Great Business Stories

Look, I’d be lying if I said I’d always wanted to cover Chesky and Airbnb. I hadn’t really read much about either of them. The business itself sounds pretty humdrum. People renting out apartments, spare rooms. Nothing really new or exciting there. And Chesky himself has always flown under the radar.
But each week the story I pick just depends on what catches my fancy and last week, for whatever reason, I thought, you know what, I know absolutely nothing about this guy. I want to dig into it.
And what a story.
Because Chesky and his co-founders basically took one of the crappiest business ideas — renting out airbeds on apartment floors — and through sheer tenacity and a fantastic understanding of how a product should work, they turned it into a $100 billion company.
But it’s really the stories behind the company that make this so good. Making their own cereal to clear their debts. Not knowing what a slide deck or an angel investor was. Coming up against the king of the clones, the dreaded Samwer brothers from Germany, losing 80% of their business when Covid hit.
It all makes for a cracking story.
Enjoy.

As regular listeners will know, I’ve wanted to cover Thiel for some time now.
He’s going to warrant a three-parter at least because, love him or loathe him, Thiel is without doubt one of the most interesting, controversial and polarising people in business over the last 30 years.
For listeners who don’t know him, Thiel was part of what became known as the PayPal Mafia - this group of supersmart guys who founded and built PayPal. The company survived the dot-com crash, it almost went under because of Russian fraudsters and they eventually cashed out in 2002.
And then a lot of the people involved went on to even more success. We’re talking Thiel himself, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Reid Hoffman. 
So this episode focuses on Thiel’s early life and brings us right up to the sale of PayPal in 2002. It is a cracking story. Enjoy.

Now I’m not a big petrol head, but as some of you might know, I love Formula 1, and I think it's fair to say that Formula 1 wouldn’t be where it is today without Ferrari—so I was really keen to dig into this.
And what a story.
Enzo Ferrari wasn’t your typical business guy. Most people think of Ferrari as a company that builds expensive road cars and also happens to race. But for Enzo Ferrari, the road car business was really secondary—those beautiful, expensive cars were made for one reason only—it was to fund his obsession with racing.
And it was an obsession.
He valued his engines more than his drivers. He had little time for his family, but still made time for numerous affairs.
He could be a charming, funny and brilliant salesman, but he could also be cold, ruthless and very difficult.
And he makes for a cracking story.

The whole WorldCom scandal never really registered with me- because it happened straight after the dotcom bubble burst, so myself and my cofounders were just dusting ourselves off and slowly realising that we weren’t going to suddenly become business tycoons and on top of that whole Enron scandal had exploded just  a bit before so that was the story that consumed me back then - so when WorldCom went bust, I didn’t really give it a lot of time, but I knew in the back of my mind that there was great story here- Bernie Ebbers, this 6 foot 4, honest to goodness church-going  cowboy who kind of came from nowhere to all of a sudden building one of the biggest telecom companies in the USA, until suddenly it all collapsed becoming the biggest bankruptcy in US history, far surpassing Enron and and I’m glad that I finally got round to digging into thai story because it really is a cracking one- enjoy

This is the remarkable story of how David and Frederick Barclay went from painters and decorators to owning the most prestigious hotels in London: the Ritz, Claridge's, the Connaught, the Berkeley.
They bought the Telegraph Newspaper Group, they bought an island and built a £100 million castle on it, their fortune was estimated to be £7 billion pounds as late as 2020. But these guys, man, they were secretive, underhand — these guys pulled some very sneaky shit. And then it all came crashing down when the twins turned on each other, culminating in the Ritz Hotel bugging scandal. This is a sensational and cracking story — enjoy.