Brad Jacobs

You could run one truck instead of 10 trucks and pick up the same amount of garbage in the same amount of time.

Obviously, margins would increase quite a bit as a result of doing that.

And we used technology to do route optimization, which now everybody does.

In fact, that was revolutionary.

And that business, we outperformed the S&P 500 from 1992 to when I sold it to what's now called Waste Management for $2.5 billion by 5.6x.

So if you bought one share of the S&P and one share of United Waste, you would have made 5.6 times more money on the United Waste one.

What I learned from that was that the trend is important.

Again, we would not be able to make that kind of money today in the waste business.

We had a trend going on where right around that time, the EPA was outlawing these dumps, which were unsanitary and were polluting the environment and really should be outlawed.

And the amount of landfills decreased by a large amount.

And the remaining landfills, which then cost about $4 or $5 million to build up, made a lot of money because they were the survivors.

So we capitalized on that.

And then after that was United Rentals I ran for 10 years.

United Rentals was based on one simple premise.

The premise was there was a lot of construction equipment that was being owned by construction companies and by end users that was only used like a few months, a few weeks, sometimes a few days out of the year.

We said, this is nuts.

This is absolutely crazy.

It makes absolutely no commercial sense.

And then you had to have a maintenance team.

It's almost like the Uber and Airbnb insight before them.