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

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

“Yeah, I mean, it was growing so fast. We just didn't have the balance sheet or the capital to support our growth. And so he helped us, you know, get some credit lines and that freed up capital. sort of organized some of the operations and stuff. Know about or have a great interest in, you know, because it wasn't the technology or the customers. And so he helped sort of get all that stuff on the right path. And then as we needed even more capital with a private placement and going public, he helped sort of get all that going. just basically how do you scale this thing up to get it ready for 10x or 100x growth”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the company was, I mean, it's like our rocket had sort of taken off, but it was pretty fragile. And we had some good ideas, but there was a lot of missing pieces. And Lee helped. Fill in those missing pieces and sort of organize the uncontrolled chaos and help us sort of really scale up the business.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lee Walker, tell me how important that was finding a person. Because you were relatively persistent in recruiting him. And you were like 21, I think, at the time?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Goddamn right, you do. This is also, again, how abnormal we are. I used to say it's like you need to build a business that's authentic to you. And then in this book, Lee was talking about he was only able to last four years, I think. And he's just like, you know, we're fighting at IBM, we don't have any money. And he's like, my back's hurting. I'm losing my hair. Like I can't sleep. And he's just like, Michael's ecstatic. He's like tap dancing to the office every day. And he said a line that changed really made me think about things. He's just like, he built a business that was natural to him. Of course, it's not abnormal to you because you built a business that's natural to you.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So he has a great line. He said that the founders, the guardian of the company's soul, that it's impossible to separate the creation from the creator. And I think over time, like the...”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's nobody that reads this book. Like, this guy's normal. No, it's not at all. So what I love about this, and this is why it's so important, because, and I mentioned this on the episode I made on you, but there's this engineered founder, Sidney Harmon. You know the company Harmon Carden? Sure.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Polite and calm and measured, but it's like you understand how rare this is. No, I know because you're like, of course you is like this is what I love. It's like just wake up.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know because you don't understand how abnormal you are. So we were halfway through our dinner. I looked at you and I was like, dude, I have this paradox in my head that I cannot reconcile between like the crazy career that you've had. It's like I study uncommon people for a living. You are uncommon amongst uncommon people, right? So the paradox I couldn't reconcile is between this crazy ride that you had that's described beautifully in your book, this four decade, you know, mission that you that you've been on that you've relentlessly given a lot of your life energy to and just how normal you are. Like you're not I'm talking about like your affectation, your personality like you're very”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But to you, this is why I think writing the book and having a conversation like this is important because there is so much shit in your head that is so unusual. And just it's so valuable getting it out and putting it out into the world because I remember like I wouldn't do it.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's never been alleviated. It's just like this constant keep going lower and lower and lower to deeper understanding of the world around you, but also how your business fits in that world and how you can build technology to enhance everybody else around you.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but what I love is just like how excited you were. Because it's like, it's something you said earlier. It's like you got a deep love for your business. And then now you get to keep peeling back the onion and getting closer and closer to how now it's like, oh, I'm spending 16 hours a day. I'm sleeping in my office. I'm working. We have customers. Hiring employees. We have revenue growth. But now I'm getting deeper and deeper, deeper understanding. And like, so as I read these biographies of people, I try to like build like, you know, I think I have a good sense of like how you think and like what's important to you. And what I realized is like that instinct that you had as a 20 year old man or however old you were at that time. It's like that has not”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a line in the book. I think the first time you realize, hey, I don't like these. Your whole thing is eliminating middlemen.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's definitely an important puzzle And a critical puzzle. I mean, I think if we had not figured out how to do our supply chain well, we would not be here today. It's as simple as that. So it's a fundamental thing that is just super important in our business.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Give me an example what's the last queer enterinal? And he goes, supply chain. He said it like, it was like obvious. It was like, I don't have a supply chain. I run a podcast. I read books, like, explain it to me. He's like, there's a handful of things. A handful. He's like, there's a bunch of things my dad is world-class at. And he's just like, one of them is supply chain. And I'm curious why you think why other people describe you as really good at that. Is supply chains related back to how we started this discussion is just like another puzzle for you to direct your curiosity to?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he says instead of typing in the, I was like, why is it called? I was like, why is it called that terminal? I don't understand what that was. And he's like, well, Bloomberg terminal. He's like, you know, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, you subscribe. You log in and you have a question. And then you type in and you get this really advanced answer. He's like, I don't use Bloomberg. I use that.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so dead terminal is what he refers to as when he kind of taps in and, you know, wants to talk about a particular topic or has a question. And it's one of my favorite times with Zach, you know, because, you know, we're talking about solving problems or challenges inside his business. And, you know, I get to share the mistakes I made, mistakes I saw other people make, lessons learned, and hopefully save him some pain and suffering. And steps from learnings along the way.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly Maximum I have from this I use on the podcast all the time is that bad boys move in silence. And so you mentioned earlier that sometimes there's no book. You're on the cutting edge. And so I remember there's this great line in this biography of Steve called Becoming Steve Jobs, which I actually think is the best biography written about him. And Steve's like, I don't even know what the business model of animation is. And they start partnering with Disney and he has this great line. He goes, you can't go to the library and check out a book called the business model of animation because there's only one company that's ever done it well. It's Disney and they don't want anybody else to know how lucrative it is. One thing that was hilarious that your son Zach wanted me to ask about was what he calls dad terminal.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not a direct quote. This is me summarizing his idea. It says, invest in technology, the savings compound. It can make it gives you an advantage over your slow removing competitors, and it can be the difference between a profit and a loss. If he didn't do that investment into the new technology that his competitors were dismissing, the stupid young kid with his fancy machine, right? That wind up making his company profitable in a year or two and their company unprofitable and then slowly and slowly they just kept losing money and then they went out of business. It's very fascinating how these like themes just keep reappearing.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are very similar. And they were very resistant to change. So they're like, no, that's not the best process. And then they would ridicule him for investing in the newest technology. He was spending a ton of money. Every time there's a better machine, a more efficient machine, he would immediately rip out the old machine and input and put in the new technology of his day. We wouldn't think about his technology today. It's definitely technology back then. And when you read his autobiography, which is in the public domain, anybody could read for free. It's an incredible gift to humanity. I remember getting to this part of the biography, which is exactly what you just said. It's like, okay, even if this doesn't give us advantage over our competitors, if we don't do it, they will have the advantage. So even if we're on the same level and the summary of what Andrew Carnegie was saying, these guys wind up not adopting this technology and they went out of business. So he says, invest in this.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography. It was really fascinating because, you know, he dabbled in a bunch of different businesses. He was pretty wealthy before he started the steel company. But once he realized that, you know, think about how important steel was at that time. It's like everything, this is the new product that everything, every other product is going to be made out of from bridges to roads and everything else. This is the biggest opportunity in my life. I'm going to go all in on it to the point where he didn't even want any distractions. He sold all of his stocks because he didn't want to find himself looking at the newspaper to wonder what the price of the stock was. He's fully focused on the greatest opportunity of my entire life. He went into an existing business that was run by older gentlemen, right? He had this new way to do steel. I think it's Bessemer Steel that he got from England. So he took that idea from England, imported into America, which is kind of weird how often that is in the history of entrepreneurship where it's like, oh, this idea is working in one geography. Will it work over there? It's like, yeah, because humans are kind of the same everywhere. There's some cultural differences, but our core motivation.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we didn't do that and our competitors did, we'd be finished. And so we're not going to do that. And even if we did it and our competitors did it, let's say. Just neutralizes, you have to do it. Do you have no choice?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You couldn't predict the actual tools that were going to be invented. You just knew that now we have this new, there's this new technology that it will transform every single process inside the business. We won't be able to predict all the tools, but we just know that they're coming.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the person helping them feels like, wow, I'm way better at my job than I used to be because now I got this genius on my shoulders telling me exactly how to solve this problem. The customer's way happier. The problem solved way faster. And the tool summarizes the call. So that saves a ton of time. And so everything gets way better. So you can take that same example and, you know, software development with coding assistants Teams have access to incredible tools. And so we're doing this all over our business. And of course, our customers are doing it. And what is this doing? It's unlocking the power of data using compute and using all these models, which also happens to be, you know, In the business of compute and storage and networking. So it's an enormous opportunity for Dell itself to be able to help.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An example would be in support, we have incredible amounts of data. We have telemetry data that the machines are giving us all the time, right? Soft errors and all these things that are going on inside the usage patterns from customers, we have warranty data, we have previous call logs, we have all these knowledge bases, we have JIRA databases. It's like millions and millions of documents. No human could ever interpret all this. And so we created this tool called Next Best Action, which takes all this data and understands what problem the customer is trying to solve. And it helps either the customer or the agent that's trying to help the customer get to exactly the Best way to”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's pretty simple. It's that it will be possible to dramatically improve the way we do things in all the core processes of the business from software development to support to sales to every major function our supply chain. Everything can be improved in a dramatic way. That's what we're doing. And we're finding as we take our data, as we reimagine the processes and simplify and standardize them, we can make them way more effective.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That hey, they're coming for us. They're going to be faster, more efficient, more capable, and they're going to put us out of business. And we're not going to let that happen because we're going to transform. We are going to be that business. Right. What was your hypothesis back then? Do you remember?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ago, okay Yeah, at the limit, nobody knows anything. And it's not a bad philosophy when you're thinking about the future. It's good to have a hypothesis, though, right, and ideas and experiments and to keep an open mind. What was when we go back to?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're not going to tell you that ChatGPT is, you know, that my 13 year old, I use ChatGPT all the time, but I'm a nerd. I like to research stuff. I like to read about stuff. She uses like a therapist, a shopper, a friend. It's an entire ecosystem. There's no way you can predict that. So there's a great line in Henry Ford's autobiography, which was written 120 years ago. This is not a new phenomenon. Human nature does not change. History doesn't repeat human nature does. And he says, if I ever want to sabotage my competition, I would fill their ranks with experts. Experts tend to know so much, and they're so convinced that they're right. They'd get no work done.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is why I think entrepreneurs have to study past entrepreneurs too. And it's obviously very valuable. It's no surprise that you were reading about these people. What I always say is the greats all study the greats. It's like very like they were doing it today. They were doing it 40 years ago. They were doing it 200 years ago. If you took like an average person in normal society and the way they think about experts and the way it's discussed in all these biographies, it's like they're very dismissive of experts, right? I just mentioned I was reading James Dyson's autobiography. You know, the whole thing is just like he believes in the Edisonian principle of design, this constant iteration. You learn as you go. You can't predict. You just, you know, change one thing and then test it and see how it goes. And he mentions setting Henry Ford a lot in that book. And then James Lyson wrote an autobiography 30 years after that that he also mentions Henry Ford Alada. And the reason I thought of that is because as you were speaking about, you know, you go and ask an expert from 10 years ago, what's going to happen?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's okay to try to predict it as well. It's just really hard to do. And you might want to have a lot of experiments. If you go back and say, okay, let's say you had somebody who was supposed to be really smart or supposed to be an expert at something, right? Ten years ago, how good were they at predicting what was going to happen? Not very good. So don't rely too much on that, right?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just had a thought listening to you speak tied to something else that you said earlier. It's like basically humans inability to have accurate predictive predictions about the future is kind of tied to the importance of iterating and make sure you're doing a lot of experiments and then having that like tight feedback loop to constantly like get information. Oh, that didn't work. Okay. We ran experiment didn't work. Let's try it a different way. Those two things work really well together. It's like we're not going to predict the future. We're going to create the future through iteration.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20% of their data because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations. Unless you have HubSpot, HubSpot is where all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. Because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a pretty good example in contemporary period where you just need to be open to the possibility that things are going to change. And there's also this thing where about every 10 years or so, something comes along and just completely expands the opportunity set for the industry. And that's part of the excitement, the super interesting aspect of what we get to do every day.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, sometimes it's a good idea, but it's the wrong time. Sometimes it's a good idea, but it's the wrong company. Sometimes it's just a bad idea, right? And so, but there's no absolutes here, right? You just have to be open-minded. Consider the possibility that things are changing fast enough that some new thing comes along. If you took the top computer scientists and researchers in AI or just broadly five years ago and you said, okay, this is what's going to happen with LLMs in the next five years, probably 99 out of 100 would say, no, no, that's not going to happen. And so.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But how do you not squash new ideas like you just said that those are great audience, like any idea can work now? Everybody's connected and they can grow faster and you can possibly imagine. So how do you like, do you have a process for like how do you not, you know, new ideas are fragile and they need some kind of protection and some time to grow. But most people just like kind of snuff them or dismiss them immediately.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've added a couple, but like you're kind of like just stuck on that, where you are just like a completely open, maybe addicted to, you know, new technology and new ways to think about or new ways to solve like old problems.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But your ability to do that is so counter to human nature because we're habitual, like we're habitual creatures. It's like, oh, I found what I want or I found what I like to do and like this is the best. If you look at what music.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a lot of wild ideas out there. And if you dismiss them all, you're going to miss some things. So you kind of have to hold this idea in your head that... Any of these wild ideas has a chance of succeeding. And let's sort of understand what do all these things mean and figure out what is the point of intersection? What should we be doing about this? And when is it actually relevant, interesting, valuable? And it's sort of, you know, hits escape velocity. And if you're sort of stuck in a particular paradigm where you're dismissing things, you're going to miss them. And so you need to be open-minded enough to consider All possibilities”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a decade before there was really a boom in things like e commerce and I mean it was it was going on in the late 90s and early 2000s, but it really didn't, it took a long, long time. So now maybe it's like five to ten times faster. If you look at the growth in the usage of these tools, and part of it is that each successive wave of technological improvement is built on the prior foundations. And so they're able to go faster. So if you have five billion people connected with all kinds of devices, well, now they can use these tools. That just goes way faster. I think you have to have this idea in your head that any new thing has some chance of succeeding, right?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are although the time frames that these things occur tend to be shrinking. We'll say more about that. So if you think about the internet, first you had the internet, you had the world wide web, right? And websites started popping up in the mid 90s. But it took.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is there like an echo between all of these, like, that you can apply certain ideas you could take away and form a structure? It was like, oh, that's kind of similar to what we had to do when we had to reinvent for X. Yeah, there are.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you've done that six or seven times, and then I think in the book, you know, obviously you say we did really great on this one, not good on this one, but we fix that, you're not going to be perfect over that many decades. But do you see”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit before you how many? So, like, I got four or five. How many have you successfully navigated and had to reinvent Dell over and over again? How many of these huge shifts do you think you've navigated?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is excessively rare. I mean, think about the story in the book where I think the line that I summarized where you were saying about IBM's like, yeah, personal computer's, you know, fine, it's going to be a great terminal for the mainframe. And it's just like, oh, you see this over and over again in these biographies if you're studying something that's occurring over multiple decades. It's like companies and people cannot envision a future that's different from the present that they succeeded in. So they just kind of like dismiss it, dismiss it or kind of ignore it. I'm trying to think though like so you just said, okay, there's no books. Like what do you guys are doing right now, though, right? You can't just like you're on the cutting edge. There's no books you can read about it. But you have surfed how many different technological revolutions you did the microprocessor, right? Microcomputer, sorry, the personal computer, then obviously the internet was invented.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we have to change. Or we're going to go out of business. You know, I also believe in this idea that if you don't have a crisis, make one, right? You get people excited, motivated. And to drive the necessary change. I mean, in one sense, this is not a technology problem. The technology is there, whether you use it or not. It's a question of how do you organize the team and people to actually go and get this thing done? How do you motivate them? How do you give them the right tools? How do you structure the ways people work together so that you can do it quickly? It's very hard for people to, you know, if you've been doing something for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years the same way and all of a sudden it's like some new thing comes along like no, I don't want to do that people don't like to change, but you have to.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In five years. And so you do all that and you say if we keep doing what we were doing before. Going to be in serious trouble because some new company is going to come along. And yeah, they're going to have all these new tools. They're not going to have this legacy of crap from the past, right? Old ways of doing things. And they're just going to do it the new way.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. So when ChatGPT came out in November of 22, or so looking at this and going, wow, this is a big deal. This is pretty interesting. And you started to see the rate of improvement in the LLMs. And in technology, you can sort of look at the rate of improvement in the learning curve and you can sort of plot, well, where's this thing going? It's going to be in a year, two years, or three years. And you look at, okay, we're going to have agents and multi-agent systems and we're going to be able to reason over incredible amounts of information. Well, what does that actually mean for the way knowledge work gets done and the tools that humans are going to have? So you think about that, you go, wow, this is a big, big deal here. We need to totally reset how we're thinking about the business and reimagine it, reframe it and understand what the processes are going to look like.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of going through that now. In fact, I want to read something that you said that was one of the most interesting things.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT