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 “precision, perfection and obsession” and continued running Uber with the mentality of someone worried about making the next grocery bill even after the company had reached a valuation of roughly $70 billion. Under his leadership, Uber expanded rapidly across cities and countries, creating a new category of app-based transportation and challenging the entrenched taxi systems that controlled many local markets.

Uber’s growth depended on empowering young operators to build markets from scratch while maintaining tight control over the decisions that mattered most. Kalanick personally participated in the pricing process for the company’s first 20 to 30 cities, using each launch to refine a playbook that could eventually operate without him. He describes this management philosophy as finding the line between order and chaos: using the fewest possible rules while preserving the structure required to move quickly at scale.

After leaving Uber, he returned to company building within months. His current company, Atoms, is developing artificial intelligence and specialized robotics for industries including food, mining and transportation. Kalanick describes his role as “problem solver in chief,” focusing on the most consequential problems that are not already being solved and pursuing what he considers his broader calling: digitizing the physical world.

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/travis-kalanick

Made possible by

Ramp: https://ramp.com

AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra

Deel: https://deel.com/senra

Chapters

(00:00:00) Building Atoms & the Meta Problem of Management

(00:03:51) The Appeal of Impossible Problems: Starting Over in China

(00:12:19) Uber vs. Didi: Copycats, Hypergrowth & China's Rules

(00:21:02) How Network Effects Become an Efficiency Fortress

(00:31:48) Capitalism vs. the Taxi Cartel

(00:44:05) The China War Goes Global & the Entrepreneur's Capacity for Pain

(00:54:04) Life After Uber: Lawfare, Media Narratives & Reputation

(00:58:21) What Founders Get Wrong About Venture Capital

(01:08:35) The Fundraising Playbook: QED Storytelling & a Five-Room Auction

(01:18:38) The Uber Coup, Radical Accountability & Outgrowing Fear

(01:26:42) Why Specialized Robots Beat Humanoids at Industrial Scale

(01:31:30) Finding Your Sport: Food, Mining & the Physical AI Stack

(01:40:14) How to Build Many Companies Inside One Company

(01:46:33) Entropy, Civilization & the Meaning of Progress

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, and showed people the technology directly.

She left to run communications at Substack, then joined the board of Activision Blizzard—and in October 2022 stepped off the board and into the company as chief communications officer. Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition was under attack from the FTC. She fought back in public, under her own name, which almost no executive in a deal that size is willing to do. It closed in October 2023.

In March 2024, she started her own firm, Rostra, and published Go Direct: The Manifesto. The first project out the door was Cognition's launch of Devin, the first AI software engineer. Shopify put her on its board that June. In December 2025, she raised a $40 million fund to back founders she believes in. She takes about a dozen clients at a time and has a waiting list of hundreds.

She named the firm after the Rostra, the speaker's platform in Rome, where a man could climb up while the city believed one thing and step down after it believed another.

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/lulu-cheng-meservey

Made possible by

Ramp: https://ramp.com

Deel: https://deel.com/senra

AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra

Chapters

(00:00:00) From China to America

(00:02:08) Learning to Read the Room

(00:06:18) Building a Movement

(00:07:30) Learning Comms by Doing

(00:10:50) Anduril as an Insurgent

(00:15:07) The Power of a Manifesto

(00:18:47) Go Direct

(00:26:45) Conviction Over Charisma

(00:31:30) Why Rostra Exists

(00:33:23) How AI Leaders Lose Trust

(00:40:40) Tell a Better Story

(00:47:55) Do Things That Can't Be Faked

(00:50:55) The Return to Beauty

(00:57:11) Originality Over Templates

(01:04:02) Do What Only You Can Do

(01:07:14) The Jetsons Rule

(01:10:41) Trust Yourself

(01:12:29) Why Humans Crave Stories

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 in the 1960s and reshaping the power dynamics of the entire industry by the 1980s, he became known for his relentless strategic thinking, his creation of the "packaging" model that bundled talent for studios, and his ability to orchestrate deals of unprecedented scale and complexity. He built a reputation in entertainment circles through his fierce intelligence, relentless work ethic and his ability to build CAA into what many called "the most powerful company in Hollywood."

His major accomplishments include co-founding CAA in 1975 in an audacious break from the establishment, pioneering the packaging system that gave agents unprecedented leverage over studios, orchestrating landmark deals including the sale of Columbia Pictures to Sony, serving as President of The Walt Disney Company and building CAA into a multi-billion dollar enterprise that expanded far beyond traditional talent representation into sports, consulting and global entertainment infrastructure.

This is Michael's second time on the podcast. Watch the first episode.

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/michael-ovitz-2

Made possible by

Ramp: https://ramp.com

Deel: https://deel.com/senra

AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra

Chapters

(00:00:00) Why Michael Ovitz Is Busier Than Ever

(00:04:27) Why This Era Is More Exciting Than Hollywood's Golden Age

(00:08:45) The Fundamentals of Building Enduring Businesses

(00:12:06) How Ovitz Chooses What Deserves His Time

(00:14:28) Why Ovitz Refuses to Be Typecast

(00:19:43) Japan, Trust & Playing the Long Game

(00:20:44) Phil Knight, Nike & the College Football Playoff

(00:25:59) Competition, Work Ethic & Winning Without Ego

(00:31:33) How Ovitz Outworked 200 Rival Agencies

(00:37:51) Protecting the Vision: Scorsese, Rain Man & Great Founders

(00:40:37) Josh Kushner & Guarding the Company's Soul

(00:43:47) Steve Jobs, Pixar & Building a Culture of Ideas

(00:47:20) "He Won, We Lost. Next Case."

(00:49:21) Bill Ackman, Universal Music Group & the Future of Music

(00:53:08) AI, Music & the Future of Entertainment

(00:59:13) Jurassic Park, Spielberg & Using New Technology Well

(01:01:10) Why Great Creators Study the Past

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 operated roughly 7,000 locations and served 50 million customers while targeting Brazil’s large unbanked population. He later sold it to Brazil’s largest bank.

Years later, after meeting Walmart CEO Doug McMillon in 2019, Malka proposed that Walmart and Ribbit build a better financial-services business together. That effort became OnePay, which now provides payments, debit, credit and lending products across Walmart’s ecosystem.

At Ribbit, decisions are made as a group, no single partner is assigned to a company, and the team shares calendars, inboxes and emails. Malka confirms that Ribbit is his sixth company and says he intends to keep building it indefinitely. As he puts it, “The best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company.”

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/micky-malka

Made possible by

Ramp: https://ramp.com

Deel: https://deel.com/senra

AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra

Chapters

(00:00:00) Why Micky Malka Refuses to Be Labeled

(00:03:00) Writing Your Way to Conviction

(00:05:41) Buying Berkshire at 13 and Learning Buffett's Operating System

(00:11:48) Token Factories, AI Bankers, and the Future of Money

(00:18:38) The Infinite Game: Why It's Better to Be Behind

(00:22:09) Gen Z Founders and the Chaordic Company

(00:29:00) Why Young Founders Want to Build Atoms, Not Just Bits

(00:34:29) Bringing Beauty and Taste Back to Technology

(00:36:56) Revolut, Founder DNA, and Earning Deep Trust

(00:45:54) Building OnePay With Walmart

(00:50:53) From Lemon Bank to OnePay: A 20-Year Idea

(00:56:00) Compounding Trust and Protecting Your Reputation

(01:00:30) Node and the Rebel Case for Digital Art

(01:07:34) What It Means to Live as a Rebel

(01:10:50) Why Ribbit Is Built Like a Startup

(01:14:41) Charlie Munger and the Power of Time

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 people and it will build a blob.

Forty-some venture firms came calling in 2005. The only investor 37signals ever said yes to was Jeff Bezos, who accepted a term sheet priced so absurdly high they were certain he would walk. They have been sending him dividend checks ever since. Basecamp has been rewritten three times, and the original 2004 version — discontinued in 2010 — still runs and still makes millions in profit.

His marketing strategy, borrowed from Kathy Sierra, hasn't changed in two decades: you can't outspend the giants, but you can out-teach them. His product test hasn't either. He builds the thing he wants for himself, and once he'd rather use it than anything else available, he assumes he isn't alone. That's how Ruby on Rails started. It's how Omarchy started too — the Linux distribution he’s spent thousands of hours making and gives away.

No investors. No board. And now, with Omarchy, no customers. He calls that last step a retirement from capitalism: still making things, still sharing them, with nobody holding a claim on his time.

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/david-heinemeier-hansson

Made possible by

Ramp: https://ramp.com

AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra

HubSpot: https://hubspot.com/startups

Deel: https://deel.com/senra

Chapters

(00:00:00) Cutting Rework From 50,000 Words To 25,000

(00:02:54) Basecamp Was Built In 380 Hours

(00:06:46) Unlimited Resources Build A Blob

(00:10:22) Terminator Beats Avatar By A 1000x

(00:15:24) The Printer DHH Never Wants To Upgrade

(00:17:31) Millions In Profit From 16 Year-Old Software

(00:20:10) The Beauty Of A Finished Product

(00:22:54) I Would Quit Before Working In An Office

(00:25:41) Four Uninterrupted Hours Or The Day Is Lost

(00:31:21) Tobi Lütke Saw The AI Future First

(00:38:51) Apple Pissed Him Off Enough To Switch

(00:42:47) The 19 Year-Old Who Beat Apple

(00:47:16) If Nobody Else Will Build It, I Will

(00:52:02) The Need For Control, Independence, And Freedom

(00:53:44) Chef's Choice, Not A Construction-Kit Burger

(00:56:50) A New Computer Ready In 2 Minutes

(01:00:33) A Cheaper Mac Will Never Win

(01:02:27) The Best Ideas Sound Stupid At First

(01:03:47) Out-Teach Your Competition

(01:06:57) The Algorithms Broke Reciprocity

(01:10:53) No Investors Is Freedom. No Customers Is Transcendence.

(01:13:25) No One Gets To Tell Me What To Do

(01:16:49) Your Moral Obligation To Buy A Ferrari

(01:23:19) Costs Are The Only Thing You Control

(01:26:49) Bezos Paid For The Promise

(01:30:17) The Confidence To Say No To Everyone

(01:32:59) The Day A Third Of The Company Left

(01:36:49) Marc Andreessen Came To Help

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 at J.P. Morgan, but he knew it wasn’t his dream. He walked out on his birthday, talked his way into any job at the newly opened Mandarin Oriental, built a restaurant website, and eventually partnered with restaurateur Joe Bastianich to get a front-row seat to the business. Watching Joe work, he realized: "I can do this, and I can do it my way." He quickly sold his companies and set out to open his own restaurant.

The idea was Carbone — elevated Italian-American food built on a simple thesis: take something everyone already loves and make the best version of it ever done. He found his partners, Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi, and opened Carbone in March of 2013. It’s now one of the most recognizable restaurant brands and sought-after reservations in the world. From there, they’d go on to launch Major Food Group, and the success has continued.

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/jeff-zalaznick

Made possible by

Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com

AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra

Deel: https://deel.com/senra

HubSpot: ⁠https://hubspot.com/startups

Chapters

(00:00:00) Seventy-Seven Restaurants, Seventy-Six Still Winning

(00:03:16) The First American Menu Written In English

(00:04:41) JFK's Cream Of Asparagus

(00:09:49) Fifty Years Of Smoke, Forty Million To Restore

(00:13:32) One Text: "Four Seasons?"

(00:16:17) Always Bet On Who Wants It Most

(00:19:13) Kill Lunch To Own Dinner

(00:24:00) The Only Thing That Matters Is If They Come Back

(00:29:37) Going Viral Isn't The Same As Being Good

(00:36:39) Watching Cooking Shows Instead Of Cartoons

(00:41:47) The Men At The Top Were Miserable

(00:43:21) Walking Into The Mandarin To Beg For Any Job

(00:49:40) A Front-Row Seat To His Hero

(00:53:06) Belief Comes Before Ability

(00:55:35) Burning The Boats

(00:57:31) Marry The Chef, Don't Hire Him

(00:59:25) The Best Version Of Something You Already Love

(01:03:56) The Hail Mary Call At Ten O'Clock

(01:08:29) "A Piacere" — Whatever You Want

(01:13:24) The Broken Neon Sign That Became An Icon

(01:18:17) Go With Whatever Feels Natural

(01:22:27) A Ten-Dollar Jar Of The Restaurant

(01:24:15) Your Mediocrity Is My Opportunity

(01:27:34) Netflix With A Restaurant

(01:32:11) The Club Where The Food Comes First

(01:37:07) Miami Was New Year's Eve Every Night

(01:40:45) Carbone Miami In 100 Days

(01:46:08) The Greatest Beach Club In America

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 for roughly three years running the business inside the bank.

That experience showed Glyman something he found strange: card companies made money by convincing customers that points and rewards were valuable, then quietly devaluing them. In 2019 he, Atiyeh, and longtime friend Gene Lee left to build Ramp on the opposite premise — instead of pushing businesses to spend more for rewards, help them spend less and waste less time doing it. Every product decision gets run through what Glyman calls a version of "Elon's algorithm": question the requirement, simplify, then automate.

Ramp tracks its own success obsessively — a running "scoreboard" of dollars and hours saved for customers, displayed on office walls and posted in Slack. Glyman now sees the company's real competitors not as other fintechs but as AI labs, since Ramp is ultimately selling automated knowledge work, not money movement. He frames the company’s mission as: build something that saves people time and money, and let the business follow — freeing entrepreneurs and finance teams from rote work so they can focus on what actually matters to their companies.

Chapters

(00:00:00) Smarter Financial Infrastructure To Run Your Business

(00:04:01) The North Star Is Time And Money

(00:10:15) A Determined Generalist Can Now Do More Than Ever

(00:11:58) I'm The Best Doctor I've Ever Been

(00:13:20) The Tower Of Babel Inside Big Companies

(00:16:00) The Kid Who Paid For College On Minecraft

(00:19:10) Everyone Is The Hero Of Their Own Story

(00:22:31) You Don't Get There In A Hundred Hours

(00:23:52) Buffett And Munger Stopped Needing To Call Each Other

(00:25:03) The Damage Of Letting People Free-Ride

(00:27:40) Consumer-Grade Design In B2B Software

(00:28:34) The Breville Toaster And The Bit-More Button

(00:31:47) We Win When Our Customers Win

(00:35:18) Put The Scoreboard On The Wall

(00:37:07) A Company Is Just A Fiction With A Common Purpose

(00:38:19) Focus On The Things That Don't Change

(00:40:02) Is This Time Actually Different

(00:40:50) Air Conditioning Made Las Vegas, Not Fortunes

(00:43:52) 1% Of US GDP Will Be Token Spend

(00:45:28) A Six-Month Lag To A Model A Hundred Times Cheaper

(00:46:46) Agents Negotiating With Agents To Buy Things

(00:49:22) Making Sure The Highest-Return Dollar Gets The Dollar

(00:51:17) The Dream Of Being At The Table That Matters

(00:54:14) Why The Labs Are Ramp's Real Competitor

(00:55:44) Banks Sell Money, Ramp Sells Time

(00:56:27) When Intelligence Becomes Functionally Free

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Google to act on it.

Groq's first decade was brutal. Early West Coast VCs passed — and would later watch as NVIDIA announced what Ross describes as the firm's largest deal by nearly 3x. Ross came within weeks of running out of money. Rather than lay off the engineers he needed to hit a critical product milestone, he created "Groq bonds" — war-bond–style instruments that exchanged salary for equity. About 80% of the team participated; nearly half took statutory minimum wage. They saved two months of runway and kept the company alive.

The core bet Ross made — that fast inference would matter — was widely dismissed, inside Groq and out. When the CEO of GitHub called needing chips to run LLMs, Ross's own engineers told him it couldn't be done. He eventually stopped asking and started declaring: "I intend to do this." He describes that shift — from inviting pessimism to announcing direction — as the most important leadership change he made.

Now at NVIDIA, Ross carries what he calls manufactured discontent: a deliberate refusal to rest, convinced that every day without sufficient compute is a day the world waits longer for cures for cancer and aging.

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/jonathan-ross

Made possible by

Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com

AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra

Deel: https://deel.com/senra

Chapters

(00:00:00) The $20 Billion NVIDIA Deal Closed In 3 Weeks

(00:00:25) Why GPUs And LPUs Are Better Together

(00:01:46) When AI Talks To AI, Speed Wins

(00:03:30) Always Start With A Hobby Project

(00:05:55) Ask The Right Questions, Not Answer Them

(00:08:23) There Are Infinite Ways To Be A Leader

(00:13:00) I Was One Of The World's Worst Leaders

(00:14:34) Fewer Constraints, More Room To Surprise You

(00:16:31) At NVIDIA There Is No Politics

(00:19:44) You Have To Learn Confidence

(00:22:23) East Coast VCs Think, West Coast VCs Follow

(00:23:50) The Keynesian Beauty Contest Of Silicon Valley

(00:26:48) The Autonomy That Created The NVIDIA Deal

(00:30:07) Making A Model Smarter By Making It Faster

(00:34:52) Reality Quotient Beats Intelligence Quotient

(00:35:44) Find The Dominant Game And Play It

(00:37:11) A Founder's Job Is Full-Time Change Management

(00:38:34) Return On Luck: Seize It Better Than Anyone

(00:42:54) You Can't Sell Speed, You Have To Let People Try It

(00:46:32) I Intend To: Intentional Leadership

(00:51:07) Groq Bonds: Trading Salary For Survival

(00:54:13) Hire For Negatives, Grow For Positives

(00:58:46) Loss Aversion And Booking The Win Early

(01:00:37) How Michael Jordan Weaponized Humiliation

(01:03:13) Manufactured Discontent Drives Everything

(01:05:02) Every Day Without Compute Has A Real Cost

(01:07:07) Code Was Rationed, Now It's Nearly Free

(01:10:04) Teach Kids To Ask Questions, Not Answer Them

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 the way he approaches a strategy game: a tree search, calculating moves, working the decision tree toward victory. By his own account, competition is all he does.

He dropped out of Harvard after two years, worked as a founding engineer at Scale AI, and co-founded Lunchclub before starting Cognition in August 2023 with fellow IOI gold medalists Steven Hao and Walden Yan. They built it in a New York apartment. Devin's annualized revenue then climbed from $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million by June 2025.

In May 2026, Cognition raised at a $26 billion valuation.

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/scott-wu

Made possible by

Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com

AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra

Deel: https://deel.com/senra

Chapters

(00:00:00) Scott Wu’s Obsession With Winning

(00:02:06) Competitive Programming, Games And Finding His People

(00:04:24) Family, Go, And The Roots Of Scott’s Competitiveness

(00:08:35) Why Losing Hurts More Than Winning Feels Good

(00:09:38) What Winning With Devin Looks Like

(00:12:55) Devin Today: The AI Software Engineer

(00:13:52) Software As The Human-Computer Interface

(00:18:45) Why AI Progress Is Hard To Intuit

(00:20:39) Thinking About AI From First Principles

(00:22:57) What Happens When Agents Can Work For Months

(00:30:18) The Original Thesis Behind Cognition

(00:31:12) Launching Devin And Handling Criticism

(00:37:17) Finding Product-Market Fit In The Enterprise

(00:42:41) How Cognition Deploys Devin Inside Large Companies

(00:48:34) Measuring ROI Instead Of Token Spend

(00:50:01) Why Cognition Wants To Be Model-Neutral

(00:52:18) Why Focus Lets Startups Beat Giants

(00:57:14) Independence, Acquisitions, And Building A Generational Company

(01:00:27) Why Money Is Not The Goal

(01:03:42) One Life: Going For It All

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 business from the inside out. What he saw clearly was that Madison Avenue was using an old playbook, failing to see that artists were shaping fashion and other cultural trends.

Stoute brokered Jay-Z's S. Carter shoe deal with Reebok — the first sneaker deal for a non-athlete — helped launch McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It" campaign, and came within one meeting of signing LeBron James. He watched an 18-year-old LeBron walk away from a $10 million signing bonus to bet on himself. It confirmed everything Stoute believed: the world had already changed, and the old gatekeepers just hadn't caught up yet. UnitedMasters was built on that same conviction — giving artists ownership of their masters and a direct line to their fans.

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/steve-stoute

Made possible by

Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com

AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra

Deel: https://deel.com/senra

HubSpot: ⁠https://hubspot.com

Chapters

(00:00:00) Run Towards The Unknown

(00:04:43) The Men In Black Glasses Nobody Got Paid For

(00:07:34) Too Scared To Buy Apple At Nine Dollars

(00:15:27) Black Consumers Buy What Isn't Marketed To Them

(00:19:13) Betting On The Education, Not The Equity

(00:21:39) A Music Video Is Just A TV Commercial

(00:24:32) The First Non-Athlete Shoe Deal

(00:27:25) LeBron Walks Away From Ten Million To Bet On Himself

(00:30:35) Why Are You Giving It Away

(00:35:18) If Artists Knew Their Fans They Wouldn't Need A Label

(00:39:57) Prince Wrote Slave On His Face

(00:46:01) How Jay-Z, Master P, And Wu-Tang Beat The System

(00:50:44) The Power Of Repetition

(00:54:13) Independent Artists Are The New Small Businesses

(00:58:56) Fame And Talent Are Now At Odds

(01:04:39) Ryan Coogler's Unprecedented Sinners Deal

(01:09:25) Live At The Convergence Of Culture, Technology, And Storytelling

(01:11:09) You Can Get Anything Done If You Don't Take Credit

(01:12:53) Signing Kobe To Out-Rap Shaq

(01:15:25) How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything

(01:18:55) The Barefoot Standoff With Jay-Z

(01:22:50) Getting Jay-Z To Write Still D.R.E.

(01:28:08) Managing Nas, The Greatest Thing He Ever Did

(01:31:00) Walking Into Queensbridge To Find Nas

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 to build a computer division at Lucasfilm. When Lucas needed cash, Steve Jobs bought that division in 1986 for $5 million and spun it out as Pixar. For years it sold imaging computers and lost money while Catmull and John Lasseter made short films to keep the dream alive. Jobs sank roughly $50 million of his own money into it. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first feature animated entirely by computer, and went public days later. Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up followed. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion and put Catmull in charge of both studios; he revived a faltering Disney Animation with films like Frozen.

Catmull cared about the conditions that let creative work survive its own fragility. Every original idea, he argues, starts out ugly and broken, and management exists to protect it long enough to get good. At Pixar that meant the Braintrust: a room where directors got blunt feedback with no authority attached and the conversation stayed on the problem, never on who was right. He laid it all out in Creativity, Inc.

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/ed-catmull

Made possible by

Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com

AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra

Deel: https://deel.com/senra

Chapters

(00:00:00) Most Companies Are Full Of Shit

(00:04:28) The Brain Trust Mechanism

(00:10:13) Why Steve Jobs Was Banned From The Braintrust

(00:17:48) Your Job Is To Manage The Dynamics

(00:23:27) Betting The Company On Toy Story

(00:24:35) Engineering Eisner's Worst Nightmare

(00:36:51) Bob Iger's Crappy Hand

(00:38:44) Why Disney Never Asked What Pixar Was Doing

(00:43:48) Take The Hard Problem

(00:44:38) The Director Can't Lose The Team

(00:48:48) Quality Is The Best Business Plan

(00:52:32) What Walt Disney Taught Him

(00:59:25) George Lucas And The Motion Blur Problem

(01:08:48) Now What's The Point Of My Life

(01:13:31) How Much Of This Was Me

(01:16:10) George Lucas Wanted The Whole Industry Healthy

(01:25:11) Refusing To Let Anyone Feel Second Class

(01:32:38) The Truck In The Building

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices