David Senra
Conversations with the greatest living founders.
Episodes
Sam Altman on Building OpenAI & Betting on the Impossible
Sam Altman has spent his career at the intersection of startups, investing and artificial intelligence. He says he was fascinated by AI as a child in St. Louis, studied it in college and eventually helped start OpenAI in 2015 after concluding that the most important opportunities often begin as non-consensus bets. His experience investing in startups taught him to look for power laws, back unconve
Travis Kalanick, Founder of Uber & Atoms
Travis Kalanick is best known for co-founding Uber and building it into one of the world’s largest transportation platforms. Before Uber, he spent years building Red Swoosh under extreme financial pressure. He says he took no salary for its first four years, repeatedly ran out of money and lost much of his social life to the company before eventually selling it. He later invested much of the proce
Lulu Cheng Meservey, Founder of Rostra
Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder of Rostra and one of the world's most trusted communication strategists, supporting companies such as Anduril, Shopify, Cognition, and Coinbase. In 2016, she co-founded TrailRunner International with Jim Wilkinson, who had just run corporate affairs for Alibaba's record IPO. She had never done comms in her life. One of her first clients was Anduril, in the compan
Michael Ovitz, Co-founder of CAA
Michael Ovitz is the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the most powerful and influential talent agencies in Hollywood history, built on a revolutionary approach to representation that fundamentally transformed the entertainment industry.
He is an entertainment executive and dealmaker widely regarded as one of the most formidable operators in Hollywood. During his time leading C
Lessons From Backing The Best Founders In Fintech | Micky Malka
Micky Malka is the founder of Ribbit Capital and helped create Node, which he describes as the first digital art studio designed for digital artists. He calls himself “an entrepreneur at heart and an investor by design”—a deliberately broad description that allows him to resist labels, which is precisely the point. The one label he wants on his tombstone: “He was a rebel.”
In his mid-20s, Malka a
DHH: How to Build a Profitable Company Without Losing Control
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is the creator of Ruby on Rails and the co-founder of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE. He has spent 25 years building a software business around one condition: no one gets to tell him what to do.
Jason Fried hired him as a contractor out of Copenhagen for $15 an hour. He built the first version of Basecamp with just 10 hours a week — 380 hours
The Restaurant Genius Behind Carbone, ZZ’s, Torrisi & More | Jeff Zalaznick
Jeff Zalaznick is co-founder of Major Food Group, the hospitality company behind Carbone, ZZ's, Torrisi, The Grill, and The Pool. He has opened 77 restaurants and bars and 76 are still operating and profitable. He is now building Major Food Group into a fully vertically integrated hospitality company spanning restaurants, private members' clubs, hotels, and branded residential towers.
Zalaznick w
Eric Glyman, Co-founder of Ramp
Eric Glyman is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ramp, the financial-infrastructure platform valued at $44 billion used by over 70,000 businesses to run payments, expenses and accounting from a single place.
Glyman grew up in Las Vegas and studied at Harvard, where he met his eventual co-founder, Karim Atiyeh. In 2014 the two started Paribus, a price-tracking app born from Glyman's frustration after m
Jonathan Ross, Founder of Groq
Jonathan Ross is the founder of Groq and the inventor of the Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), now a senior executive at NVIDIA following the company's $20 billion partnership with Groq.
Before Groq, Ross built something that didn't exist: a custom AI chip at Google called the TPU, which became the backbone of DeepMind's AlphaGo — the system that defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016. A
Scott Wu, Cognition
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the company behind Devin, the world's first AI software engineer.
Wu describes himself as "salty," a word he traces to second grade, when he competed in a seventh-grade math competition, lost, and never forgot it. Born in 1997 in Louisiana to a Chinese immigrant family, he grew up the little brother who hated losing at video games and turned that i
Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters
Steve Stoute is the founder of Translation, the marketing company behind some of the most iconic brand work of the past 25 years, and UnitedMasters, the independent music distribution platform he launched in 2017.
Stoute grew up in Queens in the 1980s, where hip-hop was his entire world. He worked his way into the music business, eventually managing Nas and becoming an executive at Sony and then
Ed Catmull, Co-founder of Pixar
Ed Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar and the former president of Disney Animation.
He grew up in 1950s Utah wanting to animate for Disney. Convinced he couldn't draw well enough, he studied physics and computer science at the University of Utah instead, landing in one of the great talent incubators in computing history. In 1972, he animated his own left hand—one of the first 3D computer renderin
Gustav Söderström, Spotify
Gustav Söderström is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Spotify, the world's largest streaming platform, with more than 760 million users across 180 countries.
He earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, founded Kenet Works in 2003 — a mobile community software company acquired by Yahoo! in 2006 — and later co-founded 13th Lab, an augmented reality
Ivanka Trump on Building an Authentic Life
Ivanka Trump grew up on construction sites and in boardrooms, learning what it takes to be a builder. At just 22 years old, she started doing real estate for a Brooklyn developer. She notched small wins with construction crews and learned the trade.
Then came the launch of her own fashion brand — which reached over $800 million in annual sales — run simultaneously with the Trump Organization's r
The Simple Genius of Rick Rubin
Rick Rubin grew up on Long Island obsessed with music — arena rock at 13, punk by high school, then hip-hop when it was still a street movement you could only hear at one club in New York City. The records coming out didn't sound like the club. They were made by professionals who didn't go to the club. So at 18, while a freshman at NYU, he made one himself — "It's Yours" with T La Rock. It sold 10
Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two Interactive
Strauss Zelnick has spent 40 years doing the same thing: finding where new technology is about to supercharge an old business, and getting there first.
He started at Columbia Pictures in 1983 running international TV distribution. When the company needed a "new media" person, they looked for the least valuable executive they could spare. That was Zelnick. New media in 1983 meant VHS cassettes. He
Dana White, UFC
Dana White grew up watching CEOs read canned statements written by lawyers. He decided early he would never do that.
When Lorenzo Fertitta and his brother bought the UFC in 2001 for $2M and handed White a small equity stake and the presidency, the company had five events a year, eight or nine fighter contracts, and no television deal. Previous owners had sold off the merchandise rights, the video
Adam Foroughi, AppLovin
Chapters
(00:00:00) The $6B Buyback That Made $60B
(00:02:15) Borrowing Money To Buy Back Stock At A Discount
(00:05:02) Why VCs Passed On AppLovin In 2012
(00:09:00) From App Discovery To Ad Platform
(00:14:45) Beating Google's AdMob With Performance Marketing
(00:19:30) No Board For Six Years
(00:30:12) The China Deal That Almost Blew Up
(00:37:45) The Convertible Note Pivot And KKR
(00
David Baszucki, Roblox
David Baszucki is the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the platform where tens of millions of people gather daily to play, build, and socialize inside user-generated virtual worlds.
Baszucki grew up in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, studied electrical engineering at Stanford, and in the late 1980s co-founded Knowledge Revolution with his brother Greg. There they built Interactive Physics, a 2D simulation
Evan Spiegel, Snap
Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat.
At Stanford, he enrolled in the product design program. In 2011, in a class project, he and two classmates — Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy — sketched out the idea for an app where photos disappeared. The insight was counterintuitive: in an era when everyone was obsessed with permanence and curation online, ephemeral
Tony Xu, DoorDash
Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, the largest food delivery platform in the United States.
Before he was a tech executive, he was a dishwasher. Xu was born in Nanjing, China, and immigrated to the U.S. at age four with parents who arrived with $200 in the bank. His mother had been a licensed doctor in China. In America, she waited tables at a Chinese restaurant in Illinois. Xu worked
The Book of Elon with Eric Jorgenson
Eric Jorgenson is an investor, author, and the CEO of Scribe Media — best known for his mission to distill the ideas of the world's most consequential thinkers into books anyone can read.
Obsessed with the idea that the best way to understand a great mind was to read everything they'd ever said, Jorgenson spent years compiling Naval Ravikant's writing, podcasts, and interviews into a single coher
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z & Netscape
Marc Andreessen is the co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world.
Before he was an investor, he was a builder. At 22, Andreessen co-created Mosaic, the first widely used graphical web browser, then co-founded Netscape — the company that brought the internet to mainstream America. Netscape's 1995 IPO ignited the fir
Brian Armstrong, Coinbase
Brian Armstrong is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, the publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange and one of the most recognized names in the digital asset industry.
Armstrong founded Coinbase in 2012 alongside Fred Ehrsam, launching out of Y Combinator with a simple but ambitious goal: to make Bitcoin easy to buy, sell, and store for everyday people. At a time when acquiring cryptocurrency requ
Jason Fried, 37signals (makers of Basecamp, HEY and ONCE)
Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the software company behind Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE. Fried is widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in modern product development, remote work, and business philosophy.
He founded 37signals in 1999 as a web design consultancy, initially creating websites for clients while developing strong opinions about simplicity, clarity, and
Jimmy Iovine, Interscope Records & Beats by Dre
Jimmy Iovine is the co-founder of Interscope Records, Beats by Dre, and the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy. Iovine is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the modern music industry.
Growing up in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, Iovine was raised in an Italian working-class family. He began working as a recording engineer in the early 1970s, and wen
Tobi Lütke, Shopify
Tobi Lütke is the co-founder of Shopify, where he has served as the company's CEO since 2008.
Under his leadership, Shopify grew from an online snowboard shop in Ottawa, Canada in 2004 to the world's leading e-commerce platform, powering over 4 million merchants in more than 175 countries. The company went public in 2015 at a $1.27 billion valuation and has since grown to a market capitalization
John Mackey, Whole Foods Market
John Mackey is the co-founder of Whole Foods Market, where he also served as the company's CEO for 44 years (1980–2022). More recently, Mackey is the co-founder of Love.Life, a wellness company focused on a holistic approach to health. He is an entrepreneur, author and advocate for conscious capitalism who spent over four decades building the natural foods industry.
Under his leadership, Whole Fo
Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Colossus & Positive Sum
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the Chairman Emeritus of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, the founder of Colossus, and the founder and CEO of Positive Sum. He is an investor, author, and podcaster who has devoted his career to understanding the world's best investors and entrepreneurs.
Under his leadership, Colossus has become one of the largest investing-focused podcast networks in the world, producing
James Dyson, Dyson
James Dyson is the founder and chairman of Dyson, a technology-led company present in 84 markets worldwide. He is an inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who has devoted his life to solving problems through new technologies.
Under his leadership, Dyson created some of the most iconic household products in the world: the bagless vacuum cleaner, the Airblade hand dryer, bladeless fans, and th
Michael Ovitz, Creative Artists Agency (CAA)
Michael Ovitz is the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the most powerful and influential talent agencies in Hollywood history, built on a revolutionary approach to representation that fundamentally transformed the entertainment industry.
He is an entertainment executive and dealmaker widely regarded as one of the most formidable operators in Hollywood. During his time leading CA
Todd Graves, Raising Cane's
Todd Graves is the founder and CEO of Raising Cane's, one of America's most successful and fastest-growing restaurant chains built on a radically simple concept that nearly everyone told him would fail.
He is an entrepreneur and restaurateur widely regarded as one of the most determined founder-operators in the fast-food industry. Rising from rejection in the mid-1990s to building over 800 locati
How Brad Jacobs Built 8 Billion-Dollar Companies
Brad Jacobs is the chairman and CEO of QXO, Inc., and the founder of eight separate billion-dollar companies including XPO Logistics, United Rentals and United Waste.
He is an entrepreneur and logistics executive widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in industrial consolidation and operational transformation. Rising to prominence from the 1980s through the 2000s, he became know
Michael Dell, Dell Technologies
Michael Dell is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies.
He is an entrepreneur and technology executive widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in personal computing and enterprise technology. Rising to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, he became known for revolutionizing the computer industry through his direct-to-consumer sales model and for building one of the world
Daniel Ek, Spotify
Daniel Ek is the co-founder and CEO of Spotify.
Daniel Ek is an entrepreneur and technology executive widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in music, podcasting and audio streaming more broadly. Rising to prominence in the 2000s and 2010s, he became known for revolutionizing how people consume music and for transforming the music industry through digital innovation, platform deve
Welcome to David Senra
Nine years ago, I launched Founders.
Today, I'm launching a new podcast called David Senra.
The first episode goes live this Sunday, September 28. Subscribe wherever you watch or listen to podcasts.
Founders will still come out every week.
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