What I learned from reading Glock: The Rise of America's Gun by Paul Barrett.

Gaston Glock's company experienced rapid growth.

He essentially went from 0 to a billion in less than 10 years.

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that Gaston Glock was 52 before he founded Glock?

And did you also know like most other founders, he had to start more than 1 business until he found his life's work?

This book didn't say what he did with that previous business, but 1

thing is for sure, if he needed to sell that business, the easiest way for him or you to sell a business is to get in touch with Tiny.

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Gaston Glock arrived in Luxembourg in July 1999 for an urgent talk with the Shell Company artist Charles Ewert.

Ewert picked up Glock personally at the airport.

Before proceeding to their meeting, he suggested that Glock take a look at the new sports car that he had just acquired.

When they got to the garage, Ewert guided Glock down to the third underground level, where they found themselves alone.

Ewert pointed out the sports car, and Glock approached on foot to take a closer look.

Suddenly, a tall man stepped out of the shadows, lunging at Glock.

Glock raised his arms defensively, and the attacker swung a large rubber mallet and struck Glock on the top and the side of the head.

Rather than intervene to help Glock, Ewert turned and ran.

Glock, meanwhile, was fighting for his life.

The gunmaker, who usually carried a pistol, lacked 1 on this day.

With no other option, Glock fought with his hands.

He swung his large fists into the attacker's eyes and mouth.

Though he was 70 years old, Glock put up a stout defense.

He drew blood and knocked out several of his attacker's teeth.

Despite the hammer blows to his head, he gained the advantage.

When the police arrived, they found a bizarre scene.

The bloodied attacker lay collapsed on top of Glock with his arms outstretched like Jesus.

Glock was pinned to the ground but not mortally wounded.

Glock had suffered several hammer blows to the head and lost a liter of blood.

At the hospital, though, he was strikingly composed.

Before doctors finished patching him up, he summoned his personal bankers.

Those 2 bankers held $70 million of his cash in accounts to which Ewert had access.

Within 3 hours of the attack, Glock had moved 40 million to a secret Swiss account.

He blocked the other 30 million from being transferred.

Ewert, Glock's supposed financial advisor, had been stealing from him.

which is Glock, The Rise of America's Gun, and it was written by Paul Barrett.

I was not expecting to do this book this week.

This book wasn't even on my radar until like

I saw somebody speaking about reading the book online and what they said made me interested in ordering the book.

And he says, what struck me is how his inexperience was a great advantage.

He didn't assume anything about how to design a handgun because he never designed 1 before.

Consequently, he of course designed the best 1 ever.

And so that idea of not knowing what's out of bounds, not knowing what you don't know, it sounds like to a normal person like a liability.

But as we've seen in many of the books that you and I go over together, for entrepreneurs, especially attacking an industry they never worked in before, it winds up becoming an advantage.

And that'll make a lot more sense as we go through the book.

So that intro occurs about 15 years after Glock invents and starts selling his handgun.

This story is wild because not only does he have people stealing from him, his financial advisor actually hired

But what's crazy is over the course of the story, Glock has so many of his top lieutenants and top executives steal from him, which I'll get to in a bit.

I want to start at the beginning because it doesn't make any sense.

He was managing a car radiator factory outside of Vienna.

He had a small manufacturing business on the side.

And yet within a decade, he goes from 0 to billionaire.

After 30 years in manufacturing, Glock had yielded a respectable social station and a comfortable life.

He was the son of an Austrian railroad worker.

He was managing a car radiator factory outside of Vienna and he operated a side business with his wife using a secondhand metal press.

They produced a modest volume of brass fittings for doors and windows.

He also made a bunch of shower curtain rods.

Over time, the side business slowly expands.

the most important ideas in the book and that is to always do the best with the job in front of you because

you can never predict what future opportunity that unlocks.

He gets really good at manufacturing things with polymer and plastic.

1 of those things he actually is going to make for the Austria's Ministry of Defense.

He starts making knives for the Ministry of Defense.

That is how he learns about the opportunity to make handguns.

So it says, the garage metal shop expanded over time to make steel blades, which so impressed Austria's Ministry of Defense that Glock obtained a contract to supply field knives and bayonets to the Austrian army.

And this is where he's going to find the opportunity.

Watch how fast he moves once he realizes there's a huge opportunity here.

1 day in 1980, he overheard a hallway conversation between 2 colonels that jolted his imagination.

The army needed a new pistol to replace the antiquated ones from World War II.

Glock interrupted the conversation and asked if it was possible if his company could bid on the pistol contract.

Designing firearms was something far beyond his experience.

He asked the colonels to describe the army's requirements for a new handgun.

He's like, well, this shouldn't be too difficult to make because he just describes it.

the handgun was simply another accoutrement that attached to a soldier's belt, similar to a knife that he already produced.

As Gaston Glock himself put in an interview, that I knew nothing was my advantage.

He gets to start with a blank sheet of paper.

All of his competitors have decades, in some cases centuries,

of built up procedures and processes and the way they do things.

So let's skip ahead and go into his initial research process, because I think there's a lot

After the conversation at the defense ministry in early 1980, he bought a Beretta, a Sig, and a modern version of the German P38 pistol.

He began disassembling the guns, putting them back together, and noted the contrasting methods used to make them.

I started intensive studies in such a manner that I visited the Austrian patent offices for weeks, examining generations of handgun innovation.

He's doing exactly what you and I are doing.

He understood that learning from history is a form of leverage.

a manner that I visited the Austrian Patent Office for weeks, examining generations of handgun innovation.

What took people generations to learn, because he's going back and doing all this reading, he learns in

I bought and tested all modern pistols available at the time and I tried to involve into conversation the best experts I knew.

So he contacts a bunch of experts in the firearm industry.

He invited several firearm specialists to join him.

Among those who attended were this colonel, who was a champion shooter, who also oversaw weapons procurement for the Austrian army that becomes extremely important.

He also invited an author of technical books such as silencers for hand firearms and then he just asked him flat-out gentlemen what do you want to see in a pistol of the future.

And the beautiful thing is his initial customer is going to give them the outline of exactly what he needs.

Remember he's gonna have to bid against, it's not like they're just gonna give him

the contract outright, he's got to bid against other gun manufacturers.

So it says they desired a high capacity pistol that held more than 8 rounds.

It should weigh no more than 28 ounces, it should have a light trigger pull for fast accurate firing, and it should be streamlined and easy to holster.

Crucially the gun should have no more than 40 parts.

1 of my favorite ideas about this entire book is the way this guy designs his company.

And I'm going to repeat a lot of the things that he does.

He designed a product and a company based on limiting the amount of moving parts.

This is going to be very reminiscent of like the early days of Henry, when Henry Ford was building his car, of Herb Keller of Southwest Airlines.

The limited moving parts, the simple product, the simple business processes they all created, allowed them to stack advantages at 1 after another.

Wait till you see the profit margins that this guy, this is incredible.

All right, let me, I'm getting ahead of myself.

So says the colonel also told Glock that the pistol should be

able to withstand extended contract with snow, ice and mud.

It should fire it should be able to fire 10, 000 rounds with no more than 1 failure per thousand.

The ideal pistol should have a long service life of 40, 000 rounds.

This professional research that Glock is engaged in is so important, and he knew, he knew it was important then.

At the evening's end, Glock had his guest sign and date 1 of the sheets of paper that memorialized their thoughts.

He treated the occasion as if it would be remembered by history.

Another main theme that appears over and over again in the book.

He tested crude early versions in a basement firing range that he built specially for this purpose.

He shot alone using all this is hilarious.

If the gun blew up on him, he would still have his good right hand.

This guy moves fast to more professional research.

Glock attended Police Academy classes and took private shooting lessons.

My intention was to learn as much as possible as fast as possible.

He filed for an Austrian patent on April 30th 1981.

So he called the gun, he called his gun the Glock 17.

So from 0 to patent that's 1 year then from finally actually submitting the actual prototype to which is going to be his first customer that's another year so 2 years in total.

After another year of testing and improvement Glock submitted 4 samples of the pistol to the Austrian army.

I worked for 2 years day and night to bring the sample to the army on time, move fast.

And then as we'll see a few times today, Glock has

a lot in common with James Dyson, difference for the sake of it and retention of total control.

To this day, the Glock family owns the company.

Glock is obsessed with control just like James Dyson was.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, listen to episode 300.

That's the third or fourth time I've read Dyson's autobiography.

2 overarching concepts would set the Glock 17 apart.

Remember, he's bidding against other existing pistol manufacturers.

First, it was to be made largely out of light, resilient, injection molded plastic.

And second, it was designed without a pre-existing factory.

I need to go ahead a few pages before I come back to this, because this comes up over and over again.

It's black plastic and metal construction set it apart from everything else on the market, suggesting modernism and efficiency difference for the sake of it.

Something that James Dyson talked about that benefited that his product, his first vacuum cleaner, benefited in the early days.

They gave him an edge over all of his competitors is it looked different.

You would go into a store, you'd see 7, 8 vacuum cleaners all

Then you get to the end, you're like, what the hell is

It immediately snaps the consumers like, oh, I need to pay attention.

He also has a great line, James Dyson has a great line on the value that a strange looking product will actually get you more media attention.

He says, it is 1 of the virtues of having such a

strange looking product that journalists are more likely to take an interest in it.

That's something that he learned when he designed a wheelbarrow, instead of a wheel, it had a ball.

And he got so much more attention than other people trying to build wheelbarrows that all looked the same, that he applied that idea about 10 or 15 years later when he was designing the vacuum cleaner.

We see that same exact idea benefiting Glock right here.

And so not only did Glock's gun look different, but it also had a huge benefit.

Remember, it has to survive in rain, snow and mud.

This was initially designed for the military.

So he's using industrial plastic, which they said is often called polymer, was actually remarkably strong and resistant to corrosion, a major problem with traditional steel guns.

And then because he started from a blank page, he's like, well, I don't have to just manufacture guns in a factory that's been manufacturing guns for 50 years.

What would a factory look like if I designed it now?

From scratch, this also gives him, this also makes him produce his gun a lot more efficiently and cheaply, and that increases his margins.

The important thing that gave him his big price advantage was that he designed the pistol for complete production on computer controlled tools.

a summary of why like studying the way he he's very flawed person as we'll get to later on but his approach to company building and creating a new product is very fascinating to me.

This is just a note I'm writing to myself.

The book is all simplicity, focus, and differentiation.

That is the best way to get my attention.

Clock produced the simplest handgun with only 34 components.

Again, simplicity lets you stack advantages 1 on top of another.

I also wrote down 1 of Steve Jobs' favorite quotes, 1 of my favorite quotes.

This was plastered all over Apple in the early days.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Because of the unfussy way, the simple way, Gaston Glock fabricated his slide, his pistol required fewer steps to manufacture, saves money, and there were fewer opportunities for error, adds durability.

The Glock 17 was put through a preliminary firing run of 10, 000 rounds.

And then again, the benefit of starting from a blank sheet of paper and a brand new company, none of his competitors could say the same.

He got it right because he hadn't done it before.

in getting a new design accepted by an established manufacturer is not just a quote-unquote not invented here syndrome but also the we don't have that tooling syndrome.

Why would we invent something new when you can simply modify what we already have?

Glock started with a blank sheet of paper.

As a result, he came up with something original and he was at the right place at the right time.

The book starts out with this this crazy shootout that's happening in Miami in the 1980s between the

And I guess these drug dealers are bank robbers.

A lot of these cops and FBI agents get killed.

They're all at that time, they're like running around with like these Smith and Weston revolvers that hold like 6 shots.

that's on Netflix called Cocaine Cowboys, the flood of drug violence in Miami in the 80s and

they're spreading all over the country actually.

These guys have Uzis, they have high powered rifles.

military and law enforcement officials all over the country and

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#308 The Unlikely King of Guns: Gaston Glock