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

“And if you hire the people from the adjacent industry companies. And ask them to go do it. Well, they're just going to go do what they were doing before, right? And so that's not going to work. So you need. A lot of creativity, and you need to sort of intuit your way to the answer by experimenting. It's like, okay, here's a theory that we think will work. Let's try it, right? And does it work? Great. Okay, let's do 2x that. Okay, let's do 10x that. Let's do 100x that. Doesn't work? Okay, let's stop. Restart, come up with another theory, and just keep experimenting until you find the answer.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fix your mistakes as fast as you find them. And you actually want to make mistakes. You just want to make them small and iterate and fix them quickly. I mean, one of the things when you're creating a new business. In an area that has never been done or with some new technology, new business model, there's no playbook. There's no book you can read. Here's how you do it, right?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Osborne fact. I don't think people talk about it so much anymore. But back then, the Osborne effect was a thing where... you introduce a new product that's better than your first product and nobody buys your first product anymore and you're you're out of business and so you know yeah don't want to do that so so go make some mistakes nobody's ever made before try to make them in small increments”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a great example of one in the book with Adam Osborne, where he had a very successful, I think the Osborne one was relatively successful, right? Okay. Yeah. And he's like, all right, now we're coming out with Osborne 2. It's even new and approved, and it's great. And you make the point. He's just like, yeah, maybe It didn't ship in time. And so now you just made this big announcement. We're like, we have this great new product, it's even better than one. What are you telling to the market?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of go back to understanding things and curiosity, and it's like you've got to know why something is working or not working. And if you're in the middle of a super competitive endeavor and you don't really completely understand what's going on, well, you're going to make mistakes, right? And so, you know, when I look at the competitors that are no longer around, yeah, They had either Over zealously expanded or made design errors or they fail to understand the competitive landscape. I mean, there's lots of ways to fail, right?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you think are some of the causes of mistakes? You have obviously smart, talented, competitive people, right? Charlie Munger has this great line where it's like intelligent people are taken up by three things, ladies liquor and leverage.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think you could make the argument that they made mistakes along the way that were fatal and ultimately the companies didn't succeed. But it's all of their own doing, right? You have to make the right choices in order to continue on and survive and ultimately thrive.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's really cool. There was something you mentioned to me when we had dinner that has been rattling around in my head. And I think it's probably the reason that I couldn't sleep. And I don't even think it was like explicit advice. I think you were just making an observation. But you said something along the lines that you've seen countless different companies and entrepreneurs come and go over four decades, four plus decades. And you said something that terrified me unintentionally that Most of the entrepreneurs and founders that you've known were never taken out by competition, that they sabotaged themselves. Can you say a little bit about that?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, how they had souped up their computers and software they had written and learned from each other. And so, you know, Steve came to speak to our user group. And yeah, I mean, he was like using these incredible metaphors and like listening to him and looking at what Apple's doing and going, wow, that's really cool. You know, you'd also started hearing about Bill Gates, you know, who's also about the same age as Jobs. And you know, they're both about 10 years older than I am, and you kind of look at them and go, well, okay, they did something cool.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in the early days of the computer industry, as I knew it, the microprocessor-based computer industry, Apple was a leading company and Steve was obviously the sort of legendary figure. I was in this Apple user group, which was a bunch of geeky people who would like to get together and you don't say. Exactly. And sort of compare.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you were 15, you met, you were, I think, at some kind of conference with, and this is the first time you ever were in the presence of Steve Jobs. I think Steve was like 25 at the time. So was he somebody when you saw him at 15 and you saw, okay, wait, this is a young kid in his 20s building a computer company. Was like that a model for you? What was your interpretation of that experience? I guess what I'm trying to get at?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But is I always think you can learn from just about anybody, whether they succeeded or failed. And so I tried to just understand as many people as I could that were entrepreneurs, that were starting businesses. How did they struggle? What worked? What didn't work? And those were always the compelling and interesting stories.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This great line that Jeff Bezos says, where he's like, we don't choose our passions, our passions shoots us. I think there's multiple, like my notes, myself in the margins, like, oh, he's compelled. He's like, this is coming through him. He has no choice. This is going to happen. But is there anybody in particular that you really honed in on and admired and tried to emulate in some way?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was a kid, you would read about entrepreneurs that were starting companies, Charles Schwab or Fred Smith, certainly Sam Walton, some of the early telecom pioneers, people that were doing it right then, like in the 70s. And those stories were just super interesting to me. I grew up in Houston, which was kind of a boom town. You'd see these new companies being created and parents were talking about that. And so those stories were always just interesting and compelling. And you want to understand, well, how did they do that? And why did they do that? And what happened? And I never imagined myself. From a very early age”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned earlier that you benefited from studying people that came before you. And this is, you know, you wanted to pass that forward. Who are a few of the people that you study, you felt you learn from or that influence your thinking about how you built your business?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Heard from, I don't know, I've probably got thousands of messages about the episode I did on you. And the most common thing was I knew the name. I had no idea. Everybody knows Dell, the brand name, right? But they didn't understand just how crazy your story and the multiple different transformations you've had to make over 41 years. And now they're like, oh, this guy, I'm so glad you put that in front of me. I think it's like a super important idea.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He understood the power of storytelling. And so he's like, You're going to walk into the retailer, you're going to see six different vacuum cleaners. His obviously design different, so it's going to catch your eye. But he insisted they wrote like a 200 word story on like a little flyer, right? Maybe like a little piece of cardboard and you could attach it to the handle of the vacuum cleaner. And what happens if that person, humans are attracted to stories attracted to people, right? And so they'd read that and then they it would increase their sales because they understood who's behind this, why did they make it? How is it different? It was a very effective sales tool. So I think doing podcasts like this. Books, anything like this, where you can actually tell why you're doing what you're doing. This is the crazy thing.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, kind of bring them up to speed. And this is the context. I also think there's an additional benefit for it to make it public facing because humans buy stories. Money flows as a function of stories. And I've experienced this. It's like if I read, I spend 40 hours reading about this person that had this idea in their head, they built a company. At the end of that, you're going to have a way better appreciation. I find out buying their products that I never even would have thought of because now I understand the story. I just reread James Dyson's autobiography, which is one of my favorite books, probably my number one recommendation out of the 400 books I've read so far, just because it's like 90% just struggle. The first autobiography is just like, I'm familiar for 14 years. This guy is like a mule. He won't give up 5,127 prototypes, but there's an idea in the book that was smart where”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So, you know, if we walk downstairs right below this room where we are, there's a new class of Small business salespeople be trained, okay And you would love for those team members to be able to understand, okay, how did we get here? What are all the things that we did right and wrong? And to really deeply understand the culture, the values, the beliefs, and then to be able to build on that with their own contributions.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they would also include the people that were important at the early days. Some people don't last in the company, but they were really important for us two, three, four years. But I listened to the thing like two or three times and thank God that now it's public. Anybody could just type in Spotify, a product story, I think, is the name of the podcast. I'm like, why don't more companies do this? Like, I'm not an employee, but if I was coming into Dell or any other company now, I could have, hey, here's eight one-hour episodes. And they say not just this decision, it's like why these are the constraints we're under. This is what was going on.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Originally, I talked to them about this. They were just going to do, it was like an eight part series. It was going to be a private podcast inside the company, which tells the history of Spotify. So if you come in now, you know, 20 years into its existence, it's like, well, what was like year one in an apartment? We got a server in a closet. And so what they did is they did this beautiful narrative.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said this on the episode I made about it it's like a great gift to future generations of entrepreneurs I actually think that idea of like having like a singular piece of media whether it's a book there's another idea for you for a podcast for people as the company grows to understand like this is the decisions that were made this is why it was this is what we've gone through Spotify has this originally they did Gustav is ahead of product at Spotify and he's actually one that made this”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the main reasons I wrote it was for our team inside the company, because I want them to understand how we think about the business and where it came from. And as a business grows larger, it's harder to be able to tell the stories directly with everyone. And so it's just a great opportunity to encapsulate all that and share what happened really, the good and the bad, the things that worked well, things that didn't work well. And I certainly benefited from reading the stories or hearing the stories of other people and thought it'd be a good idea.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we had gone through a whole lot with the going private and buying EMC and VMware. There have just been so much that happened. I wanted to kind of document it. And it was during COVID, I had some time and started writing this stuff down. And it felt like a logical place to sort of capture everything that had happened.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Zach told me he's like, he'll call me at like 5 a.m. And he was like, I have an idea. Like, we should do this product, or this acquisition, or whatever. And he's just like, he just can't help himself. And I asked him, I go, what would get him to stop? He's like, you have to kill him. What made you decide to write the book?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would get pretty obsessed with individual topics and sort of go deep on them. So, yeah, I wouldn't consider myself, you know, generally interested in a bunch of things. I was like super deep on certain things that excited me or interested me.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel it was all consuming even at that age because at the time you're like sleeping in the office when you do start like you start I know we talked about this last time it's hilarious where somebody asked you like well when you start Dell like how many hours did you work and you're like all of them I mean, it wasn't.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think the fact that they All that pressure on me is the thing that caused me to really reflect on it and decide that. No, this is more than a little hobby or a side thing. This is just like, I have to go do this.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very emotional. And so you're like, okay, in the book, you said, I caved, which is very unusual because you have a super strong personality from a young kid. But then the very next page, I can see in my mind right now cold turkey didn't even look at a computer for 10 days and tried to take notes in classes. And then I realized No, it was like you were compelled. I thought working in computers was going to be thrilling. I'm going to drop out with a thousand dollars. I'm going to take on the biggest company in the world.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's what I'm very interested in. It's like if you read the life story of somebody, like I'm very interested in understanding who the person is and like why they're doing what they're doing. And this is the genius line from Charlie Munger. It's just like, well, if you just, it's way more effective to tie the ideas to the personality that developed them. And the way you tie to the personality developed them, it's like you read about their life story. You read about their childhood. You read about what their interests were. I love the part in your book as reading yesterday where your parents confront you. Okay, you've started Dell in your dormant university of Texas and they're just distraught, which is really funny given what's occurred over the next four decades. It's like, what are you doing, Michael? You're supposed to be, you know, on this path to be a doctor. And I think your mom's crying.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are running their company on ramp, go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business play to win today. That is ramp.com. Something I don't even know if I've ever verbalized before, but it's in all these biographies that I read. What I feel is it's like there's just a lot of common sense where they just, the founder tends to just keep asking more questions and just like going to like an you just said I think peeling an onion. It was like, yeah, just like, okay, I got that answer. What's the next one? And then what's the next one? And there's something in human nature where we just like, we stop at the first question. But you have this like infinite curiosity that was very obvious from childhood. And I think based on what we were just talking about in your office is obviously still present. But yeah, it's just very fascinating. It's like, it's not rocket science. Just like keep asking questions and collecting information and thinking about the answers that you're getting.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Longer exists. The best operators in business have this in common. They know their business from A to Z and their cost down to the penny. Ramp makes doing this effortless. Ramp gives your business easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control, all on a single platform. Ramps, corporate cards are fully programmable. You can set limits so the spending of your team never gets out of hand. Most companies only find out about excessive spending after the fact. With ramp, you can stop it before it happens. Matt Paulson, who listens to this podcast and who's a founder of Market Beat recently switched to Ramp, and this is what he said about it. Ramp is the best. The amount of money you will save from unwanted renewals and employees who think company credit card equals buy whatever you want will far exceed the best credit card rewards program. Matt is talking about the importance of cost control. Ramp helps you make this an obsession. Almost all of the top founders and CEOs I know.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a book, Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel, recommends reading called Hardball, the subtitle of that book, Is Are You Playing to Play or Are Are Are Are Are Are You Playing to Win? It is a book about extreme winners and some of the best operators in business. There is a line in that book that says, if you have not examined your costs in detail, it is very likely that there exists lurking somewhere in your cost structure a major opportunity to improve your profits, weaken your competitors, and expand your influence. The first move is to drive down your costs faster than your competitors can and use the cost savings to upset their strategies. That sounds like the author was describing Dell. In his autobiography, Michael Dell says that one way that he was able to out-compete his better funded competitor compaq was with a structural cost advantage. Compaq's operating costs were $36% of revenue compared to Dell's 18% of revenue. More than 40 years later, Dell is thriving and compact.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an incredible insight to have as a teenager, though. It's like figure out what the actual cost of the components are and then go look up. And it sounds like what Elon did with rockets. The Russians won't sell it to me. I'm on the flight back. These famous stories in all the books is like, well, what is a rocket made of? Like, okay, there's a list of components. How much those components cost? What you just said is like you just kept asking questions like, oh, I'm going to take it apart. It's like, okay, well, this is all the components. This is what it is. This is like where you get them from. This is the look, the company names right here. I can just call them up and find out how much this is.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the chips were off the shelf chips. So you could see you could sort of understand what the logic flow was and what each chip was supposed to do inside the circuit. And inside the IBM PC, none of the chips were made by IBM, right? And none of the disk drives were made by IBM. The power supply wasn't made by IBM. And so I was also interested in the economics of it. It's like, well, what does this chip cost? What does that chip cost? And you sort of add it all up and then you compare it to the cost that they're selling the thing for and you go, wow, this is, they're really charging an incredible markup for this.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so it's back to when you open the thing up. Look inside, what's there? Well, there's chips, right? Yeah. And there's wires and there's power supplies and disk drives and all these components. Peel the onion, you know, and you understand all the different elements. And, you know, when I originally got the first IBM PC, yeah. Probably took it apart before I turned the thing on just to see what's inside. And one of the really cool things back then was that you didn't have these sort of application specific integrated circuits. They call them ASICs, right? Or these big sort of. That nobody really knows what's inside except the designers.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a thought when I was reading your book. You had a time you're taking part in IBM. I'm pretty sure before you're a teenager, so this was before you start Dell officially. It's, you know, and I didn't know this about IBM. I had to go back and look it up. This is like the most valuable company in the world at the time. It was the first company ever hit a hundred billion dollar market cap, which also blew my mind. But you take it apart and you're like, oh, wait, it's just component. This is the biggest company in the world. And this is their product. And if you take it apart, it's just made of components from other companies. And it's just like it's implied, or at least this is what I was reading through the lines when I'm reading your books. can do the same thing like what are they doing here that i couldn't do did you have that thought”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like this machine, it's like it does really cool stuff, but how does it work? It's like, what's inside it? And how do all those things work? How do they fit together? And why did they put these things versus those things? And, you know, sort of. Getting down to the essence of it.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's one of your character traits. You have a great story in the book where I think you save up for the Apple II. It was a computer and it was relatively expensive, especially I think you were like 12 or something at the time. And then you bring it home and your parents are like, oh, he's going to plug it in and play with it. It's like, no, I immediately took it apart. I needed to understand how it worked.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I never really realized it. You just asked me about it. It's just what I did. I just wanted to understand things. And When I was dealing with physical things, the way I would understand them is to take them apart. It's like, how can you understand something if you don't take it apart? And my parents would get pretty frustrated, you know, taking apart things in the house. Sometimes I put them together, sometimes they would still work. But it's just the desire to understand things, you know, the curiosity.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's like the curiosity solving a puzzle, understanding things, and figuring it out. Yeah, that's you always want to do that. I mean, I would feel unfulfilled if I couldn't figure out a puzzle, a question.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it's all just like fun and interesting, and I want to learn. And it's like a big puzzle to solve and understand. And you think about the impact that technology has on the world. Could be more exciting than to be in the middle of that and Figure it out and to help advance it. And it's an infinite game, right? Never ends. Love to win, hate to lose. Yeah, it's just like the most exciting thing you could do to be in the middle of a business like this and to see it all unfold and play out.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm very excited. I told you I'll buy one that I think it was cool too. I'm going to buy one as soon as it comes out. But I just love this enthusiasm that is just not dulling. What do you think? I was just with your son, Zach last night. And we were talking a lot about his business. Absolutely ripping. He's super intense. And he's just in it right now, right? And then it was like 95% of our conversation. Then he's like, all right, I have some things that you should talk to my dad about. And then it was so good. I was like, shit, he just did the outline better than me. So one of the things he's like, you need to get on record what motivates him. He's like, it's one of the most fascinating things. He's like, just ask him what motivates him. So what motivates you?”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a great line I've seen from both Ken Griffin and Larry Ellison describing you. Like, this guy was manufacturing computers in America at a time when there was like thousands of other people doing the exact very similar thing. And he was the only one that survived. And the reason I just thought about that is because I was watching this talk that Ken gave, I think, at Yale. And he says something, he's like, for reasons, I can't explain. I don't know why. I've just been obsessed with the stock market, with business since I was in the third grade. And, you know, 60 years later, old, he is, like, that obsession has not dulled. We were just in your office and you were showing me one of your new unreleased products that we can't film or photograph. But you were like, I was like, this is like a kid on Christmas. Like, you're still so”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I see like they've got the stock exchange there and all these tickers going. I'm like, wow, that's pretty cool. So I just started learning about the stock market. So anyway, it's just something I remembered. And my parents were always talking about financial markets. It just sparked sort of this interest really, really early in life.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was in junior high school in the summers in Houston, there were classes at Rice University for young kids. And so you could go to Rice University, take these classes, and my mom kind of signed me up. And it was great. They had these college professors and they were teaching these classes. The way I would get to Rice University is I would take the bus. From our house, right? And it'll like take you downtown. And I was curious. So I was like, okay, if I just stay on the bus, it takes me all the way downtown to where the really tall buildings are. So I go down there. It's like really tall buildings. I'm like roaming around, I'm like 11 or 12 years old.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And please don't forget to follow the new show David Sunro now so you don't miss future episodes. Oh, and by the way, nothing is changing with founders. I'm still doing episodes every week and we'll work on founders until I die. Want to jump right into what we were talking about before we start recording that. You said somebody was you've been obsessed running Dell for 41 years. You've been obsessed really since you were like 11 or 12. So you've been running it for 50 years because there was a Dell before a Dell, right? But you were saying somebody was telling you the story about you in middle school.”
2025-10-13 · Founders · My Conversation with Michael Dell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT