- Charlie Munger Firestone's 1926 account of building the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Out of print for decades and hard to find; Farnam Street reports that when Munger got his hands on a copy he copied it out by hand and republished it himself — Farnam Street has since reprinted the book from his story. source ↗
Harvey Firestone's own 1926 account of building the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company from scratch — a first-person founder narrative that had been out of print for decades until Munger himself copied it by hand and republished it.
Farnam Street reports that when Munger got his hands on a copy of this long-out-of-print book, he copied it out by hand and republished it himself. Firestone's story is a first-principles business case: he started with nothing but a conviction that rubber could be made reliable and built an industry around it. For founders, the book is interesting not for its strategy — much of it is raw, unsophisticated business narrative — but for its demonstration that the fundamentals of great business (obsession with quality, relentless cost control, treating employees as partners) have not changed in a century. Firestone's approach maps onto Munger's circle of competence: he knew rubber, stayed in rubber, and outworked everyone else in rubber.