David Senra
@davidsenra • 165,550 subscribers
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The two things Ramp Cofounder Eric Glyman looks for when hiring: 1. Evidence of a spike 2. Exceptional drive “ There’s a whole community of people at Ramp we found because when they were 15 years old, they were playing like 80-100 hours a week on Minecraft.” “I'm less interested in: what is on the resume. I'm far more interested in proof of work. Often I'm really looking for signs of that.” “You can find that by searching: where is the work?” “So part of our hiring process is trying to look for people who are very active on GitHub.” “We're trying to meet people who were leaders in different bizarre fringe communities.”
David Senra883,023 Aufrufe • vor 6 Tagen
“Nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically.”
David Senra65,112 Aufrufe • vor 21 Stunden
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 Senra8,651,789 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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 Senra17,641,877 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
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 Senra12,072,636 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
.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 Senra1,701,593 Aufrufe • vor 22 Tagen
Peter Thiel on why having Aspergers is an advantage and Elon Musk on why needing to be liked is a real weakness. Thiel: Many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s where it’s like you’re missing the imitation, socialization gene. We need to ask what is it about our society where those of us who do not suffer from Aspergers are at some massive disadvantage because we will be talked out of our interesting, original, creative ideas before they’re even fully formed. ‘Oh, that’s a little bit too weird, that’s a little bit too strange,’ and maybe I’ll just go ahead and open the restaurant that I’ve been talking about that everyone else can understand and agree with, or do something extremely safe and conventional. Elon: “I think it’s a real weakness to want to be liked. A real weakness. And I do not have that.”
David Senra180,225 Aufrufe • vor 3 Tagen
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 Senra3,162,557 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
The best founders in the world would never sell their company. You could never acquire Elon, Bezos, Zuck, Jobs, Ellison, Jensen, Dell, Page & Brin. Scott Wu has turned down billions and keeps saying No. “There’s got to be some crazy number somebody can throw at you where you're just like I have to take this.” “Not really.” “It’s funny you talk about money. Dude I don't have a car. I rent an apartment.” “Think about the Zuck example when he turned down $1 billion from Yahoo. They said you’re 22. You’d make $250 million.” “And Zuck was like Well what would I do with the money? I would just start another social network and I kind of like the one I have. I just want to build shit anyways.”
David Senra881,974 Aufrufe • vor 20 Tagen
“No one at Disney thought to ask why.” Ed Catmull (Pixar founder) says before Disney bought Pixar, their contract gave Disney full visibility into Pixar's business, but no one ever stopped to ask why Pixar was becoming far more successful than them. Until Bob Iger became CEO: “He walked up our walkway to the building alone. No assistant. No entourage.” “From the people at Pixar, the fact that he came alone was very impressive.” “He was there the learn.” Ed says this was the moment Iger realized that he had to acquire Pixar:
David Senra1,224,586 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
![.tobi lutke removed all the Norman doors from Shopify’s offices because he couldn’t have excellent people surrounded by bad design. Ramp Cofounder Eric Glyman says he learned the same lesson by studying Breville toasters: “ If you care about design, you should buy a Breville toaster.” “ One of the big problems in a lot of B2B software is: it starts out clean and elegant. There's a bunch of businesses who love the product and they start serving more customers and have more requirements and more ideas.” “Before you know it, you end up with these disasters of B2B softwares which require a PhD to learn how to use.” “ If you were to go ask people, ‘What do you want in a toaster or in a microwave?’ They might say I like toast but sometimes I want to reheat pizza. I should have a ‘reheat frozen pizza’ mode. Or maybe you're cooking stuff and want it to be more like an oven, or you want to make popcorn and it's a toaster/microwave and all these things.” “Before you know it, you end up with these toasters filled with buttons and buttons and knobs and dials.” “That is literally asking customers what they want and building exactly that.” “ if you watch people toast things, what they actually do falls into two categories: you hit start and either you've undercooked the toast and need to put it back in, or you've overdone it and have to start over.” “If you look at the [Breville] there are only a few buttons. One of the four buttons is called ‘A Bit More.’” “ No one would ask you for ‘A Bit More.’ They just want the perfect level of toast and it's hard to know that, so they built that in.”](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2076315938262327582/amplify_video_thumb/2076315568437932033/img/rdFkHY3dV1Iwwbfr.jpg)
.tobi lutke removed all the Norman doors from Shopify’s offices because he couldn’t have excellent people surrounded by bad design. Ramp Cofounder Eric Glyman says he learned the same lesson by studying Breville toasters: “ If you care about design, you should buy a Breville toaster.” “ One of the big problems in a lot of B2B software is: it starts out clean and elegant. There's a bunch of businesses who love the product and they start serving more customers and have more requirements and more ideas.” “Before you know it, you end up with these disasters of B2B softwares which require a PhD to learn how to use.” “ If you were to go ask people, ‘What do you want in a toaster or in a microwave?’ They might say I like toast but sometimes I want to reheat pizza. I should have a ‘reheat frozen pizza’ mode. Or maybe you're cooking stuff and want it to be more like an oven, or you want to make popcorn and it's a toaster/microwave and all these things.” “Before you know it, you end up with these toasters filled with buttons and buttons and knobs and dials.” “That is literally asking customers what they want and building exactly that.” “ if you watch people toast things, what they actually do falls into two categories: you hit start and either you've undercooked the toast and need to put it back in, or you've overdone it and have to start over.” “If you look at the [Breville] there are only a few buttons. One of the four buttons is called ‘A Bit More.’” “ No one would ask you for ‘A Bit More.’ They just want the perfect level of toast and it's hard to know that, so they built that in.”
David Senra170,687 Aufrufe • vor 7 Tagen
.Eric Glyman says Ramp follow’s Elon Musk’s algorithm for building products: 1. Make your requirements less dumb. 2. Try very hard to delete the part or process. 3. Simplify and optimize. 4. Accelerate. 5. Automate. “What we are trying to do is take that methodology and style of thinking and ask about every dollar or hour that organizations choose to spend, and how can we build technologies that make it so you can just run your business more profitably with less effort.” “Elon's algorithm is one that has been incredibly motivating and orienting and clarifying for us.”
David Senra146,854 Aufrufe • vor 6 Tagen
.tobi lutke says the photo of SpaceX’s Raptor evolution is the “most inspiring picture that exists.” “That's today’s Picasso.” “Very few teams can move forward by subtraction.” “The world belongs to the fast. The people who iterate. The people who adjust. The people who understand what’s costly, what’s unnecessary, and prune away the rest.”
David Senra1,953,234 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Groq Founder Jonathan Ross explains why all the West Coast VCs missed on investing in Groq: “Typical West Coast VCs are more like lemmings. Ttypical East Coast VCs all think that they're smarter than each other.” “So when you try and raise from the West Coast, if one VC puts money in, all the others want to put money in.” “In New York, one VC investing means nothing. They're going to run their own analysis. They do not care what other VCs are doing.” “The flip of that is, if you're on the West Coast and one VC passes, they're going to go tell every other VC, and like lemmings, they're all going to pass as well.” “All the VCs on the West Coast didn't want to invest in us. We had very few of the typical VCs invest in us at the end. We had a bunch of crossover funds from the East Coast investing.”
David Senra254,660 Aufrufe • vor 13 Tagen
![Great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself. Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 and I discuss what we both noticed but no one talks about: David: You don't have any levels of introspection? Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible. David: Why? Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. David: So I've read 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs and someone asked me what the most surprising thing I’ve learned from this was [and I answered] they have little or zero introspection. Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like: I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again. Marc: If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology. And then this kind of this kind of guilt based whammy kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self criticize. The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2033297822691516853/amplify_video_thumb/2033297659830861824/img/MUiYYoNHXGEBqCuY.jpg)
Great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself. Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 and I discuss what we both noticed but no one talks about: David: You don't have any levels of introspection? Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible. David: Why? Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. David: So I've read 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs and someone asked me what the most surprising thing I’ve learned from this was [and I answered] they have little or zero introspection. Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like: I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again. Marc: If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology. And then this kind of this kind of guilt based whammy kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self criticize. The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.
David Senra2,802,107 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
.Scott Wu says because of AI future generations won't even recognize today's jobs as "work": ”If you think about our ancestors from hundreds or thousands of years ago, imagine them looking at us and what we do.” “You're pushing buttons. You're sitting in a room and talking with other people, and you call that a meeting?” “ What do you mean that's work? I'm in the fields. I'm doing this every day. I’m farming, I'm making all of our clothes by hand.” “ I think what we’ll have going forward is going to look that different from what we have today.”
David Senra339,310 Aufrufe • vor 20 Tagen
Rick Rubin describes his daily struggle: “There is a part of me that doesn't want to show up for anything and I have to overcome that every day.” “I'm lazy. It's a real part of it. I'm telling you an honest piece of this which is every day it's not like "Let's go!” Every day it's like "Oh no. I've got to go work.”
David Senra1,003,243 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
![How Elon Musk fixed Starlink: “Starlink was a mess. It was 10X too expensive and they were building 1/10 of how many they needed. Elon’s like I've had it. This is now the bottleneck. I'm fixing this. He grabs a team of engineers that he trusts and they fly up to Seattle. They fire the entire Starlink leadership team. They sit down in a war room and they start running the algorithm. •What is the first principles of satellite design? •How simple can we make this thing? •Why does this exist? •Why are these two things so far apart? •Why do we need this much energy? •Why do we need this manufacturing process? And over the course of a few months they make a two order of magnitude leap. These people had never encountered this design before, but just by applying the algorithm and working with maniacal urgency towards this extremely high design bar, they created this product that's now —if it was a standalone business —would be worth tens of billions of dollars [or more].”](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2046729718993768659/amplify_video_thumb/2046729543147499520/img/zZ-UJk4sbFg60FQi.jpg)
How Elon Musk fixed Starlink: “Starlink was a mess. It was 10X too expensive and they were building 1/10 of how many they needed. Elon’s like I've had it. This is now the bottleneck. I'm fixing this. He grabs a team of engineers that he trusts and they fly up to Seattle. They fire the entire Starlink leadership team. They sit down in a war room and they start running the algorithm. •What is the first principles of satellite design? •How simple can we make this thing? •Why does this exist? •Why are these two things so far apart? •Why do we need this much energy? •Why do we need this manufacturing process? And over the course of a few months they make a two order of magnitude leap. These people had never encountered this design before, but just by applying the algorithm and working with maniacal urgency towards this extremely high design bar, they created this product that's now —if it was a standalone business —would be worth tens of billions of dollars [or more].”
David Senra1,582,584 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Marc Andreessen (Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸): Airbnb could have been boutique booking software. Uber could have been taxi dispatch software. Tesla could have been self-driving software. They decided to take over the entire industry instead: "Silicon Valley between 1950 and 2010 was primarily just in the tools business. You'd build a tool like an operating system or a disk drive, sell it to people, and they'd figure out what to do with it. Then something changed. Alternate universe Airbnb is just boutique booking software. A tiny little business building spreadsheet software. But Brian Chesky decided: we're going to go into the hospitality business and compete with hotels directly. Uber and Lyft in the old world were just taxi dispatch software. In the new world, they're full transportation providers. Tesla in the old world would have just been software for self-driving cars. In the new world, it builds the entire car. Facebook, same thing. Prior to Facebook, if you built online ad software, you were selling it to media companies. Mark said: no. We're just going to beat the media company. We're going to build the entire thing. That was the pivot point when the Valley's ambitions went from just building tools to going directly into incumbent industries. And then AI makes that crystal clear. The winning AI companies are raising billions, tens of billions, in some cases hundreds of billions of dollars. The old world of $10,000,000 or $50,000,000 — where VCs tap out — is just not relevant anymore."
David Senra131,838 Aufrufe • vor 10 Tagen