David Senra
@FoundersPodcast
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Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work.
Joined January 2016
Why Napoleon spent so much time learning from history:
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Steve Jobs was the single largest individual shareholder in Disney and it all started with this $5 million check. The year was 1986 and Steve Jobs was in exile from Apple. The company that would one day become Pixar was called Graphics Group. Graphics Group was owned by Star
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Charlie Munger: . Don’t be surprised when you lose to people like this
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Jony Ive on what Steve Jobs taught him about focus: . “This sounds really simplistic but it still shocks me how few people actually practice this. It’s a struggle to practice this. Steve was the most remarkably focused person I ever met in my life. Focus is not something
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My notes from Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger turned into maxims:. 1. Find a simple idea and take it seriously. 2. Good ideas are rare. When you find one bet heavily. 3. Humans have been writing down their best ideas for 5,000 years. Read them.
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Charlie Munger: . Don’t be surprised when you lose to people like this
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Warren Buffett on interest rates: . “They power everything in the economic universe.”
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Steve Jobs on money: . “I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I.
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One of the best ideas I learned from Kobe Bryant: . “Don’t copy the what. Copy the how” . Kobe would study greatness in any domain. Sports, music, business, art, whatever. This is why: . “No matter what discipline you are in, there’s a common denominator in how we approach our
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Lessons Steve Jobs wanted to pass on. Written right before he died. In his own words:. 1. ON BUILDING A REAL COMPANY:. I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash
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40 things Rockefeller wrote to his son: . 1. I never thought I would lose. 2. I do not meet competition. I destroy competitors. 3. Our destiny is determined by our actions and not by our origins. 4. Visionary businessmen are always good at finding opportunities in every
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A few months ago I had dinner with Charlie Munger. I spent over 3 hours with him. I got to see his library. I could ask him any question I wanted. At 99 he was still *ferociously* intelligent. The most important lesson I learned from him that night was: Go for great.
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What Michael Jordan and Kobe had in common according to their trainer:
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Advice from Steve Jobs: . “Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career.” . A career is a concept for how one is supposed to progress through stages during the training
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Charlie Munger tells a story about human nature: . "One of my favorite stories is about the little boy in Texas. The teacher asked the class, “If there are nine sheep in the pen and one jumps out, how many are left?”. And everybody got the answer right except this little boy,
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How Elon Musk thinks about the relationship between time and money:. “Elon would always be at work on Sunday, and we had some chats where he laid out his philosophy,” . said Kevin Brogan, an early SpaceX employee. “He would say that everything we did was a function of our burn
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Paul Graham on why ambitious people *need* to be around other ambitious people:
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My notes from Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger turned into maxims:. 1. Find a simple idea and take it seriously. 2. Good ideas are rare. When you find one bet heavily. 3. Humans have been writing down their best ideas for 5,000 years. Read them.
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Jeff Bezos’s counterintuitive idea:. “Communication is a sign of dysfunction.”
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Paul Graham on how to make yourself a big target for luck: . “When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So.
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How Kobe Bryant knew he was going to win a lot of championships:
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Steve Jobs on avoiding “the bozo explosion” . (companies fill up with second-rate talent as they grow). "For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw
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The founder of Glock just died . His life story is unbelievable: . 1. He started his company when he was 52 and ran it for over 40 years . 2. He survived an assassination attempt by beating his attacker unconscious —*with his bare hands* —when he was 70! . 3. He had zero
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Some of my favorite @naval ideas:. 1. If you don't know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. 2. Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom. 3. You will get rich.
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A new podcast on Christopher Nolan is available now. A few things I learned from reading about Nolan: . 1. Mute the world and then build your own. 2. Be a craftsman not an artist . 3. The only sensible way to live in the world is without rules . 4. Some ideas will take half a
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Paul Graham on why ambitious people *need* to be around other ambitious people:
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Jay Z on Michael Jordan: . “I absolutely love Michael Jordan. His career was a perfectly composed story about will. I went to his restaurant at his invitation to have dinner with him. It was an absolute dream conversation for me. The thing that distinguished Jordan wasn't
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The extreme mindset of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger:. 1. You are a winner, Arnold. I wrote this down and put it where I would see it. I repeated it a dozen times a day. 2. My drive was unusual, I talked differently than my friends; I was hungrier for success than anyone I knew.
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I study uncommon life stories for a living. James Dyson is uncommon amongst uncommon people. Episodes 200, 205, 300….
Dyson is a $3 billion a year company and is owned entirely by 1 person. Unreal.
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Jim Clark was the first person to found 3 separate billion dollar technology companies. At 38 he was a self described loser:
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Jay Z on realizing the pressure never ends: . “One night I ran into Bono and he told me he'd read an interview I'd done. The writer had asked me about the U2 record that was about to be released and I said something about the kind of pressure a group like that must be under
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Jim Clark was the first person to found 3 separate billion dollar technology companies. At 38 he was a self described loser:
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A new podcast on the founder of Red Bull is available now! . A few surprising things I learned from reading about Dietrich Mateschitz: . 1. He started the company when he was 41 years old. 2. He was making $500 to $800 million a year and his 49% stake is worth $20 to $30
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Kobe on mastering the basics: . “Kobe was going through an intense warm up before his scheduled workout started with his trainer. I sat down to watch. For the first 45 minutes I was actually shocked. For the first 45 minutes I watched the best player in the world do the most
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Jeff Bezos on decision making speed: . “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and.
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Marc Andreessen on why he has read hundreds of biographies:
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Peter Thiel: Distribution should be part of product design
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This book is a 100 page biography of the human species . A few lessons of history: . 1. In the end superior ability has its way. 2. History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all. 3.
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Paul Graham on why ambitious people need to be around other ambitious people:
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James Cameron: . Run towards difficult— there’s less competition
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Steve Jobs on avoiding “the bozo explosion” . (companies fill up with second-rate talent as they grow)
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My notes from Anna Wintour’s biography turned into maxims: . 1. Hire talented people as found, not as needed. 2. Taste is as rare as a unicorn. 3.Your employees should describe you as “easy to understand.” . 4.Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that
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My notes from Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist turned into maxims:. 1. Genius lies in ignoring the unimportant. 2. Intensity is the price of excellence. 3. If you’re not working on your best idea you’re doing it wrong. 4. Writing a check separates conviction
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A lesson Nassim Taleb learned from Ed Thorp:. Own your life. Don't give up control for more money. "Some additional wisdom I personally learned from Thorp: . Many successful speculators, after their first break in life, get involved in large-scale structures, with multiple
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Steve Jobs: It is the role of the CEO to force the issue
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Jay Z nails it 🎯 . “In life you gotta keep showing up. Just keep showing up. Until they give you all those accolades you feel you deserve. Until they call you chairman. Until they call you a genius. Until they call you the greatest of all time.”
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Steve Jobs was asked: . What talent do you think you consistently brought to Apple?. This was his answer: . "I think that I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with. You *must* find extraordinary people. The key observation is that, in
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James Cameron: . Run towards difficult— there’s less competition
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Paul Graham on how to make yourself a big target for luck: . “When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So.
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Peter Thiel on the best idea he had for managing people and why: . "The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee's one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on.
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Kobe Bryant was asked, “What is one quality that all the great ones have?” . Without hesitation Kobe said: . “It’s love. It’s not rocket science to me man. The quality that we all share is that we love what we do. We absolutely love it. And it’s a pure love. It’s not the
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Paul Graham's "How to Do Great Work" is excellent. 40 of my favorite ideas from the essay:. 1. Curiosity is the best guide. 2. Being prolific is underrated. 3. If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on.
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Peter Thiel on the most important lesson to learn from Steve Jobs:
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How Kobe Bryant knew he was going to win a lot of championships:
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Incredible Steve Jobs job interview story: . Steve Jobs had been hunting for a CFO of Pixar and reached out to Jordan, who agreed to meet Jobs. "I show up in my suit jacket and Jobs walks in in torn clothes, twenty minutes late.". Jobs only had two interview questions.
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My notes from the NEW Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger turned into maxims:. 1. Find a simple idea and take it seriously. 2. Good ideas are rare. When you find one bet heavily. 3. Humans have been writing down their best ideas for 5,000 years.
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My notes from Larry Gagosian (Billionaire Art Dealer) turned into maxims: . 1. The best way to raise the price of something is to say that you would never sell it. 2. The competitive drive of self-made billionaires does not go into remission once they've made a fortune. 3.
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Steve Jobs: Asking for help is a superpower. “I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help. I called up Bill Hewlett (founder of HP) when I was 12 years old. He answered the phone himself. I told him I wanted to build a frequency counter. I
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James Cameron: . Run toward difficult. There’s less competition.
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Michael Jordan on putting winning over feelings: . “I pulled people along when they didn't want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn't want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates who came after me didn't endure all the things that I
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Jeff Bezos: I believe the response to any crisis is to stay focused on the customer
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“I know what is within me, even if you can’t see it yet.” — Michael Jordan.
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Jeff Bezos: . Be like Howard Hughes. Insist on maintaining the highest standards.
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Peter Thiel: Distribution should be part of product design
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The public praises people for what they practice in private: . "Tiger often averaged more than ten hours per day on the practice range. Tiger was far more inclined to practice than to play a round of golf. Grohman: "Why don't you play the course more?" . Tiger: "I like
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Incredible to hear @lexfridman recommend listening to Founders in his excellent conversation with @JeffBezos !! . (First 10 seconds of this clip!). I love how Jeff points out the important role books and long form podcasts can play in increasing attention span and focus. Lex
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Larry Ellison: “Give me human will and the intense desire to win and it will trump talent every day of the week.”
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Jony Ive explains why Steve Jobs believed the iPhone had to come before the iPad: . "He had always been leaning toward making a tablet. But shortly after he returned from surgery, during one of their regular brainstorming walks around the Apple campus, . Steve told Jony Ive
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Paul Graham on why determination is more important than intelligence if you want to get rich:
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This little book is the company building philosophy of David Ogilvy broken down into bite-sized pieces. Buffett called Ogilvy a genius and this is a list of ideas Ogilvy wanted to pass on: . 1. Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has
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Jim Clark was the first person to found 3 separate billion dollar technology companies. At 38 he was a self described loser:
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