David Senra
@davidsenra • 285,736 subscribers
Conversations with the greatest living founders.
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Ben Wilson (Ben Wilson) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5. I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38. He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters. His work has benefited millions of people all across the world. Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations. 0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders. 55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.
David Senra1,132,173 views • 4 days ago
You would have made billions if you gave seed checks to everyone who was at Alexandr Wang’s 19th birthday party: - Jeff Yan (jeff.hl) went on to start Hyperliquid (~$20B) - Scott Wu went on to start Cognition ($48B) - Jesse Zhang went on to start Decagon ($4.5B) And Wang himself who started Scale AI, and got $14.3B from Meta for 49% of it. Wang explains: “I was doing a winternship at a trading firm called HRT. There were 12 of us, almost all of whom were students at either Harvard or MIT. I recently met up with the founder of HRT and they were talking about, ‘We're starting to do some private investments.’ I was like, ‘Just invest into the interns! All the interns get seed checks!’”
David Senra220,463 views • 1 day ago
Lessons from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Napoleon: “Elon has demonstrated that if you have a small, incredibly cracked, highly technical team, that's very flat, you can accomplish a lot very quickly.” “Mark has internalized that failure doesn't matter. It just matters when you win, how big you win.” “That concept enables Mark to operate without fear because he’s just very comfortable taking lots of risk.” “Mark has this great quote that says: The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that's changing the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” “In the book The Mind of Napoleon, Napoleon repeats that hesitation is fatal. Napoleon says before you engage in a course of action you should deliberate thoroughly. He'd study from every angle to make sure he's making the right decision. But once he’s sure he’s on the right path, he goes all in. I feel there's an echo with the way Mark operates. Once Mark knows what he wants to do, he empties the clip.”
David Senra572,851 views • 7 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 Senra17,645,660 views • 7 months ago
.Alexandr Wang says modern product marketing is now all driven by the screenshot: “To have a modern consumer product, it has to work on the screenshot. The screenshot has to fly, either through group chats or word of mouth or online.” “Having Jolly in the screenshot immediately communicates this is a Muse screenshot.”
David Senra201,504 views • 5 days 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 Senra12,081,902 views • 6 months ago
Napoleon, Steve Jobs, Vladimir Putin and Joan of Arc all had one strange thing in common: they barely ate. Ben Wilson says the pattern isn’t about food. It’s about obsession. Napoleon used to say, “If you want to dine quickly, dine with me,” because he would eat dinner in 15 minutes and get back to work. “Steve Jobs had all these weird diets. He ate almost nothing. He'd go on diets where he only ate apples for months at a time.” “Vladimir Putin would eat like a boiled egg a day as his entire diet.” “Joan of Arc fasted all the time and barely ate anything.” “I think food is a good test for if you're obsessed with something.” “Do you find yourself skipping meals? Do you find yourself forgetting to eat? That is a really good litmus test for whether you are truly obsessed with something or not, and all these people are obsessives.”
David Senra78,532 views • 2 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 Senra8,654,940 views • 5 months ago
I started this podcast a year ago. It’s been the best year of my life. Thanks to everyone for watching and to every guest for the incredible conversations 🫡 In order by appearance: Daniel Ek Michael Dell Brad Jacobs Todd Graves Michael Ovitz James Dyson Patrick O’Shaughnessy John Mackey Tobi Lutke Jimmy Iovine Jason Fried Brian Armstrong Marc Andreessen Eric Jorgenson Tony Xu Evan Spiegel David Baszucki Adam Foroughi Dana White Strauss Zelnick Rick Rubin Ivanka Trump Gustav Söderström Ed Catmull Steve Stoute Scott Wu Jonathan Ross Eric Glyman Jeff Zalaznick DHH Micky Malka Lulu Meservey Travis Kalanick Sam Altman Torsten Reil Doug Leone Zach Dell Mati Staniszewski Luca Ferrari Peter Rahal Ronnie Fieg 41 down, many many thousands to go…
David Senra419,067 views • 12 days ago
Marc Andreessen (Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸) on founders taking psychedelics: “I was describing this phenomenon we see in Silicon Valley where these guys get under pressure and they feel anxious and somebody tells them about psychedelics. They try it and they kind of come out the other end as a changed person. And they kind of come out much more at peace, but then they also tend to like quit their companies and they move to Indonesia and become a surf instructor. They just peace out. They're just done. There's been a whole bunch of examples of this and I was complaining to Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. about this and in true Huberman kind of wise Yoda style, he's like, "Well, you know, how do you know they're not happier? Maybe that was the positive outcome. Maybe the thing that was driving them to be a great entrepreneur was a fundamental level of insecurity. They had this kind of unsatisfied, neurotic impulse, and now, they're just satisfied.” And I'm like, "Yeah, but their company, it's failing."
David Senra310,925 views • 11 days ago
Ari Emanuel says Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 is wrong that psychedelics make founders work less hard: “That’s complete bulls**t. I had this argument with Marc.” “5-MeO-DMT, that’s the best psychedelic in the world.” “With 5-MeO, you smoke it. You’re tripping for about 30 minutes, and you realize how small we are in the world, and how meaningless in a weird way. Not in a bad way that you don’t want to work or anything, that you’re not aggressive or any of that. You just realize... you want a meaningful life.” “I’m not half-assing things. Zero. There’s still plenty of calls. I’m up at 5:00 this morning, worked out, in the office, did another podcast. I got you. I’m going to Montecito for something. I’m working my tail off.”
David Senra272,789 views • 11 days ago
Meta built Muse with just 200 people. “The whole executive team, everyone knew that this was probably going to be one of the most important products that Meta would ship this year.” “But we had the restraint organizationally to make sure it was a really small focused team working on it... because we knew it was a single work of art.” “This is even now starting to plague a lot of the AI labs. They become this Frankenstein, almost Cronenberg amalgamation of a bunch of different people's points of view.” “It's sort of like PM hell, where every PM has a thing that they're trying to jam into the product.” “Muse had to be the exact opposite. There's one clear point of view.” — Alexandr Wang
David Senra168,383 views • 7 days ago
Kith CEO Ronnie Fieg says social media algorithms have flattened taste: “Everyone now wants the same thing. You used to be forced to have your own opinion.” His influence came from riding across Queens, watching completely different cultures get on the train, and walking into stores before the internet had already told everyone what to like. “Every other stop would be a different culture hopping on the train.” “What I got to see became my world. That was my influence. I got to see so many different styles, people dressed in so many different ways, and that’s when the sense of individuality was at an all-time high.” “Before you were influenced by your algorithm, which now, a lot of people want the same things because it’s based off what they see.” “Back then, when you went shopping, you were forced to have an opinion because you wouldn’t have seen everything.” “Today, people will walk into a store and know about all the products before they walk in. They’ve already seen someone wearing it, a photo of it, a lookbook of it, a campaign of it.” “Back then you were just forced to have your own opinion.”
David Senra432,659 views • 21 days 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 Senra3,166,638 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 Senra960,758 views • 2 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 Senra1,715,592 views • 3 months ago
Nike’s CEO once asked Steve Jobs for advice. Steve told him, “Nike makes some of the best products in the world, but you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crap.” Ronnie Fieg came to a similar realization while working at David Z, and decides to create Kith: “I saw an opportunity in being passionate about 100% of the things I was doing, not about 10–15% of the things I was doing.”
David Senra272,000 views • 21 days ago