Podcast · Business

David Senra

by Scicomm Media · English · Business

Conversations with the greatest living founders.

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr 22 min
Latest: 11 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

11 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 12 minNew

Creating Muse: The Fastest-Growing AI Product Since ChatGPT | Alexandr Wang, Meta

Alexandr Wang is the chief AI officer of Meta and co-founder of Scale AI. We talk about the seven-month effort to build Muse, why Meta focused on personal AI agents instead of coding, and how Mark Zuckerberg and Nat Friedman helped shape the product. Alexandr shares how Zuckerberg recruited him after Meta's Llama 4 setback, why he left Scale after nine years, and how he's rebuilding Meta's AI lab around small teams, exceptional talent, and minimal bureaucracy. We also discuss using memes to make a product go viral, the importance of having a single point of view, and why Alexandr believes AI…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E45 · 7 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 24 min
Channeling Rage, Rolling Calls & Building an Entertainment Empire | Ari Emanuel, WME & TKO
Ari Emanuel is the co-founder of Endeavor, executive chair and CEO of TKO, executive chairman of WME Group, and founder of MARI. We talk about his $4.2 billion bet on the UFC, the ESPN deal that proved it right, lessons from Egon Durban and David Geffen, and how constantly making calls creates opportunities you can’t plan for. Ari also opens up about dyslexia, decades of insecurity, and learning to enjoy his life without losing the drive that built his businesses. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/ari-emanuel Made possible by Ramp: https://ramp.com AppLovin:…
E44 · 4 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 8 min
How Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Josh Kushner & Scott Wu Think | Jeremy Stern
Jeremy Stern is the editor-in-chief of Colossus, where he writes long-form profiles of leading entrepreneurs and investors. He goes behind the scenes of his reporting on Mark Zuckerberg, explaining how months of interviews revealed Zuckerberg’s fascination with Augustus, relentless competitive drive and commitment to building Meta for decades. Jeremy discusses why Meta’s distribution and infrastructure could give it an advantage in AI and why some founders seem incapable of walking away. He explains how a question about defense technology became his first profile, on Palmer Luckey, and why…
E43 · 30 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
Bringing AI to the Real Economy | Alexander Taubman
Alexander Taubman is the co-founder and CEO of Long Lake, a company that buys established service businesses and uses AI to improve how they operate. He explains Long Lake’s $6.3 billion deal for American Express Global Business Travel, why deploying AI in the real economy is difficult and why he sees productivity gains creating more jobs as businesses grow. Alex describes how Nexus, Long Lake’s AI platform, connects models to business data and workflows, why its engineers work alongside employees in the field and why he wants to own businesses rather than sell software. He shares how his…
E42 · 27 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 30 min
Building the Streetwear Empire Kith | Ronnie Fieg
Ronnie Fieg is the founder, CEO and creative director of Kith. At 13, he turned down an envelope of cash at his bar mitzvah to ask his cousin for a job, then spent 15 years working his way up from stock boy to buyer at David Z. He explains how growing up in Queens and working on 8th Street shaped his taste, how his first ASICS Gel-Lyte III collaboration landed on the front of The Wall Street Journal’s Pursuits section and why he still designs every product for himself first. Ronnie describes why Kith refuses to wholesale or license, why he opens new physical stores as online sales grow and…
20 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 21 min
Building One of the Fastest Growing CPG Companies in History | Peter Rahal of David Protein, Medici Brands & RXBAR
Peter Rahal is the co-founder of RXBAR, David Protein, and Medici Brands. After selling RXBAR for $600 million, he tried investing and quickly discovered he was miserable watching other people run companies. He explains why he returned to protein bars, why founders must deeply understand their products and how he plans to build the most important food company of the 21st century. Peter describes the intelligence, beauty and discipline behind David's brand, how growing up with dyslexia shaped his competitive drive and why he channels anger and resentment into company building. He also details…
E40 · 13 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 1 min
Luca Ferrari on Building Bending Spoons: Extreme Ownership, Talent Science & Relentless Simplification
Luca Ferrari is a co-founder of Bending Spoons, the technology company he built with his partners by rethinking how software businesses should hire, operate and allocate capital. He explains why Bending Spoons aspires to build “the best company there ever was,” why it favors raw talent and drive over experience and how a centralized talent team uses testing and more than 100 signals to identify exceptional people early. Luca describes the company’s culture of extreme ownership and relentless simplification, including why employees are given more work than they can possibly complete, why…
E39 · 9 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 11 min
Mati Staniszewski on ElevenLabs, Voice AI & Building the Communication Layer for AI
Mati Staniszewski is the co-founder of ElevenLabs, an AI audio company he started in 2022 with his longtime friend Piotr Dąbkowski. He explains how a frustration with poorly dubbed content in Poland led them to build frontier speech technology, why ElevenLabs combines audio research with product deployment and how its focus on voice shapes where the company chooses to compete. Mati also describes the Palantir-inspired operating model behind ElevenLabs: small autonomous teams, a flat organization and forward deployed engineers who work directly with customers and feed what they learn back…
E38 · 6 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
Zach Dell on Base Power, Energy Abundance & Building a Company for Life
Zach Dell is the co-founder of Base Power, an energy company on a mission to make electricity more affordable and reliable. His starting insight was that home batteries had the wrong business model. Companies sold expensive backup systems that sat idle most of the time. Base installs batteries at homes, retains ownership and operates them as a fleet: charging when electricity is cheap, discharging when it is expensive and providing backup when the grid goes down. The homeowner gets lower electricity bills and backup power. Base gets an asset it can put to work every day. Dell explains why…
E37 · 30 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 22 min
Doug Leone on Sequoia, Fear, Great Founders & Starting Over at 69
Doug Leone spent 26 years helping lead Sequoia Capital through successive eras of technological change. Born in Italy, he came to the United States without speaking English and carried the insecurity of an outsider into his career. That fear became fuel: whenever he felt himself falling behind, he forced himself to start over. After stepping down from Sequoia at 65 to make room for the next generation, he returned four years later. Now he considers himself a low-level analyst again, racing to understand an AI revolution that he believes is rewriting business more radically than anything he…
26 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 24 min
Building Defense Technologies to Protect Democracies | Torsten Reil, Helsing
Torsten Reil has spent his career working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, simulation and entrepreneurship. He began as a biologist studying neural networks and complex systems before founding NaturalMotion, whose technology was used in films including Lord of the Rings, Troy and Harry Potter and later in games including Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. After building and selling NaturalMotion, he eventually returned to entrepreneurship to co-found Helsing, a European defense technology company focused on artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. Reil believes…
23 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 18 min
Sam Altman on Building OpenAI & Betting on the Impossible
Sam Altman has spent his career at the intersection of startups, investing and artificial intelligence. He says he was fascinated by AI as a child in St. Louis, studied it in college and eventually helped start OpenAI in 2015 after concluding that the most important opportunities often begin as non-consensus bets. His experience investing in startups taught him to look for power laws, back unconventional talent and recognize the decisions that can change a company’s trajectory. At OpenAI, Altman says most of his effort goes toward research and compute. Scaling compute requires coordinating…
E34 · 16 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 49 min
Travis Kalanick, Founder of Uber & Atoms
Travis Kalanick is best known for co-founding Uber and building it into one of the world’s largest transportation platforms. Before Uber, he spent years building Red Swoosh under extreme financial pressure. He says he took no salary for its first four years, repeatedly ran out of money and lost much of his social life to the company before eventually selling it. He later invested much of the proceeds in friends’ startups, becoming the first investor in Expensify. Kalanick started Uber at 33 and carried the intensity of those earlier years into the company. He describes operating with…
E33 · 12 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 18 min
Lulu Cheng Meservey, Founder of Rostra
Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder of Rostra and one of the world's most trusted communication strategists, supporting companies such as Anduril, Shopify, Cognition, and Coinbase. In 2016, she co-founded TrailRunner International with Jim Wilkinson, who had just run corporate affairs for Alibaba's record IPO. She had never done comms in her life. One of her first clients was Anduril, in the company's first year, when Palmer Luckey had just been pushed out of Facebook, and no reporter would give him a fair hearing. So they stopped asking. They went to Quantico, to Camp Pendleton, to the CIA,…
E32 · 9 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 7 min
Michael Ovitz, Co-founder of CAA
Michael Ovitz⁠ is the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the most powerful and influential talent agencies in Hollywood history, built on a revolutionary approach to representation that fundamentally transformed the entertainment industry. He is an entertainment executive and dealmaker widely regarded as one of the most formidable operators in Hollywood. During his time leading CAA, Ovitz represented virtually every major star, including Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Steven Spielberg, David Letterman, Barbra Streisand and many more. Starting as a mailroom trainee…
E31 · 2 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
Lessons From Backing The Best Founders In Fintech | Micky Malka
Micky Malka is the founder of Ribbit Capital and helped create Node, which he describes as the first digital art studio designed for digital artists. He calls himself “an entrepreneur at heart and an investor by design”—a deliberately broad description that allows him to resist labels, which is precisely the point. The one label he wants on his tombstone: “He was a rebel.” In his mid-20s, Malka and his partners put all the proceeds from their first dot-com exit into starting Lemon Bank in Brazil. He says they nearly lost everything when the economy failed to take off. At its peak Lemon Bank…
E30 · 26 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 42 min
DHH: How to Build a Profitable Company Without Losing Control
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is the creator of Ruby on Rails and the co-founder of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE. He has spent 25 years building a software business around one condition: no one gets to tell him what to do. Jason Fried hired him as a contractor out of Copenhagen for $15 an hour. He built the first version of Basecamp with just 10 hours a week — 380 hours in total — and still credits the shortage of time for how good it turned out. He does not trust himself with unlimited resources. Nobody should, he argues. Give a team too much money and too many…
E29 · 19 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 48 min
The Restaurant Genius Behind Carbone, ZZ’s, Torrisi & More | Jeff Zalaznick
Jeff Zalaznick is co-founder of Major Food Group, the hospitality company behind Carbone, ZZ's, Torrisi, The Grill, and The Pool. He has opened 77 restaurants and bars and 76 are still operating and profitable. He is now building Major Food Group into a fully vertically integrated hospitality company spanning restaurants, private members' clubs, hotels, and branded residential towers. Zalaznick was obsessed with food from childhood, watching cooking shows on PBS while other kids watched cartoons and memorizing the Zagat guide. His first job out of college was as an investment banking analyst…
E28 · 12 Jul 2026 · 59 min
Eric Glyman, Co-founder of Ramp
Eric Glyman is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ramp, the financial-infrastructure platform valued at $44 billion used by over 70,000 businesses to run payments, expenses and accounting from a single place. Glyman grew up in Las Vegas and studied at Harvard, where he met his eventual co-founder, Karim Atiyeh. In 2014 the two started Paribus, a price-tracking app born from Glyman's frustration after missing an airfare price drop — the software automatically caught retroactive discounts and filed refunds on customers' behalf. Capital One acquired Paribus in 2016, and Glyman and Atiyeh stayed on…
E27 · 5 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 12 min
Jonathan Ross, Founder of Groq
Jonathan Ross is the founder of Groq and the inventor of the Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), now a senior executive at NVIDIA following the company's $20 billion partnership with Groq. Before Groq, Ross built something that didn't exist: a custom AI chip at Google called the TPU, which became the backbone of DeepMind's AlphaGo — the system that defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016. After watching the TPU push AlphaGo's ELO score up by hundreds of points overnight, Ross grasped a principle that would define his next decade: faster inference produces more capable models. He left…
E26 · 28 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
Scott Wu, Cognition
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the company behind Devin, the world's first AI software engineer. Wu describes himself as "salty," a word he traces to second grade, when he competed in a seventh-grade math competition, lost, and never forgot it. Born in 1997 in Louisiana to a Chinese immigrant family, he grew up the little brother who hated losing at video games and turned that into a career. At the International Olympiad in Informatics he won three gold medals and placed first overall in 2014; he was the 2011 MathCounts national champion. He approaches building a company…
E25 · 21 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 35 min
Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters
Steve Stoute is the founder of Translation, the marketing company behind some of the most iconic brand work of the past 25 years, and UnitedMasters, the independent music distribution platform he launched in 2017. Stoute grew up in Queens in the 1980s, where hip-hop was his entire world. He worked his way into the music business, eventually managing Nas and becoming an executive at Sony and then Interscope under Jimmy Iovine. In 1999, at 29, he walked away from a $2 million salary to take a $150,000 job at the Arnell Group — trading income for education. He was there to learn the advertising…
E24 · 14 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 35 min
Ed Catmull, Co-founder of Pixar
Ed Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar and the former president of Disney Animation. He grew up in 1950s Utah wanting to animate for Disney. Convinced he couldn't draw well enough, he studied physics and computer science at the University of Utah instead, landing in one of the great talent incubators in computing history. In 1972, he animated his own left hand—one of the first 3D computer renderings ever made. Since childhood he had carried a single ambition: to make the first feature film animated entirely by computer. Reaching it took more than 20 years. George Lucas hired Catmull in 1979…
E23 · 7 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 14 min
Gustav Söderström, Spotify
Gustav Söderström is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Spotify, the world's largest streaming platform, with more than 760 million users across 180 countries. He earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, founded Kenet Works in 2003 — a mobile community software company acquired by Yahoo! in 2006 — and later co-founded 13th Lab, an augmented reality startup acquired by Facebook's Oculus division. He joined Spotify in 2009 and spent the next 18 years building the product and technology organization from the inside, rising from Chief Product and…
E22 · 31 May 2026 · 1 hr 24 min
Ivanka Trump on Building an Authentic Life
Ivanka Trump grew up on construction sites and in boardrooms, learning what it takes to be a builder. At just 22 years old, she started doing real estate for a Brooklyn developer. She notched small wins with construction crews and learned the trade. Then came the launch of her own fashion brand — which reached over $800 million in annual sales — run simultaneously with the Trump Organization's real estate acquisitions. The centerpiece was the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., a dilapidated 1890s building she personally shepherded into a thriving urban hotel. In 2016, she went to…
E21 · 24 May 2026 · 1 hr 24 min
The Simple Genius of Rick Rubin
Rick Rubin grew up on Long Island obsessed with music — arena rock at 13, punk by high school, then hip-hop when it was still a street movement you could only hear at one club in New York City. The records coming out didn't sound like the club. They were made by professionals who didn't go to the club. So at 18, while a freshman at NYU, he made one himself — "It's Yours" with T La Rock. It sold 100,000 copies in 18 months. He put his dorm room address on the sleeve. This launched Def Jam Recordings. LL Cool J's first record came next. The Beastie Boys after that. His credit on those records…
17 May 2026 · 1 hr 39 min
Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two Interactive
Strauss Zelnick has spent 40 years doing the same thing: finding where new technology is about to supercharge an old business, and getting there first. He started at Columbia Pictures in 1983 running international TV distribution. When the company needed a "new media" person, they looked for the least valuable executive they could spare. That was Zelnick. New media in 1983 meant VHS cassettes. He took the assignment anyway. By 2001, when he started ZMC, he had one thesis: technology would supercharge media and destroy it simultaneously, and the only companies worth owning sat at that…
E19 · 10 May 2026 · 1 hr 13 min
Dana White, UFC
Dana White grew up watching CEOs read canned statements written by lawyers. He decided early he would never do that. When Lorenzo Fertitta and his brother bought the UFC in 2001 for $2M and handed White a small equity stake and the presidency, the company had five events a year, eight or nine fighter contracts, and no television deal. Previous owners had sold off the merchandise rights, the video library, and the video game licenses just to survive. The company nearly died. Events cost $2M to produce. Revenue covered half the spending. Four years in, Fertitta called White and told him to…
E18 · 3 May 2026 · 1 hr 26 min
Adam Foroughi, AppLovin
Chapters (00:00:00) The $6B Buyback That Made $60B (00:02:15) Borrowing Money To Buy Back Stock At A Discount (00:05:02) Why VCs Passed On AppLovin In 2012 (00:09:00) From App Discovery To Ad Platform (00:14:45) Beating Google's AdMob With Performance Marketing (00:19:30) No Board For Six Years (00:30:12) The China Deal That Almost Blew Up (00:37:45) The Convertible Note Pivot And KKR (00:46:30) Buying Gaming Studios To Get Data (00:51:45) Losing Trust With Game Developers (00:58:20) The 2022 Crash And How He Kept His Team (01:02:00) Building An Hyper Competent & Efficient Company (01:07:25)…
E17 · 26 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 28 min
David Baszucki, Roblox
David Baszucki is the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the platform where tens of millions of people gather daily to play, build, and socialize inside user-generated virtual worlds. Baszucki grew up in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, studied electrical engineering at Stanford, and in the late 1980s co-founded Knowledge Revolution with his brother Greg. There they built Interactive Physics, a 2D simulation that let students run physics experiments on screen — it sold millions of copies. MSC Software acquired the company in December 1998 for $20 million. After a few years running a division there,…

About David Senra

Conversations with the greatest living founders.

David Senra is a English business podcast from Scicomm Media. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Scicomm Media
Language: English
Category: Business
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr 22 min
Latest episode: 11 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1836497887
Website: davidsenra.com

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