interests. This investor guy, this entrepreneur, it's like athlete. And he's like, what, what, what I'm drawn to, what all these people have in common that may not be obvious to you, David.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not that hard to the numbers, you're just sitting there Talking to you, I 100% agree with you. It's like, but this is the difference between somebody that's obsessed and somebody's not. Like that guy wasn't taking apart computers compulsively. There's a story in the book. No disrespect to him. I'm not trying to throw any shade at anybody. There's a story in the book where you guys are doing, I think, the private placement or the IPO and Black Friday happens. And I think Lee Walker walks in. Office to tell you that, oh shit, there may be some trouble. There's trouble of brewing in the capital markets at this point. And he said, Michael was in his office taking apart another computer”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pay attention. I think this is tied back to the importance of following your natural star and something you're just obsessed with because I didn't know that part where you take these things and see, oh, this is the 40 second week of the 96 year. That's insane. There's a line in the book, though. It's not that hard.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Beautifully described, like you're just stacking one advantage on another advantage on another advantage. You're like, okay, we have the latest technology. We have way better supply chain management than you. We are putting out, I think you put out a computer that outperformed compacts, which you shall direct to the consumer for $795, if I remember correctly. It was faster than theirs. They sold a worse computer for $1,500, and it was only through retail stores. It's like that exactly the manifestation of all these advantages you had. You could just look at the market and be like, it's very curious to me how this founder could be like, hey, yeah.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. I did an episode on it. I'll send it to you. But. He has this whole thing where the threat comes from below. And he reduces everything to maxims. He's like a really good communicator. And so he's saying he's like, we're going to ship the whole cow because the threat goes from below. And I think I mentioned this in the episode I did on your book where it's just like you at the time came out with a you just”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did you read the new biography of Jensen Wong called in a video? Actually, it's a history of NVIDIA, but he's heavily featured in Nvidia Way. I have read.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you think he deliberately misunderstood? How is that possible for him to not be able to accurately analyze? Do you think he was just dismissive of you? Do you think you were a threat? Like, what was going on there?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Give me those books. I leaned in. I was like, I want those books. I was like. I'll crush the episodes. The episodes would be great because he had so many crazy stories without hesitation. He goes, absolutely not. I was like, why? He goes, I have no desire to educate my competitors so that you just nailed it. It's like, obviously, if you have an edge, shut up about it. This is what I don't understand. So maybe IBM and Compaq are the two people, two main companies are not understanding the advantage that you had at this time, right? IBM is a big old Saji company. Okay, that makes somewhat more sense. Compaq was run by its founder”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's 76 years old. He's been in the family business. He's a second generation of this privately held dynasty. And he started working the business since he was six. And it was a crazy story stories. He started on the shipping. They owned one of the largest privately held shipping companies in the world. And he's a rack and tour. He's like super charismatic and just like it was an incredible dinner. But I had found out same reason when you were like, hey, I'm writing this book because I want, you know, people are coming to Dale to understand the history. They had commissioned, the family had commissioned a real author, right? I have some of these books in my house, not from this guy where these family businesses or, you know, these people at Booker Companies, they have, they'll hire, you know, actual author, pay them whatever million dollars.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, and then you've got this feedback loop because you're getting signal from the customers of, oh, I like this, I want that, change this. And so you're able to, you know, create this dynamic feedback loop. So that was what we created and it worked. And we kept iterating it and evolving it. The competitors kind of dismissed it. And one of the best things was they just didn't understand it. They like they misunderstood it, which was fantastic. It's like you don't want them to understand what's going on. You don't want to explain it.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If our components are five days old and the competitors' components are 90 days old, well theirs costs a lot more than ours do, right? And so now you've got this structural competitive advantage. Now another element of this is that you also have the freshest and the newest and the best technology. You're not selling the 90 day old fish or bananas, right? You're selling the new chip, the latest. capability. And so now you've got even another advantage, right?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so they would have, you know, like 90 days of collective inventory from the time that they actually made the product to when it actually got to the customer. And you could actually understand this because if you opened up the computers, the chips had dates on them that showed the weeks they were made. So it would say 4292. And that meant it was that chip was built in the 42nd week of the 92nd year. And so you could literally date how old the inventory was by opening these things up. But anyway, so they had like 90 days in their collective supply chain. And we figured out how to have like five days. I mean, it was crazy. It was like a massive advantage. Now, the other reason this is important is because it turns out that the price of electronic components generally goes down, right? And it's a pretty, predictable thing. And so.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we didn't have any capital, right? And so What we figured out was that if we could dramatically shrink our inventory and get paid from our customers faster and maybe not pay our suppliers instantly, pay them a little bit later, then if you're growing and you have a negative cash conversion cycle, you actually generate a lot of cash. And so you don't need as much capital to raise to be able to grow the company. You have a high return on capital. So we started looking at the business that way. And of course, we also, there was this really interesting thing where our competitors who didn't really understand what we were doing, they had these elongated supply chains. They had distributors and dealers.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was receivable based financing. The problem was that. As a 21 year old starting a business with really no capital infusion from the beginning, a banker looking at it with no one Known inside the business to trust would sort of their general reaction would be, I think I'll go do something else, right? But Lee had those relationships. He was trusted and he was able to kind of explain it to them. And, you know, that helped sort of. Break open that log jam and that gave us some of the capital we needed to continue to grow and expand.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we don't know this kid. And his whole point is like, you don't have to even trust me or the kid. He's like, look at all the purchase orders. Like, do you think Texaco is going to pay us or not? And using the brand and the prestige and the, you know, essentially the value. Texaco's not going out of business. They're going to pay them, pay this kid that you said you don't know, lend us against our receivables. Yeah, it's a really good idea.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's just no cash here. And what's smart is he went to the banks and I was curious, it sounds like he had relationships with the bankers. And I always have this maximum that relationships. He did. Okay. So relationships around the world. You see that over and over again. And so Lee had relationships with these bankers that I assumed in the book, and you just verified. But then what I thought he did was really smart. They're like, listen, we trust you.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing that was very fascinating that Lee Walker said, right, is you got to the point where you had that negative cash conversion cycle, but you were selling to like individuals. So individuals like, oh, I want a computer, Michael. Okay, give me your credit card. You're like, great, I got this money, which we'll talk about in a minute. But now you've moved up and now you're doing enterprises. Some of these companies are huge, like Texaco, like these giant companies. And I remember one point in the book, it was something you were doing like 60 million a year in revenue and you had like 200 grand in your bank accounts or something.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT