BusinessFounders Podcast
Kenn Ricci, chairman of Flexjet, details his journey from purchasing a $27,500 charter operation to building a multibillion-dollar private aviation leader. He discusses navigating early fractional jet financing via Warr…
- Kenn Ricci built Flexjet into a multibillion-dollar private aviation company after starting with a $27,500 charter operation, yet spent years battling guilt that reading balance s… Read →
- Richard Santulli created fractional jet ownership at NetJets after spotting an efficiency gap: corporate planes fly 300 hours a year, but they are built to fly 1,200. Read →
- Kenn Ricci started his family limited partnership in 1990, five years before his first child was born in 1995, specifically to gift shares early rather than holding assets until d… Read →
BusinessFounders Podcast
Nik Storonsky, co-founder and CEO of Revolut, joins David Senra to discuss his hyper-competitive mentality and ambition to build the number one bank in 100 countries. He explains how treating Revolut like a machine, fun…
- During Revolut's first five years, Nik Storonsky hired more than 50 experienced executives; only two lasted past twelve months. Read →
- Revolut relied entirely on organic growth for seven years before building an in-house paid acquisition machine. Read →
- Nik Storonsky rejects founder intuition for product development because his own guesses failed repeatedly during Revolut's early years. Read →
BusinessFounders Podcast
Kurt MacAlpine explains how he transformed Canadian asset manager CI Financial into Corient, a global ultra-high-net-worth wealth manager overseeing $525 billion in client assets. He outlines how he replaced the industr…
- Kurt MacAlpine grew Corient to $525 billion in client assets by pulling CI Financial off public exchanges with Mubadala Capital and killing the decentralized roll-up model. Read →
- Kurt MacAlpine transformed Canadian asset manager CI Financial into Corient, scaling it to oversee $525 billion in client assets. Read →
- Kurt MacAlpine took over CI Financial at age 39, recognizing that relying on Canadian mutual funds left the business vulnerable to industry headwinds. Read →
BusinessFounders Podcast
David Senra interviews Ben Wilson, host of the 'How to Take Over the World' podcast, exploring the common psychological traits, habits, and strategies uniting history's greatest leaders, conquerors, and creators. They e…
- Aristotle defined zeal as a specific type of pain felt when watching someone of similar nature achieve things you are capable of but have not yet matched. Read →
- When Ben Wilson typed his symptoms into Claude, the model told him not to schedule a standard appointment and directed him straight to the emergency room. Read →
- Spotify founder Daniel Ek pointed out that David Senra is effortless to back because he is simple to understand: "You're very easy to understand, so therefore you're very easy to… Read →
BusinessFounders Podcast
Alexandr Wang, Chief AI Officer at Meta and co-founder of Scale AI, joins David Senra to discuss the development and rapid rise of Meta's consumer AI agent, Muse. Wang shares how Mark Zuckerberg recruited him following…
- Alexandr Wang structured Meta Super Intelligence Labs so that more than 200 technical researchers report directly to him. Read →
- Meta skipped corporate launch ads for consumer AI agent Muse, relying instead on seven months of engineering polish paired with Alexandr Wang posting raw memes directly to X. Read →
- Mark Zuckerberg called Alexandr Wang after Llama 4 stalled internally, opening the conversation with a simple question: "What do you think we should be doing?" Read →
BusinessFounders Podcast
Ari Emanuel discusses the high-stakes deals that built his entertainment empire, including the $4.2 billion acquisition of the UFC, the Endeavor-William Morris merger, and buying IMG. He also reflects on operating throu…
- Ari Emanuel and Silver Lake partner Egon Durban acquired the UFC for $4.2 billion, ignoring critics who labeled it the most expensive sports transaction ever. Read →
- When Ari Emanuel froze over merging Endeavor with William Morris, David Geffen gave him six words of advice: "get in traffic and get hit." Read →
- When competing against Peter Chernin's $1.9 billion bid for IMG, Silver Lake co-CEO Egon Durban pushed Ari Emanuel to bid $2.3 to $2.4 billion immediately to end the auction. Read →
BusinessFounders Podcast
Alexander Taubman, co-founder and CEO of Long Lake, joins David Senra to explain how his firm acquires established real-economy service businesses and applies proprietary AI infrastructure to accelerate growth. Taubman…
- Alexander Taubman led Long Lake's $6.3 billion acquisition of American Express Global Business Travel to deploy AI where legacy systems create operational bottlenecks. Read →
- Long Lake built Nexus as a model-agnostic AI platform where 70 to 80 percent of the core infrastructure is shared across every vertical. Read →
- Alexander Taubman and Long Lake bypass the standard SaaS model, choosing instead to acquire legacy businesses like their $6.3 billion acquisition of American Express Global Busine… Read →
BusinessFounders Podcast
Jeremy Stern, editor-in-chief of Colossus, joins David Senra to discuss the craft and psychology behind his long-form profiles of tech and business leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Scott Wu, and Josh K…
- Josh Kushner visited music producer Rick Rubin during a winning streak with Thrive Capital to ask one question: "What do I do if I lose the magic?" Read →
- Jeremy Stern focuses on prose craft and narrative weight rather than business tactics when profiling leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Scott Wu, and Josh Kushner. Read →
- Mark Zuckerberg still recites lines from Virgil's Aeneid learned in high school Latin, using ancient Rome to frame his corporate strategy. Read →
BusinessFounders Podcast
Ronnie Fieg, founder, CEO, and creative director of Kith, details his journey from working in a Queens stockroom at age 13 to building a globally recognized lifestyle empire. He discusses why Kith refuses to wholesale o…
- Kith Treats started after a failed concept for French white chocolate bread collapsed at a deli, prompting Fieg to mix cereal and ice cream instead. Read →
- Fieg enforces a strict 50/50 revenue cap between digital and physical sales, triggering new store openings whenever web sales exceed the threshold. Read →
- Ronnie Fieg refuses both wholesale and licensing deals for Kith, rejecting the standard playbook of mass retail distribution. Read →
BusinessFounders Podcast
Luca Ferrari, co-founder of Bending Spoons, explains his unorthodox approach to building an enduring software powerhouse through radical operational excellence, centralized hiring, and proprietary technology. He shares…
- Bending Spoons does not operate as a private equity fund; they acquire software assets with durable brand equity to hold and operate forever rather than flipping them on a five-ye… Read →
- Bending Spoons built an internal operating system of over 50 custom tools over ten years to automate AB testing, user lifetime value (LTV) prediction, and billing across its entir… Read →
- Bending Spoons acquires software assets like Evernote by making a single, firm, non-negotiable offer rather than engaging in protracted price haggling. Read →
BusinessFounders Podcast
ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski discusses the founding and rapid growth of ElevenLabs, detailing how childhood frustration with Polish movie dubbing inspired the creation of frontier speech AI. He shares how his…
- Early ElevenLabs conversational agents flopped because their speech was unnaturally articulate; adding human disfluencies like pauses, "ums," and "uhs" caused user performance and… Read →
- Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski started ElevenLabs in 2021 to fix foreign movie dubbing, motivated by Poland's single-voice narration style. Read →
- ElevenLabs restricts pure research strictly to audio architecture, relying on outside LLMs and third-party tools for intelligence and knowledge retrieval. Read →
BusinessTBPN
This episode delved into Midjourney's surprising expansion into medical imaging with an advanced body scanner, the intensified AI talent wars seeing key researchers and policy experts move to OpenAI, and a cultural crit…
- Renee Haas, CEO of ARM Holdings, describes AI as a "monster" with "unlimited" appetite for compute and memory, fueling unprecedented demand across the semiconductor industry. Read →
- Anti-Fund, led by Jake Paul and Jeff Woo, recently closed a $100 million fund to pursue a distinctive barbell investment approach. Read →
- Midjourney, the AI art company, has expanded into healthcare with "Midjourney Medical," developing advanced full-body scanners funded by its profitable, bootstrapped AI art busine… Read →
BusinessFounders Podcast
David Senra interviews Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke about his unique approach to company building over 21 years. They discuss Lütke's philosophy of treating companies as engineering projects, the importance of differentiation…
- Books provide "cheat codes" for real life, allowing rapid access to accumulated knowledge from others' careers. Read →
- View other companies as rivals for inspiration, not competitors for mimicry. Read →
- Tobi Lütke views companies as complex technologies, applying engineering principles to organizational design. Read →