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Founders: #45 Built From Scratch: How A Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion

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What I learned from reading Built From Scratch: How A Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank. --- The creation of The Home Depot began with two words: "You're fired!" [0:01] Blinders on focus on the customer [5:45] Learning how not to manage people from Ming the Merciless [8:37] Meeting Ken Langone / the prehistory of Home Depot [11:00] 81% private / 19% public partnerships [18:40] Ken sells to Ming. Predicts Ming will fire Bernie [28:30] Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened [35:00] Bernie Marcus at 49 years old: little cash and a ruined reputation [38:15] How Bernie Marcus walks away from Ross Perot [38:50] The importance of equity [49:19] Do not work with people who don't know how to care about other people [51:00] How they got the money to open The Home Depot [55:30] The critical importance of selling at the right price [58:32] Knowing the right way to do something by seeing it done the wrong way [1:08:54] Mistakes can teach us we're never as smart as we think we are [1:11:25] ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on deman

[00:00:00] The creation of the Home Depot began with two words in the spring of 1978. You're fired. Twenty years ago, we were two out-of-work executives. Our situation was not a lot different than millions of others who were shown the door. We had little in the way of capital and faced some daunting personal and legal challenges as we tried to get our careers back on track. In our early years, we lived on the edge, with no balance sheet and a lack of financing. It took great romancing to establish the vendor base necessary to open and maintain [00:00:33] the broad product selection for…

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