Long before Fred Smith was the billionaire founder of FedEx, he was a Vietnam veteran with a love of flying and a small fleet of planes for hire. “I would be flying these parts and pieces from Xerox in Rochester to Pittsburgh or wherever the case may be,” he told a gathering of 200 Goldman Sachs executives and entrepreneurs on Thursday. “And I would sort of sit in amazement there and say, 'They're hiring me and this whole damn airplane to carry this little part.'”
It didn’t take long for the likes of early tech giants Burroughs, Sperry, UNIVAC and IBM to hire him and his growing fleet to fly parts from the burgeoning Asian manufacturing market to the rest the world. “What I was actually seeing was the beginning of the automation of society,” he said.
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