#283 Andrew Carnegie

What I learned from rereading The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie by Andrew Carnegie.  ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders by investing in a subscription to Founders Notes ---- Follow one of my favorite podcasts Invest Like The Best   ---- (1:01) 3 part series on Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick: Meet You In Hell: Andrew Carnegie Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America by Les Standiford. (Founders #73)  The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie by Andrew Carnegie (Founders #74)  Henry Clay Frick: The Life of the Perfect Capitalist by Quentin Skrabec Jr. (Founders #75)  (2:00) What these guys all had in common is they were hell bent on knowing their business down to the last cent. They were obsessed with having the lowest cost structure in their industry. (2:00) Highlights from Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America: —Cut the prices, scoop the market, watch the costs, and the profits will take care of themselves. —Frick knows his business down to the ground. —Frick’s rise from humble beginnings was obviously intriguing to him. It signaled to Carnegie that Frick was another of the fellow “fittest,” and those were the individuals with whom Carnegie sought to align himself. —Carnegie would repeat the mantra time and again: profits and prices were cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and in Carnegie’s view, any savings achieved in the costs of goods were permanent. —On this issue the two men were of one mind. Frick had made his way in coke by the same reckoning that Carnegie had in rail and steel: if you knew your costs down to the penny, you were always on firm ground. (6:00) Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson. (Founders #115) (7:00) A sunny disposition is worth more than a fortune. Young people should know that it can be cultivated; that the mind li