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Founders

Founders

By: David Senra
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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. This quote explains why: "There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, new ways to manage etc. They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book. For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize. You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before and you learn every time." —Marc Andreessen© David Senra Economics Leadership Management & Leadership World
Episodes
  • #408 How to Make a Few MORE Billion Dollars: Brad Jacobs

    #408 How to Make a Few MORE Billion Dollars: Brad Jacobs
    Dec 29 2025
    In 2024 Brad Jacobs wrote the book How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. In the book Brad explains how he built 8 separate billion dollar companies and other lessons from his 40+ year career as an elite entrepreneur. In the two years since Brad has made a few MORE billion dollars and so the sequel to his first book is: How to Make a Few MORE Billion Dollars. In this episode I share some of Brad's ideas on raising tons of money (Brad has raised over $50 billion), mastering his integration playbook, ideas for organizational integration, org chart design, and how Brad keeps his mind centered and in a positive place to handle the inevitable ups and downs of building great companies. Episode sponsors: ⁠ Ramp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud ⁠⁠⁠by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money.⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ramp.com Automate compliance, security, and trust with Vanta.⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Vanta helps you win trust, close deals, and stay secure—faster and with less effort⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠Find out how increased security leads to more customers by going to Vanta⁠⁠⁠. Tell them David from Founders sent you and you'll get $1000 off. https://vanta.com/founders⁠⁠⁠ Collateral⁠⁠ transforms your complex ideas into compelling narratives. Collateral crafts institutional grade marketing collateral for private equity, private credit, real estate, venture capital, family offices, hedge funds, oil & gas companies, and all kinds of corporations. Storytelling is one of the highest forms of leverage and you should invest heavily in it. You can do that by going to ⁠⁠https://collateral.com
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    43 mins
  • The Life of Jesus

    The Life of Jesus
    Dec 25 2025
    The Life of Jesus as told in the book Jesus: A Biography of a Believer by Paul Johnson. This episode was originally published on Christmas Eve 2023.
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    35 mins
  • #407 Bruce Springsteen Repairs the Hole in Himself

    #407 Bruce Springsteen Repairs the Hole in Himself
    Dec 14 2025
    A viciously unhappy childhood causes Bruce Springsteen to retreat into work in an extreme way as he searches for success (and control). He channels his pain into focus and drive and gets everything he thought he wanted. He didn’t yet know he was lying to himself. He will find that out soon. He falls into a deep depression. One that almost leads to s*icide. With the help of his true friend Jon Landau he seeks professional help. This help helps immediately. The lie he was telling himself was that work was the most important thing in his life. What he really wanted, was what he was incapable of doing: forming a lasting and loving relationship with a woman. For that he realizes he can’t run. For that he realizes he has to stay. That thought terrifies him and is what caused him to seek help. He meets a truly singular woman and for the first time in his life he's able to have a healthy relationship with someone he loves. This realization comes almost 400 pages into Bruce’s incredible autobiography (one of the best I’ve ever read) and it is shocking. I originally thought I was making an episode about Bruce Springsteen’s extreme work ethic (one example: He wrote this book out by hand, multiple times, over 7 years. It’s almost 600 pages. He’s like this with everything btw.) But as I read, and reread this book over the last 6 months I realized that is not the most important part of the story. The work Bruce had to do to fix his mind is the heart and soul of the book. The work he did with Dr. Wayne Myers over 25 years is what allowed him to have a life. Not just a job. A life. As Bruce says after coming through the other side of this: “Work is work . . . but life . . . is life . . . and life trumps art . . . always.” This is a very unusual episode of Founders. I hope you enjoy it. If you want to skip to the part where he starts dealing with the struggles going on in his mind that starts 46 minutes in. Episode sponsors: ⁠ Ramp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud ⁠⁠⁠by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money.⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ Automate compliance, security, and trust with Vanta.⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Vanta helps you win trust, close deals, and stay secure—faster and with less effort⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠Find out how increased security leads to more customers by going to Vanta⁠⁠⁠. Tell them David from Founders sent you and you'll get $1000 off. ⁠⁠⁠https://www.vanta.com/founders⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ Collateral⁠⁠ transforms your complex ideas into compelling narratives. Collateral crafts institutional grade marketing collateral for private equity, private credit, real estate, venture capital, family offices, hedge funds, oil & gas companies, and all kinds of corporations. Storytelling is one of the highest forms of leverage and you should invest heavily in it. You can do that by going to ⁠⁠https://collateral.com
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    1 hr and 13 mins
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