David Senra

Meta built the first prototype of Muse in just 2 weeks. It started with @natfriedman going “all in” on OpenClaw. “He had an experience I would describe as somewhere between terrifying and euphoric.” “He told his OpenClaw that he wanted to drink more water, and then his OpenClaw would watch him in security footage to make sure that he was drinking water and tell him good job.” @alexandr_wang says he wrote a memo about how this was likely going to become the “final consumer product.” “Many of the decisions that made its way into the final Muse product were present in the first prototype.”

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Mark Zuckerberg’s core philosophy comes down to 2 ideas: 1. Failure doesn’t matter. What matters is when you win—how big you win. 2. In a world that's changing all the time, the biggest risk is not taking any. @alexandr_wang says it’s why Zuckerberg is able to “operate without fear” and why Meta doesn’t look more like Google: “There's certainly versions of the world where Meta looks a lot more like Google in some sense... more slow-moving and more bureaucratic.”

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“The world has been shaped by the small number of fanatics who have found a way to make their wants real, but we've never seen humanity with every single person's agency fully switched on.” @alexandr_wang on what the world is going to look like when AI agents proliferate to the masses: “I think that world looks crazy in a very good way.” “It'll be kind of insane to think about what exactly that looks like where literally billions of people have, all of a sudden because of abundant intelligence, the resources to make incredible things happen.” “In my head it's almost like the Rick and Morty interdimensional cable, but somehow manifested into reality for humans.”

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Lessons from @elonmusk and Mark Zuckerberg and Napoleon: “Elon has demonstrated that if you have a small, incredibly cracked, highly technical team, that's very flat, you can accomplish a lot very quickly.” “Mark has internalized that failure doesn't matter. It just matters when you win, how big you win.” “That concept enables Mark to operate without fear because he’s just very comfortable taking lots of risk.” “Mark has this great quote that says: The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that's changing the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” “In the book The Mind of Napoleon, Napoleon repeats that hesitation is fatal. Napoleon says before you engage in a course of action you should deliberate thoroughly. He'd study from every angle to make sure he's making the right decision. But once he’s sure he’s on the right path, he goes all in. I feel there's an echo with the way Mark operates. Once Mark knows what he wants to do, he empties the clip.”

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The full episode is on X

Meta built Muse with just 200 people. “The whole executive team, everyone knew that this was probably going to be one of the most important products that Meta would ship this year.” “But we had the restraint organizationally to make sure it was a really small focused team working on it... because we knew it was a single work of art.” “This is even now starting to plague a lot of the AI labs. They become this Frankenstein, almost Cronenberg amalgamation of a bunch of different people's points of view.” “It's sort of like PM hell, where every PM has a thing that they're trying to jam into the product.” “Muse had to be the exact opposite. There's one clear point of view.” — @alexandr_wang

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.@alexandr_wang explains why he’s been posting memes nonstop on X since Meta launched Muse: “It felt important that we figured out a way to make Muse break through.” “Most people are constantly being bombarded with new AI products and startups and releases and things and models.” “Obviously at Meta, we have lots of distribution... but that's not enough to make it break through in an interesting cultural or fascinating way.” “The internet rewards risk, and it rewards surprise and things that people don't expect.” “For what it's worth, literally every one of those tweets I write.” “It was really hard for me to pay attention in meetings because I would just think of a meme, and I'd be like, ‘Oh God, I have to get this out.’” “I actually think it genuinely made an impact on growth, which is kind of hilarious.” “Meta was not cool for a while. We wanted to make Meta cool and interesting and kind of funny. And then the unhinged-ness was something that happened naturally over time.”

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My conversation with @alexandr_wang, chief AI officer of Meta. 0:00 The vision behind Muse 1:32 Discovering the potential of personal AI agents 3:34 Three years of therapy in one AI session 5:46 Building Muse in 7 months 9:16 Why Meta bet on personal AI 16:51 Mark Zuckerberg's obsession with improving products 20:15 How Meta knew Muse was ready to launch 23:32 Why great products need a single point of view 25:56 Making Meta cool again with memes 34:38 Building trust with AI agents 38:43 The future of human ambition 45:22 The call from Mark Zuckerberg that changed everything 52:13 Leaving Scale AI for Meta 55:19 Rebuilding Meta's AI lab from scratch 58:13 From founder to coach 1:05:55 The future billionaires at Alexandr's 19th birthday party 1:08:04 Diamond mining vs. building skyscrapers 1:09:21 Why Alexandr has more than 200 direct reports Includes paid partnerships.

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Some of my favorite photos from my conversation with @alexandr_wang, chief AI officer of Meta. Episode is out tomorrow.

Alexandr Wang. Meta Superintelligence Labs. Tomorrow!

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Full episode is now on X

One of my favorite ideas I learned from making the podcast: Steve Jobs fired two members of his board because they never disagreed with him: He said: “If they don't disagree with me then they aren't bringing any value to the company.” Steve understood that there is no upside in being wrong.

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"We think the best team size is one, because a single author can do things that is impossible to do for teams, and hit high notes that are unreachable." — @tobi

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Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) on founders taking psychedelics: “I was describing this phenomenon we see in Silicon Valley where these guys get under pressure and they feel anxious and somebody tells them about psychedelics. They try it and they kind of come out the other end as a changed person. And they kind of come out much more at peace, but then they also tend to like quit their companies and they move to Indonesia and become a surf instructor. They just peace out. They're just done. There's been a whole bunch of examples of this and I was complaining to @hubermanlab about this and in true Huberman kind of wise Yoda style, he's like, "Well, you know, how do you know they're not happier? Maybe that was the positive outcome. Maybe the thing that was driving them to be a great entrepreneur was a fundamental level of insecurity. They had this kind of unsatisfied, neurotic impulse, and now, they're just satisfied.” And I'm like, "Yeah, but their company, it's failing."

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Ari Emanuel says @pmarca is wrong that psychedelics make founders work less hard: “That’s complete bulls**t. I had this argument with Marc.” “5-MeO-DMT, that’s the best psychedelic in the world.” “With 5-MeO, you smoke it. You’re tripping for about 30 minutes, and you realize how small we are in the world, and how meaningless in a weird way. Not in a bad way that you don’t want to work or anything, that you’re not aggressive or any of that. You just realize... you want a meaningful life.” “I’m not half-assing things. Zero. There’s still plenty of calls. I’m up at 5:00 this morning, worked out, in the office, did another podcast. I got you. I’m going to Montecito for something. I’m working my tail off.”

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Jeff Bezos’ advice to Ari Emanuel: “When you’re on the field, be on the field. But remember, you can’t always be on the field. There has to be a time-out, halftime. You have to heal. Recover. The show must go on, sure, but the game must stop, now and then, for the players to catch their breath.”

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.@elonmusk was telling me about where AI was going back in 2007. He told me the only thing that can’t be disintermediated by AI is sports and live events. That’s what gave the idea to start Mari:

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My conversation with @AriEmanuel. 0:00 The UFC negotiation that blew up 3:33 Meeting Egon Durban and buying IMG 7:30 Betting $4.2 billion on the UFC 15:16 Getting the ESPN deal done 22:58 Taking over William Morris 30:02 Starting Endeavor with a table and a phone 32:53 Why you won’t remember the extra $400 million 35:01 Stop telling yourself stories 39:21 David Geffen: Get in traffic and get hit 45:19 Why Ari rolls the calls 49:35 Building your own school of entrepreneurship 51:56 Learning from Elon Musk and betting on live events 53:58 Learning from Hollywood’s greatest agents 1:00:23 Outgrowing rage without losing ambition 1:10:10 Psychedelics, purpose, and letting go of legacy 1:18:18 How Entourage changed Ari’s life 1:22:32 Ari never had a plan B Includes paid partnerships.

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My favorite photos from my conversation with @AriEmanuel. Out tomorrow.

Ari Emanuel. Unfiltered. Tomorrow!

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I started this podcast a year ago. It’s been the best year of my life. Thanks to everyone for watching and to every guest for the incredible conversations 🫡 In order by appearance: Daniel Ek Michael Dell Brad Jacobs Todd Graves Michael Ovitz James Dyson Patrick O’Shaughnessy John Mackey Tobi Lutke Jimmy Iovine Jason Fried Brian Armstrong Marc Andreessen Eric Jorgenson Tony Xu Evan Spiegel David Baszucki Adam Foroughi Dana White Strauss Zelnick Rick Rubin Ivanka Trump Gustav Söderström Ed Catmull Steve Stoute Scott Wu Jonathan Ross Eric Glyman Jeff Zalaznick DHH Micky Malka Lulu Meservey Travis Kalanick Sam Altman Torsten Reil Doug Leone Zach Dell Mati Staniszewski Luca Ferrari Peter Rahal Ronnie Fieg 41 down, many many thousands to go…

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Roblox bought their first 1500 users from Google for $1 each. You can tie the 300 million users today back to those original 1500:

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Most companies take two weeks to do what @elonmusk does in an hour. Elon hired a machinist, negotiated his salary, and had him start — all in one conversation. On a Saturday at 6 PM.

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The full episode on The Book of Elon by @EricJorgenson is awesome:

.@tobi says most companies think about recruiting backwards: “My job is to make a company worthy for the best and brightest to work for. This is the part everyone skips. Everyone is like “We need a better recruiting team.” When you just need to be worthy of the kind of talent you would like to have. Talent eventually takes care of itself. There are not that many good companies to work for. There are not many companies that deserve the attention of people who are the most capable people, because those people have the option to start their own companies.”

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Some of my favorite quotes from my awesome conversation with @RonnieFieg

Why was @PalmerLuckey the first person @colossusjeremy ever profiled? It started with a much bigger question Jeremy had after watching Hamas invade Israel with hang gliders and construction equipment: “Is this whole defense tech thing basically bullshit? Does any of this stuff actually work?” “You start spending time with someone and thinking a lot about them, you talk to everyone in their life, and a whole universe opens up and it turns into this 15,000-word cradle-to-grave piece about basically his entire life.” “The piece came out in August 2024. This was only maybe one month after the assassination attempt on Trump. After which kind of all of Silicon Valley, a bunch of founders and VCs, end up aligning behind Trump having not aligned behind him the previous two times.” “And one really interesting thing about Palmer is that he had supported Trump. The specifics of his support for Trump were not particularly interesting. What was really interesting was that he did it and was willing to stand behind it not at a moment when everyone else in his industry was also doing the same thing, but when it cost him everything. He did it at a moment when it led to him getting fired by Facebook, which had bought his company, and he lost the company that he'd spent his brief adult life building.” “I thought that suggested something interesting about his character or his integrity or his belief in himself or belief in what was right.”

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Jeremy Stern on the 2 things people still don’t understand about Mark Zuckerberg: 1. People underestimate how competitive and ruthless he is. 2. He's not an asshole. He doesn't treat people badly. He's actually a pretty nice guy. “Even his critics and rivals said a lot of the same stuff. His competitive drive can't be underestimated, and it's also interesting that most other people who are that competitive just have this gene where they also are pretty monstrous to the people around them. [Zuck doesn’t]”

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.@JoshuaKushner felt like he had “captured magic in a bottle” with Thrive. He went to Rick Rubin to ask, “What do I do if I lose the magic?” “One thing I really appreciate about Josh is that he does recognize, even if only in some ultimate sense, that things do eventually fall apart, and you have to make the most of it while you can. And you have to do everything you can to make yourself invulnerable while you can.”

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.@colossusjeremy says Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with the Roman Empire goes back to when he was 15 years old, and traces of it are still everywhere at Meta: “He has this long-standing interest in the Romans and in Augustus in particular. Augustus was the first emperor of Rome and turned it from a republic into an empire.” “He used to end meetings by shouting, ‘Domination,’ and Sean Parker, the early president of Facebook, told him he had to stop doing it because it could be cited one day in an antitrust suit.” “Courses he took in Latin in high school, where they had to read and memorize verses from Virgil's Aeneid, he still remembers now at the age of 42 and can recite them.” “Just recently at their keynote, he brought out his personal Muse agent, and refers to it as Agrippa. Agrippa was one of the two key early lieutenants for Augustus.” “I remember at some point Elon compared himself to Napoleon. I think a lot of these world-straddling figures at that level, they do think in these historical parallels.”

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“The thing that ties Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk together is that it’s unimaginable that they would just step back and spend the rest of their life on a yacht. They're just going to die as CEO.” “Zuckerberg as a figure is ideologically coherent and unconfused in a way that a lot of the major AI figures are not.” “I think Zuckerberg is probably the most competitive person in the world at the thing that he does.”

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Jeremy Stern (@colossusjeremy) writes the world’s best profiles on the elite entrepreneurs and investors of our time. In this episode, we talk about what he’s learned from spending time with Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Josh Kushner, Neil Mehta, Scott Wu, and more. 0:00 Jeremy’s Zuckerberg profile 6:39 Why Zuckerberg identifies with Augustus 13:03 The competitive drive people still underestimate 18:49 Why Zuckerberg won’t walk away 21:11 How Palmer Luckey became Jeremy’s first profile 35:05 Bringing literary ambition to business writing 39:20 Why Scott Wu stood out among AI founders 48:29 Josh Kushner’s family history and the American dream 56:36 Asking Rick Rubin: What if I lose the magic? 1:01:44 The mentor who taught Jeremy to use his gifts Includes paid partnerships.

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Nothing pisses off Dana White more than (1) trying to take credit for UFC’s success and (2) changing your name to sound French even though you’re from Jersey: “We go to this lunch and we got to listen to how fucking rich he is for the first 20 minutes. And then he tells us that *he* built the UFC and if we don't like the offer he's making he'll just build another one. That's literally what he said. And we left that meeting I was like "He built the UFC huh?” Okay Phil Duman. We'll see. So we end up leaving Spike TV and going to Fox (for an even bigger deal). Everything happens for a reason. That guy ended up being one of the biggest brand killers of all time.”

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Ari Emanuel tells a hilarious story about this lunch on our upcoming episode:

Ari Emanuel pulled up today and gave me some great advice. Episode out soon:

How to sell AI properly: "One of the things Long Lake was formed to do is actually take those frontier innovations, taking away toilsome work from our team members, mundane work, process-oriented stuff ..there's so much mental friction that comes from that 30% of work" "...taking that away and and freeing up human capacity for more impactful work, dealing with the customers, focusing on growth...You know, there there's a lot of fun parts of the job that keep people going. If we can do more of the fun parts, less of the dull parts, they love their job more." "We're very positive sum. You know, we really believe in this concept of like AI abundance...if you have the best people in every industry using the best tools, creates a much better customer experience. And then you grow faster, you retain your customers better, you make more money, you can pay your people more. That's the positive-sum." — @alextaubman

“The greatest gift that you can have in a partner is someone who makes you more ambitious.” - @alextaubman

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Warren Buffett said Henry Singleton had “the best operating and capital deployment record in American business.” The legendary Teledyne founder had one mantra: “ Stay flexible.” @alextaubman says it’s one of the reasons Long Lake wound up acquiring Amex GBT: “He didn't like detailed strategic plans. He preferred to stay flexible.” “That's part of our whole philosophy of staying open to different industries… we never would've said when we started the company that we wanted to do travel. It just wasn't something I'd thought about. We eventually built a thesis on it, and that was because we had an open mind. And now, I think it's one of the most exciting deals we've ever done.”

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“A high bar in everything is the key. A high bar in talent. A high bar in acquisitions. A high bar in technology. That's what you need to make this work.”

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Why hasn’t the growth in AI translated into massive GDP gains yet? Long Lake CEO @alextaubman says it’s because deploying AI into the real economy, where a lot of businesses are still running on legacy systems, is actually way harder than people expected: “Dwarkesh was talking about this recently—you would have thought everybody would be using AI everywhere. The economy would look totally different. GDP would have doubled or tripled.” “Deploying technology innovations in the real economy is actually really hard. There's tons of legacy systems, tons of legacy data, workflows, change management, and so being able to deploy these innovations at scale in the economy is actually really hard.”

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Long Lake is making a contrarian bet: the doomers are wrong. AI is going to lead to more hiring, not less. @alextaubman explains why: “We really believe in this concept of AI abundance. If you look throughout history, most innovations that lead to big productivity gains are actually good for the economy, good for wages, good for consumers.” “We're actually adding heads because if your people are 50% more productive, and can handle 50% more clients with better customer service, so you're retaining customers better, and you're growing faster—the people are much more valuable. Do you want more of them or less of them?” “If you have a salesperson with AI that's now doing 3X quota, do you want to have one-third the salespeople? No. You obviously want as many of those people as you can have.” “This is all going to be very good for jobs and very good for US GDP and the economy.”

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Long Lake was founded 3 years ago. Now it’s buying this 111-year-old public company for $6.3 billion. American Express Global Business Travel serves close to half the Fortune 500 & has 40M customers in its database. “It was actually started in 1915 by American Express to help get their travelers' checks customers out of Europe during World War I.” “They manage travel for some of the most iconic customers and businesses in the world, close to half the Fortune 500, a huge percentage of the Global 2000, a lot of the US government and military, and governments around the world.” “There's millions of travelers per year that they're supporting. It's a big scale of impact for us to pursue the Long Lake mission—to deploy AI into the real economy.” “Travel's a huge multi-trillion dollar global sector growing better than GDP. We think that we can have a massive impact here.” — Long Lake CEO @alextaubman

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My conversation with @AlexTaubman, co-founder and CEO of Long Lake. Long Lake is 3 years old, has 30,000 employees, $4 billion in revenue, and just took Amex Travel private. Alex and his partners have spent the last three years building Long Lake with almost no public profile. They started in HOA management and expanded into five service lines. Their latest deal: $6.3 billion for American Express Global Business Travel. Long Lake buys great businesses and makes them better with AI. Their engineers sit alongside the people doing the work, understand what slows them down, and build tools that give them more time to serve customers. We talk about what he learned growing up in a family of entrepreneurs, why Long Lake built its own AI platform, what Henry Singleton and the Rales brothers taught him about compounding, and why the best partners make you more ambitious. Alex wants to spend the next 50 years on this. We talk about how far it could go. 0:00 The $6.3 billion Amex GBT deal 1:21 Bringing AI to the real economy 6:17 Why greater productivity can mean more jobs 11:29 A prepared mind and a tight acquisition filter 16:01 Nexus and the AI platform behind Long Lake 17:32 Put the engineers where the work happens 20:36 Why own the businesses instead of selling software? 22:28 Build tools people want to use 25:24 A high bar for talent, acquisitions and technology 28:03 What his grandfather taught him about removing friction 36:40 Learning capital allocation at Goldman Sachs and Oaktree 41:01 Buying founder-owned businesses with permanent capital 44:35 How the Long Lake team came together 47:26 The best partners make you more ambitious 49:28 More than $4 billion in projected revenue 53:32 Why going public could expand Long Lake’s ambition 54:23 Henry Singleton and staying flexible 55:57 John Malone and the businesses that will endure 57:57 Why Long Lake doesn’t plan to sell 1:00:13 Could Long Lake become a trillion-dollar company? Includes paid partnerships.

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Long Lake is 3 years old, has 30,000 employees, $4 billion in revenue, a shit ton in EBITDA and just took Amex Travel private. A new episode with @alextaubman on Long-Lake will be out tomorrow. Here’s a mashup of Alex talking about the $6 billion acquisition: “We acquired American Express Global Business Travel. It's an iconic franchise. It's a 111-year-old company with over a century of customer excellence.” “It was actually started in 1915 by American Express to help get their travelers' checks customers out of Europe during World War I.” “The opportunity to partner with them, take the company private, invest in growth, invest in technology, I think it's going to make the travel experience much more seamless.” “Long Lake is just here to be a deep long-term permanent capital partner, who's going to help you bring AI into the company, make your team members faster, better, smarter, make your customers happier.” “Amex GBT is an unbelievable iconic business with a reputation for gold-plated customer excellence. I think it's one of the most exciting deals we've ever done.” — Don’t miss the full episode with Alex tomorrow.

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Full episode is now on X:

Kith CEO @RonnieFieg was forced to buy back his own IP from an Italian “crook” after not properly locking down the Kith mark for apparel: “When I first opened the store, my attorney asked me if I wanted to register the IP for product.” “I was like, ‘Well, I'm not making any product.’” “4 years later, there's this fucking crook out of Italy that went and registered my mark, the same mark, in Italy for apparel, and I’d already become successful with apparel. I just didn't revisit buying the IP.” “I then had to buy my IP and negotiate with this crook to buy the IP back and own it globally. That was a very expensive lesson that I learned.”

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Nike’s CEO once asked Steve Jobs for advice. Steve told him, “Nike makes some of the best products in the world, but you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crap.” @RonnieFieg came to a similar realization while working at David Z, and decides to create Kith: “I saw an opportunity in being passionate about 100% of the things I was doing, not about 10–15% of the things I was doing.”

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How one customer changed @RonnieFieg’s life: “When I released my first shoe we only sold a few pairs. But one of pairs that sold was to an editor for the Wall Street Journal. He asked me a shit ton of questions about the shoe. I didn’t know he worked at the Wall Street Journal. The next day I get to work and there’s a line down the block and the shoes sell out instantly. And on the same day, the CEO of North America for Adidas was moving into his office across the street and saw the line and came over and asked: What’s going on over here? So I’m telling him what happened and he’s like you worked on the shoe? And I’m like yeah and I showed him the piece in the Wall Street Journal. And he says: When do you take your lunch break? So I meet him when I take lunch and he walks me over to the Adidas store. We walk into the store and he says: What would you want to work on here?”

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Kith CEO @RonnieFieg says social media algorithms have flattened taste: “Everyone now wants the same thing. You used to be forced to have your own opinion.” His influence came from riding across Queens, watching completely different cultures get on the train, and walking into stores before the internet had already told everyone what to like. “Every other stop would be a different culture hopping on the train.” “What I got to see became my world. That was my influence. I got to see so many different styles, people dressed in so many different ways, and that’s when the sense of individuality was at an all-time high.” “Before you were influenced by your algorithm, which now, a lot of people want the same things because it’s based off what they see.” “Back then, when you went shopping, you were forced to have an opinion because you wouldn’t have seen everything.” “Today, people will walk into a store and know about all the products before they walk in. They’ve already seen someone wearing it, a photo of it, a lookbook of it, a campaign of it.” “Back then you were just forced to have your own opinion.”

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My conversation with @RonnieFieg, founder, CEO and creative director of Kith. At 13, Ronnie turned down an envelope of cash at his bar mitzvah and asked for a job instead. He started the next day in a sneaker stockroom and spent the next 15 years learning every part of the business before launching Kith in 2011. Today, Kith puts out more than 5,000 styles a year across apparel, footwear, kids and accessories, and has lines outside its stores from New York to Seoul. It has no outside investors, doesn’t wholesale and doesn’t license. Until recently, Ronnie was still the fit model for the product. Ronnie describes himself as a world builder, and this conversation is the best explanation I’ve heard of what that means. 0:00 You can’t work backwards from money 4:43 “Keep the envelope. I want a job.” 10:25 Why the CEO is also the fit model 18:43 The childhood shoe that launched his career 20:52 The Wall Street Journal, a line down the block and a visit from Adidas 26:48 Get rid of the crap 31:09 What luxury should actually mean 32:40 Why Kith doesn’t wholesale or license 38:24 Building the opposite of an arrogant sneaker shop 40:39 The Italian crook who registered Kith’s trademark 52:02 How a $20 deli experiment became Kith Treats 55:11 Serve your customers, don’t chase new ones 59:35 Always give people more than they pay for 1:02:41 Seeing 15 years of work laid out on the floor 1:12:00 Growing up before the algorithm 1:25:46 How a padel obsession created Kith Ivy Includes paid partnerships.

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Ronnie Fieg. Kith. Tomorrow!

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The full episode is now available on X

How a final round interview wth Tony Xu (@t_xu) at DoorDash goes: "I'm going to give you 20 minutes and you can ask me any question that you want. But after the 20 minutes expires, I'm going to give you $20 that you can use to go and acquire 100 customers for us, and you have eight hours to do so. But here's also a plane ticket, in case you want to quit the interview now and just move on and find somewhere else to work. So much of what we were trying to test for early on is someone who's going to do something to go and collect information, as opposed to someone who's going to collect data, scrape information from the internet and do some magical analysis on it. What if none of that information existed? You have to go and do things in order to actually collect information."

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Tony gives me young Jeff Bezos vibes. Building something we can’t see yet. Full episode here: davidsenra.com/episode/tony-xu

“Jensen moves fast.” @JonathanRoss321 talks about the $20 billion deal with Nvidia: “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:

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.@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.”

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The full episode and transcript is available here. Dana has a lot of hard earned, practical wisdom: davidsenra.com/episode/dana-w…

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.”

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Full episode and transcript available here davidsenra.com/episode/eric-g…

Jimmy Iovine just gave me great advice: Build friendships with a sniper rifle, not a shotgun.

A picture of @DHH's desk goes viral every few months, and the number one comment he gets is that it can't be a real office because it’s too clean. His response: "If I have shit all over my desk, I'm not creating work, because my mind will just go to the shit." “It's a bit like that Marie Kondo thing where you go through simplifying your home and throwing out all this stuff. It actually creates free mental space.” “I need this pure cocoon.” “It's actually a form of procrastination, and I need to run out of obvious things to procrastinate on before I'll start the real work.”

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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.”

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“There's no playbook in entrepreneurship. You just have to think from first principles, understand the fundamentals, and f*cking just go.” “One of the best things about founders is they’re not ruined by corporate America or school. School ruins you. You have to follow procedures. You're not thinking outside the box. You're following a playbook.” “There's no playbook in entrepreneurship.”

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Peter Rahal. Medici. Out now. Available everywhere you get podcasts. @PeterRahal @medicibrands

Maniacs with something to prove will push your company forward: “The best people are some combination of inexperienced, and then some damage, some chip on shoulder.” “There are individuals in our company that you can't compete with. They're not giving up. They have something to prove. Those are the most powerful people to get that you want to organize around.” “The people driving the company are usually those maniacs that have a chip on their shoulder, they are high agency, and are more entrepreneurial.”

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This is something Rockefeller would have done: 1. Identify a critical dependency. 2. Acquire the only company that produces it. 3. Cut off the supply to your competitors. Force them out of business. 4. Recruit the founding team of your dead competitors to work for your company. This is how @PeterRahal did this: 1. Peter discovers a breakthrough ingredient. Epogee had developed EPG, a patented modified fat substitute that could provide the taste and mouthfeel of fat with fewer calories. 2. Peter’s company becomes overwhelmingly dependent on EPG. David Protein was buying roughly 90% of Epogee’s available supply. Because Epogee was the sole source, losing access could cripple Peter’s business. “We’d be dead if we lost this ingredient.” 3. Peter recognizes the dependency immediately. “This is a nasty dependency. This is going to end in litigation, extortion, or we’re going to buy them. All my attention was on this.” 4. Peter protects David before acquiring Epogee. He negotiates a strong supply agreement with protections including favorable pricing and priority over available inventory. (His competitors fail to do this) 5. David’s growth begins exceeding Epogee’s production capacity. David eventually needs about 150% of what Epogee can produce. 6. Epogee proposes that Peter take over the company. The two sides begin negotiating an acquisition. 7. Peter acquires Epogee. Instead of merely buying a critical ingredient, he now controls the company producing it. 8. Peter prioritizes his own demand. Peter’s competitors lacked contractual supply guarantees. With David consuming more than Epogee could produce, those companies lose access. Peter has no sympathy: “I don't have sympathy for stupidity. I don't have sympathy for incompetence. It was so obvious that if you're going to use an ingredient that has a single source, you better make sure you have a supply agreement. It's like fundamental. And their response was like, "Well, I didn't know that [buying the supplier] was an option." It's like, "What the fuck? What are you doing all day?" 9. This move generates an antitrust lawsuit. The claim was dismissed three times. 10. Some of the former founders of his dead competitors join Peter’s company and now run individual business units. Peter says “the most talented people in our company are former founders.” Watch the full episode. Peter is an old-school founder type: a combination of ruthless efficiency and hyper competence.

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

Peter: If we lose our entrepreneurial values I'm f*cking leaving. David: Why did you just grit your teeth? Peter: Because it makes me angry. I hate big, fat, stupid things and I don't want to be a big, fat, stupid company.

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Why did this protein bar company start selling frozen fish? “Product as marketing.” When David Protein launched, they made a comparison chart showing how many calories different foods came from protein. Their bars were #1 in every category. “Any time I see a chart where it's all number one, I'm like, ‘It's bullshit.’” So they went looking for something with a better protein-to-calorie ratio. The only thing they could find was boiled cod. So they put boiled cod at #1 and David at #2. Halfway through year one, @PeterRahal decided to do something really bold: actually start selling the cod. “It was actually a very intelligent thing because it centered the conversation around protein to calorie ratio… $55 frozen cod online, no one really wants that. We didn't have product market fit, but it functioned as a really great communication tool.” “We call it ‘product as marketing.’ I'm not giving up on it. We're going to keep going. We're going to keep going on cod until we get product market fit.” “It's funny because if you look at our website, it's—protein bars, bronze and gold, pints of frozen ice cream, ready-to-drink beverages, and then there's fucking fish.”

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My notes from this episode: 1. Chasing men for allocation is something I didn’t want to do. 2. Investing is too hands off for me. 3. I’m used to being in knife fights. 4. My divorce was caused by hubris. I moved too fast. I thought it was going to be easy. 5. I just assumed every entrepreneur had the same tenacity as me. And then I quickly realized, I'm probably actually a miserable investor because I'm handcuffed sitting in the back seat while someone else is driving and they don't know where they're going. And that's a torturous position to someone who knows where to go. 6. I just assumed that anyone who's getting into entrepreneurship was willing to die before their company fails. That they are willing to sacrifice comfort to win. They want to win. And then I realized no, that's actually not what a lot of people do or prioritize. 7. If the investor is the one giving criticisms to the company, that's a problem. The CEO should be the most critical. If the investor is the one spotting problems or saying go faster, that's not a good sign. 8. I was frustrated [after selling my company]. I needed to get back in the game. 9. If I start a company I'm fucking all in. And that's a really scary thing, actually, because then my friends go away, my health goes, all this stuff happens to me. 10. My leadership style is just all in. Burn the bridges. I can't go into something half-assed, ever. What I commit to is very serious. 11. If I die, on my gravestone, it might say, "Protein bar guy." And I'm comfortable with that. 12. I've been in the food business since I was like 12. I have a deep intrinsic knowledge of it. 13. If the leader of the company has to pick up the phone to fix the product, they're fucked. The leader has to be able to deeply understand the product and be able to fix it. 14. I want to build the most important food company in the 21st century. 15. If you have a crystal clear identity for a brand and its product offering, its position, the marketing actually becomes really easy. You just constantly hammer those points over and over again. 16. If you look at the best brands, they're all old. And so time's a factor that's really, really important and the consistency of that. 17. I love beauty, I love intelligence, and I love suffering and discipline. 18. I always choose the hard path. 19. I think there's something spiritual about suffering that I find very gratifying once you get through it. 20. What's nice about building a company is it is emotional suffering. It's a lot of tough conversations. What I've learned early on is if you face those things, there's growth on the other side of it. 21. The more you suffer, the stronger you get and the more growth you experience. 22. When I see suffering, lean into it. 23. Travis Kalanick said "The life sof an entrepreneur is I can take more pain than this guy, and I'll prove it to you." Do you agree with that? Yes. It’s fun. I love it. 24. I think enduring suffering makes you a better man. 25. I have a lot of resentment and anger in my life, and if I do not harness that in a certain way, I become a bad person. I start to not be happy. And so physical exertion, exercise, company building, is a way for me to channel all this spite and anger in a way that's really productive. 26. When I was fake working as an investor, I was deeply unhappy because I wasn't able to channel that. I was like, "I'm on the sideline, and I'm not a fucking cheerleader." 27. When I was a kid I was labeled stupid because of my dyslexia. 28. It’s actually why I am so disagreeable with any sort of authority or contrarian by nature, because my survival strategy as a child was to say, "All you teachers are wrong. This whole system is broken. Fuck off." 29. We're the fastest growing food company in history. 30. A company is just a group of people aligned towards a mission. 31. Who you select into the organization is the most important thing. 32. I don't want a cover your ass culture where people are like, "I have this data, therefore my decision's good." You look at people from big corporate America who come in and then they will generate a bunch of data to cover their ass if the experiment goes wrong. 33. Fearing of failure is the opposite of entrepreneurship. 34. [When you recruit from big companies] You have to baptize them when they come in. You just have to teach them new beliefs, new values. 35. [On recruiting former founders] They have agency, they have courage, they have humility. And they're not ruined by corporate America or school. 36. There's no playbook in entrepreneurship. You just have to think from first principles, understand the fundamentals, and fucking just go. 37. The best people in our company have some damage, some chip on shoulder. There are individuals in our company that you can't compete with them. They're not giving up. They have something to prove. They got something fucked up in their childhood. There's one kid in our team, like he's going to die before he fails. And those are the most powerful people who you want to organize around. 38. I don't have sympathy for stupidity. I don't have sympathy for incompetence. It was so obvious that if you're going to use an ingredient that has a single source, you better make sure you have a supply agreement. It's like fundamental. And their response was like, "Well, I didn't know that [buying the supplier] was an option." It's like, "What the fuck? What are you doing all day?" 39. I've seen founders prioritize enterprise valuation early, and it's just fucking gross. Because it's not about that. It's about the right people and focusing on the mission. 40. Running a business is like a river. As long as it's flowing, it’s great. But if there's something blocking that flow, you need to fucking fix it. If something's in the way, I ruminate on it to the point where I can't sleep. I have to fix it so I can sleep. 41. Performance equals freedom. 42. Speed and agility is the main objective. 43. I hate big, fat, stupid things, and I don't want to be a big, fat, stupid company. 44. I think the best design is the simplest design. 45. I love the fight, so I seek it.

Founder of Rxbar and David Protein @PeterRahal explains how to build a lasting brand: “The most important factor in building a brand is it just takes time.” “The timepiece is critical. You have to be doing that over time.” “David's values are around intelligence, beauty, and discipline, and that's rooted in the story of Michelangelo's masterpiece, the sculpture of David. Those values are rooted in the symbolism of that masterpiece, and then the tool, the chisel, which is like this crude nail, but the meaning of a chisel is intelligence, discipline, and if you apply those things, you get a masterpiece, something beautiful.” “If you have a crystal clear identity for a brand and its product offering and its position, the marketing actually becomes really easy. You just constantly hammer those points over and over, over again.”

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David Protein CEO @PeterRahal says pain and suffering makes you a better man: “I always choose the hard path.” “When I exercise, I choose the most painful exercises.” “When I take my son out, I refuse to take a stroller. I just always carry him.” “The more you suffer, the stronger you get and the more growth you experience.”

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“The most talented people in our company are former founders.” @PeterRahal on why he specifically targets former founders: “Founders have have agency. They have courage. They have humility. Founders haven’t been ruined by corporate America or school.” “School ruins people because it teaches them to follow a playbook. There's no playbook in entrepreneurship. You just have to think from first principles, understand the fundamentals, and just fucking go.” The way Peter recruits founders: “I would position the company as a platform for you to go do your thing. You could do your thing with amazing technology. You can do your thing with resources. And you don't have to deal with the bullshit of raising money and all the bureaucracy that comes with the different stakeholders.”

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.@PeterRahal on how rare it is to be all in: “I just assumed that anyone who's getting into entrepreneurship was willing to die before their company fails. That they are willing to sacrifice comfort to win. That they want to win. And then I realized no, that's actually not what a lot of people do or prioritize.”

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Elon’s #1 priority is to find the bottleneck and attack it relentlessly. @PeterRahal’s says a good way to think about that idea is picturing your business as a river: “Running a business is like a river. As long as it's flowing, great. But if there's something blocking that flow, you need to f*cking fix it.” “If something's in the way, I ruminate on it to the point where I can't sleep. I have to fix it so I can sleep.”

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“The best people in our company have some damage, some chip on their shoulder. There are individuals in our company that you can't compete with. They're not giving up. They have something to prove. They got something f*cked up in their childhood. There's one kid in our team, he's going to die before he fails. And those are the most powerful people who you want to organize around.” @PeterRahal on recruiting people who have something to prove:

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My conversation with @PeterRahal, one of the best CPG founders on the planet. 0:00 Life after selling RXBAR for $600 million 7:29 Going all in and burning the boats 11:48 Building the most important food company of the 21st century 13:49 How a brand is like a human being 21:07 Why Peter always chooses the hard path 28:17 From zero to $300 million in two years 29:59 Why Peter started selling frozen cod 32:51 The organization is the product 36:56 Why he recruits former founders 41:15 Buying his supplier and victimizing his competitors 51:56 How Neil Mehta and Greenoaks earned a spot on the cap table 55:47 How Peter fundraises 1:00:31 Running a business is like a river 1:04:16 Why the company is named Medici 1:06:28 Bureaucracy is not inevitable 1:11:48 Why Peter has 25 direct reports 1:16:06 Peter's principle of reactionary leadership support 1:17:45 On divine discontent and loving the fight Includes paid partnerships.

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“I just assumed that anyone who got into entrepreneurship was willing to die before their company fails.” Peter Rahal. David. Tomorrow!

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Travis Kalanick on failure: “You will never be truly world-class if you have a fear of failure.” “A lot of early founders have a fear of failure. But what that does is it creates blockage around making progress because you're just bogged down. The psyche around fear of failure fucks with your ability to get there.” “It will get you places, but it won't get you all the way.”

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.@DHH on @tobi nerd mogging him on AI: “Tobi saw much further ahead. His eyes were much further up.” “I'm actually a little frustrated that I did not have the same conviction as Tobi did as early as he did.” “He wrote a memo to the company internally in '23 or early '24, way before agents, going, ‘I've seen it. This is the big switch. This is what we've been waiting for. This is why I'm here as a CEO to identify those kinds of discontinuations in the trend line, and we need to be a very different company to be able to position ourselves for that and take advantage of that.’” “So, Tobi nerd sniped me into leveling up and diving deeper and setting things up and giving it an extra try.”

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Every company says they have Forward-Deployed Engineers now. ElevenLabs CEO and former Palantir Deployment Strategist @mati gives one of the best explanations of what an FDE is—and says companies are missing the key piece of what actually makes FDEs valuable: “In our case, FDEs are part of the product team. They are not part of the go-to-market team. They are deeply embedded in understanding what the roadmap of the product is.” “You want all the FDEs to actually solve the customer problem and stretch your product in that direction. But the second thing you want them to do is bring any of that knowledge back to the product, so the product becomes better for the next generation of companies building on top of it. I feel like the second part is frequently missed.” “The beauty of that is—everybody benefits because you work with one customer, learn, and you bring that into the product experience. Both of those customers benefited from having their product optimized for better work.” “The domain expertise they have is still theirs. They can win based on their domain expertise. But the product experience of how you build based on that domain expertise can be abstracted, and can be reusable.”

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When @mickymalka was 24 years old, he met Charlie Munger. He owned just 1 share of Berkshire, but Charlie told him he was the wealthiest person in the room: "Charlie looks at me and says, 'You must be very wealthy to be here! I said, 'Actually, no, I only own one share?' He says, 'You don't get it. You are the wealthiest guy in the room. You have the power of time. All of us here are in our last chapter. You're just starting your time. You will compound for the next 70 years of your life. So never forget the rule I'm about to tell you: you only need to get rich once.' And then he says, 'And now I'm going to eat, and just sat down and ate."

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The full episode is excellent. A lot of timeless insights from Micky here: davidsenra.com/episode/micky-…

Sam Altman on the best advice Peter Thiel ever gave him: “ChatGPT 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, 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.’” “So we went super hard on ChatGPT and it was great.”

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Full episode and transcript is available here: davidsenra.com/episode/sam-al…

“Uniquely focused, ruthless, highly rational and effective. A 10 out of 10 in all those areas” Luca Ferrari (CEO of Bending Spoons) describing Adam Foroughi (founder of Applovin)

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Luca Ferrari’s Dream Team style of management: Great teams should have as few rules as possible. "If you have a mediocre talent then the appeal of process and procedures becomes greater because you need to guide them more. You can't count on people to problem solve autonomously.” “You can't count on them coming to work with fire in their belly.” “If you are lucky enough to have a very strong team, then you want to have as few rules as possible. You want give people massive leeway to express and develop their talent.”’ “This makes them feel trusted and they will bring the best of themselves to work.” “It's similar with sports. If you were coaching the Team USA Dream Team with Jordan and Barkley, you would do it a certain way that would be different than the way you would optimally coach a team of modest talents.” “It's a lot easier to win with Jordan.” “You're not gonna tell your more modest talents, 'Okay, go and figure it out.' You will try to give them a system that's a lot more guiding. So we try to approximate as much as possible to be like the Dream Team."

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Here’s my texts from the lunch with Luca Ferrari that I mention on this episode. All of these are Luca’s ideas on building Bending Spoons:

Luca Ferrari says Bending Spoons has never been outbid: “I don't remember a single case, at least not in the last five years, in which we put forth an offer and then the seller sold to someone else.” “We always say, ‘Do you want to shop it around?’ Often people try to look for exclusives. They're like, ‘This is my offer, but unless I get exclusivity within five days, the offer is gone.’ Because they know that their best chance is to win on timing. They know the offer is not that great.” “In our case, we almost always say, ‘If you want to, we encourage you to go and shop it around.’ Because once you convince yourself that this is the best offer, it'll be easier for us too. We'll sign faster, and we'll close more easily.”

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Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari says too many companies chase vanity metrics while ignoring what actually matters: cash. “For instance, if you are running a business where most of the revenue comes from subscriptions, and you know that the optimal price is a higher price, pretty much with any product in a free market, if you raise prices, you're going to have fewer customers. Which can be fine. Maybe you have 30% fewer customers, but each ultimately contributes twice as much—you're better off. However, often the markets will punish you dramatically if you do that because when they see that the number of subscribers has gone down, even if revenue has gone up, they will not like it.” “If you're a management team, in that particular context, you will have to heed the opinion or expectations of the market, and you will not do that pricing change even if you know that it's going to be positive.” “However, if a business is run within the broader Bending Spoons, where none of the businesses ends with itself, but it's a piece of a broader puzzle, a source of cash for further deployment and growth, then it's much easier to make those otherwise unpopular decisions.”

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“We're not big on founders.” “I know this is maybe ironic to say given your podcast.” “We try to eliminate the idea of a founder from this company as much as possible. We think it distracts people from the company. The company is the center and whether you're a founder or you joined a little bit later, all that matters is your contribution, your trajectory.” — Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari

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I love this idea from Bending Spoons founder Luca Ferrari: Find someone young and talented and “saturate their capacity.” “Everybody at the company should have way more on their plate than feels even remotely comfortable.” “Let's say you have 10 possible tasks, each with a certain ROI attached. If I add an 11th, assuming you select well, it's impossible that adding an 11th task will lower the ROI of what you choose to do because you still have the other 10.” “If this is a lower ROI than the others, you're going to do the others. But it's possible that it happens to be the highest ROI of all, and so you end up doing something more valuable.” “The more work you give people, the better the opportunity for them to create value.” “When you give people a lot more work than feels comfortable, you're really forcing them to come to terms with the immensity of the possible.”

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Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari believes procrastination can actually be a good thing: “We like to make decisions as late as possible.” ”Procrastination is awesome if it doesn't come from laziness, because if you postpone decisions, you often have more information when you actually get to make them.”

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“People who compare Bending Spoons to private equity have a simplistic, superficial view of the world.” 3 main differences between Bending Spoons and private equity: 1. They buy to hold: “We have never sold a material business. We buy to hold and operate forever.” 2. They deeply transform the businesses they acquire, “sometimes beyond recognition.” 3. They integrate them under a shared platform and operating system, with a core team of “Spooners” handling R&D, marketing, and operations. “People who compare Bending Spoons to private equity have a simplistic, superficial view of the world.” “None of this bears any resemblance to what private equity does.” “Those are funds that buy to sell after, say, 5 years. They intervene maybe on costs or price, but I've never seen PE reinvent a product or rebuild the org, or rebuild the technological infrastructure. And they generally don't integrate the businesses together under a shared platform because they don't have a platform, and even if they did, they need to sell them piecemeal. So if you integrate them, you can't sell them, or at least it would be much more difficult to sell them.”

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Why Bending Spoons eliminated all job titles: “At some point, we were looking for ways to streamline and simplify, and someone said, ‘Why do we even have titles? What's the benefit of titles?’” “Let's not be arrogant. There's probably some benefit. What's that benefit? We ultimately determined that the benefit was that people needed titles for bragging rights.” “So we just got rid of titles and told people, ‘You can pick your title for your CV, LinkedIn, whatever. We don't need to know. We don't want to know. We don't need to approve it. We don't want to see it. Just don't embarrass us." “If you're a new hire, don't say you're the CTO because then people will question our integrity as a company. But as long as it's broadly reasonable, we're good. We have never reintroduced them again. We don't have any titles.” “We never looked back. We probably saved easily hundreds if not thousands of person-hours in terms of defining different terms and having emotionally draining discussions with people. Never had a problem, not a single instance of someone complaining that we didn't formally assign to them a title ever out of, at this point, many hundreds, actually multiple thousands of people.”

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“If you want to try to be the best of the best, you need to take some risks and rethink things.” "If you copy what most people are doing you're guaranteed to be mediocre.” Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari says being geographically isolated from most startup hubs, helped them to think differently: “We figured, let's try to experiment, invent, and think from first principles. We will make more mistakes. It will take longer than if we copied some of the tried and tested approaches, but we should be able to find at least a few insights, a few new ways that will set us apart.” “Being more isolated geographically has probably played to our advantage in that regard. We weren't under the influence of the mantras that everybody in the big startup hubs over time were preaching."

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The best founders in the world like @elonmusk or @tobi “go ultra-hardcore on deletion and simplification.” Luca Ferrari says Bending Spoons employs this idea of “Relentless Simplification” across their businesses: “Humans have a tendency to add complexity and do things that destroy value.” “If you leave an organization, almost any environment unattended, and you don't provide guidance in this regard, it will tend to become more complicated. People will add parts. It could be expanding a team or adding a step to a process, or adding an entire new process. If it's a product, adding a feature to the product. New rules. It applies to almost any human endeavor.” “People tend to add pieces, they very rarely remove pieces.” “If you don't make a conscious effort to achieve simplicity, and avoid this increasing value-destroying complexity, that's how we got to our modern society with all the bureaucracy and complicated regulation.” “We have this principle whereby we ask everyone who works here, every time someone is suggesting that we should be adding complexity, the burden of proof is on those making that suggestion. The people who support the thesis that we shouldn't be adding complexity don't need to prove it. They just have to raise a flag and say, ‘I don't think we should.’ The burden of proof is on those who want to add complexity.” “The other part of relentless simplification is that we want people to be on the lookout for existing complexity and suggest that we should remove it.”

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My conversation with Luca Ferrari, co-founder of Bending Spoons. 0:00 Fanatical founders building enduring companies 1:23 Luca on building the best company there ever was 4:22 The origins of Bending Spoons 5:47 Talent and why experience is overrated 15:05 Turning hiring into a science 23:30 Why Bending Spoons doesn't use bonuses 29:26 Why everyone in the company has the same job 42:41 On finding great potential and saturating their capacity 49:50 Insisting on a culture of extreme ownership 59:28 Luca's principle of relentless simplification 1:05:15 Why Bending Spoons doesn't use job titles 1:10:27 The proprietary operating system behind Bending Spoons 1:17:07 Why Bending Spoons isn't private equity 1:19:32 How Bending Spoons acquired & transformed Evernote 1:28:01 How Bending Spoons uses AI 1:40:42 How Bending Spoons thinks about capital allocation 1:43:50 Why procrastination without laziness is good 1:46:46 Operational excellence is not optional 1:49:07 How Bending Spoons negotiates acquisitions 1:54:47 Logic over numbers Includes paid partnerships.

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