One of my favorite entrepreneurs is John H. Johnson. He was a publishing entrepreneur who created Ebony and Jet magazines. Both were iconic magazines in the Black community for several decades. Johnson bootstrapped his company, and by 1987 it was doing over $174 million in annual revenue—almost $481 million in 2024 dollars. Johnson’s autobiography was one of my favorite reads last year. I bought several copies and wrote a five-part deep dive on it (see here).

I wanted to learn more about Johnson and found Empire: The House That John H. Johnson Built, a biography of him. It was written by Margena A. Christian, who used to work at Johnson’s Johnson Publishing Company.

I’m still reading the book, but a few things have caught my attention:

• Start-up capital – Johnson “borrowed” the customer list (20,000 names) of the insurance company that employed him. He then wrote a letter to every customer asking them to prepay for a subscription to a magazine he hadn’t created yet. Three thousand people agreed to pay $2, giving him $2,000 in start-up capital—more than $100,000 in 2024 dollars. This biography highlighted Johnson’s copywriting in that letter. He worded the sales letter in a highly effective way and made people want to buy, sight unseen. Johnson noted that this letter was so unique that he could never replicate those results.
• Curation – Johnson’s first magazine, Negro Digest, didn’t include any original articles. He aggregated all its articles from various publications about Blacks. Making information readily available in a single place made his first magazine successful.
• Cloning – Johnson didn’t try to reinvent the wheel or create something new. He “borrowed” from successful magazine formats and used them to communicate to the Black community. Life magazine was a picture-based magazine that was wildly successful. Johnson used that format when he launched Ebony magazine.

Those are some of my early takeaways from the book. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Early-stage founders often take one of two paths. Sometimes they lived a problem and used their experience to build a solution and market it to people like them. Other founders learn about a problem and then must learn more about it to figure out what solution to build. You can do both, too, but that happens less frequently.

If a founder has lived the problem, they are the customer. They’re building something for themselves and people like them. If founders haven’t lived the problem, they need first to understand it from the customer’s perspective. To do this effectively, ideally before they start building, founders would be well served to do customer discovery interviews. Simply put, they should interview customers to understand a problem from their perspective and, ideally, uncover unique insights about a problem. When done correctly, customer discovery saves time and resources by preventing founders from building something customers don’t want.

Customer discovery is more difficult than it sounds because founders want to tell everyone about their ideas. This process isn’t about the founders’ ideas; it’s about the customers’ problems. So, founders have to go from sell mode to listen-and-learn mode, which isn’t always easy. Ideally, the founder’s ideas shouldn’t even be mentioned during customer discovery conversations.

Luckily, there’s a great book written for founders that details a framework for conducting effective customer discovery interviews. It’s called The Mom Test. I’ve read it a few times and gotten value from it each time. Whenever I want to learn about a problem, I refresh myself on the framework. It reminds me how to ask questions in a way that leads to my gaining a better understanding of the problem, which leads to unique insights and creative ideas about how to solve the problem.

This week, I caught up with a founder friend. His company is early-stage, and he’s at an inflection point. They have early customers, and revenue is growing at a moderate clip. But he has a nagging feeling that his market isn’t the ideal market to build a company in. There are lots of competitors, and prices are going down quickly, which is pressuring his margins. His customers could build a comparable solution in-house, but they use his solution because it’s cheaper, for now, than building it themselves. Translation: his customers will build something in-house if they start spending too much with his company. Last, his customers view his solution as a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

The founder is trying to figure out whether he should keep pushing through with his current product. He doesn’t want to feel like he’s giving up too early.

I thought about Felix Dennis and his book How to Get Rich as we chatted. The book is about how to succeed as an entrepreneur, which leads to wealth—it’s not just about how to get rich. One thing Dennis shared was that entrepreneurs need to be persistent. They need to have conviction that they’re right and will be proven right (hopefully shortly). Conversely, though, Dennis said that entrepreneurs shouldn’t be stubborn, which means you’re persisting even when there’s plenty of evidence that you’re wrong or that you shouldn’t persist. In a post about this book (see here), I shared the following:

Acknowledging a mistake and realizing a new plan is needed are signs of clear thinking and help focus your persistence on the right activities. The most successful people I know are persistent but also rational and clear thinkers.

I’m not sure what my friend will do, but I shared with him that giving up on something doesn’t mean you aren’t persistent if the data and the market are telling you it isn’t working. It’s an opportunity to redirect your energy and persist toward the right thing.

My takeaway from this chat and Dennis’s book is that I want to be persistent but not stubborn. I want to think rationally in choosing what to work on and be persistent about the right things.

When I chat with other founders about what I’ve learned from biographies, I try to understand how they learn and ask them about their reading habits. Many have said they want to read more but don’t have the time or haven’t made time. In other words, entrepreneurs have an execution problem around reading. They know the benefits and want to do it, but picking up a book and reading is challenging.

This weekend, I was thinking about the focus sessions I’ve been doing with my developer friend (see here). They’re scheduled execution sessions on video that are focused on deep work. I love them because they’re about executing on something high priority, they add accountability and a feeling of teamwork, and they’re scheduled.

I started wondering if this format could be useful for entrepreneurs who want to find solutions to their most pressing problems by reading (not leisure reading). Could bringing entrepreneurs together early mornings on video to read books help them overcome their execution problem around reading?

I did some research and found groups that are doing something similar: scheduled video sessions for people who want to be more productive and do more deep work. One group has over 1,500 paid members around the world.

I’m going to do more customer discovery on this execution problem entrepreneurs have around reading to understand what a solution to the problem could look like. Maybe it’s focus sessions; maybe it’s something else.

This weekend, I finished reading Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry, which is the autobiography of Michael Dell. The book was first published in 1998, so it covers only Michael’s (remarkable!) early journey. Michael turned $1,000 in 1984 into a company doing over $12 billion in revenue during the fiscal year ending February 1, 1998. That’s an astonishing level of growth in 14 years.

Michael is an incredible entrepreneur. He was in his early thirties when this book was published. A lot of Dell’s success can be attributed to him as its leader. (Side note: He’s still CEO over 25 years later.) But in the book, Michael highlighted another factor that led to Dell’s success: the PC market. In 1984, Michael unknowingly stumbled into a market in its infancy that exploded in growth for various reasons (including the internet) over the next 14 years. Dell rode the wave of the personal computer market (later, servers too). Michael’s genius was in combining explosive growth in a new market with an innovative business model (selling direct). He realized what Charlie Munger calls a Lollapalooza effect. The result? Dell became a massive company that grew at a torrid pace for 14 straight years. And Michael amassed a sizeable fortune, $125 billion per Bloomberg as of this writing.

The lesson learned is that markets matter a lot. A rapidly growing market is an ideal place to build a business because it usually means the number of people experiencing the problem is growing rapidly too. In that type of market, a company’s solutions don’t have to be stellar. They need to not suck. If companies can check that box, the demand from the market will yank them along. In this type of market, there’s enough business to go around, so there likely isn’t much price competition and margins and profits are healthy.

Michael Dell built, and still runs, a juggernaut of a company. Dell is a textbook example of why entrepreneurs want to start businesses in markets that are—or will be—growing rapidly.

There’s an old saying: sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. I agree. As a founder, I was jumping from one detail to the next to keep the business operating. It was hard to see the bigger picture.

A few years in, I joined EO and had monthly accountability meetings with other entrepreneurs. To prepare for these meetings, I had to think through the business at a high level and make notes. I then shared my thoughts and the previous month’s metrics with my EO forum members. I engaged in this ritual every month for years, and it was transformative for my business.

The meetings forced me think about my business more broadly. I had to consider what strategic things I wanted to accomplish and what was hindering me. I got perspective from people who didn’t know the details of my business but were familiar enough with it at a high level to ask tough questions, share relevant experiences, and point out insights I was staring at but couldn’t see.

I learned from my years in EO that, as a founder, it was easy for me to live among the trees. But I couldn’t stay there all the time. To take my business to the next level, I had to get a bird’s-eye view of it. These regularly scheduled sessions with credible people I respected—whose only view of my business was from high up—were invaluable.

You’ll always have a ton of problems to solve down among the trees. But being intentional about looking at the business from a higher level on a regular cadence can be transformative. I did it with EO, but you can accomplish this in many other ways. Whatever your method, make time for it. The forest looks different from up there.

I’m making my way through Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry, Michael Dell’s autobiography. He’s the founder of Dell and, according to Forbes, worth about $115 billion as of this writing. A big part of Dell’s successful direct-sales model was understanding customer needs deeply and offering appropriate solutions.

Michael said he spent roughly 40% of his time with customers at the time this book was published, even though he was the CEO. How he did that caught my attention. “By spending time with your customers where they do business,” Michael wrote, “you can learn more than by bringing them to where you do business. You can experience the issues and challenges they encounter in their daily lives, and better understand how your product ultimately affects the ways in which they serve their customers.”

This passage gave me pause because it wasn’t the first time I’d heard this. Sam Zell was a prolific entrepreneur and real estate investor. In his book Am I Being Too Subtle? Sam shared a story about learning the value of observing people in their own environments. Because of this lesson, Sam didn’t have people meet him at his office. Instead, he spent over a thousand hours a year on his plane, traveling the world to meet people. He wanted to see them in their environments so he could learn more about them.

Sam, like Michael, was wealthy. He was worth billions when he passed in 2023. People would gladly come to see either of these guys in their office. But both insisted on leaving the office to go see people because observing someone in their home or workplace is an immense learning opportunity. The better you understand someone, the easier it is for you to add value and have a positive relationship with them.

When two credible and unrelated people say the same thing, I take note. The lesson is clear. Get out of your office and go see people—especially your customers—in their offices.

This week, I started reading Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry. It’s the autobiography of Michael Dell, founder of Dell. The company is famous for being the first to allow customers to order custom-made computers directly from a manufacturer.

I’m early in the book, but already one line has caught my attention: “The $1,000 required to capitalize a company in Texas was the extent of my initial start-up capital.” Michael incorporated the company in January 1984 while he was in college. He dropped out after he finished his freshman year, to his parents' chagrin.

So, Michael is super young and starts this company with $1,000. By the end of 1986, three years later, the company was doing $60 million in annual revenue. And Michael set a goal to do $1 billion in annual revenue by 1992 (which he exceeded).

In the first three years of Dell’s existence, it did $160 million in total revenue and raised zero outside capital. This is probably one of the craziest growth stories for a bootstrapped company I’ve ever read. Growing fast is expensive. You have to put people, systems, and processes in place ahead of that kind of growth. It’s very rare to grow that fast and not raise outside capital.

This is where the genius of Michael’s model shines. A lot of this can be attributed to how Dell sold computers then. It didn’t make computers ahead of time and ship from inventory. Customers paid up front, and then Dell built and shipped the computers. Getting paid up front was a stroke of genius. It allowed Dell to obtain growth capital from customer revenue instead of having to raise money from outside investors. Now, Dell did have to buy parts and other stuff to assemble the computers, but it did so as close to just in time as possible, minimizing the amount of money tied up in raw materials inventory.

In October 1987, Dell completed a private placement on Black Monday and raised $20 million, even though the stock market was crashing. The following summer, Dell went public. The company merged with EMC Corporation in 2016, so it has changed a bit. But that combined company has a market capitalization (valuation) of over $78 billion as of this writing and over 120,000 employees. And Michael Dell is still CEO, more than 40 years later.

I was impressed when I read the details of Dell’s early growth and how Michael did it. His story is a reminder that customer revenue is always the best source of growth capital, especially if you can get customers to pay up front.

I’m rereading Junk to Gold: From Salvage to the World’s Largest Online Auto Auction. It’s the autobiography of Copart founder Willis Johnson. Johnson is worth roughly $3 billion today, most of which is his stake in Copart. I listened to an interview he gave recently, and it made me want to read his book again. He founded Copart in 1982 as a salvage yard. He purchased wrecked cars and sold the parts and scrap metal for a profit. The company has expanded. It’s now a global online auction market for used and repairable vehicles. As of this writing, it has a market capitalization (i.e., valuation) of over $56 billion.

In his book, Johnson describes himself as rough around the edges. He isn’t polished and doesn’t always use the “right” words. He attended community college for one semester on the GI Bill and then dropped out. So, how did Copart become a massive company?

As I shared last year when I read the book, Johnson didn’t have a big vision for the company. He didn’t even have a plan. But he knew he wanted to grow. The key to Johnson’s success was his ability to master two things.

He was a cloner. He paid close attention to what was happening around him and what others had done. If he liked an idea and thought he could make money with it, he tried it out. He learned about a new model involving people pulling parts off cars themselves called “Pick-A-Part.” He studied it closely and copied it by creating “U-Pull-It.” The idea was a massive success. When he heard a competitor was raising capital to expand rapidly by doing an IPO, he paid attention. Two years later, Johnson’s company was trading on the stock market too.

Johnson also was an astute student and avid reader. He believed he could teach himself anything. For example, to figure out how to do an IPO, he started by trying to get a basic understanding of IPOs. He read the IPO prospectus of his competitor many times to understand what the IPO involved and to understand the Wall Street terminology. He then went to his local library to find books that explained the IPO process and all the terminology in more detail. He had trouble finding a book because nothing came up when he searched for “IPO.” He went to three different library branches. It wasn’t until someone at the third library branch told him that “IPO” stands for “initial public offering” that he found a helpful book from Ernst & Young, which he studied extensively.

Being an avid learner and reader is a great way for entrepreneurs to get ideas and strategies to grow their businesses. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs and investors didn’t invent new ideas or strategies; they copied other people’s great ideas. For example, Warren Buffett got the idea to have an insurance company (and maybe decentralization too) as part of Berkshire Hathaway from Henry Singleton and Teledyne. Henry Singleton got the idea by reading the book My Years at General Motors by former General Motors chairman Alfred Sloan.

The beauty of both of these—copying others’ good ideas and self-learning—is that anyone can do them. They don’t require permission or consent from anyone else. Not sure what to do to solve a problem? Not sure how to grow your business? No problem; start reading biographies of credible entrepreneurs. Learning about their journeys to build their companies is bound to give you some ideas about how to grow yours.

Today, I listened to an interview of Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and Automattic. WordPress is an open-source content management system for websites. The platform helps you manage what your website shows. WordPress is extremely popular, powering roughly 43% of all websites (hundreds of millions of them) on the internet. Automattic is a holding company that owns several internet businesses, including WordPress. It did over $500 million in revenue in 2024.

Matt started WordPress when he was 19. One thing in the interview got my attention. WordPress is a platform that people can build businesses on. To develop his platform strategy, Matt didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Instead, he studied another platform company—and not just any platform company, but the most successful one: Microsoft. He read about Microsoft and realized that the Windows operating system had Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). For Microsoft, building its own application on top of its platform was a key strategy that turbocharged its financial performance.

Learning about Microsoft’s strategy led Matt to ponder what the WordPress equivalent of Microsoft Office would be. What application could he own that sat on top of the WordPress platform? Matt leaned into the strategy but didn’t build an application. He bought one. He ended up purchasing WooCommerce, an e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It allows people to turn a WordPress website into an e-commerce site where people can complete purchase transactions.

WooCommerce, according to Matt, has been one of his best acquisitions. Last year, $30 billion worth of transactions occurred on WooCommerce.

Matt’s a pretty sharp dude. Even so, he got his inspiration from reading about the history of another successful company. He copied its strategy (clearly, it worked, since his product is running a little less than half the internet) and modified it for his situation. He didn’t waste time trying to figure out what would work; he focused on modifying and executing a wildly successful strategy.

This resonated with me because I’ve had a comparable experience. This past summer I read about Michael Bloomberg’s strategy in a biography. After that, everything clicked, and I knew what my strategy was for my book project. I’ve been executing on it  since.

My takeaway from Matt’s interview and my experience is that there’s immense value in the biographies of founders and histories of companies. If you’re unsure about what strategy to take to grow your company, reading biographies and learning about other entrepreneurs’ strategies and why they worked is a good use of time. You might just read one that clicks and changes your business or idea, too.

If you want to see this strategy section of Matt’s interview, it’s here. If you want to watch the entire interview, which is good, see here.