#384 Ken Griffin: Founder of Citadel and Citadel Securities

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David Senra

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4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Because of the podcast I get to meet a lot of super successful people. I'm always asking them "Who is the smartest person you know" and "Who do you think has the best business?". "Ken Griffin" is a very common answer. I've heard Ken described in two ways: "Winner" and "Killer". For years I've come across interesting anecdotes about Ken. Like when he appears as a 19 year old kid in Ed Thorp's excellent autobiography A Man For All Markets. Or when John Arnold describe Ken's intense competitive drive following the blowup of Enron. And then consider the fact that I'm obsessed with people who run their business for decades (Ken founded Citadel 35 years ago and Citadel Securities 23 years ago) —and I knew I had to make an episode about his life and work. The only problem was there's no great biography of Ken. So to make this episode I transcribed this talk that Ken gave at Yale. And for additional context I read the book Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's a book that Ken Griffin recommends reading. It's called Hardball. And the subtitle of that book is,
0:05.3	are you playing to play? Are you playing to win? It is a book about extreme winners and some of the
0:10.9	best operators in business. And there's a line in that book that sounds like it could have been
0:15.4	written by any of the almost 400 historically great founders that you and I have studied on this
0:20.0	podcast before. It says,
0:21.3	if you have not examined your cost in detail, it is very likely that there exists lurking somewhere
0:26.9	in your cost structure, a major opportunity to improve your profits, weaken your competitors,
0:32.6	and expand your influence. The first move is to drive down your cost faster than your competitors can
0:38.6	and use that savings to upset their strategies. Two weeks ago, I told you about Todd Graves,
0:44.4	who owns 90% of his business, over 90% of his business. That is a business that's worth
0:48.7	at least $10 billion and is still growing at 30% a year. Todd Graves is obsessed about staying in the details of his business, just like Ken Griffin
0:57.1	is obsessed about staying in the details of his business.
0:59.3	And Todd said that some of the most successful or all of the most successful people he
1:03.8	knows stays in the detail of their business.
1:06.6	He mentioned learning from one of his friends who runs a multi-billion dollar shipping company
1:10.8	and how that friend would even pay attention to how much his business was spending on bottled
1:16.0	water.
1:17.5	When I read that section, I thought it would be a lot easier to do that if that shipping
1:21.6	company was running on ramp, something a lot of history's greatest founders have in common.
1:26.2	They know their business from A to Z and their costs down to the penny. Ramp makes doing this effortless. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. These corporate cards are fully programmable. You can set limits so the spending of your team never gets out of hand.
1:45.2	Most companies only find out about excessive spending after the fact, just like that shipping
1:49.4	company with the rampant spending on water. With RAMP, you stop it before it happens.
	...

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