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John Malone Overtakes Ted Turner as America’s Largest individual Land Owner
Both of these men are on my list of top tycoons to study. Both competed and collaborated for decades in the cable-TV industry where they did deals both big and small. Malone is typical of the men covered in The Tycoon Playbook. They all had the patience and discipline to start off small and build an empire one step at a time. Malone earned a Ph.D. in operations research from Johns Hopkins in the late 1960s and then joined General Instruments Corp., which was part of the cable-TV industry. After quickly becoming dissatisfied with the company’s management he took a major gamble by quitting and moving to Denver where he accepted a 50% pay cut for the privilege of working for a startup teetering on bankruptcy owned by a Bob Magness. The company was Tele-Communications Inc., which later was renamed TCI.
Tinkham Veale II
The world lost a great tycoon this past week. Tinkham Veale II was 97. Mr. Veale started back in the 1960s and built a huge conglomerate from an office in a stable, as legend has it. By the mid-1990s, his empire enjoyed sales of over $10 billion and employed 36.000 people. He was both a wealth and job creator. Sadly, too many of today’s so-called tycoons only know how to create wealth by destroying other people’s jobs.
The Veale Growth Strategy
Here’s how Mr. Veale grew his empire.
Arbitrage with Richard Gere
Power is the best alibi.
Is there any actor better suited to playing wealthy businessmen than Richard Gere? Well okay, there is Michael Douglas. I suppose they are equals when it comes to these types of roles. Just imagine the two of them together in a film about warring tycoons.
Steli Efti gives a candid talk at TED about the common mistakes made by entrepreneurs, such as simply pushing harder and harder when things are not working, and how to replace such self-defeating habits with ones that actually work. I could personally relate to a lot of the examples he gives in the talk.
Steli Efti is a serial entrepreneur who dropped out of high school to start 3 profitable companies in Europe until he sold everything he had and bought a one way ticket to San Francisco 5 years ago. He founded Supercool School, a startup that empowered thousands of schools in over 50 countries to use a free online education platform to spread learning online.
Last year he co-founded SwipeGood, a social good startup that offered people a simple way to round up all their purchases and give small change to their favorite charities.
He’s currently working on a new stealth startup that has been funded by the very same investors as Twitter, Facebook & Google.
Steli’s pursuit of happiness has been guided by a simple principle: Do what seems most challenging next. Move outside your comfort zone. Grow!
Warren Buffett – The Book that Changed My Life
Some tycoons become rich by coming up with a single idea that they then pursue to the limit. Others rely on building cookie-cutter systems for creating wealth. Buffett falls into the latter category. Many technology and online entrepreneurs fall into the former, “big idea,” category. In this video Warren talks about the book that set his imagination on fire at an early age and helped him to create the growth system that has made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet. For most of us it’s easier to follow a wealth creation system than it is to come up with a truly original idea.
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