David Senra

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Conversations with the greatest living founders.

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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. After watching the TPU push AlphaGo's ELO score up by hundreds of points overnight, Ross grasped a principle that would define his next decade: faster inference produces more capable models. He left Google to act on it. Groq's first decade was brutal. Early West Coast VCs passed — and would later watch as NVIDIA announced what Ross describes as the firm's largest deal by nearly 3x. Ross came within weeks of running out of money. Rather than lay off the engineers he needed to hit a critical product milestone, he created "Groq bonds" — war-bond–style instruments that exchanged salary for equity. About 80% of the team participated; nearly half took statutory minimum wage. They saved two months of runway and kept the company alive. The core bet Ross made — that fast inference would matter — was widely dismissed, inside Groq and out. When the CEO of GitHub called needing chips to run LLMs, Ross's own engineers told him it couldn't be done. He eventually stopped asking and started declaring: "I intend to do this." He describes that shift — from inviting pessimism to announcing direction — as the most important leadership change he made. Now at NVIDIA, Ross carries what he calls manufactured discontent: a deliberate refusal to rest, convinced that every day without sufficient compute is a day the world waits longer for cures for cancer and aging. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/jonathan-ross Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) The $20 Billion NVIDIA Deal Closed In 3 Weeks (00:00:25) Why GPUs And LPUs Are Better Together (00:01:46) When AI Talks To AI, Speed Wins (00:03:30) Always Start With A Hobby Project (00:05:55) Ask The Right Questions, Not Answer Them (00:08:23) There Are Infinite Ways To Be A Leader (00:13:00) I Was One Of The World's Worst Leaders (00:14:34) Fewer Constraints, More Room To Surprise You (00:16:31) At NVIDIA There Is No Politics (00:19:44) You Have To Learn Confidence (00:22:23) East Coast VCs Think, West Coast VCs Follow (00:23:50) The Keynesian Beauty Contest Of Silicon Valley (00:26:48) The Autonomy That Created The NVIDIA Deal (00:30:07) Making A Model Smarter By Making It Faster (00:34:52) Reality Quotient Beats Intelligence Quotient (00:35:44) Find The Dominant Game And Play It (00:37:11) A Founder's Job Is Full-Time Change Management (00:38:34) Return On Luck: Seize It Better Than Anyone (00:42:54) You Can't Sell Speed, You Have To Let People Try It (00:46:32) I Intend To: Intentional Leadership (00:51:07) Groq Bonds: Trading Salary For Survival (00:54:13) Hire For Negatives, Grow For Positives (00:58:46) Loss Aversion And Booking The Win Early (01:00:37) How Michael Jordan Weaponized Humiliation (01:03:13) Manufactured Discontent Drives Everything (01:05:02) Every Day Without Compute Has A Real Cost (01:07:07) Code Was Rationed, Now It's Nearly Free (01:10:04) Teach Kids To Ask Questions, Not Answer Them Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 h 12 min
28 de juny

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 into a career. At the International Olympiad in Informatics he won three gold medals and placed first overall in 2014; he was the 2011 MathCounts national champion. He approaches building a company the way he approaches a strategy game: a tree search, calculating moves, working the decision tree toward victory. By his own account, competition is all he does. He dropped out of Harvard after two years, worked as a founding engineer at Scale AI, and co-founded Lunchclub before starting Cognition in August 2023 with fellow IOI gold medalists Steven Hao and Walden Yan. They built it in a New York apartment. Devin's annualized revenue then climbed from $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million by June 2025. In May 2026, Cognition raised at a $26 billion valuation. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/scott-wu Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Scott Wu’s Obsession With Winning (00:02:06) Competitive Programming, Games And Finding His People (00:04:24) Family, Go, And The Roots Of Scott’s Competitiveness (00:08:35) Why Losing Hurts More Than Winning Feels Good (00:09:38) What Winning With Devin Looks Like (00:12:55) Devin Today: The AI Software Engineer (00:13:52) Software As The Human-Computer Interface (00:18:45) Why AI Progress Is Hard To Intuit (00:20:39) Thinking About AI From First Principles (00:22:57) What Happens When Agents Can Work For Months (00:30:18) The Original Thesis Behind Cognition (00:31:12) Launching Devin And Handling Criticism (00:37:17) Finding Product-Market Fit In The Enterprise (00:42:41) How Cognition Deploys Devin Inside Large Companies (00:48:34) Measuring ROI Instead Of Token Spend (00:50:01) Why Cognition Wants To Be Model-Neutral (00:52:18) Why Focus Lets Startups Beat Giants (00:57:14) Independence, Acquisitions, And Building A Generational Company (01:00:27) Why Money Is Not The Goal (01:03:42) One Life: Going For It All Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 h 5 min
21 de juny

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 Interscope under Jimmy Iovine. In 1999, at 29, he walked away from a $2 million salary to take a $150,000 job at the Arnell Group — trading income for education. He was there to learn the advertising business from the inside out. What he saw clearly was that Madison Avenue was using an old playbook, failing to see that artists were shaping fashion and other cultural trends. Stoute brokered Jay-Z's S. Carter shoe deal with Reebok — the first sneaker deal for a non-athlete — helped launch McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It" campaign, and came within one meeting of signing LeBron James. He watched an 18-year-old LeBron walk away from a $10 million signing bonus to bet on himself. It confirmed everything Stoute believed: the world had already changed, and the old gatekeepers just hadn't caught up yet. UnitedMasters was built on that same conviction — giving artists ownership of their masters and a direct line to their fans. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/steve-stoute Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra HubSpot: ⁠https://hubspot.com Chapters (00:00:00) Run Towards The Unknown (00:04:43) The Men In Black Glasses Nobody Got Paid For (00:07:34) Too Scared To Buy Apple At Nine Dollars (00:15:27) Black Consumers Buy What Isn't Marketed To Them (00:19:13) Betting On The Education, Not The Equity (00:21:39) A Music Video Is Just A TV Commercial (00:24:32) The First Non-Athlete Shoe Deal (00:27:25) LeBron Walks Away From Ten Million To Bet On Himself (00:30:35) Why Are You Giving It Away (00:35:18) If Artists Knew Their Fans They Wouldn't Need A Label (00:39:57) Prince Wrote Slave On His Face (00:46:01) How Jay-Z, Master P, And Wu-Tang Beat The System (00:50:44) The Power Of Repetition (00:54:13) Independent Artists Are The New Small Businesses (00:58:56) Fame And Talent Are Now At Odds (01:04:39) Ryan Coogler's Unprecedented Sinners Deal (01:09:25) Live At The Convergence Of Culture, Technology, And Storytelling (01:11:09) You Can Get Anything Done If You Don't Take Credit (01:12:53) Signing Kobe To Out-Rap Shaq (01:15:25) How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything (01:18:55) The Barefoot Standoff With Jay-Z (01:22:50) Getting Jay-Z To Write Still D.R.E. (01:28:08) Managing Nas, The Greatest Thing He Ever Did (01:31:00) Walking Into Queensbridge To Find Nas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 h 35 min
14 de juny

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 renderings ever made. Since childhood he had carried a single ambition: to make the first feature film animated entirely by computer. Reaching it took more than 20 years. George Lucas hired Catmull in 1979 to build a computer division at Lucasfilm. When Lucas needed cash, Steve Jobs bought that division in 1986 for $5 million and spun it out as Pixar. For years it sold imaging computers and lost money while Catmull and John Lasseter made short films to keep the dream alive. Jobs sank roughly $50 million of his own money into it. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first feature animated entirely by computer, and went public days later. Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up followed. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion and put Catmull in charge of both studios; he revived a faltering Disney Animation with films like Frozen. Catmull cared about the conditions that let creative work survive its own fragility. Every original idea, he argues, starts out ugly and broken, and management exists to protect it long enough to get good. At Pixar that meant the Braintrust: a room where directors got blunt feedback with no authority attached and the conversation stayed on the problem, never on who was right. He laid it all out in Creativity, Inc. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/ed-catmull Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Most Companies Are Full Of Shit (00:04:28) The Brain Trust Mechanism (00:10:13) Why Steve Jobs Was Banned From The Braintrust (00:17:48) Your Job Is To Manage The Dynamics (00:23:27) Betting The Company On Toy Story (00:24:35) Engineering Eisner's Worst Nightmare (00:36:51) Bob Iger's Crappy Hand (00:38:44) Why Disney Never Asked What Pixar Was Doing (00:43:48) Take The Hard Problem (00:44:38) The Director Can't Lose The Team (00:48:48) Quality Is The Best Business Plan (00:52:32) What Walt Disney Taught Him (00:59:25) George Lucas And The Motion Blur Problem (01:08:48) Now What's The Point Of My Life (01:13:31) How Much Of This Was Me (01:16:10) George Lucas Wanted The Whole Industry Healthy (01:25:11) Refusing To Let Anyone Feel Second Class (01:32:38) The Truck In The Building Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 h 35 min
7 de juny

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 startup acquired by Facebook's Oculus division. He joined Spotify in 2009 and spent the next 18 years building the product and technology organization from the inside, rising from Chief Product and Technology Officer to Co-President before becoming Co-CEO alongside Alex Norström at the start of 2026. Spotify survived an existential challenge from Apple, which launched Apple Music in 2015 and told its teams internally they would kill Spotify within six months. Spotify's answer was a three-part strategy: a stronger free tier, superior personalization, and ubiquity across non-Apple hardware. All three bets paid out. The throughline in everything both Söderström and Spotify build is a conviction that media should be time well spent. Spotify surveyed users anonymously across major platforms and found that Gen Z valued roughly 90% of their time on Spotify, while regret rates on competing platforms topped 60%. That data formalized what had been an instinct: expand only into categories that are good for users — music, podcasts, audiobooks, fitness. He believes this is not just the right thing to do; it is what makes Spotify durable. His current bet is that AI gives every user a direct conversation with the product — and that Spotify should be first. He has been preparing since 2017, when he read the Transformer paper days after publication and evangelized internally. His principle: periods of change are when market share moves, and the companies that win are the ones that get there first. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/gustav-soderstrom Chapters (00:00:00) How Gustav Prepared To Become CEO (00:02:30) There Is No Right Org (00:05:06) Synchronized Swimming At Spotify (00:09:25) You Ship Your Org Chart (00:10:31) Why Apple's Functional Org Works (00:11:48) Tenure Is The Key (00:13:31) Oracle vs. Elon On Churn (00:16:41) Finding Your North Star (00:18:24) Choosing Pain For Distribution (00:19:21) Prioritize The User Over Yourself (00:23:05) The No Regrets Strategy (00:25:21) Building A Running Playlist With AI (00:27:35) Figuring Out What To Spend Your Life On (00:30:01) Being Honest About Doing Good (00:32:25) The Anti-Engagement Decision (00:34:50) Giving Users Control Of The Algorithm (00:37:57) The 1-9-90 Power Law (00:40:23) Getting Into AI Early (00:43:55) You Are Your Thoughts (00:48:22) Building Tools That Enhance Humanity (00:49:45) The Genius Of The Kindle (00:51:57) When Steve Jobs Came To Kill Spotify (00:54:24) Three Bets Against Apple (00:57:07) Building A Personal AI Agent (01:00:55) Premeditated Media (01:02:27) Who Tells You The Truth (01:05:16) The Vulcan Mind Meld Of Tenure (01:07:28) Hiring For Spikes And Fresh Blood (01:10:14) What Keeps Him Up At Night Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 h 14 min
31 de maig

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 real estate acquisitions. The centerpiece was the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., a dilapidated 1890s building she personally shepherded into a thriving urban hotel. In 2016, she went to Washington, D.C. to provide support to her father in his first term as President of the United States. During the four years in Washington, D.C., she helped in doubling the child tax credit for 40 million families, standing up the first national paid family leave plan for federal employees, passing nine pieces of legislation against human trafficking, and getting the Great American Outdoors Act signed — the largest environmental legislation since Teddy Roosevelt created the national parks. When it ended, she started over, and built again. She co-founded Planet Harvest, creating a market for the 40% of American fruits and vegetables discarded each year because they don't meet cosmetic specifications. She's building Sazan, a 1,400-hectare private island in the Mediterranean with five miles of beachfront. She's investing in founders at the frontier of AI, biotech, robotics, and space. And she's working with Elad Gil to create Alexandria AI, a project that will translate the world's great public-domain literature into every major language and give it away for free. She describes herself as mission-driven now, not achievement-driven. The difference, she says, took her decades to find. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/ivanka-trump Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Knowing What Excites You (00:02:02) The Sazan Island Project (00:07:18) Knowing Who You Are (00:13:06) Creating Stillness (00:16:30) Finding Mentors In Books (00:17:04) Avoid Competition Through Authenticity (00:21:05) Reading As An X-Ray Of The Soul (00:21:29) Phil Knight's Shoe Dog (00:24:55) Meaning Redeemed By Hardship (00:29:39) The Call To Government (00:31:16) Handing Back The Keys (00:41:42) The Reset In Miami (00:46:25) Less And Better (00:50:13) Finding The One Thread (00:55:54) Turning Waste Into An Asset (01:03:38) Democratizing The World's Great Books (01:12:07) Marry The Right Person (01:12:47) Deciding What To Build (01:16:23) No Contract Protects A Bad Partner (01:19:08) Opportunity Where Others See Nothing (01:21:34) Backing Fragile New Ideas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 h 24 min
24 de maig

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 100,000 copies in 18 months. He put his dorm room address on the sleeve. This launched Def Jam Recordings. LL Cool J's first record came next. The Beastie Boys after that. His credit on those records didn't say "produced by." It said "reduced by" — a theological statement as much as a job title. His method has never changed: strip everything down until what remains has no place to hide, then protect whatever magic appears. He's applied it to Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eminem, The Strokes, Metallica, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and many other top artists. He describes himself as a lazy workaholic. The Zen exterior is real. So is the guy who spent the first 25 years of his career in a dark room 16 hours a day, seven days a week, waiting for a miracle to show up. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/rick-rubin Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Deel: https://deel.com/senra HubSpot: https://hubspot.com AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra Rick Rubin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rickrubin X: https://x.com/RickRubin Tetragrammaton: https://www.tetragrammaton.com The Creative Act: https://a.co/d/05FKl59a Substack: https://rickrubin.substack.com Chapters (00:00:00) Less Is More But Harder (00:02:00) Def Jam From The Dorm Room (00:04:00) Capturing Club Energy On Record (00:06:00) Going Deep On Influences (00:12:30) Why Reduced By Rick Rubin (00:14:00) Beatles Structure Meets Rap (00:16:00) The Ruthless Edit (00:19:30) Eminem: The Most Obsessive Artist (00:22:00) Lazy Workaholic (00:25:30) Protecting The Moment Of Magic (00:29:00) Dana White And Becoming A Podcaster (00:32:30) Professional Listener (00:44:00) Fishing And Showing Up (00:47:00) Johnny Cash And Constraints (00:55:30) Church Business vs. Banking Business (00:58:50) Run On Intuition Alone (01:01:00) Jay-Z vs. Eminem Process (01:04:30) In Service Of The Artist (01:09:00) Work As Diary Entries (01:13:30) Four Ways Success Destroys You (01:16:00) How To Sustain Success (01:21:00) The House On The Mountain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 h 24 min
17 de maig

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 took the assignment anyway. By 2001, when he started ZMC, he had one thesis: technology would supercharge media and destroy it simultaneously, and the only companies worth owning sat at that intersection. In 2007, he used it to take over Take-Two Interactive with no money. The company had a chairman under indictment, four government investigations, and six months of cash left. Zelnick had written memos for Carl Icahn twice saying stay away. Then Icahn told him to read the bylaws. A plain vanilla Delaware charter allowed a board replacement if a majority of shares physically present at the annual meeting voted for it. Zelnick met the 10 hedge funds holding 70% of the stock, got commitments, walked in thinking he had 48%, discovered most had loaned their shares to short sellers, and won with 88%. The only asset worth keeping was GTA. His pitch to creative talent: we will fund your vision, stay out of your way, and run a company where nobody gets indicted. Market cap when he arrived: $700 million. Today: roughly $35 billion. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/strauss-zelnick Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Hostile Takeover With No Money (00:01:29) Becoming the New Media Guy (00:03:58) Lessons From Entertainment History (00:09:44) Why Hollywood Feared Games (00:11:52) Fox Turnaround and Barry Diller (00:20:54) Rupert Murdoch and High Stakes Calm (00:26:20) Taking the Leap to Crystal Dynamics (00:38:04) Bootstrapping Without Capital (00:43:57) Carl Icahn Connection (00:47:01) Take Two Proxy Coup (00:56:36) Turnaround Cost Cutting Playbook (01:01:37) Leading Creative Geniuses (01:06:24) Rationality Beats Magic (01:07:54) Borderlands Bet (01:09:28) GTA Timelines Pressure (01:11:22) Specific Goals Visualization (01:21:34) Service Leadership Mindset (01:31:52) Media Versus Entertainment (01:34:22) AI Productivity Reality (01:36:08) Why Hits Surprise Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 h 39 min

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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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

19/09/2025

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1 min