David Senra

Conversations with the greatest living founders.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

My conversation with Gustav Söderström (@GustavS), Co-CEO of Spotify.

0:00 How Gustav Prepared To Become CEO
2:30 There Is No Right Org
5:06 Synchronized Swimming At Spotify
9:25 You Ship Your Org Chart
10:31 Why Apple's Functional Org Works
11:48 Tenure Is The Key
13:31 Oracle vs. Elon On Churn
16:41 Finding Your North Star
18:24 Choosing Pain For Distribution
19:21 Prioritize The User Over Yourself
23:05 The No Regrets Strategy
25:21 Building A Running Playlist With AI
27:35 Figuring Out What To Spend Your Life On
30:01 Being Honest About Doing Good
32:25 The Anti-Engagement Decision
34:50 Giving Users Control Of The Algorithm
37:57 The 1-9-90 Power Law
40:23 Getting Into AI Early
43:55 You Are Your Thoughts
48:22 Building Tools That Enhance Humanity
49:45 The Genius Of The Kindle
51:57 When Steve Jobs Came To Kill Spotify
54:24 Three Bets Against Apple
57:07 Building A Personal AI Agent
1:00:55 Premeditated Media
1:02:27 Who Tells You The Truth
1:05:16 The Vulcan Mind Meld Of Tenure
1:07:28 Hiring For Spikes And Fresh Blood
1:10:14 What Keeps Him Up At Night

Includes paid partnerships.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Elon was 8 years old the first time his father called him worthless.

"He would stand in the living room and be berated by his father for hours. It's not just like a mean comment. He'd scream in his face and call him worthless and useless and stupid.

He got beat up very badly — stomped by a gang of kids and was in the hospital for like a week, unrecognizable face. And his dad sided with the bullies and called him stupid for picking a fight.

That is an unbelievably brutal place to start.

Some of these rumors about how privileged he was actually come from his dad lying and trying to take credit for some of his success.

Elon arrived as an immigrant to Canada at 17, paid his way through college, graduated with student debt, dropped out of Stanford graduate school to start his first company. He couldn't afford an apartment and an office so he leased an office and he showered at the YMCA.

All he had was a laptop and some books and student debt. That's his starting place.”

[Forbes @Forbes]

.@elonmusk grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, where he taught himself to code. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002—the same year he founded SpaceX.

Musk is featured on the #Forbes250 America’s Most Successful Living Immigrants list. View the full list: https://t.co/2Xgu79oZeb
📸: Martin Schoeller

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@christianjesusz @GustavS @FoundersPodcast I love the way Gustav communicates

[David Senra @davidsenra]

James Dyson.

"If you're experienced, you know why not or how not to do something.

Whereas if you're naive, you don't have that negativity, and often, it's something that hasn't worked previously that could work.

So, you're very open. I love naivety, people asking silly questions, stupid questions. It creates a different way of doing things."

[Nat Eliason @nateliason]

You can put one entrepreneur in this chair to inspire a room of teenage Founders.

Who are you picking?

[David Senra @davidsenra]

More ideas from Elon here:

[David Senra @davidsenra]

My conversation with @EricJorgenson, author of The Book of Elon (@elonmusk).

0:00 Book Reveal
0:39 Build Useful Things
2:19 Engineering Talent Edge
4:26 Wired for War
6:47 Tip of the Spear
8:47 Burn the Boats
13:13 Facing Fear
15:16 Origin Story Myths
18:19 Know Business A to Z
22:17 Simplify and Fail Fast
25:35 Reality and Physics
28:18 The Algorithm Begins
30:34 Delete and Simplify
34:25 Starlink War Room
36:52 Repetition as OS
38:18 Step Three Simplify Optimize
38:43 Question Every Requirement
39:13 Tesla Battery Pack Delete
40:43 Repetition Installs Ideas
42:02 Step Four Accelerate
43:26 Design Org for Speed
46:06 Step Five Automate
46:29 Control and Clean Sheet
48:54 Vertical Integration and Costs
50:47 SpaceX Incentives and Mars
57:11 Frontier Unlocks Starlink
1:00:26 Time as True Currency
1:03:58 Speed Triage and Bottlenecks
1:10:11 Internalized Responsibility
1:12:56 Avoid Serialized Dependencies
1:14:31 Aligning the Team
1:15:07 Time Is the Constraint
1:16:00 One Metric Focus
1:18:03 Directional Predictions
1:19:06 We Must Make Stuff
1:25:39 Manufacturing as Moat
1:26:23 Speed and Direct to Customer
1:28:41 SpaceX Feasibility Study
1:33:07 Edge of Sanity Leadership
1:37:10 Bottlenecks and Integration
1:40:01 Design and Simplify
1:45:15 Catch the Rocket
1:48:14 Capitalism and Closing

Includes paid partnerships.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Elon’s advice to future builders:

"There is an over allocation of talent in finance and law. Too many smart people are going into finance. We should have fewer people doing that and more people making stuff. Manufacturing used to be highly valued in the United States. These days it hasn't been as much, which I think is wrong. Making cars is an honest day's living, that's for sure. Making anything or providing a valuable service, these are valuable things to do. I've got mad respect for makers of things."

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@Tashi343i @GustavS 🫡🫡

[David Senra @davidsenra]

My conversation with Gustav Söderström (@GustavS), Co-CEO of Spotify.

0:00 How Gustav Prepared To Become CEO
2:30 There Is No Right Org
5:06 Synchronized Swimming At Spotify
9:25 You Ship Your Org Chart
10:31 Why Apple's Functional Org Works
11:48 Tenure Is The Key
13:31 Oracle vs. Elon On Churn
16:41 Finding Your North Star
18:24 Choosing Pain For Distribution
19:21 Prioritize The User Over Yourself
23:05 The No Regrets Strategy
25:21 Building A Running Playlist With AI
27:35 Figuring Out What To Spend Your Life On
30:01 Being Honest About Doing Good
32:25 The Anti-Engagement Decision
34:50 Giving Users Control Of The Algorithm
37:57 The 1-9-90 Power Law
40:23 Getting Into AI Early
43:55 You Are Your Thoughts
48:22 Building Tools That Enhance Humanity
49:45 The Genius Of The Kindle
51:57 When Steve Jobs Came To Kill Spotify
54:24 Three Bets Against Apple
57:07 Building A Personal AI Agent
1:00:55 Premeditated Media
1:02:27 Who Tells You The Truth
1:05:16 The Vulcan Mind Meld Of Tenure
1:07:28 Hiring For Spikes And Fresh Blood
1:10:14 What Keeps Him Up At Night

Includes paid partnerships.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@xkaidus @nateliason Or even better someone who never sold:

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@nateliason James Dyson

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@EricJorgenson @nateliason How about someone who failed 5,127 times?

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@nateliason James Dyson

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@nateliason James Dyson

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@DuchMario @tobi is awesome. Looking forward to many more conversations with him.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Competition makes companies obsessed with copying. Rivalries push them toward excellence.

@tobi says when companies start competing with each other, they tend to just copy what the other side does and become obsessed with the “Xerox strategy”:

“Mimicry is not the way of getting to excellence.”

“If you treat other companies in your space as rivals, it’s much easier to have a positive sum outcome.”

“Rivalries inspire you to be the best.”

[David Senra @davidsenra]

.@RickRubin says hanging out with Dana White inspired him to start his podcast:

“ We talked for about three hours, and at some point in the conversation I said, ‘Do you mind if I record this? Because I feel like I'm not going to remember what we're saying and I'm really liking this story.’”

“That was a breakthrough of—this is what doing a podcast is like.”

“I already do this in my life. I don't record them but I meet the people that make things that are interesting to me and I spend time with them and I listen to what they do and I ask a lot of questions because I'm curious.”

“It really is an outgrowth of my normal life.”

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Full episode is wild:

[David Senra @davidsenra]

This is the best founder you've never heard of. Adam Foroughi's company prints $5 billion in cash a year with just 400 people. When his stock price dropped by 92%, he borrowed money to buy back $6 billion in stock. That bet made the company more than $60 billion. The entire C-suite is just 4 people. To this day, Adam approves every hire. This episode has the highest insight-to-minute ratio of any conversation I've had so far.

Here’s our full conversation:

0:00 The $6B Buyback That Made $60B
2:15 Borrowing Money To Buy Back Stock At A Discount
5:02 Why VCs Passed On AppLovin In 2012
9:00 From App Discovery To Ad Platform
14:45 Beating Google's AdMob With Performance Marketing
19:30 No Board For Six Years
30:12 The China Deal That Almost Blew Up
37:45 The Convertible Note Pivot And KKR
46:30 Buying Gaming Studios To Get Data
51:45 Losing Trust With Game Developers
58:20 The 2022 Crash And How He Kept His Team
1:02:00 Building An Hyper Competent & Efficient Company
1:07:25 Why Every New Hire Needs His Approval
1:19:06 The Axon 2 Inflection Point
1:21:15 One Great Engineer Now Beats A Hundred

Includes paid partnerships.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Adam rejected a $600 million acquisition offer. His company is worth $170 billion today:

“I like running my own business. It’s hard to imagine me as an employee.”

“We were just growing really quickly and doing $50 million of EBITDA and we started getting offers from other tech companies to buy us.

We got an offer for $600 million in cash.

The challenge with that was we were still growing 100% year over year.

But there’s a lot of zeros in $600 million.

The problem was between the time of seeing that number and getting to a deal, your business has grown a ton.

I would have sold the company but not at that number. I ended up walking away from the deal.”

—-
I asked Adam what the number would have had to been and he said $1 billion.

Turning down this deal was one of the best decisions of Adam’s career. This is what he said:

“We would have left a lot of money on the table. Most businesses when they sell, they lose the opportunity to keep innovating.

Had we done that none of us would have known what this company could have become.”

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@realeliasp Zero chance anyone can run it like Adam. I meet a lot of founders. Very few like Adam. Ruthlessly efficient killer.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@ryancarson @bhalligan Devin is awesome. Just recorded an episode with Scott Wu! Will be out soon.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Software has no moat:

"The big wake-up call was when Facebook carbon copied Snapchat to make Poke.

Mark Zuckerberg recorded him saying the word "Poke" as the notification sound. He was so excited about this. It ended up being super helpful to Snapchat.

They literally put "Download Poke" at the top of every single Facebook app. And it was just a clone of Snapchat.
And then, on Christmas Day, to see Snapchat number one in the App Store in that context — it was huge for us. But that was the first time we realized we're going to have to be really smart about how we build this business and invest in the things that are hard to copy.

To be living in my dad's house with three of my buddies from college — and this huge company set their sights on us. It was definitely a formative experience."

- @evanspiegel

[David Senra @davidsenra]

“There's a lot of negativity around AI right now — and for good reasons.”

“There is potential for AI to create the most addictive algorithm you have ever heard of because it can understand you so deeply.”

“There is potential for darkness.”

“But AI is a dual use technology. You could choose to do something else with generative AI.”

“And so what Spotify is choosing to do is to give back users control of the algorithm.”

“We can say hey here's who we think you are and based on all your listening and this is the podcast we think you're interested in. These are the audiobooks that we think you're interested in.”

And you can say no, you're wrong. Maybe that's what I do, but it's not what I want to be. I want even more biographies or I want to get back into classical music. And that will happen.”

[David Senra @davidsenra]

My conversation with Gustav Söderström (@GustavS), Co-CEO of Spotify.

0:00 How Gustav Prepared To Become CEO
2:30 There Is No Right Org
5:06 Synchronized Swimming At Spotify
9:25 You Ship Your Org Chart
10:31 Why Apple's Functional Org Works
11:48 Tenure Is The Key
13:31 Oracle vs. Elon On Churn
16:41 Finding Your North Star
18:24 Choosing Pain For Distribution
19:21 Prioritize The User Over Yourself
23:05 The No Regrets Strategy
25:21 Building A Running Playlist With AI
27:35 Figuring Out What To Spend Your Life On
30:01 Being Honest About Doing Good
32:25 The Anti-Engagement Decision
34:50 Giving Users Control Of The Algorithm
37:57 The 1-9-90 Power Law
40:23 Getting Into AI Early
43:55 You Are Your Thoughts
48:22 Building Tools That Enhance Humanity
49:45 The Genius Of The Kindle
51:57 When Steve Jobs Came To Kill Spotify
54:24 Three Bets Against Apple
57:07 Building A Personal AI Agent
1:00:55 Premeditated Media
1:02:27 Who Tells You The Truth
1:05:16 The Vulcan Mind Meld Of Tenure
1:07:28 Hiring For Spikes And Fresh Blood
1:10:14 What Keeps Him Up At Night

Includes paid partnerships.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@thatdonnyslater 🫡🫡

[David Senra @davidsenra]

The strategy Spotify used to beat Apple:

“We bet on three things. They were all counter positions to Apple deliberately.

1. Freemium. We believed that if Apple ever did a free product they would struggle to do advertising. We bet they wouldn't do a good free tier. And so we focused a lot on freemium and a really good free tier.

2. Personalization. I would almost say Apple was against data at the time. We bet that they would never get good at personalization recommendations. And we believed that was the future.

3. Ubiquity. We bet that they were
going to prefer their own products and never get to be good on a Samsung TV or an Android phone.

So these were our bets and they panned out really well.”

[David Senra @davidsenra]

My conversation with Gustav Söderström (@GustavS), Co-CEO of Spotify.

0:00 How Gustav Prepared To Become CEO
2:30 There Is No Right Org
5:06 Synchronized Swimming At Spotify
9:25 You Ship Your Org Chart
10:31 Why Apple's Functional Org Works
11:48 Tenure Is The Key
13:31 Oracle vs. Elon On Churn
16:41 Finding Your North Star
18:24 Choosing Pain For Distribution
19:21 Prioritize The User Over Yourself
23:05 The No Regrets Strategy
25:21 Building A Running Playlist With AI
27:35 Figuring Out What To Spend Your Life On
30:01 Being Honest About Doing Good
32:25 The Anti-Engagement Decision
34:50 Giving Users Control Of The Algorithm
37:57 The 1-9-90 Power Law
40:23 Getting Into AI Early
43:55 You Are Your Thoughts
48:22 Building Tools That Enhance Humanity
49:45 The Genius Of The Kindle
51:57 When Steve Jobs Came To Kill Spotify
54:24 Three Bets Against Apple
57:07 Building A Personal AI Agent
1:00:55 Premeditated Media
1:02:27 Who Tells You The Truth
1:05:16 The Vulcan Mind Meld Of Tenure
1:07:28 Hiring For Spikes And Fresh Blood
1:10:14 What Keeps Him Up At Night

Includes paid partnerships.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

@Twoket9 @bhalligan @FoundersPodcast Brian didn’t interrupt. I enjoyed our back and forth.