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Founders: #384 Ken Griffin: Founder of Citadel and Citadel Securities

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Because of the podcast I get to meet a lot of super successful people. I'm always asking them "Who is the smartest person you know" and "Who do you think has the best business?". "Ken Griffin" is a very common answer. I've heard Ken described in two ways: "Winner" and "Killer". For years I've come across interesting anecdotes about Ken. Like when he appears as a 19 year old kid in Ed Thorp's excellent autobiography A Man For All Markets. Or when John Arnold describe Ken's intense competitive drive following the blowup of Enron. And then consider the fact that I'm obsessed with people who run their business for decades (Ken founded Citadel 35 years ago and Citadel Securities 23 years ago) — and I knew I had to make an episode about his life and work. The only problem was there's no great biography of Ken. So to make this episode I transcribed this talk that Ken gave at Yale. And for additional context I read the book Ken recommends: Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win. ---- Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ram

[00:00] David Senra: There's a book that Ken Griffin recommends reading. It's called Hardball. And the subtitle of that book is Are you playing to play? Are you playing to win? It is a book about extreme winners and some of the best operators in business. And there's a line in that book that sounds like it could have been written by any of the almost 400 historically great founders that you and I have studied on this podcast so far. It 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…

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