How to Make a Few Billion Dollars: Your Guide to Business Success

Brad Jacobs, who has founded or led eight billion-dollar-plus companies (including United Rentals, XPO Logistics, and GXO) and completed roughly 500 acquisitions, distills his playbook for building large businesses fast through aggressive consolidation and acquisition. The book covers how he identifies durable macro trends before they're obvious, structures deals and org charts, raises and deploys large amounts of capital, integrates acquired companies, and hires the people he builds his companies around. It's written as a practical operating manual drawn directly from his own repeated experience rather than as a conventional memoir.

David Senra has covered this book on Founders in multiple episodes (including #335 and #373, the latter from a breakfast conversation with Jacobs himself), and treats Jacobs as a rare example of someone who has proven a repeatable formula for building billion-dollar companies rather than getting lucky once. Senra's key emphasis is Jacobs' method for spotting big, inevitable trends early and betting the company on them before the trend is consensus — Jacobs treats trend-spotting as a discipline, not intuition, and builds his entire capital allocation strategy around it.

The other major thread Senra pulls out is Jacobs' philosophy on people and organizational design: hire for raw intelligence, integrity, and hunger to learn over people who claim to have all the answers, and deliberately keep teams slightly understaffed so they stay focused instead of drifting into redundant busywork. Senra also stresses Jacobs' insistence that business is fundamentally about handling a continuous stream of problems — the founders who last are the ones who've made peace with that reality and keep their mental state steady regardless of what's breaking that week, since a leader's composure sets the ceiling for how well the whole organization performs under stress.