I'm obsessed with Brad Jacobs

I’ve recently been rereading Brad Jacobs’ book How To Make A Few Billion Dollars, in preparation for reading his new book How To Make A Few More Billion Dollars. (All of my friends who know how ambitious I am think this is hilarious).

I’ve been mildly obsessed by Brad Jacobs since I first read this book because he’s so different to the usual glorified archetype of successful Silicon Valley company builders. But he’s also one of the only founders I’ve come across who has demonstrated that he can consistently and reliably repeat his success across multiple companies in multiple industries.

The highly successful founders that are most in the zeitgeist are framed as having some spiky tech edge that leads them to develop an exceptional new product which takes off. There is skill in this story, but there is also an element of luck - that the founder is in the right place at the right time and has access to whatever technology is core to their product. I suspect this is part of why most founders are known for one, maybe two huge things, but they rarely do another equally big thing, let alone several more (there are obviously alternative reasons for this - e.g. the founder wants to stay at the thing they’ve built that became huge for as long as possible, they’re burnt out when they leave and don’t want to start another thing, advantage compounds with time in their industry, etc).

Elon Musk is obviously a counterexample to this; but I would argue that Elon, along with Brad Jacobs, has developed a repeatable system for building huge companies. Their systems are extremely different, almost completely opposing in their execution, and you could argue that Elon’s must be better from a purely financial perspective based on the scale of companies he’s created (although it may be worse in other ways). However, both systems are based on three central tenets: people, capital, and some key strength that is applicable beyond one field. Being technically exceptional can certainly help, but is not sufficient or required for repeatably and consistently building multi-billion dollar companies - and public perception definitely over-indexes on it at the expense of other pieces.

On capital: both Brad and Elon (is it weird to write on a first-name basis?) have an exceptional understanding of how capital flows and how to leverage narrative to raise from both private investors and the public markets. Their methods are very different - Elon spins his narrative by pointing at a big, ambitious, technologically difficult goal. Brad raises on trust, reliability, and investor confidence that if he says he can do something then he can absolutely do it. Different methods, but both demonstrably effective narratives for attracting the flow of capital.

On some key strength: Elon’s key strength is his ability to quickly master complicated concepts in every field he goes into, both technical and operational. He can lead the room in everything from rocket science to finance. Brad Jacobs’ key strength is M&A - he has built the muscle to acquire a lot of fragmented businesses in an industry, and successfully integrate them to form enduring, sustainable companies. This is something most CEOs fail at, and it is the thing that has enabled him to repeatably build billion+ dollar companies.

On people: both Elon and Brad have a highly effective way of motivating their team to achieve exceptional things. Their respective methods are extremely different, and related to their key strength. Elon will identify the biggest problem in his company and sit with the person or people responsible for it every single day until it is solved. This comes directly from and contributes to his ability to master complex concepts in every field.

What fascinated me about Brad’s book is how much time he spent talking about how to make a team feel like part of something where they matter - to quote him, how to make everyone feel “love vibes”. This is a surprising thing to take up a substantial portion of a business book on how to be ultra-successful at M&A. More than the mechanics or quality of the deal, more than hiring or firing people, this seems to be the thing he thinks about the most. Upon reflection, this likely comes directly from and contributes to M&A as his core strength. I suspect most CEOs fail at M&A because they don’t realise that this is the most important part of it.

If I put Elon Musk or Brad Jacobs in the middle of nowhere today with few resources and no knowledge that they had built huge companies before, just the skills they used to build them, I have every confidence that they would come out with a billion dollar company. If I put Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos in the same situation, although they’ve built exceptional companies, I have much less confidence that they would do the same again with a different company. The differentiating factor is that Elon and Brad both have a repeatable playbook that extends across industries; their playbooks are extremely different in execution, but similar in the what their differentiating elements are. To me, that makes Brad Jacobs worth studying.