#359 The Russian Rockefellers

Founders

David Senra

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4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2024

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The name of Nobel usually calls to mind Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, and the internationally prestigious prizes that bear his name. But Alfred was only one member of a creative and innovative family who built an industrial empire in prerevolutionary Russia. The saga begins with an emigre from Sweden, Immanuel Nobel, who was an architect, a pioneer producer of steam engines, and a maker of weapons. Immanuel's sons included Alfred; Robert, who directed the family's activities in the Caspian oil fields; and Ludwig, an engineering genius and manufacturing magnate whose boundless energy and fierce determination created the Russian petroleum industry. Ludwig's son Emanuel showed similar mettle, shrewdly bargaining with the Rothschilds for control of the Russian markets and competing head-on with Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell for lucrative world markets. Perhaps no family in history has played so decisive a role in building an industrial empire in an underdeveloped but resource-rich nation. Yet the achievements of the Nobel family have been largely forgotten. When the Bolsheviks came to power, Emmanuel had to flee the country disguised as a peasant. The Nobel empire with its 50,000 workers lay in ruins. An empire which had taken eighty years to design and build, was nearly destroyed, bringing a sudden and bitter end to one of the most remarkable industrial odysseys in world history. This episode is what I learned from reading The Russian Rockefellers: The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry by Robert Tolf.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You and I always talk about this phenomenon that reoccurs throughout the history of entrepreneurship.
0:03.7	That you can always understand the son by the story of his father, the story of the father is embedded in the son.
0:09.5	The story you're about to hear is one of the most remarkable industrial oddices ever told.
0:14.4	And at the center is this relationship between a father and his two sons.
0:19.2	The founder of this family dynasty was a great inventor, but he wasn't a great entrepreneur.
0:25.2	He knew how to build great products but he didn't pay enough attention to the financial
0:29.2	side of his business and as a result he goes bankrupt. That is a mistake that his two sons actually learned from and successfully avoided.
0:37.5	His sons, Ludwig and Alfred, were both world-class entrepreneurs and some of the wealthiest people on earth when they were alive.
0:44.5	They both built their businesses to last.
0:47.4	They never went bankrupt like their father and they were both obsessed with watching their costs. They both knew that it's not enough to build a great product.
0:55.8	You have to build a great business and people that built great businesses.
0:59.0	Businesses that last is who we study on this podcast and every single one of them was obsessed
1:04.6	with controlling their expenses just like Ludwig and Alfred were in fact this
1:09.2	book talks about the fact that Ludwig and Alfred were both born in the 1830s and there's all these great
1:14.0	founders are also born in that decade and the book talks about what some of these great
1:17.5	founders all born in the 1830s had in common and one of the people that is
1:21.6	mentioned in the book is Andrew Carnegie and Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again
1:27.1	Profits and prices are cyclical subject to any number of transient forces on the marketplace
1:32.0	Costs however could be strictly controlled,
1:35.0	and in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in the cost were permanent.
1:40.0	This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric,
1:42.0	who's the co-founder and CEO of
	...

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