David Senra

Helsing cofounder Torsten Reil won't back down from the most controversial thing he's said. He believes 100,000 Helsing drones could prevent a land war in Europe once and for all. He explains why this is true: "The deterrence that you get out of having a very large number of strike drones at your border is pretty strong. And the reason is that if you turn up with say 3,000 tanks on the other side. 100,000 strike drones will destroy those tanks in a matter of hours. It's very hard to defend against."

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“The lifestyle of  an entrepreneur  at its core is:  I can take more pain than the other guy, and I'll prove it.” “ There's a zen that can happen when a warrior has fought for a long time. You can get used to it.” “ You almost start accepting it. Like, something bad happens and you don't even get mad.” “ There are benefits.  But you need to make sure you don't get so used to it that it doesn't even bother you. You can get so zen, you're unbothered.” “ There's something special about the extra fierceness of being bothered, being upset about something that is wrong.” — @travisk

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“It's machines versus machines. It's going to be a battle of material.” Helsing co-founder @torstenreil says in the near future, it will be considered unethical to send humans to war: “You can't really enter the battlefield as a human and survive for very long. That's going to get worse and worse because at the moment, the drones attacking you are usually remote controlled. Once they're autonomous, it's going to be even more dangerous.” “If you want to have humans on the battlefield, it's going to be very difficult. The trend is going to be, and I think people are realizing this, is that it's going to be unethical to send humans on a battlefield where you know they're not going to survive.”

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This is what the AI fighter jet looks like:

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Helsing cofounder @torstenreil on building an autonomous fighter jet: “We've been told by active pilots that nothing will ever replace the intuition that a human has.” “That turns out to be bullshit. Actually the AI is much, much better.” “And the reason is that it's able to explore the search space much more efficiently than a human can. And we use the same approach basically as DeepMind used for AlphaGo and AlphaStar, using reinforcement learning. And we have an extremely high-performance simulator that runs at 25000x real-time speed. That allows us to explore the search space much, much more efficiently. And that means that we can train a neural network to be better than an active fighter pilot.” “It almost looks like ballet. It's quite beautiful to watch. It's extremely complex.” “It’s essentially chess in the sky.”

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Helsing co-founder @torstenreil says in the near future, it will be considered unethical to send humans to war: “It's going to be a battle of material. It's machines versus machines.” “That's already the case in Ukraine. You can't really enter the battlefield as a human and survive for very long.” “That's going to get worse and worse because at the moment, the drones attacking you are usually remote controlled. Once they're autonomous, it's going to be even more dangerous.” “If you want to have humans on the battlefield, it's going to be very difficult. It's going to be unethical to send humans on a battlefield where you know they're not going to survive.”

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"It’s underestimated how much of a difference aggression and ambition makes. I think 95% of a company's success is that.” @torstenreil on not letting anything stop you: “Everything else is excuses.” “Regulation doesn't matter. Yeah sure it takes longer to start a company in Germany. Yes you have to go to a notary. Who cares?” “It's not a problem.” “The regulations that we are subject to as a defense company with regards to the certification qualification of our systems, export law, and a whole bunch of other things… dealing with confidentiality, classified information, is a hundred times more than what a startup has to deal with in terms of bureaucracy and you can still deal with it.” “It still doesn't slow us down.” “Who gives a shit? Stop making excuses.” “I just don't like when people make excuses.” “You just have to have a few very aggressive companies that point out that everyone else is basically mailing it in, and I think a lot of people are."

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Torsten Reil (@torstenreil) is the founder of Helsing, Europe’s most valuable defense-tech startup. Previously, he was a computational biologist who taught neural networks to make virtual creatures walk, turned that into a gaming company he sold for $527 million, and then, at the moment defense was the least fashionable thing a European technologist could touch, founded the Al company that would help Europe defend itself. In March 2021, with no product and a pitch deck that predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine, he and two co-founders raised $8.5 million. Four months later, Daniel Ek invested $100 million of his own money. Eleven months after the deck, Russia invaded Ukraine. Five years later, Helsing is Europe's most valuable defense-tech startup. Helsing is building thousands of strike drones, teaching Al to fly fighter jets, and seeding the deep sea with autonomous gliders capable of subsurface surveillance. Torsten is on a lifelong mission to build Artificial Intelligence that protects democracies. He will never sell Helsing. 0:00 Drones, Tanks & the Future of Warfare 7:08 Why Torsten Founded Helsing 9:27 Founder Conviction & Betting on European Defense 19:19 Helsing's Mission: Protecting Democracies 23:38 Programs of Record & Winning the Eurofighter Contract 28:35 Building a Superhuman AI Fighter Pilot 36:14 Deterrence, Autonomous Weapons & the Morality of Defense 42:11 Mass Manufacturing, Software & the Future of Materiel 48:33 Airbase Vulnerability, Procurement & Scaling Strike Drones 52:46 Talent Density, Hiring & Performance Management 59:44 How Torsten Hires Exceptional People 1:05:27 Helsing's Culture: Whatever It Takes & Truth Is in the Field 1:07:38 Deploying in Ukraine & the Weight of Defense Technology 1:10:50 NaturalMotion, Gaming & Torsten's Path Into AI 1:18:33 Outsiders, First Principles & Ambitious North Stars 1:20:54 Why Commentary Is Worthless & Founders Should Build Includes paid partnerships.

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Torsten Reil. Helsing. Out now. Available everywhere you get podcasts. @torstenreil

“It’s underestimated how much of a difference aggression and ambition makes. We’re going to go full throttle.” Mashup of my conversation with Torsten Reil, founder of Helsing. Full episode out tomorrow.

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Full episode is out now:

Sam Altman on why he likes hard problems (like making his own chip) “Philosophically I'm very inclined to try to find the high-leverage, difficult problem that will continue the exponential. And for us this is models and compute. Those are problems that naturally suit me.” “To scale compute in the way that we're doing requires a complex supply chain. There's a lot of interesting partnerships to figure out, which I like doing. There's interesting financial challenges of how you're going to finance what is rapidly becoming the most expensive infrastructure project in history.” “The technology questions that go into building out compute at this scale from designing your own chip, to the supply chain of fabs and people that make racks, to the power systems for these things. There are a lot of problems that are interesting across technology, business, policy, supply chain, logistics— all come together around building compute at this kind of scale.”

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.@sama on the similarities between startup investing and AI research: “The thing in my career that I have found closest to startup investing is managing an AI research program.” “There's a lot of similarities: -how you find non-consensus bets -how you decide where to have conviction -how you understand what exponential growth looks like -how you identify outlier talent” Both AI research and startup investing are dominated by power laws: “So people talk about this all the time in investing which is you have to reprogram your brain because we don't seem naturally well-suited to think this way:” “Your best investment will outperform all of your other investments put together. Your second-best investment will outperform everything else put together after that. And AI research is like that as well.” “When we started people thought it was totally unlikely that AGI was possible.” “We just got hammered by all of the intellectual giants of the field for saying that we were going after AGI.” “And then when we started really focusing on large language models we got hammered again saying ‘This is completely ridiculous.’” “And I understood from my startup background that high-risk bets are okay as long as you take the ones where if they work it's super valuable. And research looks this way too.” “The kind of people that make great researchers are non-consensus, have a fresh approach, have high energy, and are non-standard people.” “You don't want to fund a founder who has a slightly different take on the same idea as the last thousand people you talked to. One that has tried to convince you, and maybe convince themselves, that somehow they're completely different and doing something totally new. A founder that is mostly trying to fit in with the herd and be on the same track as everybody else and do what they're supposed to do, which is start a startup. And they've heard Peter Thiel say enough times that there's something that you're supposed to be doing different that they kind of try to emulate, but they don't really mean it.” “It's very clear to me when you have someone who just thinks differently than most other people and is willing to stand by convictions that are very unpopular, but if right at least they're going to be really right versus someone who has a thin veneer on the same idea that everybody else has.” “In late 2015 when we were starting OpenAI there were very few AGI efforts in the world. It was a very non-consensus thing to do.” “In that same year there were probably many thousands of founders starting photo-sharing apps.That was probably not as good of a thing to do.” “Today a lot of people want to start AI labs. There are some handful of people, two, three, whatever, doing something completely new that actually wasn't possible until the AI got this good but doesn't seem like a good idea yet.” “And that is the thing that as a startup funder I always wanted to fund and the thing that mostly worked for me.” “There's a similar thing for researchers. There were a lot of researchers that would chase whatever the last thing was that worked and there were a small number of researchers that had high conviction towards a new idea.” “And I think we were, and are, the best research lab for those people.”

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“The most important thing that we can do is to create smart models and to be able to run them efficiently and abundantly for a lot of people. If we can get that right, I believe that everything else will follow.” — @sama

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The question Sam Altman has been waiting for: “The thing to me that feels most psychologically inconsistent about myself is that I have for 20 years been using computers the same way. I now have a magic thing called Codex. So do you, so does everybody. That means I should be using my computer in a completely different way. I should not be clicking around pasting from one messaging app to another. I should not be scrolling mindlessly through my emails and trying to figure out which one is least painful for me to open and respond when I don't want to be dealing with it. I should not be keeping a to-do list and doing sort of these rote computer tasks in the same way that I have for so long. And yet there's something in my mind that is encoded that doing this kind of stuff is what it means to work and what it means to be productive. And if you asked me I would never say I like doing it that way. In fact I would say the opposite and I think I would mean it. I have a better way to do it now. I can do it faster. I can be using Codex for more of just my day-to-day to get through this stack of emails, to do this stuff on my to-do list, to deal with all these things. And I still do it that way. And it makes no sense other than I must secretly like it or feel good about it.”

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.@sama says without YC, OpenAI never would have existed: “The degree to which @ycombinator totally influenced everything that has happened in the last 20 years of the tech industry, startups, and entrepreneurship, I think, is only sort of understood.” “The changes that YC induced in the whole ecosystem—more leverage going to founders, young technical founders having the ability to raise lots of capital, the ability to work on ambitious things without a very proven resume—I don't think OpenAI would've been possible.”

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My conversation with Sam Altman (@sama), co-founder & CEO of @OpenAI. 0:00 Tobi Lütke, AI-Native Companies & Why Adoption Moves Slowly 5:45 Sam's Own Resistance to AI & the Missing iPhone Moment 10:00 Models, Compute, Power Laws & Non-Consensus Talent 18:37 From AI-Obsessed Kid to Founder, Investor & Back Again 23:19 Impossible Problems, Scientific Discovery & Human Connection 30:16 AI's Two Biggest Risks: Loss of Control & Centralized Power 33:09 Iterative Deployment, AI Safety & Learning From Reality 40:27 Why People Fear AI & the Coming Small-Business Boom 46:13 Context, Memory & the Next Way We Will Work With AI 49:17 OpenAI's Platform Strategy & Killing Good Ideas 53:20 Peter Thiel, Paul Graham & the Value of Nonlinear Thinkers 1:00:42 How Y Combinator Changed Startups & Shaped OpenAI 1:04:03 Learning More From Success & the Power of Repetition 1:09:45 Building OpenAI Without Customers, a Product or a Playbook 1:15:57 Letters to His Son & Preserving the Story Includes paid partnerships.

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Sam Altman says AI leaders have done a terrible job at communicating to the public: “The, ‘Dear peasants, we will bequeath upon you these gifts of a cure for cancer and material wealth and great entertainment, and you stop complaining, and we'll make all the decisions about the future and just trust us, we'll be benevolent dictators.’ That’s not good. Not good.” “A lot of the people building AI have been saying, ‘There's a 25% chance we're going to destroy the world, and yet we're going to race ahead to do it because otherwise those bad guys will do it first.’” “Or, ‘Man, this thing is going to be really terrible, and 50% of the jobs are going to go away in the next year, and we hope you all are okay, but it seems really scary.’” “We have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated—and we certainly have not done a good job even if people have had answers like saying, ‘There's going to be UBI, or work will be optional.’” “There's been very little discussion from people about how and why it's important that people have more power and personal freedom in the world, not less. And that matters a lot to most people.” “The ability of people to influence their own future and collectively design where society is going to go, and the autonomy that comes with that, is very important. I don't think a lot of people in the AI field… they feel it for themselves, but they don't spend much time thinking about it, reflecting on or acknowledging how important that is to other people.”

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“You learn some lessons from failure, but I think you learn way more from success.” - @sama “When I look at the lessons where I failed at something, I learned something generic about grit and determination and something not to do, but, most things don't work. There’s a lot of reasons why things don't work. It’s harder to put together the correct causation.” “When I've had something really work, when I understand what parts of Y Combinator really worked or what parts of OpenAI really worked, trying to apply those lessons going forward has been much more helpful to me than trying to apply the anti-lessons of what didn't work.” “You should of course learn as much as you can from every data point. Learn from the failures, learn from the successes. But in my own experience, when I have tried to apply those lessons, the lessons I learned from success were very good and I should have applied those more. And the lessons I learned from failure were either fairly generic and I kind of already knew them, or got in the way of something else.”

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.@sama says the two biggest risks of AI that he’s most worried about are: 1. AI becoming so powerful that humans lose control. 2. Power getting centralized by one person, company, or model. “The right approach is to say, ‘We want people deeply in control of the future. We want people deeply empowered. People are the whole point of this all.’” “It's like a very misanthropic thing to say we're going to just put all of our trust in this model and let it have all the power and decision-making over the world. I think there are some people in the world who think that's the right outcome.” “There are some people in the AI field who effectively say, ‘We're going to give the world a cure to all disease, and make stuff really cheap, in exchange for people giving up their autonomy and impact over the future and power, and also in the name of safety, and also just absolutely rampant inequality.” “This is a terrible sales pitch. This is a very anti-human sales pitch that somehow people feel willing to make.”

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Good ideas are the enemy of great founders. Sam Altman (@sama) on shutting down Sora and Atlas to focus on Codex:

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.@sama says the best advice Peter Thiel ever gave him was to focus on what’s working. Peter was the one who convinced him to double down on ChatGPT early on: “After we launched ChatGPT, it was sort of this weird thing because people didn't really know what to use it for. It was growing super fast, but it felt very unstable, or kind of almost low-value growth.” “A lot of people in the company were like, ‘We gotta figure out something else. This is not sustainable value.’ And we were talking about this list of 5 or 6 other things that we could focus on instead.” “He was like, ‘It's an obvious mistake to do anything but this.’” “Besides the fact that it's growing, which is rare and great, and it was not growing as fast then as it did after, he's like, ‘The power of this is the power of the Google text box. It's like a text box you can type anything into, and it does the right thing.’” “He's like, ‘People have just been chasing the Google business model for 20 years and this is the first thing that's come up, and clearly the empty text box worked for Google, so why don't you just double down on that? It's growing. It's very flexible and it has all of the signs other than it doesn't fit the current Silicon Valley wisdom.’” “And I was like, ‘Okay.’ And so we went super hard on ChatGPT and it was great.”

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My conversation with Sam Altman (@sama), co-founder & CEO of @OpenAI. 0:00 Tobi Lütke, AI-Native Companies & Why Adoption Moves Slowly 5:45 Sam's Own Resistance to AI & the Missing iPhone Moment 10:00 Models, Compute, Power Laws & Non-Consensus Talent 18:37 From AI-Obsessed Kid to Founder, Investor & Back Again 23:19 Impossible Problems, Scientific Discovery & Human Connection 30:16 AI's Two Biggest Risks: Loss of Control & Centralized Power 33:09 Iterative Deployment, AI Safety & Learning From Reality 40:27 Why People Fear AI & the Coming Small-Business Boom 46:13 Context, Memory & the Next Way We Will Work With AI 49:17 OpenAI's Platform Strategy & Killing Good Ideas 53:20 Peter Thiel, Paul Graham & the Value of Nonlinear Thinkers 1:00:42 How Y Combinator Changed Startups & Shaped OpenAI 1:04:03 Learning More From Success & the Power of Repetition 1:09:45 Building OpenAI Without Customers, a Product or a Playbook 1:15:57 Letters to His Son & Preserving the Story Includes paid partnerships.

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Sam Altman. OpenAI. August 23, 2026. Available everywhere you get podcasts. @sama @OpenAI

Sam Altman. OpenAI. Tomorrow!

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Full episode is out now: Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/13MILU… Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dav… YouTube: youtu.be/kG8AoExkX40?is…

“The one who serves the customer best gets all the customers.” .@travisk on becoming a monopoly by being "so competitive" versus "anti-competitive": “Sometimes the monopoly emerges because the company is so competitive. Sometimes the monopoly emerges because the company is anti-competitive. They’re different.” “Our motto was the one who serves the customer best gets all the customers.” “At Uber, we never got a regulation passed that would hurt a competitor. We never would do that. That's not how we rolled.” “We never donated to a campaign ever to try to get something passed.” “You wanted to win because you built the best service.”

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"One day Elon’s going to be sending missions to asteroids to mine them. Maybe we can help out in some way." @travisk on why land—and the minerals and materials it produces—is the lever that moves the world:

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“If it’s not painful you’re clearly not pushing hard enough.” @travisk on entrepreneurship, pain, progress, and excellence:

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“I was running a $70 billion company the way somebody who thought he was going to starve next week would run it." "Every decision I made at Uber, I defend to this day.“ “The problem was I ran too close to the line in too many situations. When you're big and important, the scrutiny and expectation is that you don't run that close to the line, even if it's correct. That is a thing I definitely did not understand.” “It comes from what I did before Uber. First four years, no salary, ran out of money several times, super grind, lose all friends. The non-luckiest entrepreneur journey of all time.” “It was so hard that I had to be epically precise and hardcore just to pay the bills and go to the grocery store next week. And that precision and intensity made Uber what it was.” — Travis Kalanick @travisk

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“At dinner you interrupted me, put your hand in my face and said: Real founders don’t listen to VCs.”

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When then dinner ended and Travis left I turned to my friend and said: “That’s the most intense person I ever met.”

The founding of Uber was an insurgency against government corruption. .@travisk describes why taxis are a “government-condoned cartel.” “In the early 1900s, people were picking up other citizens that needed a ride across town and charging them for it. Eventually the city decided they needed it to be licensed and controlled. They started giving out licenses, but anyone could get one for free. Around the 1930s, the people who already owned licenses lobbied the city to give no more licenses out. Then the taxi guys went to the city council and lobbied again for the ability to sell the license to someone else. Then they went to the city council one more time, and asked to be able to lease out the license to an individual on a daily or weekly basis. That is the modern taxi system today. Which means the guy who had the license, whose grandpa got it for free is getting $80,000 a year renting a car to a taxi driver, and that taxi driver who's paying $40,000 a year for 12 hours a day—he's renting a car for $40,000 a year. For that privilege, he gets to be impoverished. So, what is the taxi system? It is a government-condoned cartel that outlaws competition.”

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Deleted scene: @travisk and I talking about the dinner we had last year: “I left that dinner thinking maybe I f**king scared him.”

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.@travisk on the little details that helped Uber beat Lyft: “I needed to subsidize rides to gain market share. When I gain market share there's a network effect because if I'm bigger, then my system is more efficient and if I'm more efficient than them, they have to subsidize more than I do to compete with me. This is why Lyft is smaller than Uber because we were better at this and people don't really know that's what it takes. But how do you get efficiency edge? Efficiency edge starts when somebody even downloads the app and signs up. If it's easier to sign up on one versus another you have an efficiency edge. If it's easier to call a vehicle and get it to you without problems, you have an efficiency edge because you'll have less support. If the cars are moving to where the demand is because the driver app has good ways to point drivers to the right place that means you have shorter pickup time, that’s another efficiency edge. And efficiency edge means you get bigger faster.”

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"I don't want to fail, but I'm not afraid of it." — @elonmusk Travis Kalanick (@travisk) on why you can’t fear failure: “The psyche around fear of failure f*cks with your ability to get there.” “A lot of early founders have a fear of failure. That fear blocks you from making progress because you're bogged down.” “You will never be truly world-class if you have a fear of failure.” “Fear of failure will prevent you from going all the way.”

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Founders love @travisk

.@travisk on reading the biography of Rockefeller: “I'm reading about him and going, ‘Holy shit, this dude was way more hardcore.’” “People use OG the wrong way. Rockefeller was the OG, OG.” “He was the original gangster.”

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.@travisk on finding your business soulmate: "I like to say you go out on a date with an idea. Was it a good date? Did it go well? How did you and the idea get along? Who you are is going to be a big part of which idea works for you. [I call this] finding your sport or your business soulmate. If you're in touch with who you are then when the right idea comes your way you just know."

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“You don’t go to Jordan and tell him how to dunk.” Travis Kalanick (@travisk) on why 90% of VCs add no value: A great operator is like a chess master. And they’re playing this game 80 hours a week. The VC is a chess enthusiast and they check in on the chess match every 3 months and say “Hey why don't you do this or that?” But if you're not in this game every day, 12 to 16 hours a day, “it ain’t a thing.” That’s hard for most people to understand who aren’t actually running the company because it’s natural for everyone to want to make a mark. It’s natural for everyone to have an opinion.

Incredible story how @travisk went from a $6 billion valuation to a $17.5 billion in 2 months: “[The investor] was like I think you could get a $6 billion valuation done right now. It was nine months after the $3.5 billion. Just take the first term sheet and make it happen.” “Now if you're a founder hearing that you're just like ‘Dude I hear you but even if the world is about to end, the best thing you can do is have alternatives and the deal will actually get done faster.’” “If you want a round to go well, and to go fast, you have to have a process. If you just go take the first term sheet getting the round done will actually take longer because there's no alternatives.” “If you don't have alternatives it gets weird… and it actually becomes highly likely that the deal just blows up.” “So I like to say I never get attached to a price. I get attached to a process.” “That process is about excellence in fundraising.” “Two months later we got a round done at a 17 and a half billion pre.” “That's my point. You’ve got to do things right. And VCs, not all but many, most, they're worried about other things.”

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I’m going to change the name of the show. Drop the David. Just Senra. It’s cleaner:

Excellence is the capacity to take pain. @travisk on not giving up: “You ever seen a marathoner on mile 21? Is that dude smiling? F*ck no. He’s pushing through pain. That extra push is what excellence is.” Excellence is about pushing, pushing into the extent of what a human is capable of. Pushing to reach your full potential. “If you don't, somebody else will and then that becomes the standard of excellence.” “The lifestyle of entrepreneuring is this pride in I can take more pain than the other guy.”

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“ A super high bar for a VC is: do no harm.” @travisk says only 10% of VCs are able to do no harm, and only 1% are actually helpful: “ An operator who's running a company, if they're good, is a grandmaster of chess.” ”And the VC is a chess enthusiast. They check in on the chess match once every three months and they're trying to make a mark on the world. They have an opinion.” “And you're like, don't go to Jordan and tell him how to dunk, and definitely don't go to him and tell him how to dribble. But it's hard because everybody has an opinion.” “The way to think about it is—you're on the Serengeti. If an antelope limps in the Serengeti, the lion will take it down, even if it's not hungry. Can't even fucking help it. It's just what he does. That's kind of the nature of most VCs.”

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“ The right way to do it is to start with a low price.” When @travisk fundraised for Uber, he turned the process into a multi-room operation: four investor rooms running simultaneously for 12 hours a day over an entire week. Room 1: Investors considering $250M + Room 2: $100M Room 3: $50M Room 4: $25M “ The right way to do it is to start with a low price.” “A lot of entrepreneurs will get attached to the price and not the process. You have to be careful. It's very easy to get sucked into that, where you get some signal that it should be a price, and you get attached to it, and then that becomes your price—but you haven't cleared the market.” “ It's a very bad place to be from my perspective.” “You want to start at a low price and say, ‘Look, I don't know where the price is going to go, but I know it's at least here.’” “ You have a bidder…  If you're doing a winner takes all round, then you would just go to the next guy, and you say whatever that guy said, X+5. And then you go to the next guy, and it's: X+5+5. And the next guy: X+5+5+5. And while that's happening, it's a winner takes all deal. So you go back to the original guy and you're like, ‘Dude, it's going up,’ and you're telling people it's going up. That's a winner takes all approach.” “ Then you're like, ‘Okay, going once, going twice, sold.’” ”Most deals that are big deals today are not working that way.”

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“The lifestyle of  an entrepreneur  at its core is:  I can take more pain than the other guy, and I'll prove it.” “ There's a zen that can happen when a warrior has fought for a long time. You can get used to it.” “ You almost start accepting it. Like, something bad happens and you don't even get mad.” “ There are benefits.  But you need to make sure you don't get so used to it that it doesn't even bother you. You can get so zen, you're unbothered.” “ There's something special about the extra fierceness of being bothered, being upset about something that is wrong.” — @travisk

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My conversation with @travisk, founder of Atoms and Uber. 0:00 Building Atoms & the Meta Problem of Management 3:51 The Appeal of Impossible Problems: Starting Over in China 12:19 Uber vs. Didi: Copycats, Hypergrowth & China's Rules 21:02 How Network Effects Become an Efficiency Fortress 31:48 Capitalism vs. the Taxi Cartel 44:05 The China War Goes Global & the Entrepreneur's Capacity for Pain 54:04 Life After Uber: Lawfare, Media Narratives & Reputation 58:21 What Founders Get Wrong About Venture Capital 1:08:35 The Fundraising Playbook: QED Storytelling & a Five-Room Auction 1:18:38 The Uber Coup, Radical Accountability & Outgrowing Fear 1:26:42 Why Specialized Robots Beat Humanoids at Industrial Scale 1:31:30 Finding Your Sport: Food, Mining & the Physical AI Stack 1:40:14 How to Build Many Companies Inside One Company 1:46:33 Entropy, Civilization & the Meaning of Progress Includes paid partnerships.

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“The lifestyle of an entrepreneur is I can take more pain than the other guy and I’ll prove it.” — @travisk Incredible mashup of my conversation with Travis Kalanick. Full episode out tomorrow:

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Travis Kalanick. Atoms & Uber. August 16, 2026. Available everywhere you get podcasts. @travisk

Full episode is available on X

Ugly is a choice. @lulumeservey on why we should put effort into making beautiful things again: “People are allowed to care about objectively beautiful things. We had the better part of a decade where we had to take this aesthetic, relativistic view that everything is beautiful in someone eyes. That this piece of art that is clearly trash is just as beautiful as one made by the great masters. Or somebody who is clearly unhealthy is just as beautiful as someone who takes really good care of themselves. People are allowed to say a beautiful building is worth creating and a beautiful website is worth creating. This is what Joe Gebbia and the National Design Studio team are doing. They’re saying, "We believe that a more beautiful experience on the internet reflect the dignity of being an American citizen, and that is what we want. So we're going to put in effort and talent to go make that for you because it's worth something. We're not going to pretend that a website has to be ugly." Anything big or small or glamorous or pedestrian, like a simple government website, can (and should) be made more beautiful. And when it is, people appreciate it so much more because we do have this inherent yearning for beauty.“

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Don't show your product. Show the change your product enables. Steve Jobs did this best. Steve used “a bicycle for the mind” as a metaphor for what his product could do for human intelligence. He told a story about reading a Scientific American study comparing the energy efficiency of different animals moving from point A to point B. The condor ranked first, while humans were about a third of the way down the list. Then the researchers measured a human riding a bicycle. The human on the bicycle was vastly more efficient than the condor. Jobs said this realization had a huge impact on him: “We humans are tool builders. And we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes.” This led to his famous conclusion: “For me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind. Something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.” “That is a perfect illustration of ‘I’m not selling you bits and bytes and RAM. I'm saying what is going to occur after you use my product.’” “Show the benefit.”

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“You can go and talk to David Senra.” — @travisk 🐐 We might have something for you soon 👀

.@PalmerLuckey is the reason why @lulumeservey created the Go Direct manifesto: Anduril had to go direct. They had no other option: “You're going to call some mainstream reporter and say, ‘Hey, the guy who got fired from Facebook for supporting Trump that you hate is doing a thing and you should hear him out?’” “We were not going the traditional path of TechCrunch or what Palmer calls trying to get the coolest startup award at one of these conferences.” “We were going directly to Quantico, to Camp Pendleton, to the CIA. Literally walking into their building and speaking to them.” “ Why would you go to somebody else as a supplicant asking them to carry the message for you so that they can filter it through their worldview, and then their editor, and then put it into their publication, and then hope that that spray and pray reaches some of the people that you care about?” “When you do that you lose the power of your intensity. [The wrong way is] the founder relays the message to their PR person who puts it into their own words and then pitches an editor and then the editor reinterprets the message.” Work backwards: Go to the podcasts and places where your ideal customers and recruits are getting their information and just go there.

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Help settle this debate:

“Taste is the recognition of beauty.” “Fake things aren’t beautiful.” .@lulumeservey says for the first time in a decade, people are allowed to care about objectively beautiful things again: “We had probably a decade where we had to take this aesthetic relativistic view of, ‘Everything is beautiful in someone's eyes,’ and this piece of art that is clearly trash is just as beautiful as one of the great masters, or somebody who is clearly unhealthy and unhappy is just as beautiful as someone who takes really good care of themselves.” “Victoria's Secret had this phase of obese women and men. Men! It became Victor's Secret.” “People are allowed now to say, ‘This is more beautiful than this.’ A beautiful building is more beautiful than an ugly building. A beautiful website is worth creating.” “This is what @jgebbia and the National Design Studio team are doing, saying, ‘We believe that more beautiful experiences on the internet reflect the dignity of being an American citizen, and that is what we want. So we're going to put in effort from the best talent in the private sector to go make that for you because it's worth something.’” “Anything big or small or glamorous or very pedestrian, even a simple government website, can be made more beautiful.”

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Whoever wants it more wins. @lulumeservey on why every founder needs a manifesto: “The purpose of a manifesto is to make concrete your intensity. To paint for people a vision of what the world could be.” “Once you see a good manifesto you can't get it out of your head. You have to go do it.” “The manifesto is the magnet. If you don't have that, you have no right to go up to someone and say ‘Leave your comfortable job and leave your beautiful family and come with me on what is probably a death mission.’” “There's no amount of money or incumbency that can overcome somebody who wants it so much more.”

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"There's a sense of taste and discernment and beauty I don't see in these fake things. They're not made with love." — @lulumeservey

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@david_perell @lulumeservey David’s are supposed to stick together

.@lulumeservey says the last effective techno-optimist message was The Jetsons: “What we want is for the optimistic stories about tech to have the tech in the background.” “Everything techno-pessimist, the tech is in the foreground, and it's about the tech. Terminator or Blade Runner—anything where there's a future that you potentially don't want, the dystopian stories —it’s about the tech.” “You and I have talked to many founders who started companies based on being inspired by sci-fi. @PalmerLuckey’s obviously one of them.” “And it's not because they're bludgeoning you over the head with one specific invention. It's because they're showing the better world and the human stories within it, with technology in the ambiance.”

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“Everything seems fake now.” .@lulumeservey on companies paying for retweets on their product launches: “Every launch uses the same slop cinematic video, same template.” “Half of them, you go to the engagement—it's completely fake.” “You can just start to tell that the amount of engagement this thing has is completely disproportionate to how interesting it actually is. And when you look through the people engaging with it, it's all some random account in a developing country that has no other tweets other than shilling products like this.” “When that happens, I write off the entire company as fake.” “I don't think, ‘This was a fake video or fake engagement.’ I think to myself, ‘It's a fake company with a fake founder. I will never buy their product or do business with them. I would never recommend somebody go work with them. The whole thing is fake.’” “It's better to put out something that truly represents the best version of what you’re doing that might get lower engagement, but the people who are engaging are actually real people, and they care. It's better to get 50 people who feel like this is speaking to them than to get 4,700 retweets that seem obviously fake.”

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Lulu (@lulumeservey) is the best in the world at what she does. She’s the go-to comms strategist for Silicon Valley and many of the top founders in tech trust her. She’s an advocate for going direct, has built a singular career and shares everything she’s learned. 0:00 From China to America 2:08 Learning to Read the Room 6:18 Building a Movement 7:30 Learning Comms by Doing 10:50 Anduril as an Insurgent 15:07 The Power of a Manifesto 18:47 Go Direct 26:45 Conviction Over Charisma 31:30 Why Rostra Exists 33:23 How AI Leaders Lose Trust 40:40 Tell a Better Story 47:55 Do Things That Can't Be Faked 50:55 The Return to Beauty 57:11 Originality Over Templates 1:04:02 Do What Only You Can Do 1:07:14 The Jetsons Rule 1:10:41 Trust Yourself 1:12:29 Why Humans Crave Stories Includes paid partnerships.

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The full episode and transcript is available here: davidsenra.com/episode/lulu-c…

Lulu Cheng Meservey. Rostra. Tomorrow. August 12, 2026. Available everywhere you get podcasts. @lulumeservey

Full episode is available now:

How @elonmusk fixed Starlink: “Starlink was a mess. It was 10X too expensive and they were building 1/10 of how many they needed. Elon’s like I've had it. This is now the bottleneck. I'm fixing this. He grabs a team of engineers that he trusts and they fly up to Seattle. They fire the entire Starlink leadership team. They sit down in a war room and they start running the algorithm. •What is the first principles of satellite design? •How simple can we make this thing? •Why does this exist? •Why are these two things so far apart? •Why do we need this much energy? •Why do we need this manufacturing process? And over the course of a few months they make a two order of magnitude leap. These people had never encountered this design before, but just by applying the algorithm and working with maniacal urgency towards this extremely high design bar, they created this product that's now —if it was a standalone business —would be worth tens of billions of dollars or more.”

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This episode is full of Elon’s ideas on company building: davidsenra.com/episode/eric-j…

Mobile put a bank in your pocket. AI is going to put a banker in your pocket. @mickymalka says AI agents will start making investment decisions on your behalf very soon. “What I expect to see very soon is an AI agent that can do all kinds of investment decisions and recommendations. The agent will do all kinds of commerce decisions and recommendations. It can do any kind of payment decisions on your behalf. The agent is going to free up time for you and give you ideas that you didn’t have. We're just starting. What we expect is that we're going to see a bunch of new companies and incumbents that are going to be shipping these features in ways that we have not experienced before.”

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Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) describes how @MichaelOvitz and CAA took over Hollywood: "One of the practices was at every agency, they would have their staff meeting at 9AM. The staff meeting would go from 9AM to 10AM. Then at 10AM, they would start calling their clients. So of course Michael's like, alright. We'll have our staff meeting at 7AM. We'll be done at 8. Between 8 and 9, we'll call the clients. And by the way, we won't just call our clients. We'll call their clients. Imagine you're Paul Newman. Your agent calls you at 11 — I've got this great role. And you say, the guy at CAA called me about that three hours ago. Your agent is like, they don't represent you. Paul is like, yeah, isn't it great? Isn't that fantastic? You rinse and repeat that a thousand times. The people running competitive agencies were managers. Not founders. Not the same thing. The thing a manager never does unless they're under duress is reconsider fundamental assumptions. They hate that. The whole point of running something big is you don't have to do that. You get to run the big thing at scale. This is what our founders do every day. Industry after industry after industry."

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New episode with Ovitz is out now. A lot of great stories in this one: x.com/davidsenra/sta…

“I've watched Marty Scorsese take Harvey Weinstein apart like he was a toothpick. Harvey was giving Scorsese the dumbest notes imaginable. Scorsese has seen every movie ever made. He has encyclopedic knowledge. Nobody should be giving Marty notes about the core of his film or the conceit of a character or where he's putting the camera. It was a joke.”

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“He didn't care who got that ball in the basket.  It just had to get in there. It was about winning.” Michael Ovitz shares the most important business lesson he learned from Magic Johnson: “ What I learned from Magic was an extraordinary lesson that helped me build CAA, which was, when he was doing the fast break down that court, he had no goal except to score.” “He didn't care who got that ball in the basket.  It just had to get in there.” “It was about winning at the end of the day. It's about not having an ego about it.” “One of the great things we did at CAA is I didn't care who scored. I just wanted to score. And when we asked people to do things at CAA, even the youngest people, we never asked them to do anything we wouldn't do ourselves. And if they were slow on it, I went and did it to prove a point.”

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“If I take a day off now, I feel like I've missed three months.” Michael Ovitz says it’s more exciting today than in the ‘70s, ‘80s, or ‘90s because back then every medium they were dealing with was old. “The exciting part was the creation of the software of the moment—film or videotape or music or books. It was fantastic to read Michael Crichton's rough draft of Jurassic Park. It was a thrill, but it was a book, and there've been books since the invention of the printing press.” @mlevchin told him a few years ago, “If I take a day off from work, I come back and I feel like I've missed a week.” “I saw him recently at the Allen Conference, and he said, ‘If I take a day off now, I feel like I've missed three months.’”

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“Everyone said we were going to fail.” When Michael Ovitz was starting CAA,  the four partners at a leading agency all told him they would never represent any movie stars. “I said, ‘We're going to have all of them.’” “Every time we signed a movie star, which was once a week, we took out a full red page ad in Variety… Every time we signed a movie star, I took that ad, tore it, put it in an envelope to those four guys, and I did that for the next ten years.” “ I love monopolies. There's no room for competition. I love Peter Thiel's monopoly lectures at Stanford. He's spot on.”

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When Barry Diller competed to buy Paramount in 1993 and lost to Sumner Redstone, the press asked him why. He said, “He won. We lost. Next case.” “ It was so brilliant. He’s right. You can’t look back.” “ I am so upset when friends of mine try to do deals and they lose it, and then they dwell on it. It's dumb. It's not going to change. So what are you looking back for?” “I don't like to look backwards. I think you have to always look forward.”

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Michael Ovitz calls Nike founder Phil Knight “the most competitive businessman alive, bar none.” An obscure biography of Michael Jordan tells the story about someone trying to convince Jordan to launch with another company. Somebody in Nike warned them: "You don't understand. Phil Knight is the most competitive person on the planet. If you do this and betray him, he will chase you to the ends of the Earth."

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The best founders love it when you tell them they’re going to fail. Four people told Michael Ovitz that he would never be able to sign a movie star. They said he was arrogant to even think he could. Every time he signed a star Ovitz ran a full page ad in Variety announcing the partnership. Then he ripped the ad out of the magazine and mailed it to those 4 people. He did this once a week for a decade.

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My second conversation with @MichaelOvitz, co-founder of CAA. 0:00 Why Michael Ovitz Is Busier Than Ever 4:27 Why This Era Is More Exciting Than Hollywood's Golden Age 8:45 The Fundamentals of Building Enduring Businesses 12:06 How Ovitz Chooses What Deserves His Time 14:28 Why Ovitz Refuses to Be Typecast 19:43 Japan, Trust & Playing the Long Game 20:44 Phil Knight, Nike & the College Football Playoff 25:59 Competition, Work Ethic & Winning Without Ego 31:33 How Ovitz Outworked 200 Rival Agencies 37:51 Protecting the Vision: Scorsese, Rain Man & Great Founders 40:37 Josh Kushner & Guarding the Company's Soul 43:47 Steve Jobs, Pixar & Building a Culture of Ideas 47:20 "He Won, We Lost. Next Case." 49:21 Bill Ackman, Universal Music Group & the Future of Music 53:08 AI, Music & the Future of Entertainment 59:13 Jurassic Park, Spielberg & Using New Technology Well 1:01:10 Why Great Creators Study the Past Includes paid partnerships.

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Michael Ovitz. CAA. Tomorrow. August 9, 2026. Available everywhere you get podcasts. @MichaelOvitz

This mashup from tomorrow’s episode with Michael Ovitz is awesome and hilarious 😂

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Michael Ovitz returns to the podcast tomorrow. Things got a little testy between us:

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Chips on shoulders puts chips in pockets. How Adam Foroughi, founder of Applovin, built one of the most efficient companies by hiring outcasts with something to prove: “One of the things that I always looked at for hiring was to find people who have a chip on their shoulder. Someone who has a reason to push hard. We ended up with this group of people that were outcasts from other places. One of the best hires I ever made was this kid who was a high school dropout. He was not getting a job in big tech. But he had skills that smoke everyone else when it comes to selling. I knew I could bring that person in, empower that person, and they're going to be hungry and they're going to push harder than the others.”

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Dana White on his $7.7 billion deal with Paramount: “The Ellisons are aggressive guys. They're aggressive and financially powerful. And literally at the half-yard line they said f*ck it we want everything. And they went after it.”

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Dana tells a bunch of wild stories in the full episode. Available here: davidsenra.com/episode/dana-w…

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 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.”

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.@mickymalka says you know you’ve built enough trust with a founder when you no longer need to talk about the business: “If we get that phone call, it means that we did 100 things right to deserve the right to be there to help this person think through it. Never to answer the question, just to help him or her answer the question. And that means you are able to talk about life and family, society and politics, and you are able to talk about everything, because that's the only way you're going to get to really help this person answer the question.”

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The roadmap behind one of the world's biggest restaurant empires was essentially laid out in a single conversation between future partners:

“My two partners had opened a small 10-seat Italian-American restaurant on Mulberry Street that started to gain traction.” “They served sandwiches during the day and a five-dish prix fixe menu for $35 in the evening.” “I was blown away by the meal.” “I got home that night and told my girlfriend, who later became my wife, ‘I think I found the guys I want to partner with and I want to bring you back to the restaurant.’” “They said, ‘Can you come in at 10 PM? Because Mario gets off service at 10, and he would love to talk to you about something.’” “I said, ‘That's crazy. I want to talk to him about something.’” “So we went for dinner and after service, he and I went for drinks.” “We sat down at The Jane Hotel. I told him my idea of what I wanted to do with Italian-American food, and he immediately said, ‘That's exactly what we want to do. That's our dream.’” “We were there till 4 or 5 AM just talking about what we wanted to create.” “We talked about all these things in our first conversation, which has basically been the exact roadmap that we have followed up until today.”

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Jeff is a master storyteller and has built an incredible business. Full episode here: davidsenra.com/episode/jeff-z…

Cognition CEO @ScottWu46 on extreme 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 @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.’”

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“Writing is everything.” “We can sit here and talk about ideas for hours, but if you're not willing to put them in writing, you will never learn truly how deep they are.” — Ribbit Capital founder @mickymalka x.com/0xportola/stat…

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Ribbit Capital founder @mickymalka shares “the eye of the tiger” The 5 traits he looks for in founders: - The energy of a scientist - The conviction of a missionary - The heart of a partner - The dreams of an athlete - The obsession of an owner

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The full episode with @mickymalka is awesome x.com/davidsenra/sta…

How @tobi got over his fear of public speaking: “I  was terrified of public speaking until I sat down for like a week and every day I spent ten minutes just writing that I like public speaking.” “ If you tell yourself or write something down 100 times about yourself, that writes it into the prefrontal cortex at such a deep level that your brain will start reconciling you to that.” “It’s not a placebo. You actively change your prefrontal cortex.”

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From this episode with Tobi. One of my favorite conversations I’ve ever had. Full of unique insights: davidsenra.com/episode/tobi-l…

“If I end up being labeled as the greatest venture capitalist, I will be very depressed. I want no labels.” - @mickymalka “All I want on my tombstone is to say, ‘He was a rebel.’” ”That will say everything about me. The way I raise my kids, my relationship with my wife, the way I treat my friends, the way I make business decisions, the way I change my mind. I'm willing to change my mind if I learn something different. That's a rebel mindset.” “I know a lot of people that get to a point in life when they stop asking questions, and they start to preach.” “Everybody has that breaking point somewhere in their lives. I want that to be the last day of my life.”

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.@mickymalka shares the full story of how one dinner with former Walmart CEO Doug McMillon led to building OnePay, one of the “biggest financial brands you've never heard of.” “I've been a fan of Sam Walton all my life.” “Through Sarah Friar (@thefriley), who's now at OpenAI but was on the board of Walmart, she organized a dinner where I had a chance to meet Doug McMillon, the CEO at the time. We had a lovely dinner in San Francisco a few months before COVID. And Doug says after dinner, ‘If you ever find yourself in Bentonville, come visit me.’ And I'm like, ‘I don't know what I'm going to do in Bentonville.’” “He introduced me to John Furner, who's now the CEO of Walmart, alongside Doug. They were there for almost 30 years at Walmart, both of them, since they were 17.” “I said, ‘Listen, you guys can build something much better with financial services here. This is not your priority number one, two, and three. It is for us. Let's figure it out.’” “And they did something they had never done. They created a JV, a company that we both co-own, and we went together and built a rockstar team with a new brand. We bought two companies to build the infrastructure run by Omer Ismail today, called OnePay. It's one of the biggest financial brands you've never heard of.” “You see it online on every shopping cart experience on Walmart. You see it in Walmart stores everywhere. If you want to pay with your phone today, the only way to pay at Walmart is with OnePay. If you want a debit card, it's the only way. If you want a loan from Klarna, it goes through OnePay. If you want an installment loan or a credit card, it goes through OnePay. Every single financial product to millions and millions and millions of American consumers.”

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.@mickymalka says he would rather be playing from behind than be ahead. How he views competition: “ I don't look at other people. Everyone is playing their own game. I try really hard to not have FOMO. I try really hard to make sure that I'm playing the best game I can. To play this game until the last day I am alive.” “I've learned about myself, I'd rather be behind. I'm a much better person being behind than when I'm ahead.” “It's not good to be ahead. You want to be ahead for a while, but you want the rules to change to fall behind, so you can innovate again.”

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A lot of texts like this in the last 24 hours: x.com/davidsenra/sta…

Warren Buffett would repeat the same line: “We can afford to lose money. We can afford to lose a lot of money. But we cant afford to lose even a shred of reputation.” @mickymalka says  ”Reputation matters more than anything.” Berkshire would play a clip of Buffett saying that line at every single Berkshire annual meeting: “ I started to go to the Berkshire annual meetings when I was eighteen. Back then they were much smaller. They were on a Friday afternoon at a Holiday Inn, with a couple hundred people.” “As soon as they moved to the bigger convention center a few years later, they had this clip playing in the beginning of the annual meeting with a bunch of Buffett interviews over the years. Every time, they were playing Buffett getting deposed when he was the chairman of Salomon Brothers saying that line that you just said.” ”Reputation matters more than anything.”

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"Only First Class business, and that in a First Class way." — David Ogilvy x.com/prajitn/status…