Brad Jacobs

And we were like, really, it was almost no risk.

It was a little risk, but almost no risk because we understood each component of that.

And today, everybody understands that.

That's not unique proprietary information.

But the time was really great.

The next business I went into was waste management.

And this was, I started a business in 1989 and took a public in 1992 called United Waste Systems.

And the strategy there was real simple.

It was to go into these tertiary markets, not even secondary markets, but to go into the upper peninsula of Michigan or

Appalachia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and go down to rural Mississippi and buy up the landfill capacity and then buy the hauling companies, the collection companies that were coming.

It was called tipping at those landfills and build up scale and build up a density so that you could run the business.

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.