David Senra
@davidsenra • 247,220 subscribers
Conversations with the greatest living founders.
Shorts
Videos
Doug Leone on the mistake every VC makes: Selling their winners too early. “We owned 20% of Nvidia and sold.” “We were the first investor in Apple and sold.” “We owned 10% of Google and sold.” “If we hadn’t sold Google that would be half a trillion dollars.” “We owned a quarter of Cisco and sold.” ($433 billion market cap) “Those are big ownership in very big companies.” “The great companies compounded 20+ years after the IPO. If you had a little sniffer that this thing has essentially an unbounded market for many years, you should never sell a share.” “You can make way more money holding those. If you're compounding a $5 billion gain that can turn into a $50 billion gain.” “But we all made that mistake.”
David Senra334,538 views • 2 days ago
Doug Leone once got his tooth drilled without Novocaine just to see if he was a real badass or a faker: “I had a tooth drilled for a root canal, and had to go to a meeting right after. I told the dentist, ‘Drill without any Novocaine.’” “He says, ‘You're out of your mind.’” “My whole life I wanted to see if I was a badass or not. Am I a fake badass, or am I really a badass on the inside? I told the dentist, ‘Take it out with no Novocaine.’” “He drilled, and I jumped. And I told the dentist, ‘I won't move again.’ And I didn't move again.” “I love fear. It does wonders for me.”
David Senra203,049 views • 2 days ago
IBM built a cloud of suits to make sure the CEO never talked to anyone actually doing the work. Elon Musk does the opposite. "Elon's method is extreme focus on substance. Extreme focus on getting to the truth. In any organization with multiple layers, there's compounding lies. Each layer wants to look good. Each layer puts a little spin on things. If one layer lies to the next layer above it, maybe that's okay. When that happens two or three times, the lies compound. If that happens six times, the lies really compound. If that happens 12 times, the CEO has no idea what's happening. That was IBM. By the time I got there as an intern, I calculated there were 12 layers of management between me and the CEO. They even had a term for it: the great cloud. A cloud of men in gray business suits who followed the CEO around and prevented him from ever talking to anybody who was actually doing the work. When he would come to visit, it was like a visit from the king. A completely impervious bubble. That's the polar opposite of the Elon approach." — Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸
David Senra17,644,327 views • 5 months ago
“ A super high bar for a VC is: do no harm.” travis kalanick says only 10% of VCs are able to do no harm, and only 1% are actually helpful: “ An operator who's running a company, if they're good, is a grandmaster of chess.” ”And the VC is a chess enthusiast. They check in on the chess match once every three months and they're trying to make a mark on the world. They have an opinion.” “And you're like, don't go to Jordan and tell him how to dunk, and definitely don't go to him and tell him how to dribble. But it's hard because everybody has an opinion.” “The way to think about it is—you're on the Serengeti. If an antelope limps in the Serengeti, the lion will take it down, even if it's not hungry. Can't even fucking help it. It's just what he does. That's kind of the nature of most VCs.”
David Senra953,150 views • 16 days ago
Doug Leone has three questions he asks himself before investing in any company: 1. Would I put my kids' money into this? 2. If I only make 20 investments in my life, is this one of the 20? 3. Can I return the whole fund with this investment? “If I don't pass those three, I'm not going to make the investment.” “There's probably 200 investments that you can make in your lifetime, and a lot of them are going to return 2x your money, 3x your money. I only want the ones where you can return 100x your money. That's all I'm interested in. I want the outliers.”
David Senra122,023 views • 3 days ago
Elon didn’t start SpaceX to build a rocket company: “The original vision for SpaceX was not to start a launch company. Elon’s original goal was to increase NASA’s budget, and he was willing to just burn 100 million dollars on a philanthropic mission to display a greenhouse on Mars. Shooting a greenhouse to Mars with existing rocket technology, get this photo on the front page of every paper. A little plant on the red planet, the first time life had transferred to another planet. That’ll probably increase NASA’s budget and spur this wave of exploration and interest in space. When he tried to do that, he discovered that the space launch market was so expensive and un-innovative and hadn’t been moving forward. That’s actually how he discovered the opportunity to start SpaceX. That’s what’s actually going to move this market forward.”
David Senra8,653,937 views • 3 months ago
Marc Andreessen on why Starlink may be the most misunderstood success story in tech right now: “Elon’s not the first guy who said we’re going to do satellite-based internet access. There was Bill Gates, Craig McCaw. Complete catastrophe, total bankruptcy, complete disaster. Elon’s like, ‘I know, I’m going to do another three of those. We’re starting as a side project at the rocket ship company.’ If the rockets are reusable, we’re going to be launching them all the time. What’s going to go in the rockets? I could wait for the customers to come to me, or I could just put up my own satellites. Anybody who knew anything about the history of satellites knew that was the craziest idea in the world. And of course it’s like this giant success. It’s the side project. It’s clearly the least studied and understood thing I know of in the world right now.”
David Senra12,079,784 views • 4 months ago
.Sam Altman says the best advice Peter Thiel ever gave him was to focus on what’s working. Peter was the one who convinced him to double down on ChatGPT early on: “After we launched ChatGPT, it was sort of this weird thing because people didn't really know what to use it for. It was growing super fast, but it felt very unstable, or kind of almost low-value growth.” “A lot of people in the company were like, ‘We gotta figure out something else. This is not sustainable value.’ And we were talking about this list of 5 or 6 other things that we could focus on instead.” “He was like, ‘It's an obvious mistake to do anything but this.’” “Besides the fact that it's growing, which is rare and great, and it was not growing as fast then as it did after, he's like, ‘The power of this is the power of the Google text box. It's like a text box you can type anything into, and it does the right thing.’” “He's like, ‘People have just been chasing the Google business model for 20 years and this is the first thing that's come up, and clearly the empty text box worked for Google, so why don't you just double down on that? It's growing. It's very flexible and it has all of the signs other than it doesn't fit the current Silicon Valley wisdom.’” “And I was like, ‘Okay.’ And so we went super hard on ChatGPT and it was great.”
David Senra410,282 views • 10 days ago
3:04
Sensitive content
This media may contain sensitive content.
“The lifestyle of an entrepreneur at its core is: I can take more pain than the other guy, and I'll prove it.” “ There's a zen that can happen when a warrior has fought for a long time. You can get used to it.” “ You almost start accepting it. Like, something bad happens and you don't even get mad.” “ There are benefits. But you need to make sure you don't get so used to it that it doesn't even bother you. You can get so zen, you're unbothered.” “ There's something special about the extra fierceness of being bothered, being upset about something that is wrong.” — travis kalanick
David Senra533,132 views • 17 days ago
“Everything seems fake now.” .Lulu Cheng Meservey on companies paying for retweets on their product launches: “Every launch uses the same slop cinematic video, same template.” “Half of them, you go to the engagement—it's completely fake.” “You can just start to tell that the amount of engagement this thing has is completely disproportionate to how interesting it actually is. And when you look through the people engaging with it, it's all some random account in a developing country that has no other tweets other than shilling products like this.” “When that happens, I write off the entire company as fake.” “I don't think, ‘This was a fake video or fake engagement.’ I think to myself, ‘It's a fake company with a fake founder. I will never buy their product or do business with them. I would never recommend somebody go work with them. The whole thing is fake.’” “It's better to put out something that truly represents the best version of what you’re doing that might get lower engagement, but the people who are engaging are actually real people, and they care. It's better to get 50 people who feel like this is speaking to them than to get 4,700 retweets that seem obviously fake.”
David Senra637,136 views • 21 days ago
A picture of DHH's desk goes viral every few months, and he says the number one comment he always gets is that it can't be a real office because it’s too clean. His response: "If I have shit all over my desk, I'm not creating work, because my mind will just go to the shit." “It's a bit like that Marie Kondo thing where you go through simplifying your home and throwing out all this stuff. It actually creates free mental space.” “I need this pure cocoon.” “It's actually a form of procrastination, and I need to run out of obvious things to procrastinate on before I'll start the real work.”
David Senra1,133,278 views • 1 month ago
Marc Andreessen (Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸) on what it’s like to work at SpaceX: “It’s like being dropped into a zone of shocking competence.” “Everybody is ultra competent, and the reason everybody’s ultra competent is because if they’re not, Elon sniffs it out and fires them. He knows, ‘cause he’s talking to the people actually doing the work.” “The best engineers in the world want to work for him, ‘cause he’s the one CEO like this who’s able to work with them as a peer on whatever the technology is.” “What would be better as an engineer than being able to design a rocket engine with Elon Musk as your engineering partner?”
David Senra3,165,134 views • 3 months ago
.danawhite says one of the keys to longevity is to block out all negativity: “It never even crosses my mind that something's not going to work. I just keep going until it does work.” “There's this Bruce Lee quote where he says, ‘Never say negative things about yourself or what you're working on even if you're joking, because your body doesn't know the difference.’” “I never take in any negativity.”
David Senra1,712,251 views • 2 months ago
“We need aggressive founders with large ambitions. “Think about what you want to do. It needs to be big. And you need to be truly aggressive.” “It is underestimated how much of a difference aggression and ambition make. I think 95% of a company's success is that.” “A lot of people find excuses why they can't build a big company. Too much regulation or not enough funding. None of that is true. They're all excuses.” “We need aggressive founders with large ambitions.”
David Senra86,950 views • 5 days ago
Ugly is a choice. Lulu Cheng Meservey on why we should put effort into making beautiful things again: “People are allowed to care about objectively beautiful things. We had the better part of a decade where we had to take this aesthetic, relativistic view that everything is beautiful in someone eyes. That this piece of art that is clearly trash is just as beautiful as one made by the great masters. Or somebody who is clearly unhealthy is just as beautiful as someone who takes really good care of themselves. People are allowed to say a beautiful building is worth creating and a beautiful website is worth creating. This is what Joe Gebbia and the National Design Studio team are doing. They’re saying, "We believe that a more beautiful experience on the internet reflect the dignity of being an American citizen, and that is what we want. So we're going to put in effort and talent to go make that for you because it's worth something. We're not going to pretend that a website has to be ugly." Anything big or small or glamorous or pedestrian, like a simple government website, can (and should) be made more beautiful. And when it is, people appreciate it so much more because we do have this inherent yearning for beauty.“
David Senra313,748 views • 18 days ago