The Ambition of John Jacob Astor (part two)

Welcome to The Strategy Files—a newsletter about history's most ambitious people in fashion, beauty, and culture. I study the icons, you apply their strategies; you win.

As some of you know, I recently started a tech consultancy called NoteLoft AI. I have 13 years of engineering experience, and I’m excited to use that experience to build products for people I enjoy working with. So if you’re building a tech product, and would rather be reading in your garden instead of managing a chaotic dev team, please get in touch. I’d love to talk.

Let’s get into it!

If you missed part one, go back and read that first. For the rest of us, let’s dive into part two.

John Jacob Astor was born in Walldorf, Germany, in 1763. And just in case you aren’t putting it together ( I didn’t at first ), that’s Astor as in the Waldorf-Astoria, Astoria New York, and my favorite over-the-top character from The Gilded Age: Mrs. Astor.

When John was 14, his education came to a halt; he started working for his father, a butcher. Now, being forced to stop attending school at such a young age sounds terrible to us today. However, if John had stayed in school, he would never have learned how to cut and cure animal hides. And being able to cut and cure animal hides was a rare skill that he could successfully apply to a growing market: the fur trade.

Because back then, fur trading was one of the most lucrative industries in the world. Beaver pelts were in such high demand that the poor little rodents almost went extinct in Europe in the late 1700s.

And that brings us to lesson number one: it’s not enough to acquire a skill that’s aligned with an exploding market. It’s important, but it’s not enough. You have to be willing to go where those skills matter most.

But how did John figure out where that was?

He left Germany.

His first stop was London, where sixteen-year-old John got a job working for his uncle selling pianos and flutes. Then September 1783 rolled around, marking the end of the American Revolutionary War. A month later, John boarded a ship to New York.

And that’s when his fate changed. It was on that ship is that he met a man who understood how valuable John’s skill was to the fur trade.

From the book:

“Over the course of his long voyage, the young fortune hunter befriended a fellow German traveler who worked trading furs and learned that there was serious money to be made in the buying and selling of pelts and that it didn’t require much capital up-front.”

Sometimes people have information about markets that you don't. They can see how your skill set aligns with that market before you can. But in order to make that happen you have to be out it the world, meeting people, having real conversations, putting yourself in rooms where new information flows.

Which is why I’m FORCING myself to attend two tech events in DC next week. Do I want to. I guess? I want to meet more people in DC and I want to get a better feel for the tech scene here.

But I also want to doom scroll on TikTok in my pajamas while wearing a face mask and eating overpriced snacks from Whole Foods.

So I guess that means I’ going.

Anyway, back to Astor.

In New York, John took a very low level job working for a man selling furs, just so he could learn about the fur trade. About a year later, he acquired enough furs to sell where there was a lot of pent up demand: Europe.

See you next week,

LaToya