@davidsenra
Conversations with the greatest living founders.
Ramp cofounder @eglyman says their real competitors are the AI labs: “From the get-go what we were really trying to sell you was time.” “We would move your funds, but the pain that people had was—it was a waste of everyone's time to do expense reports. It was a waste of time to have to tick and tie for every payment to close your books.” “What we're trying to do is automate and do the work around the money movement.” “It is a form of knowledge work and intelligence that we are serving and servicing for you.” “I think that labs are in some sense the most comparable provider of this type of service.” “We're building the circulation and connective tissue so you can stop dollars from leaving before they ever go out. And so I think it tends to feel much more like an operating system in connecting to the movement of funds.”
Ramp cofounder @eglyman explains how companies should choose their values: “A lot of companies have values.” “My elementary school had values.” “What I didn't like about the values at my elementary school was there were like 20 of them and I couldn't remember any of them.” “What we tried to do at the very start of the company was ask: what are the very few things that all of us really agree with? If we don't all strongly feel and agree with this, it's a nice idea you can go pursue, but it's not an actual value.” “One of the top level things we wanted to do at the start of the company was set a goal: could we measure how many dollars our customers are spending? How many did we block? How many dollars did we prevent from going out of their company? How many hours did they spend doing expenses or closing their books or paying bills or moving funds to earn higher yield?” “Our job is to make sure the products that we build ultimately ladder back to that goal.”
Full conversation is here x.com/davidsenra/sta…
This is a combination of Steve Jobs’ (1) The storyteller is the most powerful person in the world and Jeff Bezos’ (2) Invest in things that won’t change: “A company is just a fiction You make some filing and you say "We're a corporation today even though we're just two people sitting around a couch and we have a few dollars in a bank account.” And if these fictions are intended to grow to tens of thousands of people it should be because there is some common purpose. There is something that in aggregate, the sum of the parts of all the people working together should be able to move something further than anyone alone could do. And the role of a leader is to go and assert how will we measure ourselves? If we are seeking to be our best and get better every day how should we think about that, and how can we understand our forward progress? I don't know what Ramp will look like exactly in 100 years but I think just as it was true 100 years ago people always wanted more out of every dollar and more out of every hour, I think people will absolutely still want that in 100 years —in whatever form that may take.”
Ramp cofounder @eglyman says AI is reducing the need for specialized expertise and forcing leaders to rethink how they structure their businesses: “ We used to be in a world where skills were very scarce and very hard to find.” “ We're starting to get to a place where a very determined generalist can do much more than they used to be able to do.” “LLMs have read more lines of code than any engineer alive. More medical case texts than any doctor alive. More company filings than any accountant who's ever lived or probably ever will live.” “In some sense, if I can just ask a good question, I'm the best doctor I've ever been in my life, and I'm not a doctor.” “ It leads you to question—you design organizations with lots of subspecialties, which can lead to walls and barriers and things that get lost between organizations.” “ I think we’ll start seeing fewer types of specialties within organizations, and it's leading a lot of organizations right now to question: do I have the right shape of an organization for the world that we're starting to enter into?”
The two things Ramp Cofounder @eglyman 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.”
Tobi has a similar perspective on hiring for spikes: x.com/davidsenra/sta…
Co-CEO of Spotify @GustavS wants to work with the same people for decades. Elon likes fresh blood. Ramp Cofounder @eglyman says he wants both: “My actual goal is: I want to work very early with people and I want to work with them for a long time.” “I agree with Elon's philosophy of trying to find really smart people, in part because it allows you to find something like a mispricing in the market.” “Early in careers, when people don't have a resume, you can find signs of incredible aptitude, drive, and potential for performance early-on and start to build an affinity.” “We try to find those folks and give them a lot more responsibility than they're used to.” “And when they work for quite a number of hours and do great things despite their age, and they've built experience earlier in your company than they would have otherwise, they want to stay.” “When you've built trust and understand how to complete each other's sentences, you're able to rely on each other, you're able to move faster, and you're able to communicate far more in a shorter period of time, which leads you to act with higher velocity.”
“AI is making power laws more extreme.” “The speed which companies are getting built is accelerating.” “The returns to talent are higher than ever.” “The most effective person in the world is no longer 10 times as effective, or 100 times as effective. They could be 1000 times as effective in a particular area.” “All of this leads you to question how you design your organization.“ “ I think we’ll start seeing fewer types of specialties within organizations, and it's leading a lot of organizations right now to question: do I have the right shape of an organization for the world that we're starting to enter into?” Ramp cofounder @eglyman on how AI is forcing leaders to rethink how they structure their businesses:
Ramp cofounder @eglyman says there’s a distorted reality around AI. People are starting to ask: “Should we even build a company if AGI is around the corner?” “History offers some pretty interesting lessons around this.” “ Let's talk about air conditioning.” “It's 95 degrees outside. We're not sitting here talking about the great robber baron families of the air conditioning industry and the great family fortunes of people who created it.” “At the same time, I was born in Las Vegas. That city wouldn't exist if not for the air conditioner.” “There are entire ecosystems, and the value that was created out of those ecosystems far exceeded the value that was captured by the people who invented this technology.” “ One of the more interesting questions to be asking in a world in which intelligence is very plentiful, accessible, and cheap is: what should you build? What kind of businesses are now possible— just as there were cities and things created that were not possible before the air conditioner?”
.@eglyman says Ramp follow’s @elonmusk’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.”
@eglyman @BrevilleUSA “A bit more” button is genius. Sounds like something @jasonfried would do.
.@tobi removed all the Norman doors from Shopify’s offices because he couldn’t have excellent people surrounded by bad design. Ramp Cofounder @eglyman 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.”
My conversation with Eric Glyman (@eglyman), co-founder of Ramp (@tryramp). 0:00 Smarter Financial Infrastructure To Run Your Business 4:01 The North Star Is Time And Money 10:15 A Determined Generalist Can Now Do More Than Ever 11:58 I'm The Best Doctor I've Ever Been 13:20 The Tower Of Babel Inside Big Companies 16:00 The Kid Who Paid For College On Minecraft 19:10 Everyone Is The Hero Of Their Own Story 22:31 You Don't Get There In A Hundred Hours 23:52 Buffett And Munger Stopped Needing To Call Each Other 25:03 The Damage Of Letting People Free-Ride 27:40 Consumer-Grade Design In B2B Software 28:34 The Breville Toaster And The Bit-More Button 31:47 We Win When Our Customers Win 35:18 Put The Scoreboard On The Wall 37:07 A Company Is Just A Fiction With A Common Purpose 38:19 Focus On The Things That Don't Change 40:02 Is This Time Actually Different 40:50 Air Conditioning Made Las Vegas, Not Fortunes 43:52 1% Of US GDP Will Be Token Spend 45:28 A Six-Month Lag To A Model A Hundred Times Cheaper 46:46 Agents Negotiating With Agents To Buy Things 49:22 Making Sure The Highest-Return Dollar Gets The Dollar 51:17 The Dream Of Being At The Table That Matters 54:14 Why The Labs Are Ramp's Real Competitor 55:44 Banks Sell Money, Ramp Sells Time 56:27 When Intelligence Becomes Functionally Free Includes paid partnerships.
Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 says the ability to “choose the dominant game being played” is what determines whether a company succeeds or not: “MySpace was focused on number of accounts signed up. Facebook focused on monthly active users—it was the dominant game.” “If you maximize the monthly active, you're going to beat someone who's maximizing accounts signed up. You're playing a better game.” “What most really successful founders and entrepreneurs do is, everyone else is playing this game, and they realize that if you play this higher level game, you win.”
Eric Glyman. Ramp. Tomorrow. July 12, 2026. Available everywhere you get podcasts. @eglyman @tryramp
“Steve Jobs was blown away because Bob Iger starts the conversation by saying, ‘I've got a crappy hand. Can we talk?” “Bob just started off by being completely honest, and Steve said, ‘Okay, this is somebody I can be a good partner with.’ And they formed a very close bond and relationship throughout the rest of Steve's life.” “Steve said: That is why I love Bob Iger. He just blurted it out… He just put his cards out on the table and said, ‘We’re screwed.’ I immediately liked the guy because that’s how I work too.” Bob Iger was watching a parade at Disney Hong Kong when he realized that every popular character he saw was created by Pixar. Ed Catmull says after Iger became Disney’s CEO in 2005, he realized that acquiring Pixar from Steve Jobs was his best chance at revitalizing Disney Animation: “Bob Iger realized he couldn’t let Pixar get away.”
“I love young people that are willing to take a shot.” @danawhite created his own version of Shark Tank: “ Every day, multiple times a day, entrepreneurs come in here and pitch me something like Shark Tank.” “I love hearing different people's ideas. I love young people that are willing to take a shot and aren't afraid to do it.” “ I connect them with other people that I think they could do business with, or I get involved myself.” “ I'm not looking for anything other than I hope they all win.”
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.”
Cognition founder @ScottWu46 says most software never gets built because the economics don't work: "The math only really works out to create software if it's going to be used at least a million times or something. Maybe it's 10,000 times or whatever." "You need that software to be used enough times or to create enough value for that to be worth it." "There are so many things out there which only need to be used a few times or even only need to be used once." "I'm going to go look through these 15 LinkedIn profiles. Or fill out these forms. Or do this data analysis and put this Excel sheet together—all of these things are things that could be done with software." "It obviously doesn't make sense to hire a whole team of people to go make you that piece of software which you're going to use one time and never again—versus just having the human go and do that themselves."
Jimmy: I had no f*cking idea how to run a company. None. Zero. David: Is this when David Geffen sold Geffen Records [for $550 million]? Jimmy: Yeah. David: Can you tell that story? Jimmy: David Geffen is brilliant. He comes from right near my neighborhood in Brooklyn. He's exactly 10 years older than me. He's five seven. I'm five seven. He's Jewish. I'm Italian. We were buddies. He was great with artists. He signed Joni Mitchell and The Eagles and all this great sh*t. So I felt real comradery with him. I'm producing records. I'm actually in the studio for 20 years making music. I wake up one day and he sold his company for $500 million. I'm from Brooklyn. I want to make a lot of money. I'm not embarrassed by that. I wanted to live like I saw on tv. David: What I love in “The Defiant Ones” …cause everybody feels this way. Especially if you didn't grow up with money. I know exactly what you're talking about. This story comes from when you were an engineer, not a record producer [yet]. You see this producer and he comes in and he's got a leather jacket, a fancy bag, and he's got a beautiful girl. And you’re like: That’s it! Jimmy: Yeah, you bet. That's it. You gotta tell yourself the truth. I'm not Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger. Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder. Marvin Gaye. So I felt the next best way in was producing. That was my way in. So I'm like, well this feels really good. And then I saw Geffen and I said… David: That feels better! Jimmy: Oh sh*t! He's doing the same thing. He's not even in the studio all night. He goes home at six o'clock. I'm working until three o'clock in the morning, So I said I bet I can do that. David: And then you go talk to him and what does he say? Jimmy: He said to me, “You could start a record company. You know how many stupid people there are that have record companies?” So I started a record company.
Rick Rubin on why a lot of successful people sabotage themselves: “Success is a funny thing. You think that's the thing that you want, but when you get it it's not like what you think it is.” “All these pressures that come with it no one's ready for.” The 4 most common ways successful people implode: drugs, alcohol, women, and megalomania. “Genius level talents have completely imploded and destroyed their lives.” “It's a brave face. They might not know this. They rarely know it. It's different sides of the same imbalance.”
Marc Andreessen (@pmarca): 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."
The full episode with Marc is awesome. We go deep on a lot of business and tech history: davidsenra.com/episode/marc-a…
Someone asked @elonmusk how he prioritizes with so many things going on at once: "Prioritize? It's usually been out of desperation, not selection. It's not 'Oh, let's sit back and leisurely decide how we should spend these resources.' It's 'This isn't working. If we don't make it work, we're going to go bankrupt, so we better make it work.' I felt like Indiana Jones running down the temple. There's a huge boulder chasing you and you need to jump across a giant pit in the ground. If you slow down, the boulder will crush you. And if you don't make the leap, you'll die in the pit. That's prioritizing. I lived in the factories for three years, running around like a maniac through every part of the factory. I slept on the floor so the team going through a hard time could see me on the floor and knew I was not in some ivory tower. Whatever pain they experienced, I experienced more."
Full episode is full of Elon’s ideas: davidsenra.com/episode/eric-j…
.@danawhite says one of the keys to longevity is to block out all negativity: “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.” “It never even crosses my mind that something's not going to work. I just keep going until it does work.”
In 2025, Nvidia and Groq announced a landmark $20 billion deal. From the moment the idea was first floated to the money being wired, the entire deal came together in just three weeks. Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 says the reason Jensen moved so quickly is because that's how successful entrepreneurs operate: “You move quickly. You don't wait. There's an opportunity cost to waiting. Technology is not a business where you can wait a year.”
Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 completely changed how he hired after realizing hiring isn't about finding reasons to say yes. It's about finding reasons to say no: ”The biggest flip in my hiring was when I went from looking for positives, which is what you do when you're trying to grow talent, to looking for negatives, which is what you do when you're trying to select talent.” “ When I'm trying to help someone grow and improve, I want to show them the path.” “ When you're hiring you're really looking to vet people and you're trying to say no to things, and that's a very different motion.”
“ The better the people, the harder they are to manage” Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 says that managing 450 employees felt more like managing a group of 5,000 people because it’s much harder to manage a creative organization:
Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 says he realized if he wanted to do something disruptive, his job would have to become “change management.” “The first principle of change management is to make it feel like it isn't a change.” “ People do not like change. No human being likes change.” “The difference between people who appear to like change and people who don't like change, is often they're looking at different things, and for the one that is fine with the change nothing changed.” “So your change management duty is to give people enough context so that they see that their job hasn't really changed. What they're trying to accomplish is the same thing.”
A single, viral post on X skyrocketed Groq’s business. Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 was looking for a way to show people that fast inference would be extremely useful. He remembered an example from Eric Schmidt showing off an LLM at a conference three weeks before the ChatGPT moment. Nobody in the audience cared. Then he looked at what made ChatGPT’s launch successful and realized that it worked because they allowed people to ask their own questions. “They got an answer to their question that was specific to them. That was magical.” “Seeing text show up for someone else's answer wasn't magical.” So he put Groq’s fast inference hardware on the internet for anyone to try. Someone posted a video on X of an LLM running on Groq running super fast. “It was just such eye candy when people saw it that everyone started creating their own and we just went viral.”
Full episode here: x.com/davidsenra/sta…
“Jensen moves fast.” @JonathanRoss321 talks about the $20 billion deal with Nvidia for the first time publicly: “We called Jensen and asked if we could buy 100,000 GPUs.” Jensen asked what we were working on. When he saw what we had done, he thought it would be better to make this available to all of Nvidia’s customers. We had an initial call about a potential deal and 3 weeks later the money was in the bank. Jensen moves fast. That’s how you stay ahead:
The full episode and transcript: davidsenra.com/episode/jonath…
“I was a terrible leader. I was one of the world's worst leaders.” Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 says his ability to lead turned around once he realized that minimizing constraints led to more success: “The fewer constraints you give someone, the more freedom they have to solve the problem and surprise you with the solution.” “If you want to run a highly creative and innovative organization, then what you really want to do is minimize the number of constraints, but you also have to give them the things that matter.” “If you aren't able to very crisply distill what you're trying to accomplish, then either you're going to over-constrain or under-constrain people.”
Successful organizations have every member of the organization pursuing a common goal. Come up with a goal so simple that you could put it on a challenge coin and give it to every employee: “Everyone at Groq had a challenge coin that said "25 million tokens per second" Everyone knew that was the thing to do. It's like when you ask an agent an AI agent to do something. The fewer constraints you give it the more freedom it has to solve your problem. So if you want to run a highly creative and innovative organization then what you really want to do is minimize the number of constraints. And you can’t do that if you aren't able to very crisply distill what you're trying to accomplish then either you're going to over-constrain or under-constrain the people. If you get this right then it goes from being Superman to being the Avengers.”
“There was this submarine commander took over the USS Santa Fe. It was worst in nuclear readiness in the nuclear submarine fleet. In a year or two, he got it to number one in readiness.” “There had been incidents where a submarine had dived with the hatch open and no one wanted to push back because the commander was command and controlling, and they were used to doing whatever the commander said.” “But when people would use intentional leadership and say, ‘I intend to move the boat down to 500ft, then all of a sudden someone said," Wait the hatch is open.’” “If you express intentional leadership and say, ‘I intend to do this.’ People don't tend to offer their opinion. But if it's very wrong and there's a reason to, they will push back.” Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 on Intentional Leadership:
Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 on what he learned from Michael Jordan: It seemed that Jordan discovered the secret quite early in his competitive life: the more pressure he heaped on himself, the greater his ability to rise to the occasion. “He would very intentionally taunt the other players so that a loss would be humiliating, to force himself to perform at superhuman levels.” “Most people are so afraid of putting themselves out there and suffering the negative outcome, that they won't get their hopes up. They will actually keep their sights much lower.” “Entrepreneurs start a company and they're like, ‘Of course I'm going to be successful. I'm going to tell everyone. I'm going to go raise money. I'm going to put my reputation on the line and I'm going to be forced to perform.’”
“We were going to run out of money.” Groq was 3 weeks away from death and @JonathanRoss321’s leadership team put together a list of layoffs that also would have killed the company. He realized that the only way to survive was to convince their employees to take a salary cut. The wild story of Groq Bonds: “We had an all-hands and put up World War II-looking pictures of war bonds. We called it ‘Groq Bonds.’” 80% of Groq’s employees participated in exchanging their salary for equity. Half of them went to the statutory minimum salary by law. “Engineers get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. These folks cut their salary down to $50,000 to $60,000.” “By doing this, we put everyone's hand on the steering wheel. They were participating in saving our runway and we had less than 10% attrition. It might've been closer to 5%, which was probably better than our attrition rate before then.”
Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 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.”
Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 shares the biggest leadership lesson he learned from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: “There is no circumstance where Jensen has one-on-ones with people.” “When you're leading groups of people, if you want to reduce the amount of politics, stop having one-on-ones. Have big meetings with everyone who you want to tell something to and tell them all at once.” “Copy everyone on the email.” “If someone says, ‘Hey this person is screwing up,’ copy that person on the email. Let them jump in. Otherwise you're allowing politics to happen.” “There's no politics. It's the least political large organization you will ever see.”
The simple genius of Jensen Huang: “I got way too cute on trying to play 3D chess whereas Jensen is very much just like: What does the customer need? I want to develop trust with the customer. I want to always tell the customer things that are true, that I believe, and that I can support. And if I have a thing that isn't what the customer wants I'm not going to sell it to them. I'm going to sell things to customers that they actually need and that I believe they need.” — @JonathanRoss321
Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 says the ability to “choose the dominant game being played” is what determines whether a company succeeds or not: “MySpace was focused on number of accounts signed up. Facebook focused on monthly active users—it was the dominant game.” “If you maximize the monthly active, you're going to beat someone who's maximizing accounts signed up. You're playing a better game.” “What most really successful founders and entrepreneurs do is, everyone else is playing this game, and they realize that if you play this higher level game, you win.”
A conversation with @JonathanRoss321, founder of @GroqInc. This is the first podcast that Jonathan talks about his $20 billion partnership with NVIDIA. In this conversation, we talk about his decade building Groq: why West Coast VCs kept passing on the company, how fast Jensen works, overcoming near-death experiences, and why he thinks the entire AI age turns on a single skill — knowing what to ask. Hope you enjoy this conversation: 0:00 The $20 Billion NVIDIA Deal Closed In 3 Weeks 0:25 Why GPUs And LPUs Are Better Together 1:46 When AI Talks To AI, Speed Wins 3:30 Always Start With A Hobby Project 5:55 Ask The Right Questions, Not Answer Them 8:23 There Are Infinite Ways To Be A Leader 13:00 I Was One Of The World's Worst Leaders 14:34 Fewer Constraints, More Room To Surprise You 16:31 At NVIDIA There Is No Politics 19:44 You Have To Learn Confidence 22:23 East Coast VCs Think, West Coast VCs Follow 23:50 The Keynesian Beauty Contest Of Silicon Valley 26:48 The Autonomy That Created The NVIDIA Deal 30:07 Making A Model Smarter By Making It Faster 34:52 Reality Quotient Beats Intelligence Quotient 35:44 Find The Dominant Game And Play It 37:11 A Founder's Job Is Full-Time Change Management 38:34 Return On Luck: Seize It Better Than Anyone 42:54 You Can't Sell Speed, You Have To Let People Try It 46:32 I Intend To: Intentional Leadership 51:07 Groq Bonds: Trading Salary For Survival 54:13 Hire For Negatives, Grow For Positives 58:46 Loss Aversion And Booking The Win Early 1:00:37 How Michael Jordan Weaponized Humiliation 1:03:13 Manufactured Discontent Drives Everything 1:05:02 Every Day Without Compute Has A Real Cost 1:07:07 Code Was Rationed, Now It's Nearly Free 1:10:04 Teach Kids To Ask Questions, Not Answer Them Includes paid partnerships.
Jonathan Ross. Groq. Tomorrow. July 5, 2026. Available everywhere you get podcasts. @JonathanRoss321 @GroqInc @nvidia
Ben Wilson has advanced cancer. He has 4 small children. Please watch this video and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations. He’s a good guy and a close friend. Please help in any way you can. x.com/benwilsontweet…
“IBM was 80% of the market cap of the entire tech industry. It was a level of scale and importance nobody else had. The founder was convicted of antitrust crimes *before* he started IBM. Then he monopolized the mainframe business and they convicted him again. He’s a double dipper.” @pmarca tells the unparalleled history of IBM:
.@ScottWu46 describes himself as super salty. I asked him what that means: “It means you take offense to the very idea of losing.” x.com/davidsenra/sta…
Brad Jacobs has done over 500 acquisitions in his career. His latest acquisition was for $17 billion. Brad spoke about the toolkit he uses for acquisitions: "I'm good at figuring out what the right industry to consolidate is and I have a toolkit. I find the right industry. I find something that's large. I find something that's growing. I find something that’s fragmented. I find something that we can buy at reasonable prices. I find something where technology could be used. I find a not very tech-forward industry. I find something that AI and automation are not going to disrupt anytime in the near future. I find industries that have certain characteristics to it, whether it was garbage, construction, transportation, or logistics. They all have the same characteristics, they have the same traits. Then I put together an amazing team….”
"No work gets done in the CEO's office." Strauss Zelnick on what a CEO actually does: "A good CEO needs to serve his or her team. No work gets done in the CEO's office. So what do you really do? You agree on the mission, you set the strategy, you agree on the culture, and then you drive daily execution. But you're driving that daily execution through other people. How do you do that? You have to motivate them. You have to stay informed so you know what's happening, and then you have to motivate them. On the very rare occasion that a problem can't get solved below my level, you got to solve the problem. On the rare occasion that a decision about an approach or capital allocation isn't obvious or is above someone's approval level, it comes to me. I'm not writing memos. I'm not doing Excel spreadsheets."
Full episode with Strauss is here: davidsenra.com/episode/straus…
Dana White’s response to being criticized for using AI: “Why don't you just shut the fuck up and watch the fights? Why do you care what we're doing technology-wise? We still have to hire people to do this stuff. I'm not downstairs doing the fucking AI shit. We hire people that are doing it. AI is the future. It's coming. It’s here right now and we’re in.”
Rick Rubin's House on the Mountain test: Create according to your own taste, not for applause, critics, algorithms, or market demand. "Imagine going to live on a mountaintop by yourself, forever. You build a home that no one will ever visit. Still, you invest the time and effort to shape the space in which you'll spend your days. The wood, the plates, the pillows—all magnificent. Curated to your taste." "This is the essence of great art. We create our art so we may inhabit it ourselves." "I'm willing to go to extremes to make the thing that I want to inhabit and it's not for anyone else. it's just for me."
The full episode with Rick Rubin is awesome and available here: davidsenra.com/episode/rick-r…
Why Elon calls engineering magic: "He was very influenced by sci-fi and thinking about things that are possible. He talks about engineering as magic. 'If you build something that couldn't previously exist, that's like being a magician and who wouldn't want to be a magician?'" x.com/elonmusk/statu…
“I was asking MrBeast about turnover with his most talented employees and he said there’s value in keeping everyone together for a long time.” “Mr. Beast used to live with the guy that runs his operations. He said I haven’t spent 10,000 hours talking to him. I’ve spent 30,000 hours talking to him.” Now when Mr. Beast walks on set Tyler can know what he’s about to say before he even opens his mouth. Tyler can predict and rebut every objection or question Mr. Beast would have. He understands how he thinks completely. “It’s like the Vulcan mind meld from Star Trek.” “You can move fast without even communicating.” “You don’t get that in 100 hours. You need more time together.” “One benefit of long tenure is trust. People keep you honest.” “The other benefit is efficiency. You don't have to give as much context.”
.@ScottWu46 explains why startups can beat incumbents: "You have no right to exist. You have no right to win. The reason you are sometimes able to win anyway is: you plant your flag in the ground and put a stake into what you think the future is, and run like hell towards that." "The idea that you would work with AI as a coworker rather than as a tool or chatbot, I think that was very important for us—our brand, our recruiting, our customer work, everything—for us to be the first ones to actually plant that flag in the ground and say that."
Full episode with Scott is available here x.com/davidsenra/sta…
Why extremely focused AI companies won’t be destroyed by the AI labs: It’s hard to beat someone who simply cares more about *one* thing than you do. “I love the quote from Daniel Ek about Spotify. People were saying YouTube's trying to go and do this and Apple has Apple Music, why should Spotify win?” And Daniel was like "You know I can give you all the other reasons but the truth is we're just going to care way more about music than they are.” And I think for us that’s true. We are just going to care so much more about what does it look like to build software end to end at Goldman Sachs or at Mercedes-Benz or something like that. And there's a lot of nuance in that and there's a lot of messiness in that. It's not as simple as like "Oh here's a sandbox algorithms problem. Go and code me the correct 30-line program that solves this problem" or something. It's like how do you work with all the messiness of the real world? How do you understand the code base as it exists today? How do you collaborate with all the humans on it? How do you plug into their ticketing system? How do you give the agent the ability to test its own code and run everything locally? All of these are obviously super hairy messy problems and that's what we care a lot about. And so from that perspective it's nice that the labs have their own products. I'm sure they'll continue to do more but in practice there are a lot of nice ways for us to cooperate.” — @ScottWu46 founder and CEO of @cognition
AI is going to shift humanity’s focus from Survival Mode to Creative Mode. Cognition CEO @ScottWu46: “ We've been spending all this time living in Survival Mode as a species. Now we're going to be living in Creative Mode.” ”Minecraft Survival Mode is where you're growing food, you're making sure you're safe from the monsters at night.” “Creative Mode is—everything's up to you. You have all the resources at your disposal. If you want something to happen, it'll happen. The only question for you is: what do you want to make happen?”
“We like being Switzerland.” @ScottWu46 on why Cognition was built to be neutral to frontier model providers: “ We are just as incentivized as [customers] are to figure out how to make their token spend efficient.” “ Some tasks are these really crazy hard ones where you want to use max-thinking, and you want to use the very best models you can get your hands on in the world.” “ Many other tasks are boilerplate or repetitive enough that what you care about is just getting it done really fast.” “ Devin can use any of the different models it has in its arsenal, which include all of the models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, but also our own models or open source models, and it will dynamically choose these models for these tasks.”
Scott Wu (@ScottWu46) on what programming will look like in the future: “All programming really comes down to is how do you tell your computer what to do? For every single piece of software that you use, some team of engineers came together and thought through all these details of, "Okay, here's what I want it to do. Here's how I want it to look. Here's what I want this button to do. Here's how I want to architect it." Every single little decision was made by somebody. And the computer is then executing it according to the wishes of its creators. At this point you don't need to know a programming language. You don't need to know Python or Java or something like that in order to build your own software. You can just say, "Hey, here's what I want. I wanna make a cool website that does this and that." Or in my existing product, "Here' what we have today, and I wanna change this thing or add this new feature," and just have the agent go and do that for you. I think we're gonna continue to go further down that axis. I think we'll start to see that abstraction will continue to climb. I think what we'll see a lot more of in the near future is making a piece of software which you're going to use one time and never again. To create software today the math only really works out if it's gonna be used at least a million times or something. Maybe it's 10,000 times or whatever. My point is if you wanna go build a product today, you need a whole team of engineers. Engineers are expensive. You need that software to be used enough times to create enough value for that to be worth it. But there are so many things out there which are very specific things that only need to be used a few times, or even only once. There’s all of these things that could be done with software. It just obviously doesn't make sense to hire a whole team of people to go make you that piece of software, which you're gonna use one time and never again. We're gonna get to a point where you are just giving your instructions to your agent, and the agent is gonna figure out, okay, I'm gonna write this code that's gonna go do this. I'm gonna put a script that automates this part etc. and that's what's gonna allow [single use software]. What [this is all about] is really just how you control your computer and how you get it to do what you wanna go do. You’ll wake up in the morning and you’ll talk to your agent about it. The agent does the literal writing of the code and you're the one that's deciding what to do.”
Scott reminds me a young Bill Gates in Hard Drive. The full episode is incredible: x.com/davidsenra/sta…
Steve Jobs has a great quote about this. Steve said this shortly before he died: "I hate it when people call themselves "entrepreneurs" when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They're unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That's how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That's what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be." @ScottWu46 explains his thinking on not selling during the last 5 minutes of the episode. It’s worth listening to how he thinks about a very important topic.
A lot of companies forward deploy engineers —Cognition forward deployed their entire company. @ScottWu46 says he flew the entire company to Brazil to make sure Devin worked: “ Our entire team was the forward-deployed team. We all flew to Brazil.” “ It was the first case. Let's be real here—agents did not work generally. So it was a lot of: how do you make it work for a very specific company?” “It was literally like, "Okay, let's go through all these different things that you guys think could make sense. Let's go through each one. Let's try some of it manually ourselves to understand what the task looks like. Let's see if we can teach Devin to do this correctly and build in the right kind of orchestration for Devin to be able to do this.” “ Basically building the product was almost like building it for one company.” This strategy worked: Nubank was Cognition’s first customer success.
Cognition CEO @ScottWu46 predicts that AI agents will eventually be able to work for a year straight without interruption: “There’s this famous METR report which said a couple of years ago that AI would do about 10-20 seconds worth of human work without interruption.” “That’s doubled every couple of months basically. Now we're talking about hours of work.” “If you ask from a first principles question: why can't that be days or weeks or months of work?” “And then what does the world look like if everybody has an agent that can just do months of work for them at a time?”
Founder of Cognition @ScottWu46 says humans are fundamentally wired to underestimate AI: “Humans have a really hard time understanding exponential curves.” ”People often underestimate how fast things can change and how fast the world can change.” “ Five years from now, it’ll be insane to think about all these things that we're going to have.” “Ten years from now, we're going to have forgotten that we ever lived without them.”
Cognition CEO @ScottWu46 on the importance of focus: “ The way you build a real lasting business or product is by really focusing and narrowing on one specific thing, making a very concentrated bet, and then your bet has to end up being right.” “ I love the quote from Daniel Ek (@eldsjal) at Spotify.” People asked why Spotify should exist at all when YouTube and Apple Music were already working. “He was like, ‘You know, I can give you all the other reasons, but the truth is—we're just going to care way more about music than they are.’
Cognition CEO @ScottWu46 says he couldn’t sleep after he saw Devin work for the first time: “ The first time it did a real task, I could not sleep that night.” “ The first task that Devin did was it set up MongoDB for us.” “It’s a standard thing, issues that people run into all the time. You have this whole flow where you find an error. Google the error. Find some message on Stack Overflow. Ask ChatGPT. It tells you, ‘Here’s what you should try.’ You try it. Run into a different error, paste that in…” “ At some point we're just like, ‘Okay, Devin, just try to fix it. Go run commands. Do whatever you need to.’” “And it worked.” “ It was just seeing the exponential curve ahead because this was a very specific case. It was the one success that we had.” “ There was this feeling of—why shouldn't all software and all products be built this way now where you can just tell it what you want it to do, and have it go do it.”
Scott Wu. Cognition. Out now. June 28, 2026. Available everywhere you get podcasts. @ScottWu46 @cognition x.com/davidsenra/sta…
.@ScottWu46 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.”
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.”
My conversation with @ScottWu46, founder and CEO of @Cognition, the company behind Devin, the first AI software engineer. 0:00 Scott Wu's Obsession With Winning 2:06 Competitive Programming, Games And Finding His People 4:24 Family, Go, And The Roots Of Scott's Competitiveness 8:35 Why Losing Hurts More Than Winning Feels Good 9:38 What Winning With Devin Looks Like 12:55 Devin Today: The AI Software Engineer 13:52 Software As The Human-Computer Interface 18:45 Why AI Progress Is Hard To Intuit 20:39 Thinking About AI From First Principles 22:57 What Happens When Agents Can Work For Months 30:18 The Original Thesis Behind Cognition 31:12 Launching Devin And Handling Criticism 37:17 Finding Product-Market Fit In The Enterprise 42:41 How Cognition Deploys Devin Inside Large Companies 48:34 Measuring ROI Instead Of Token Spend 50:01 Why Cognition Wants To Be Model-Neutral 52:18 Why Focus Lets Startups Beat Giants 57:14 Independence, Acquisitions, And Building A Generational Company 1:00:27 Why Money Is Not The Goal 1:03:42 One Life: Going For It All Includes paid partnerships.
Jonathan Ross. Groq. Tomorrow. June 28, 2026. Available everywhere you get podcasts. @JonathanRoss321 @GroqInc @nvidia
Adam’s company will print $5 billion in cash this year with just 400 employees. To this day if you want to hire someone you have to get direct approval from him: “I took over the HR organization. We had become bloated. I was like why is the head count so high? Why does it keep going up? Well it turned out that every time we let someone go or someone quit there was automatically a new job placement that went up. They would just automatically rehire which means there's no way your head can go down. Now what bugged me about that was we had hundreds of job postings and in order to hire and train and get value out of a new employee you're talking about a six to 12 month process. What happens in the period of time when that person quits and you don't have a new person? Why do you need to backfill if you can survive without anyone in that role for some period of time? You probably don't. And so I took over hiring and I said you need to convince me that you need more people. So we went from somewhere in the neighborhood of hundreds of new hires a year, to in the tens. Because people were so spooked about trying to convince me that they needed to hire more people. And now it's like if they come to me I know that they're desperate and that people are working so much that they really need this extra hire. Okay go make it.”
A ton of founders that I’ve recorded episodes with but haven’t release yet have asked me to introduce them to Adam. This episode is incredible. Very few founders like Adam. Full episode here: x.com/davidsenra/sta…
.@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.”
Steve Jobs was banned from Pixar’s brain trust meetings, and Ed Catmull says that anyone else with power had to “shut the hell up” for the first 10-15 minutes: ”If a person with power speaks, they tend to set the tone for the rest of the discussion. So you don't want them to speak at the beginning.” “Steve had such a powerful voice that it didn't matter when he spoke, he was going to have this extremely strong effect on the dynamics of the room and he understood that.”
Filmmakers are entrepreneurs and should act like it: “Pay attention to what Ryan Coogler has just done with Sinners.” His movie made $400 million and set the record for the most Oscar nominations. “When he negotiated his deal he said he would only work with the studio that would allow him to get the rights back. So they put up the money —but he retains ownership.” “That is unprecedented in the film industry. And they agreed to it.” “What do you think every other director is thinking right now? I want Ryan Coogler's deal.“ “The ice has been broken. The door is now open.”
.@tobi on why the right video game is a great way to learn entrepreneurship: “The good video games are simulations. They are a world upon itself, and you are a high-agency actor, and you modify things. You perform actions, you make decisions, and then you learn about the consequences of your actions. When I was in my teens in the 90s, I played StarCraft and I loved it. It was easy to learn, but hard to master, which is a hallmark of everything that’s worth doing. It taught me there’s no right decision. There’s only context in which decisions turn out to be correct. It taught me resource management is extremely important. Managing resources is not just about quantifiables. It’s also teaches you about managing your attention. I learned a lot about how do you get better? How do you get more out of every game you play? How do I get more skill progress units out of the time that I have? StarCraft might have just been the right teacher for me at that moment, and the student was ready. It was a perfect little sandbox to explore how to think about when it’s time to build infrastructure, when it’s time to invest in resources, when it’s time to prepare, when it’s time to reveal your hand, when it’s not time to reveal your hand. I think it was a perfect place to spend time for me in my teenage years, given what I did afterwards.”
This is probably my favorite conversation I’ve had this year and the one I refer to the most. Reading the transcript is awesome too: davidsenra.com/episode/tobi-l…
“My summary of Elon is he’s David Goggins’ level intensity. He's Richard Feynman's level unconventional technical brilliance and he's Napoleon's strategic genius and insane bias to action. Those three traits combined make him incredibly singular.” “And the volume of time that he puts in, even if you put in this amount of time to try to know your business from A to Z, without that deep technical intuition or sense of the fundamentals and the materials you couldn't make the calls that he's making.” “The founder is the guardian of the company’s soul.” — @EricJorgenson
“A hard problem is more likely to lead to an interesting film.” “It's fairly easy to come up with something mediocre. It's cheaper too.” "If you're making a movie about a rat that wants to cook—that's not a slam dunk." Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull on creating Ratatouille: x.com/discussingfilm…
“The value of a company is the sum of all problems solved.” — Daniel Ek (1) I've got this tool box called a computer and (2) I’ve got all these problems around the world. Which problems am I passionate about solving? And which problems can I spend the next decade of my life fixing? Because if I'm not interested enough to spend a decade fixing it, it's probably not worth pursuing.”
“He stopped because it was hard. It required discipline, dedication, and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped. I didn't stop. Was there ever a time where you almost quit? No. Failure is not an option when you come from where I came from. When you grew up in the San Fernando Valley and your father makes about 300 bucks a week and you don't get any allowance and you have to have a paper route at nine to be able to go buy an ice cream and you're also saving for a car because when you're 16 you know your dad can't afford it. Failure is not an option. It's binary: Success or death.” — Michael Ovitz
.@JoshuaKushner has this great quote: “If you have to choose between the most experienced person, or the most educated person, or the person who wants it the most, you always pick the person who wants it the most.” @danawhite on taking risks and going for it:
"If I see something that's just wrong and not in line with what I want to accomplish long term around civilizational progress, I don't really care that much about being disliked for it. And I know that it'll piss people off. There are a handful of things like this that I've done at Coinbase, which people consistently remark to me, 'Wow, that was really unique.' And to me it didn't seem that unique. This mission-first blog post I put out where we said the company's going to be apolitical during 2021. Or suing your regulator. Or this draft bill going through the Senate, where I stood up and said it's a giveaway to the traditional financial system. And it pissed a bunch of these bank CEOs off. These are things which most people probably wouldn't do because they're afraid of being disliked. And it's not that I like being disliked, it actually causes me a fair amount of stress too. But I don't let that stop me from doing what I think is the right thing." —@brian_armstrong
Sage observation from Marc Andreessen: “Technology is an enormously powerful force in the world. And the big problem is that there's not enough technology, there's not enough information, there's not enough intelligence.” “We have these special sets of technologies that let us fundamentally improve things. And then there's this very special personality type — the entrepreneur —who's able to build a product, and then able to build a company, and build a phenomenon, and really make an impact on things.” “I think the world we live in is just a very primitive and crude place as compared to what it should be —and what it could be." “And so the whole thing that we've been trying to do for 17 years at @a16z is build the ideal partner to founders based on our own experiences of having been founders.” “Every once in a while you have somebody who comes along and says: I actually have an idea of how to make things fundamentally better. And I have a way to build a business around that and build a company, and build an empire around that." “These founders are like a rogue movement against stagnation. Without them there's nothing but stagnation.” “Many people could be trying to do this. These are completely open fields and it's shocking to me how few people actually give it a shot.” “The fate of the world over the next 1,500 years is riding on the people who actually want to give it a shot.” @pmarca
I'll pay you $10 million to not take that meeting: "There's a famous story about LeBron. We're pitching him for Reebok. We send a plane. Everybody wants to sign him. And I tell Paul, "Hey, we do this in the record business and it works. You give an artist an advance and you bring the advance right there." In the music business sometimes it's cash in a duffel bag. But in this case it was going to be a check. And Paul called his wife because he couldn't get the company to get the check and his wife wrote a personal check for $10 million. We went to the meeting and Paul says, "LeBron, I know it's $100 million that Adidas is going to offer and Nike too. I'll match that deal and give you a $10 million signing bonus—right now—to not take those meetings. We'll give you $100 million plus the $10 million." Keep in mind LeBron is in high school at this time. He's going back to homeroom the next morning. He's in there with his mom and his team, but he's clearly LeBron James. He's making the decision. He asks for some room. We leave the meeting and go into the other room. We're like, "Oh, you think he's going to do it? I'm like, "Man, I think so. It's $10 million, man." We come back in the room and this 18-year-old kid says, "No. I'm betting on myself. I'm taking those other meetings." He walked away from $10 million and went back to the projects in Akron. I applaud him for that."
“Success can only be achieved through repeated failure. In fact, success represents one percent of your work which results only from the ninety-nine percent that is called failure. I believe your final success can only be achieved if you face challenges with this kind of pioneer spirit.” — Soichiro Honda. One of James Dyson’s heroes
“Failure is so much more interesting than success. And it always saddens me that school doesn't teach that. At school the thing is to be brilliant and to get the answer right first time. And there are brilliant people who could do that, but for the rest of us who are not brilliant, we have to strive, and we have to go through failure. And we realize that you don't get it right the first time or the second time. In my case and I counted it. It took 5,127 times. With failure you question it “Well why did it go wrong?” And actually the reason it goes wrong is often very, very interesting. Where something works you say “Great that worked.” You don't even stop to wonder why it works. So if you've got to enjoy failure.” —James Dyson
The memes that spread through Elon’s companies: 1: Tip-of-the-spear focus Always identify and attack the biggest limiter. Don’t spread effort across secondary problems. Laser in on the single constraint that, if removed, would unlock everything downstream. 2: Push through roadblocks A roadblock isn’t a reason, it’s a problem statement. You either clear it or escalate until someone does. 3: Scrappiness Cost-sensitive resourcefulness over bureaucratic process. SpaceX’s scrappy approach extends everywhere: reusing test hardware, hacking tools together, building ground support equipment from industrial components instead of aerospace-grade systems. Small teams build end-to-end instead of handing off between specialized groups. Engineers are expected to design, build, and test what they own. Musk calls the alternative “ivory tower engineering” — design something, throw it over the wall, and let someone else figure out how to actually make it. At SpaceX, the person who drew the bracket is the person who welds it. 4: Question requirements Every constraint — customer, regulatory, internal — is treated as a hypothesis to interrogate, not a fact to accept. This is the embodiment of first principles thinking. 5: Treat everything as learning Failures and explosions are data for the next iteration, not disasters to be concealed. SpaceX published compilation videos titled “How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket.” Spectacular droneship crashes, set to music. This isn’t just PR, it’s a genuine signal that visible failure is acceptable if you extract the lesson.
This is the essay on SpaceX we are talking about futureblind.com/p/atoms-are-ch…
I took Steve Jobs to a meeting with McDonald's and he said to them “Don't you guys know you make food that kills kids?”
Full episode is packed with incredible stories: x.com/davidsenra/sta…
Repetition is persuasive. Why the best advertisers repeat, repeat, repeat: “The power of repetition will force you to have some recall.” “I shouldn't know the Britney Spears song Oops!...I Did It Again. There's a lot of N-Sync songs I shouldn't know. But they were pounded in your brain. You couldn't avoid it because MTV and radio had a monopoly on it.” “When they control the system they could push something on you. And the power of repetition will force you to have some recall.” “Repetition is persuasive.” “I love to study the advertising industry. If you go back to the 50s and 60s when they're building massive advertising firms on Madison Avenue they all talk about this: “You're not repeating your ads enough. Repetition is persuasive. Do it over and over and over again.” “They’ve talked about this for 100 years. It’s so important.”
“When the unknown is a better option than the known, run in that direction. Run towards darkness.” x.com/davidsenra/sta…
How you do anything is how you do everything. What Steve Stoute learned when Kobe Bryant lived with him: “Kobe spent a month at my house. I watched his routine. It was phenomenal.” “He had these tapes of Michael Jordan. He’d study Michael Jordan going right, Michael Jordan going left, Michael Jordan guarding people going right, Michael Jordan guarding people going left.” “He completely immersed himself.” “Everything Kobe did, he went all the way.” “I had to go find 10 point guards for him to practice against. He was playing against Allen Iverson and wanted 10 point guards with handles.” “We go to Chelsea Piers. These guys are lined up at half court, 10 of them.” “Kobe's at the foul line, and they start coming one by one. They have to get by him and go to the basket. He's stripping the ball, blocking the ball, and as soon as he gets that one, the next one comes. He does not play offense.” “It was like an assembly line.” “This was after he already shot a thousand shots.” “I was like who am I dealing with? And he was 18 or 19 at the time.”
