まだ始まったばかり——デル・テクノロジーズのマイケル・デル

I want to jump right into what we were talking about before we started recording that. You said somebody was you've been obsessed. You've been running Dell for 41 years. You've been obsessed really since you were like 11 or 12. So you've been running it for 50 years cuz you were it was there was a Dell before a Dell, right? But you were saying somebody was telling you the story about you in middle school. When I was in uh junior high school in the in the summers in Houston, uh there were classes at Rice University for for young kids, okay? And so you could go to Rice University, take these classes, and my my mom, you know, kind of signed me up and it was great. you know, they had these college professors and they were teaching these classes. And uh the the way I would get to Rice University is I would take the bus from from from our house, right? And it'll like take you downtown

super cool product. Yeah, I'm I'm very excited.

And then that was like 95% of our conversation. Then he's like, "All right, I have some things that you should talk to my dad about." And then I he was so good. I was like, "Shit, he just did the outline better than me." So one of the things uh he's like, "You need to get on record what motivates him." He's like, "It's one of the most fascinating things." He's like, "Just ask him what motivates him." So, what motivates you?

Yeah, he that's one of the things he's like he's addicted to puzzles. So that's the way you look at it.

and to and to figure them out. Puzzles and and math have always been uh important.

I never really realized it. I You just asked me about it. Uh I it's just just it just what I did. I just wanted to understand things.

And and you know when I was dealing with with uh physical things, the way I would understand them is to take them apart. It's like how can you understand something if you don't take it apart? Like and um my parents would get pretty frustrated, you know, taking apart things in the house.

Yeah. That's one of your character traits. You have a great story in the book where I think you save up for the Apple 2. It was a computer and it was, you know, relatively expensive, especially I think you were like 12 or something at the time and then you bring it home and your parents like, "Oh, he's, you know, he's going to plug it in and play with it." It's like, "No, I immediately took took it apart. I needed to understand how it worked."

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so it's back to when you open the thing up,

Yeah.

power supplies and disc drives and all these components. It's like, well, where do those things come from? Who makes those? What's inside those? How do they make those? And so you sort of peel the onion, you know, and you understand all the different elements. And you know, when I uh originally got the first IBM PC, you know, yeah, probably took it apart before I turned the thing on, you know, just to just to see what's what's inside. And one of the really cool things back then was that you didn't have these uh sort of application specific integrated circuits. They call them AS6, right? Or these big sort of uh chips that nobody really knows what's inside except the designers.

and what each chip was supposed to do inside the circuit and inside the IBM PC none of the chips were made by IBM right and and and uh none of the disc drives were made by IBM the power supply wasn't made by IBM and and so uh you know I was also interested in the economics of it. It's like, well, what does this chip cost? What does that chip cost? And you sort of add it all up and then you compare it to the cost that they're selling the thing for and you go, wow, this is they're really charging an incredible markup for for this.

Like, "Okay, well, there there's a list of components. How much those components cost?" What you just said is like you just kept asking questions like, "Oh, I'm going to take it apart." It's like, "Okay, well, this is all the components. This is what it is. This is like where you get them from. This is the look, the company names right here. I can just call them up and find out how much this is." Well, you could go to the distributors and you'd say, you know, "Okay, how much does this chip cost?" And they'd say, "Well, it's this price for a hundred of them."

Right. Uh, and you could you could literally map out the cost of every chip inside the thing. There is a book Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel, recommends reading called Hardball. The subtitle of that book is, "Are you playing to play or are you playing to win?" It is a book about extreme winners and some of the best operators in business. There is a line in that book that 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 improve your profits, weaken your competitors, and expand your influence. The first move is to drive down your cost faster than your competitors can and use the cost savings to upset their strategies." That sounds like the author was describing Dell. In his autobiography, Michael Dell says that one way that he was able to outco compete his better funded competitor Compact was with a structural cost advantage. Compact's operating costs were 36% of revenue compared to Dell's 18% of revenue. More than 40 years later, Dell is thriving, and Compact no longer exists. The best operators in business have this in common. They know their business from A to Z and their cost down to the penny. Ramp makes doing this effortless. RAMP gives your business easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control, all on a single platform. RAMP's corporate cards are fully programmable. You can set limits so the spending of your team never gets out of hand. Most companies only find out about excessive spending after the fact. With RAMP, you can stop it before it happens. Matt Pollson, who listens to this podcast and who's a founder of Marketbe, recently switched to RAMP, and this is what he said about it. Ramp is the best. The amount of money you will save from unwanted renewals and employees who think company credit card equals buy whatever you want will far exceed the best credit card rewards program. Matt is talking about the importance of cost control. RAMP helps you make this an obsession. Almost all of the top founders and CEOs I know are running their company on RAM. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business play to win today. That is ramp.com. something I I don't even know if I I've ever like verbalized before, but it's in all these biographies that I read. What I feel is just like there's just like a lot of common sense where they just the founder tends to just keep asking more questions and just like going to like an you just said I think peeling an onion it's like yeah just like okay I got that answer what's the next one and then what's the next one and there's something in human nature where we just like we stop at the first question but you have this like infinite curiosity that was very obvious like from ch from childhood and I think based on what we were just talking about your office is obviously still present but yeah it's just very fascinating like it's not rocket science just like keep asking questions and collecting information and thinking about the answers you're getting.

it and and so that's always been a thing for me.

And I think your mom's crying. You're you know,

And so you you were like, "Okay." In the book, you said, "I caved." Okay. Which is very unusual cuz you have super strong personality from from a young kid.

no, this is more than a little hobby or a side thing. this is just like I have to go do this.

Yeah. I mean I I wasn't doing anything else. I mean, there wasn't really anything else that was important to me and so yeah, it was it was totally all consuming and uh super exciting and wasn't doing anything else. Yeah.

I I would get pretty obsessed with, you know, individual topics and sort of go go deep on them. Mhm.

Is that still the case today or is it just basically

Yeah. Zach told me he's like he'll call me at like 5:00 a.m. and he was like, I have an idea like we should do this product or this acquisition or whatever. He's just like he just can't help himself. And I asked him, I go, "Uh, what would get him to stop?" He's like, "You have to kill him." What made you decide to write the book?

uh with the going private and buying EMC and VMware and there just been so much that happened. I wanted to kind of document it and it was during co I had some time and start started writing the stuff down and it felt like a logical place to uh sort of capture everything that that had happened. And you know, one of the main reasons I wrote it was for our team inside the company because I you know want them to understand uh you know how we think about the business and where it came from and you know as a as a business grows larger it's harder to be able to tell the stories directly w with w with with with everyone. And so it's just a great opportunity to encapsulate all that and uh share, you know, what happened really, the the good and the bad, the things that worked well, things that didn't work well. And um you know, I certainly benefited from reading the stories or hearing the stories of other people and thought it'd be a good idea. I said this on the the episode I made about it's like a great gift to like future generations of um entrepreneurs. I actually think that idea of like having uh like a singular piece of media whether it's a book there's another idea for you for podcast uh for people as the company grows to understand like this is the decisions that were made this is why it was this is what we've gone through. Uh Spotify has this. Originally they they did Gustaf is the head of product at Spotify and he's actually one that made this. And originally um I talked to them about this. They were just going to do it was like an eight-part series. Uh it was going to be a private podcast inside the company which tells the history of Spotify. So if you come in now, you know, 20 years into its existence, it's like, well, what were we what was like year one in an apartment? You know, we got a server in a closet. And so what they did is they did this beautiful like narrative and uh they would also include the people that were important at the in the early days like you know some people don't last in the company but they were really important first two three four years

Exactly. So, you know, if we walk downstairs right below this room where we are, there's a new class of

Yeah. Kind of bring them up to speed. And this is the context. I also think there's a additional benefit for for it to make it public facing because humans buy stories. Money flows as a function of stories. And I've experienced this. It's like if I read I spend, you know, 40 hours reading about this person that had this idea in their head. They built a company. At the end of that, you're going to have a way better appreciation. I would find buying my buying their products that I never even would have thought of because now I understand the story. Um, I just reread James Dyson's uh autobiography, which is one of my favorite books, probably my number one recommendation out of the 400 books I've read so far, just because it's like 90% just struggle. The first autobiography is just like, I'm failing for 14 years. This guy is like a mule. He won't give up. 5,127 prototypes, but there's an idea in the book I thought was smart where he understood the power of storytelling. Okay? And so he's like, you're going to walk into the retailer, you're going to see six different vacuum cleaners. His obviously is designed different so it's going to catch your eye. But he insisted they wrote like a 200word story on like a little flyer, right? Maybe like a little piece of cardboard and that you could attach it to the handle of

It's all it's all been a lot of fun and and and still and still is and and it feels like we're just getting started actually when when I think about the business and the opportunities we have and uh yeah, it's all fun. You mentioned earlier that you benefited from studying people that came before you and this is you know you wanted to pass that forward like who are a few of the people that you study you felt you learn from or that influence like your thinking about how you're building how you built your business

So when was he somebody like when you saw him at 15 and you saw okay wait this is a young kid in his 20s building a computer company. Was like that a model for you or like what was your interpretation of like that experience? I guess what I'm trying to get at.

you know, Apple was a leading company and Steve was obviously the sort of legendary figure. So,

you know how they had souped up their computers and software they had written and learned from each other and so you know Steve came to speak to our user group and yeah I mean he you know he he he he was like using these incredible you know metaphors and like listening to him and uh looking at what Apple's doing and going wow that's that's really And you know, you you'd also start started hearing about Bill Gates, you know, who's also about the same age as Jobs. And you know, they're both about 10 years older than than I am. And you kind of look at them and go, "Well, okay, they did something cool. May maybe maybe I've got a shot."

Charlie's right about those three things. Uh, you know, we we we we stay away from those.

You have a great example of one in the book with Adam Osborne where he had a very successful I think the Osborne one was relatively successful, right?

Okay.

And he's like, "All right, now we we're coming out with Osborne 2. It's even new and improved and it's great." And you make the point, he's just like, "Yeah, maybe, but it didn't ship in time." And so now you just made this big announcement. You're like, "We have this great new product. It's even better than one." What are you telling to the market?

Fix your mistakes as fast as you find them. And you actually want to make mistakes. You just want to make them small and you know iterate and fix them quickly. I mean one of the things when you're when you're creating a new business in an area that is never been done

Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, when uh Chat GPT came out in November of 22 or so, looking at this and going, "Wow, this is a big deal. This is this is pretty interesting." And you started to see the rate of improvement in the LLM. And you you you know, in technology, you can you can sort of look at the the rate of improvement and the learning curve, and you can sort of plot, well, where's this thing going, right? where's it going to be in a year or two years or three years? And you look at, okay, we're going to uh have agents and multi- aent systems and we're going to be able to reason over incredible amounts of information. Well, what does that actually mean for the way knowledge work gets done and the tools that humans are going to have? So, you think about that, you go, "Wow, this is a big big deal here. um we need to totally reset how we're thinking about the business and reimagine it, reframe it and understand what the processes are going to look like in 5 years. And so you do you do all that and you say, "Uh, if we keep doing what we were doing before, we're going to be in serious trouble because some new company's going to come along and yeah, they're going to have all these new tools. They're not going to have this legacy of crap from the past, right? Old ways of doing things, and they're just going to do it the new way. And so we have to change or we're going to go out of business. You know, I also believe in this idea that uh if you don't have a a crisis, make one, right? You know, you get people excited, motivated, and to drive the the necessary change. I mean, in one in one sense, this is not a technology problem. The technology is there whether you use it or not. It's a it's a question of how do you organize the team and people to actually go and get this thing done? How do you motivate them? How do you give them the right tools? How do you structure uh you know the uh ways people work together so that you can do it quickly? And it's very hard for people to, you know, if you've been doing something for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years the same way and all of a sudden it's like some new thing comes along, you're like, "No, I don't want to do that." You know, people don't like to change. But you have to. And so that's what we've been doing. Yeah. This is excessively rare. I mean, think about the story in the book where I think the line that I summarized where you were saying about IBM's like, "Yeah, the personal computer's, you know, fine. it's going to be a great terminal for the mainframe. And it's just like, oh, you see this over and over again in these biographies if you're studying, you know, something that's occurring over multiple decades. It's like companies and people cannot envision a future that's different from the present that they succeeded in. So they kind of like dismiss it, dismiss it or kind of ignore it. I I'm trying to think though like so you just said, okay, there's no books like what you guys are doing right now, Dell, right? You can't there's like you're on the cutting edge. There's no there's no books you can read about it. But you have surfed how many different technological revolutions? You did the micro processor, right? That micro computer, sorry. Uh the personal computer. Um then obviously the internet was invented.

How many? So like I got four or five. How many have you successfully navigated and had to reinvent Dell over and over again? How many of these like huge shifts do you think you've navigated? Yeah, there's probably been six or seven of them.

is there like an echo between all of these like that you can apply like certain ideas you can take away and like form or structure like oh that's kind of similar to what we had to do when we had to reinvent for X.

Say more about that.

you know if if you look at the growth in the usage of these tools. And part of it is that each successive uh wave of technological improvement is built on the prior w you know foundations and so they're able to go faster. So if you have five billion people connected with all kinds of devices, well now they can use these tools and that just goes way faster. And I I I think you have to have this idea in your head that any uh you know new thing has some chance of succeeding, right? And and

So there's a lot of wild ideas out there and if you dismiss them all, you're going to miss some some things. So, so you you you you kind of have to hold this idea in your head that uh any of these wild ideas has a chance of succeeding and let's sort of understand what do all these things mean and figure out what is the point of intersection right you know what should we be doing about this and when when is it actually relevant interesting valuable and it's sort of, you know, hits escape velocity and if you're if you're sort of stuck in a particular paradigm or you're like dismissing things, you're going to miss them.

Yeah, I love I love this stuff. But how do you not squash new ideas? Like you just said like you know that those are great lines like any idea can work now. Everybody's connected and they can grow faster than you can possibly imagine. So how do you like do you have a process for like how do you not you know new ideas are fragile and you know they need some kind of protection and some time to grow like but most people just like kind of snuff them out or dismiss them immediately. Well, you know, sometimes uh it it's a it's a good idea, but it's the wrong time.

um but there's no absolutes here, right? You you you just have to be open-minded and consider the possibility that things are changing fast enough that uh you know some some new thing comes along. If you took the top computer scientists uh you know and researchers in AI or just broadly you know five years ago and you said okay you know this is what's going to happen with LLMs in the next 5 years probably 99 out of 100 would say no no that's not going to happen right and so uh that's a that's a pretty good example in contemporary period here, you know, where you you just need to be uh open to the possibility that things are going to change. And and and there's also this thing where about every 10 years or so, something comes along and just completely expands the opportunity set for the industry. And that's part of the fun, the excitement, the super interesting aspect of what we get to do every day. The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns. But you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20% of their data because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations. Unless you have HubSpot. HubSpot is where all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. Because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com.

Yeah. And and you know, it's okay to try to predict it as well. It's just really hard to do. And you know, you might want to have a lot of experiments. I mean, if you go back and and say, okay, let's say you had somebody who was supposed to be really smart or supposed to be an expert at something, right? 10 years ago, how good were they at predicting what was going to happen?

Yeah. At the limit, nobody knows anything, right? And it's not a bad uh philosophy,

Um it's good to have a hypothesis though, right? and and and and ideas and experiments and to keep an open mind.

What was your hypothesis back then? Do you remember?

Yeah. There's a line in uh Andrew Carnegie's biography. It was really fascinating because, you know, he dabbled in a bunch of different businesses. He was pretty wealthy before he started the steel company. But once he realized that, you know, think about how important steel was at that time. It's like everything this is the new the new product that everything every other product is going to be made out of. Uh from bridges to railroads and everything else like this is the biggest opportunity in my life. I'm going to go all in on it. To the point where he didn't even want any distractions. He sold all of his stocks cuz he didn't want to find himself looking at the newspaper to wonder like what the price of stock was. Like fully focused on the greatest opportunity of my entire life. He went into an existing business that was run by older gentlemen, right? He had this new way to do steel. I think it's Bessemer steel that he got from England. So he took the idea from England, imported into America, which it's kind of weird how often that is in the history of entrepreneurship where it's like, oh, this idea is working in one geography. Will it work over there? It's like, yeah, cuz humans are kind of the same everywhere. There's some, you know, cultural differences, but, you know, our our core motivations are, you know, uh, very similar. And, uh, they were very resistant to change. So they're like, "No, that's not the best process." And then they would ridicule him for investing in the newest technology. He was spending a ton of money. Every time there was a better machine, a more efficient machine, he would immediately rip out the old machine and input and put in the new technology of his day. We wouldn't think about his technology today. It's definitely technology back then. And when you read his autobiography, which you know is in the public domain, anybody could read it for free. It's it's an incredible gift to humanity there. I remember getting to this part of the biography which is exactly what you just said. It's like okay even if this doesn't give us advantage over our competitors if we don't do it like they will have the advantage. So even if we're on like on the same level and the the the summary of what Andrew Carnegie was saying these guys wind up not adopting the technology and they went out of business. So he says invest in this is not a direct quote this is me summarizing his idea says invest in technology. uh the savings compound. It can make the uh it gives you an advantage over uh your slower moving competitors and it can be the difference between a profit and a loss. If he didn't do that that investment into the new technology that his competitors were dismissing the stupid young kid with his fancy machine, right? That wind up making making his company profitable in a year or two and their company unprofitable and then slowly and slowly they just they kept losing money and then they went out of business.

Exactly. you don't necessarily want everybody to know what you're doing. Also,

Yeah. So, dad terminal is is what he he refers to as when he kind of taps in and, you know, wants to talk about a particular topic or has a has a question. And it's one of my favorite times with Zach, you know, cuz cuz you know, we're we're talking about solving problems or challenges inside his business. And um you know I get to share the mistakes I made, mistakes I saw other people make, lessons learned and uh hopefully save him some some pain and suffering and you know uh steps from you know uh learnings along the way.

Exactly. Yeah.

I use that terminal." And I was like, "Give me an example like what is what's the last query into that terminal?" And he goes,

and and a critical puzzle. I mean, I think if we had not uh figured out how to do our our supply chain well, um you know, we we would not be here today. It's as simple as that. So, it's a it's a fundamental thing that is just super important in it in our business. So, it's just you've thought more about this area over

Yeah. There's a line in the book, I think, the first time you realize, hey, I I don't like these. Your whole thing is eliminating middlemen and like getting as close to the source as possible. And um I think you're like n it might be 20 years old at the time, but you're taking your first trip to China if I'm not mistaken.

So where you were going to Asia?

Yeah. But what I love is just like how excited you were.

Because it's like you said something you said earlier. It's like you had a deep love for your business and then now you get to keep peeling back the onion and getting closer and closer to how now it's like, oh, I'm like spending 16 hours a day. I'm sleeping in my office. I'm working. I'm We have customers. We have we're hiring employees. of revenue growth. But now I'm getting like deep a deeper and deeper deeper understanding and like so as I read these biographies of people I try to like build like you know I I think I have a good sense of like how you think and like what's important to you. And what I realized is like that instinct that you had as a 20-year-old man or however old you were in at that time. It's like that has not you never been alleviated. It's just like this constant like keep going lower and lower and lower to like seek more a deeper understanding of like the world around you, but also how your business like fits in that world and how you can build technology to like enhance everybody else around you.

You say, of course, like this is the f this is another thing I told you when we had dinner. Like,

I wouldn't know any other way to do it.

No I know cuz you're like Of course you like it's this is what I love. It's like

This is why you're great. This is why but that's that's why you're great. So like

Yeah, sure.

So, he has a great line. He said that the founder is the guardian of the company's soul. That it's impossible to separate,

I resemble that.

Yeah. And if if you've been doing it every day for 41 years, it seems pretty normal, right?

21. Yeah.

Like what's the role that you feel he played at that point in Dell's history?

in like operations like what do you think? Yeah, I mean it it was well well well first of all we were growing so fast we just we just didn't have the balance sheet or the capital to support our growth and so he helped us you know get some uh credit lines and you know that that you know freed up capital and then like you know sort of organized some you know some of the operations and stuff I didn't really know about or or have a great interest in, you know, because it wasn't the technology or or uh the customers.

And so he helped sort of get all that stuff on the right path. And then as we as we needed even more capital, you know, with a private placement, then going public, you know, he helped helped sort of get all that going. and you know just basically how do you how do you scale this thing up to get it ready for 10x or 100x growth. One thing I thought was very fascinating that Lee Walker said, right, is you got to the point where, you know, you had that negative cash conversion cycle where but you were selling to like individuals. So individuals like, "Oh, I want a computer, Michael. Okay, give me your credit card." You're like, "Great, I got this money, which we'll talk about in a minute." But now you've moved up and now you're doing enterprise. And some of these companies are huge like Texico and like these giant companies. And I remember one point in the book, it was something you were doing like 60 million a year in revenue and you had like 200 grand in your bank accounts or something. It's like just no cashier. And what was smart is he went to the banks and I was curious. It sounds like he had relationships with the bankers. And I always have this maximum that relationships run.

Okay. So relationships around the world. You see that over and over again. And so Lee had relationships with these these bankers that I assumed in the book and you just verified.

Yeah. It was receivable based financing. The problem was that, you know, as as a as a 21-year-old, you know, starting a business with really no capital, uh, you know, in infusion from from the beginning, you know, thousand dollars, right? you know, uh, a banker looking at it with no one, uh, known inside the business to trust would sort of their their general reaction would be, I think I'll go do something else, right? Yeah. But, you know, Lee had those relationships. he was trusted and he was able to kind of explain it to them and you know that helped sort of uh break open that log jam and that you know gave us some of the capital we needed to continue to grow and expand. Yeah. So, you know, we we didn't have any capital, right? And so, uh, you know, what what we what we figured out was that if we could dramatically uh shrink um our inventory and get paid from our customers faster and, you know, uh maybe not pay our suppliers, you know, instantly, pay them a little bit later. Then if you're growing and you have a negative cash conversion cycle, you actually generate a lot of cash. And so then you don't need as much capital to raise to be able to grow the company. You have a high return on capital. So we started looking at the business that way. And of course, we also uh there was this um really interesting thing where our competitors who didn't really understand what we were doing, they had these elongated supply chains. They had distributors and dealers and so they would have, you know, like 90 days of collective inventory from the time that they actually made the the product to when it actually got to the customer. And you could actually uh understand this because if you opened up the computers, the uh chips had dates on them that showed the weeks they were made. So, you know, it would say like uh 4292 and that meant it was that chip was built in the 42nd week of the 92nd year. And so you could literally date how old the inventory was by opening these things up. But anyway, so they had like 90 days in their collective supply chain. And we figured out how to have like five days. I mean, it was crazy. It was like it was like a massive advantage. Now, the other reason this is important is because it turns out that the price of electronic components generally goes down, right? and and you know it's it's a pretty predictable thing. And so uh if our components are 5 days old and the competitor's components are 90 days old, well theirs cost a lot more than ours do, right? And so now you've got this structural competitive advantage. Now uh another element of this is that um you also have the freshest and the newest and the best technology. You're not selling the 90-day old fish or bananas, right? You're selling the the the the new chip, the the the latest capability. And so now you've got even another advantage, right? And so and then you've got this feedback loop because you're getting signal from the customers of, oh, I like this, I want that, change this. And so you're able to, you know, create this dynamic feedback loop. So that was what we created and it worked you know and we kept iterating it and evolving it. The competitors uh you know they they um kind of dismissed it and one of the best things was they they just didn't understand it. They like they like misunderstood it which was fantastic. it's like it's like you don't want them to understand what's going on. You you you don't want to explain it. now? Now now you can explain it, but back then you don't want to you don't want them to know what's happening. You just want them "I'll crush the episodes. episodes would be great." Like, because he had so many crazy stories. He without hesitation, he goes, "Absolutely not." I was like, "Why?" He goes, "I have no desire to educate my competitors." How do you think he deliberately misunder like how is that possible for him to not be able to accurately analyze? Do you think he was just dismissive of you? You didn't think you were a threat? Like what was going on there? Did you read the new biography of Jensen Wong called the Nvidia? It's actually it's a history of Nvidia but he's heavily featured NVIDIA way or I did an episode on it. I'll send it to you. Um, but he has this whole thing where the threat comes from below. And his I think he he reduces everything to maxims. He's like a really good communicator. And so his thing is like we're going to ship the whole cow because the threat goes from below. And I think I mentioned this in the episode I did on on your book where it's just like you at the time came out with a you Yeah. And you, you know, you kind of hope that they don't even see it. Right. I mean, I think there's a human instinct to to say, "Hey, look at me. I'm doing this great thing. Isn't this cool?" Right. But actually, in business, it's better if the competitor doesn't understand or doesn't see you. So, because you weren't in stores, the only way they would know that is if they were ordering directly from you. And they probably weren't doing that. Yeah. Or or if they were sort of paying attention, you know, but but you you kind of hope they don't notice and don't pay attention. There's a line in the book. I I 100% agree with you. It's like, but this is the difference between somebody that's obsessed and somebody that's not like that guy wasn't taking apart computers compulsively. There's a story in the book and no disrespect to him. I'm not trying to throw any shade to anybody. There's a story in the book where you guys are doing I think the private placement of the IPO and is Black Friday happens and I think Lee Walker walks in your office to tell you that oh … we there might be some trouble. there's trouble brewing in the capital markets at this point. And he said Michael was in his office taking apart another computer. is that there's no end to like you can't get to the end of what they're interested in. He you think he used the analogy of like a a cup like you just pour and pour and pour. It's just like it just keeps going. like they can never get to the end of their curiosity. And I think you're a perfect example of that where if you look at other founders that are doing things for fame or status or whatever the case is, it's like Jerry Seinfeld has a great line. He goes, "If you just do it for the money, you're only going to go so far." Yeah. And you're you're taking to our chips and analyzing like, "Oh, I have a 90 days advantage over here." And I'm not worried about the capital markets cuz we're just going to keep serving our customers and like eventually that is going to change. There's not going to be a depression forever. So what can I focus on? I can just focus on understanding what I'm working on, what's in front of me and then following this deep curiosity, you know, and and and actually taking the curiosity that comes from your head into like an actual product that makes somebody else's life better. It's like the miracle of entrepreneurship. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. and still caring about the company even from the grave. Um it's it's a common I think misconception. I'm curious to get your take on this where people are like well you know if you don't raise all the money at the beginning and your competitor does like you're automatically dead. And I hear that a lot and I was like I don't know like compact raised 75 h 100red million and you had $1,000 in a dorm room. Do you feel that like it is actually different today? Like if you were advising like a younger entrepreneur Yeah. uh advice there. I don't think, you know, like I was saying saying earlier, I don't think there are ever these absolutes. I think you always have to hold out the possibility that somebody is going to figure out some clever interesting way to do something that nobody's ever thought of that is different and you know, uh that's just going to happen, right? Yeah, that's actually an interesting area to go down where it's like who else you you figured out by accident like because you know uh necessity is the mother of all inventions like I don't have capital so how do I get money? Well, I just ask my customers for the money and then you you you accidentally discovered all these advantages and had a deeper understanding as you went along. Are there any other examples of like entrepreneurs or businesses that you've studied where it's like, "Wow, that's like a really clever way to do something effectively inexpensively." Well, I mean, you think about uh some of the some of the uh retailers, you know, like, you know, Walmart and Costco and Amazon obviously came up with with super clever ways of of winning in that space by uh you know, doing things inexpensively, taking out all kinds of cost. Yeah, there's that mail war thing again. really and it was sort of like as we were establishing our brand. Uh you know sort of the conventional wisdom was a mail order company which was sort of like a like an insult. Yeah. Like it's like okay it's a mail order company how did how did you beat it? just kept doing our thing, you know, and and eventually people go, "Well, I guess it's not really mail. I mean, it's internet and it's not mail order." I was like, "What? Nobody order stuff in the mail. What is it?" Yeah. Well, so we we were selling direct, right? We, you know, like people would call us on the phone and we used to have these rooms with like a gazillion fax machines and they would send us their orders on faxes. It was crazy. And they had cataloges, right? And so then uh you know the worldwide web comes along and you websites you know like oh you mean we can create a website and people can go on there and like the catalog is there and they can like press a button order the thing in my first book you notice on every page at the bottom it said www.dell.com com. Like obsessed with it just became like the uh easy way to interact with people. I think 98. Yeah. 98. I remember when you could like go to all the websites I'm done for the day. kind of it sounds crazy now, but there there there used to be not that many websites and you could like go to them and like okay, I'm done. Like it's just there's nothing nothing else to see. That obviously changed quickly. I think it was probably 9096 95 build to build had to build the whole thing. Yeah. It's it's funny. Uh I forgot about the fact that Dell.com is on the bottom of every page, but what's fascinating is if you read Bezos's shareholder letters, it's not he never refers to it as Amazon. Every single uh shareholder letter up until, you know, you don't have to do it anymore. And then every single interview it's Amazon.com, Amazon.com, Amazon.com. Then it turns into Amazon because it's just like we got to push you guys to this new thing called the internet where you can buy things. It's such a fascinating like thought like how uh novel it was. But you kind of saw it like right away like this just we should just do this cuz it's cool. We had experimented with how do you create an electronic version of the catalog even like we're going to send you a floppy disc or a CD ROM and you put it in your computer and you load it up and the catalog is there. Right. Those are some of the ridiculous things that happened before the internet before the worldwide web. Yeah. Yeah, we did. you know, you wanted to make it easy for the customer to understand your offerings and then the worldwide web just made that, you know, kind of infinitely accessible to to anyone. uh obviously for a business that was selling directly to businesses and uh you know, individuals, you know, all over the world, it was just total rocket fuel. How soon into Dell were you starting to sell like targeting institutions over individuals? Okay. So go it started with like doctors and dentists, right? Or lawyers were some of your first but they were using it for business purposes. an individual doctor or dentist, I would think of them as as as more like an individual. But uh roughly 75 to 80% of it is businesses, not consumer. And so that's kind of been the thing for a long time. Similar percentage. Yeah. you know, there were companies, universities, they were buying five, 10, 10, 20, 50 machines at a time. One final thing that I want to talk to you about that I think is like one of the most important ideas in your book, uh, especially when you're trying to like push these stories down the generations. So I like I see it in a lot of the biographies and I think it's like another misconception how we just talked about the misconception between like entrepreneurs know be wary of experts and like how they can kill new ideas where like a a normal person would revere them right so there's like this this this difference of understanding between that another one that I would say is like the importance of ego and self-belief and self-confidence and my you know general society might say you know uh you should generate evidence and then be confident. And I hear this a lot which is perplexing to me because in the books this is no you have that direct completely back backwards. Belief comes before ability. And so I would go back to this part in your book that I think is super important when you're 19 years old and your dad's like what do you want to do with your life? Like and you're like I want to compete with IBM and you sit there and like again I I don't think you should be reading these books quickly. This is like there's no test at the end. Like sit with the ideas and really think about what's happening on this page. And I think it's one of the most important pages in the book. I can actually see the page in front of me. And what you realize, you say on that that page where it's just like, was I a little full? You know, the idea is like, I have $1,000. I'm in the UT dorm room. I'm going to take on the biggest company in the world. And you said, was I a little full of myself at 19? Sure, I was. I think you have to be to do anything important. Can you explain that mindset? Yeah, I think I think it's a combination of of uh naivee, right, which is an important element. It's like you don't know enough to know that maybe this won't work. being real here, I think a perfect illustration of that would be your reluctance, initial reluctance to name the company after you because it was PC's limited right at the very beginning. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But then you realize like why don't we just do Dell? And then that's when I thought of the Osborne thing cuz you're like wait a minute this guy he named his company after that. Like there's no what if it doesn't work? Yeah. And and uh you know fear. Has that happened to you? It's perfectly said. Thank you for writing the book. Thank you for the time. I really appreciate, Michael.