· David Senra, Peter Rahal
[00:00:00] S0: ... to fix. [00:00:00] S1: Running a business is like a river. As long as it's flowing, great. But if there's something blocking that flow, you need to fucking fix it. Like, if something's in the way, I ruminate on it to the point where I can't sleep, that I have to fix it so I can sleep. I ruminate on the problems. So they just nag at me. This is actually a problem I have. A flaw of my leadership style is I don't acknowledge the wins or success. I'm only preoccupied about what's wrong. So, I'm working on that. But I actually outsource that to people internally to like, "Hey, make sure we're like, say, like our birthday is tomorrow." I fucking hate birthdays. But our birthday's tomorrow, so I'm like, "Please do something so we can acknowledge our birthday." But, like, I don't do that. So I outsource it a bit internally, but yeah. If you just fix that, I don't know, the approach makes sense. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah, it's almost like what Elon does. So we just had Zach Dell on the podcast, and Antonio's on his board. And he says the first, I think it's still to this day, like the first two years, every conversation that Zach Dell had with Antonio, is it Gracias? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Antonio Gracias is, "Hey, Zach, how's it going?" "Good." "What's your bottleneck?" [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: He refused to talk about anything. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah.
· Peter Rahal, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And he's like, "What is the bottleneck? What is the in way or critical path? And then we're just going to talk about this. The entire conversation is this. And then the next thing that is resolved, okay, what's the next bottleneck?" And it's just over and over and over again. It's just relentless focus on the bottleneck. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. I think it's like, all right, my job is to scan the holistic picture of the business and react to the problems and then go fix them and get the fuck out of the way. Just like constant confronting the problems. [00:00:00] S0: I think this is, like almost all the elite entrepreneurs have this exact same mentality, where it's like you can even go to like, Buffett and Munger would talk about this when they were talking about people operating all the subsidiaries of Berkshire. It's just like, just tell us the bad news because the good news is- [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, exactly. It's like the river running. I don't care- [00:00:00] S0: Just tell me the bad news. [00:00:00] S1: Exactly.
· Peter Rahal, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Exactly. [00:00:00] S0: Tony Xu from DoorDash, who I want to get him back on the show as soon as possible because I can't explain why, but like, you talk to him, I think he's like 41, 42, and you just sit there and if you actually look, it's not just a delivery business. That's not what this guy's doing. He gives you like young Jeff Bezos vibes, and he's chasing after something much larger that he sees, but you can't really see it at the moment. And he said he has this problem too, where it's just like they hit a milestone, they do some kind of revenue or whatever the case is, and he's like, "I might go out to dinner." [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: "But in many cases, I don't even do that." And it's like, "Okay, I'm onto the next thing the very next day." [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, same with that. Like our RXBAR, I didn't do anything. That deal happened, I just, the next day. [00:00:00] S0: You bought a house in Miami and looked for a wife, though. [00:00:00] S1: That was a year and a half later. Yeah, I did do that at some point. [00:00:00] S0: So what is the thing that you're trying to unlock right now that you see blocking you? [00:00:00] S1: So we've reorganized the group to be a hybrid organization where we have David as a business unit, which has its sales, marketing, supply, finance, and we have HallPass, another BU. So we have two BUs, and we're about to have a third business unit, all operating semi-autonomously. And then we have, at the Medici level, sort of shared services. [00:00:00] S0: Why name the company Medici?
· David Senra, Peter Rahal
[00:00:00] S0: Why name the company Medici? [00:00:00] S1: I love history, and it reflects how we operate organizationally. So the Medicis, they created the conditions for the Renaissance to happen. They weren't necessarily the doers. So they created the conditions. They identified Michelangelo, Donatello, Galileo, and it's a little bit of the analogy of what our people that work at Medici at the company, they create the conditions for the business units to thrive and flourish, and they're the artists and scientists. So at Medici, it's like the money, the law, like the things that are agnostic live at there, and then the artists and scientists, the people actually doing the work, are at the business unit level. So the name suited how we operate. Medici and our company creates the conditions for the business unit leaders and all the operators to go execute what they need to. [00:00:00] S0: Say more about the structure. So you have all these business... You just said they operate semi-autonomously? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. Semi-autonomously meaning there are some centralized services, but they more or less are their own business unit that have agency and autonomy, run their own P&L, and go do. Versus like a large CPG are typically centralized. So it's a decentralized approach because speed and agility is the main objective. Because you look at it and you're like, all right, your payroll's too high. Like, it's quite inefficient on a P&L basis because you have double sales. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah, duplication of efforts.
· David Senra, Peter Rahal
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah, duplication of efforts. [00:00:00] S1: But to me, the main design objective is speed. And so if it's speed, you're designing for speed, you're going to pay extra people to do that. [00:00:00] S0: Me and Rob had this exact same conversation yesterday. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. Speed's important. Like, it's always been important, and it's really important, especially in our market we're in, where we're dealing with people with mega, mega scale. Our ability to bring product to market fast is... I don't want to lose that. And honestly, if we lose that, I'm like, I'm done. [00:00:00] S0: What do you mean you're done? [00:00:00] S1: Like, if we lose our entrepreneurial, and I say this to the company, if we lose our values and the way we operate, our culture, I'm fucking leaving. [00:00:00] S0: Why do you just grit your teeth? [00:00:00] S1: Grit my teeth? [00:00:00] S0: You just grit your- [00:00:00] S1: Because it makes me angry. Because it makes me angry. I hate big, fat, stupid- [00:00:00] S0: I'm fucking leaving. [00:00:00] S1: I hate big, fat, stupid things, and I don't want to be a big, fat, stupid company. The problem is it's actually inevitable as you get bigger. Like, my job is to fight bureaucracy, fight the bullshit.
· Peter Rahal, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: I hate big, fat, stupid things, and I don't want to be a big, fat, stupid company. The problem is it's actually inevitable as you get bigger. Like, my job is to fight bureaucracy, fight the bullshit. [00:00:00] S0: It doesn't have to be. I mean, you even kind of stumbled upon, or maybe not even stumbled upon, you were probably very intentional about the way you operated this. I just did this episode of my other podcast, Founders, about Henry Singleton, and he led one of the most successful conglomerates of all time. In many cases, a lot of the ideas that we ascribe to Buffett and Munger were actually things they learned from him. And his whole thing is, I think at the time- In the '70s, he owned like 130 businesses, 129 of them were profitable. [00:00:00] S1: Jesus. [00:00:00] S0: And essentially, same thing, they ran their own operations. The only thing he centralized was compensation and capital allocation. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: So, you're on your own, you're making cash, I'm going to leave you alone. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, performance equals freedom. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah, exactly. And then you just send your cash, and then I make the capital allocation decisions for us. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: So I don't think... And he didn't have a big, fat, stupid, ugly company. So it doesn't have to be the outcome. [00:00:00] S1: No, I know. But it's like the nature of these organizations. The more people they want, nature pulls it in together. It almost wants to be that, a group of people.