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David Senra

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

Founders

A curated collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews, and correspondence, Make Something Wonderful offers a window into how one of the world’s most creative entrepreneurs approached his life and work. In these pages, Steve shares his perspective on his childhood, on launching and being pushed out of Apple, on his time with Pixar and NeXT, and on his return to the company that started it all. Read the book for free courtesy of The Steve Jobs Archive. 

This episode was originally published April 17, 2023. 

Episode sponsors: 

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here.

#398 Steve Jobs In His Own Words (Make Something Wonderful)

Jiro Ono is the greatest living sushi chef. He was kicked out his house when he was 9. He started working in a restaurant so he wouldn't have to sleep under a bridge. He never stopped. Over his 75 year career he rose to the very top of his profession. People travel from all over the world to eat at his restaurant. The meal costs $400 per person and lasts 15 minutes. This episode is what I learned from reading the transcript of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi and is full of ideas you can use in your work. 

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 

Join my free email newsletter to⁠⁠⁠ get my top 10 highlights from every book⁠⁠⁠ https://davidsenra.com

#397 Jiro Ono: Simplicity Is The Ultimate Advantage

I've read hundreds of thousands of words about Enzo Ferrari. For this episode I distilled down his most important ideas into 1 hour. Ferrari was truly one of history's greatest obsessives.

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
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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
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Join my free email newsletter to⁠⁠⁠ get my top 10 highlights from every book⁠⁠⁠ https://davidsenra.com

Sources: 

The Terrible Joys of Enzo Ferrari by Winthrop Sargeant. Published in The New Yorker January 7th 1966. 

The Story of Ferrari by Stuart Codling 

Enzo Ferrari: Power, Politics and the Making of an Automobile Empire by Luca Dal Monte 

Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine by Brock Yates

Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans by A.J. Baime

Selected highlights: 

1. He who travels fast, carries little.

2. All masterpieces bespeaks the character of its creator

3. "When the driver steps on the gas I want him to shit his pants."

4. It is obvious that a Ferrari is the product of a sort of automotive watch-maker.

5. Ferrari has never taken a vacation in his life.

6. Racing is a profession for men who do not wish to die in bed. 

7. If there was one essential quality about the man it was his ironbound tenacity, his fierce devotion to the single cause of winning automobile races with cars bearing his name. From 1930 onward, for nearly sixty years, hardly a day passed when this thought was not foremost in his mind. Win or lose, he unfailingly answered the bell. In that sense his devotion to his own self-described mission was without precedent. For that alone he towered over his peers.

8. “I was back where I had started. No money, no experience, limited education. All I had was a passion to get somewhere.”

9. Ferrari had two fundamental talents. He was an agitator of men and he was an absolute marketing genius. 

10. "A Ferrari must be desired. It cannot and must not be perceived as something that is immediately available; otherwise, the dream is gone."

11. "I have never considered myself a designer or an inventor, but only one who gets things moving and keeps them running. My innate talent was for stirring up men."

12. Enzo Ferrari was the consummate manager of men— not docile, soft men, but proud, fiercely competitive, egocentric men. 

13. He was a pathological competitor. A man with a diamond-hard will to win at all costs.

14. When asked how he wanted to be remembered, he replied: "As someone who dreamt of becoming Ferrari."

15. Ferrari was animated by an extraordinary passion that led him to build a product with no equal.

16. "I had the stubborn determination to capture the trust of those who work with me." 

17. “I should not have married because a man dominated by a passion such as mine, can hardly divide himself in half and be a good husband. If I had listened to my wife, I would have been a clerk in a bus company.”

18. He understood that showmanship is salesmanship. 

19. They were cars built by Italian artisans, every detail down to the steering wheel handcrafted using some of the same methods used to make Roman suits of armor and the royal carriages of the ancient kingdoms.

20. When asked about the root of his mania, his obsession with victory, Ferrari said, "Everything that I've done, I did because I couldn't do anything less. One day I want to build a car that's faster than all of them, and then I want to die."

#396 The Obsession of Enzo Ferrari

Those on the margins often come to control the center. That maxim ties together the three remarkable people profiled in this episode:

Colin Chapman, known as “the mad scientist of F1”, did more to influence F1 design than any other person in history. 

Bernie Ecclestone, known as “Supremo”, Bernie transformed Formula One from a disorganized, rag-tag, chaotic collection of racing teams, into the world’s premier motor racing series. He built the business of F1— and made billions for himself along the way. 

Dietrich Mateschitz, founder of Red Bull, bought two Formula One teams and insisted on becoming the sport’s foremost disruptor. Determined to question every standard way of operating, Mateschitz’s unlimited ambition transformed his team of outsiders and mavericks into a dominant force, all while building one of the world’s most valuable private companies. 

All three were outsiders. All three thrived on taking risks. All three insisted on doing things their way. 

This episode is what I learned from reading The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport by Joshua Robinson and and Johnathan Clegg.

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⁠⁠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.⁠⁠

-----

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. 

-----

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#395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport

Your dad dies before you’re born. Your mom can’t afford to take care of you. You grow up without a family and in an institution. You learn a trade and start working full time at the age of 14. You work all day and go to school at night. You’re precise, meticulous, restless, and work circles around everyone. You’re promoted to run the factory at 18 but the thought of working for anyone else terrifies you. For your entire life you’ll be obsessed with control. You’ll do whatever it takes to escape the harshness of poverty and the pangs of hunger. You organize your life around a simple principle: "I want to be the best at everything I do.” You start your own workshop, create the best product, and your biggest customer wants to become your partner. They underestimate you and abuse you. You destroy them. You take all of their customers. You’re not satisfied with being a subcontractor. You want everything. You make your own glasses, you buy your distributor, you list your company on the New York Stock Exchange, you complete hostile takeovers of much larger companies, you buy entire retail chains, and control everything about your product: from the raw materials to the relationship with the customer. Your competitors call you the hawk because you circle, wait, and then strike. You work 20 hours a day and fuse yourself with the factory. You get married four times, to three different women, and have six kids. You don’t look back, you don’t rest on your laurels, and you don’t go to sleep on wins. You make something great, then you do it again. Your biggest deal comes 60 years into your career. The only thing that could stop you was death. 

You are Leonardo Del Vecchio. 

This episode is what I learned from reading Leonardo Del Vecchio by Thomas Ebhardt and The Spectacle of Big Lens: How One Giant Company Will Dominate How the World Sees by Sam Knight. 

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⁠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.⁠

-----

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. 

-----

Join my free email newsletter to⁠ get my top 10 highlights from every book⁠

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#394 An Orphan Who Built An Empire: Leonardo Del Vecchio and The Founding of Luxottica

Your family asks you to take over a failing factory in a remote part of France. This “family business” comes with a stack of unpaid bills, a small team of workers who haven’t been paid in months, and a banker refusing to extend any more credit. You cut every unprofitable product and go all in on making rubber tires. You have no experience and don’t know a single thing about rubber manufacturing. You have a genius insight that selling tires is a waste of time and instead you should create the conditions for your product’s success. You organize the entire company around this core loop: encourage more driving → which leads to more movement → more movement leads to more wear → more wear leads to more tire sales. A simple and beautiful organizing principle emerges: a tire company will prosper if people travel more, so let’s help them do that. You make promiscuous use of the press. You write columns advertising the joys of the new activity of driving. You draw the maps, create the routes, and build thousands of road signs across France. All for free. Why? Because better signage means longer trips, more driving, and more tires sold. You publish the Michelin Guide — a free travel book with locations of hotels, restaurants, mechanics, and sites to see. You create the Michelin stars which become the global gold standard in fine dining and help people travel far for great food. You stimulate demand through spectacle. You sponsor races, airshows, and contests with cash prizes. You make smart bets early so by the time cars appear in large numbers you already own the roads. You create the most successful company mascot of all time and create a family dynasty that lasts 100 years.

You're not one person, but two. André and Édouard Michelin, two brothers and one of the greatest cofounder teams in history.

This episode is what I learned from reading Michelin: A Century of Secrets by Alain Germain and The Michelin Men: Driving an Empire by Herbert Lottman. 

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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.

-----

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. 

-----

Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book

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#393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers

You take over the family pastry shop and transform it into one of the most valuable privately held businesses in the world. Your father dies young. Your uncle does too. Everyone is relying on you and this keeps you up at night. You insist on differentiation and refuse to make me too products. You obsess over quality. You run tens of thousands of experiments. The products you invent will sell successfully for decades. You shroud your entire operation in secrecy. You study your competitors but never tell them what you’re doing. You go to great — almost absurd — lengths to control everything about your business. You have no outside shareholders and no debt. You commute by helicopter so you can perform quality control in person. You insist on constant customer contact and invent new ways to collect information from the customers you obsess over. You build your own machines, control all of your raw materials, and invest so heavily in distribution and logistics that you own the largest private fleet of vehicles in Italy, second only to the Italian army. You love your business and don’t want to spend time doing anything else. When you propose to your wife you tell her that she is marrying a man who will always talk to her about chocolate. You believe creating wealth is a moral duty. 

You are Michele Ferrero. 

This episode is what I learned from reading Michele Ferrero by Salvatore Giannella. 

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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.

-----

Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book

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Episode highlights: 

 We create mythical products that create markets. 

 If a market is interesting, we must become the leader. 

 The product is put at the center of everything. All of the company's activities must revolve around it.

 He would repeat: If you want to go bankrupt just listen to everybody.

 He insisted that all shares remain in the family. He never wanted to have to justify his choices to anyone. 

 He insisted on continuous innovation, the refusal of repetition of the already known, the search for new paths, and the opening of new horizons by differentiating from others.

 One of his favorite metaphors: A good entrepreneur must be like a good skeet shooter: hitting the target by aiming not at the launch station, but further ahead—always with a long-term vision.

 Control everything you can – ingredients, process, technology – to safeguard quality and trade secrets.

 For me work is a spiritual necessity. I was accustomed to it from a young age and couldn't do without it.

 Focus on making well-crafted, high-quality products, and the rest will follow.

 I was able to do all this because of being a family business. This allowed us to grow calmly, to have long term plans, to know how to wait, and to not be caught up in the frenzy of the daily ups and downs.

 Mrs. Valeria (the name he gave to his customers) is the mistress of it all, the CEO, the one who can decide your success or your demise, the one you have to respect, never betray, and understand completely.

 He said that doing good for others is doing good for oneself. 

 Michele Ferrero seemed to possess a genuine, childlike passion for bringing joy through his creations.

 He couldn’t resist spending time in the laboratory, dreaming up new delights. He was known to work through Sundays and even overnight, feverishly experimenting to perfect a flavor or texture.

 Our identity is based on our independence. If we had shareholders they would ask us to increase turnover. But it takes time to make a good product.

 Many of the machines were invented and built in-house by Ferrero’s own engineering department.

 Ferrero pursued perfection with monastic devotion.

#392 Michele Ferrero and His $40 Billion Privately Owned Chocolate Empire

You grow up in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn. You drop out of college. Your dad is your best friend but you don’t want to work the docks like him. You’re determined to “do something special.” You get a job sweeping the floor at recording studio. You get fired—twice. You’ll do anything to work in the music business, including working on Easter Sunday. That’s how you meet John Lennon. This is the day your life begins. You focus on being of service. You stay in the room and in the saddle. Bruce Springsteen teaches you what work ethic really means. You work with Tom Petty, Bono, Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks, and countless others. You’ll produce hundreds of songs. You get restless, start a family, and start a record company. You get advice from David Geffen. You figure out your edge is producing the producers. You work with the absolute best, hand them the keys, and tell them to drive. You’re a scrapper, you’re persistent, you use fear as a tailwind, you keep the main thing the main thing, you work all the time, you put 100% into whatever is in front of you. You’re described as fiercely competitive, insanely driven, and brilliant. You can never turn it off and you don’t understand why everyone else isn’t like that too. You start multiple companies, make billions of dollars, and tell the best stories when you go on podcasts after you retire. You are Jimmy Iovine. 

This episode is what I learned from rewatching the documentary The Defiant Ones and listening to these excellent interviews with Jimmy Iovine. 

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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.

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#391 Jimmy Iovine

I've read this interview probably 10 times. It's that good. Steve Jobs was 29 when this interview was published, and with remarkable clarity of thought Steve explains the upcoming technological revolution, why the personal computer is the greatest tool humans have ever invented, how the computer compares to past inventions, why software needs to be simplified (You shouldn't have to read a novel to write a novel!) why the future is always exciting and unpredictable, what soul in the game looks like and why his competitors don't have any, why slightly insane people are the ones who make great products, the importance of questioning things and how doing so produces novel insights, why it's dangerous to have layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work, the importance of hiring troublemakers, why more people should aspire to be like Edwin Land, and how if he every leaves Apple he will always come back. 

Read the full interview here

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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.

-----

Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book

----

Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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Highlights from this episode: 

 We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy—free mechanical energy, in this case. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. We’re on the forefront.

 A computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer. We have no idea how far it’s going to go

 The hard part of what we’re up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, “What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?” he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn’t know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. That is what Macintosh is all about. It’s the first “telephone” of our industry.

 Ad campaigns are necessary for competition; IBM’s ads are everywhere. But good PR educates people; that’s all it is. You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.

 We didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

 
The people in the Mac group wanted to build the greatest computer that has ever been seen.

#390 Rare Steve Jobs Interview

When Tamara Mellon’s father lent her the seed money to start a high-end shoe company, he cautioned her: “Don’t let the accountants run your business.” Little did he know that over the next fifteen years, the struggle between “financial” and “creative” would become one of the central themes as Mellon’s business.
Mellon grew Jimmy Choo into a billion dollar brand and her personal glamour made her an object of global media fascination. Vogue photographed her wedding. Vanity Fair covered her divorce and the criminal trial that followed. The Wall Street Journal reported on her relentless battle between “the suits” and “the creatives" and Mellon’s triumph against a brutally hostile takeover attempt.
But despite her eventual fame and fortune, Mellon didn’t have an easy road to success. Her early life was marked by a tumultuous and broken family life, battles with anxiety and depression, and a stint in rehab. Determined not to end up unemployed, penniless, and living in her parents’ basement under the control of her alcoholic mother, Mellon honed her natural business sense and invested in what she knew best—fashion.
In creating the shoes that became a fixture on Sex and the City and red carpets around the world, Mellon relied on her own impeccable sense of what the customer wanted—because she was that customer. What she didn’t know at the time was that success would come at a high price—after struggles with an obstinate business partner, a conniving first CEO, a turbulent marriage, and a mother who tried to steal her hard-earned wealth.
Now Mellon shares the whole larger-than-life story, with shocking details that have never been presented before. From her troubled childhood to her time as a young editor at Vogue to her partnership with the cobbler Jimmy Choo, to her very public relationships, Mellon offers an honest and gripping account of the episodes that have made her who she is today.
In My Shoes is a definitive book for fashion aficionados, aspiring entrepreneurs, and anyone who loves a juicy true story about sex, drugs, money, power, high heels, and overcoming adversity. This episode is what I learned from reading In My Shoes: A Memoir by Tamara Mellon. 
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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.
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Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. 
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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth
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#398 Steve Jobs In His Own Words (Make Something Wonderful)

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