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

    #392 Michele Ferrero and His $40 Billion Privately Owned Chocolate Empire
    Jun 23 2025
    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. ---- 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 ---- 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.
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    55 mins
  • #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
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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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