Fred Smith
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It's July, 1974.
Fred Smith is sitting at a blackjack table in Las Vegas at 3 a.m.
He's playing with the last $5,000 his company has left, literally the entire bank account of FedEx.
Back in Memphis, 14 jets sit on the tarmac.
They need $24,000 worth of fuel by Monday morning or Federal Express dies.
Smith's already been turned down by every investor.
He's personally guaranteed millions in loans.
His house, his inheritance, everything he owns is on the line.
General Dynamics, an early investor in FedEx, just told him no for the third time.
The company is burning a million dollars a month with no plan to profitability.
Most founders would have given up, but Fred Smith isn't most founders.
He went to Vegas instead.
By sunrise, he's turned that $5,000 into $27,000, just enough to fuel the planes for two more weeks.
that bought him the time to raise $11 million and save the company.
Five decades later, that desperate gamble has become an $88 billion empire that moves 17 million packages a day.
But here's what matters.
Fred Smith didn't build FedEx because he got lucky at Blackjack.
He built it because when everyone else said overnight delivery was impossible, he saw that impossible was just another word for opportunity.
Welcome to The Knowledge Project.
I'm your host, Shane Parish.