You used to play guitar in a band. If you nailed your part, that was on you. Nobody else could do it for you, and nobody else could take that away. Then you became a manager. And suddenly your success depended entirely on what other people did. Welcome to the most jarring transition in any career.
Henderson is sitting in Wroclaw, Poland. It is Easter week. The city is empty because all the students went home to their villages. He finds a kebab shop, sits outside in the cold wind, and starts eating his shawarma. Two pigeons attack his food. He yells at them in English. “Go away, pigeons!”
Everything we covered so far in this book was about numbers. Profit, growth, risk, cash flow, cost structures, valuation. Important stuff. But here is the thing: none of it works without people. And people are messy.
Henderson is walking through Siem Reap, Cambodia. He is not heading to Angkor Wat like every other tourist. He is going to the Sofitel Hotel to hear the story of a French expat who became a millionaire selling cakes.
Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Honey, today was a win. We created a million dollars of value by nudging the cost of capital down by 0.005 percent!” But somehow, every single manager in every company is connected to value creation. Chapter 10 explains how.
Henderson opens this chapter with an interview. Not just any interview. He is sitting in his home in Bogota, Colombia, talking to Michael Saylor. Yes, that Michael Saylor. The MicroStrategy guy who bought over $2 billion in Bitcoin by early 2021.
On April 19, 2022, Netflix told the world it lost 200,000 subscribers. The stock dropped by a third in one day. Fifty billion dollars of shareholder value just vanished. But how do you even put a price tag on a company in the first place?
Henderson is in Phoenix, Arizona. He calls a real estate agent named William. They go see two properties. The first one is ideal. Nice finishes, good floor plan, easy to resell later. The second one is a dump.
“Sure, we are losing money on every unit we sell. But we will make it up in volume!” That famous line is sometimes a joke about startup founders. And sometimes it is a real business strategy. How do you know which one you are dealing with?
Henderson walks into what sounds like a Bond villain lair. Steel gates. Blast-proof doors. Metal detectors. Backscatter machines. Guards you can see and guards you cannot. He is deep underground in Singapore, inside the Freeport. One of the most secure private vaults on the planet.