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Founders: #394 An Orphan Who Built An Empire: Leonardo Del Vecchio and The Founding of Luxottica

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Your dad dies before you’re born. Your mom can’t afford to take care of you. You grow up without a family and in an institution. You learn a trade and start working full time at the age of 14. You work all day and go to school at night. You’re precise, meticulous, restless, and work circles around everyone. You’re promoted to run the factory at 18 but the thought of working for anyone else terrifies you. For your entire life you’ll be obsessed with control. You’ll do whatever it takes to escape the harshness of poverty and the pangs of hunger. You organize your life around a simple principle: "I want to be the best at everything I do.” You start your own workshop, create the best product, and your biggest customer wants to become your partner. They underestimate you and abuse you. You destroy them. You take all of their customers. You’re not satisfied with being a subcontractor. You want everything. You make your own glasses, you buy your distributor, you list your company on the New York Stock Exchange, you complete hostile takeovers of much larger companies, you buy entire retail chains, and control everything about your product: from the raw materials to the relationship with th

[00:00] A: It's amazing to me how across the last three episodes you had world class founders, founders that build the leading companies in their industries and they all share the same obsession and that is investing heavily in technology. It didn't matter if they were making eyeglasses like Delvecchio or tires or some of the best chocolate in the world. They all had the same obsession that founders like Andrew Carnegie had, that John D. Rockefeller had as well. If you read Andrew Carnegie's autobiography, you'll see one of the main ideas in that book is invest in technology because the…

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