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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 Economics Leadership Management & Leadership World
Episodes
  • #391 Jimmy Iovine

    #391 Jimmy Iovine
    Jun 13 2025
    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. ----- 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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    57 mins
  • #390 Rare Steve Jobs Interview

    #390 Rare Steve Jobs Interview
    Jun 4 2025
    I've read this interview probably 10 times. It's that good. Steve Jobs was 29 when the 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 ----- 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. ---- 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.
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    41 mins
  • #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon

    #389 The Founder of Jimmy Choo: Tamara Mellon
    May 26 2025

    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.

    -----

    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.

    ----

    “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

    Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast
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    56 mins
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My favourite podcast, keep grinding! You are helping a lot with your insights! I am thinking of subscribing to the notes too, the autobiographies really are better than any businessbook!

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