John Mackey

They have a business model where it's called a blockbuster business model.

One runaway successful idea is all they need to make billions of dollars.

And so they can have a lot of failures.

So they try to scale a lot of these businesses too quickly.

And they tell them it's okay to lose money.

We'll just keep raising the price round after round.

And guess what?

If you don't scale well or if you start to lose money, maybe you can't get a higher price.

Then the entrepreneurs get diluted.

And they get a crammed down round and they may get forced out and they bring in professional management to take their place.

So my dad taught me the best capital you'll ever have is the money that you make and then invest it back in the business.

So from very early on, we never tried to scale Whole Foods so much as we just tried to be successful and we kept reinvesting the money in store after store after store.

That was a very big lesson.

And the second lesson he really taught me was you've got to be able to build a really good team.

And the best team, that means you have to be sort of very self-aware, Jim.

It's like you've got to know what you're good at, but more importantly, you've got to know what you're not good at.

And one of the things I've noticed about entrepreneurs that become successful is their egos can get really inflated, and it's like they think they're good at everything.

You know, I was so bad at so many things that I needed to build a good team around me to compensate for all my weaknesses.

And so don't hire and promote people that are just like yourself.

You've already got that covered.