David Senra
David Senra episodes converted into bullet points.
Episodes
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Building Pixar, Working With Steve Jobs, and Cultivating Creativity | Ed Catmull
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 Follow David Senra X: https://x.com/davidsenra Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidsenra LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsenra Facebook: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senrashow Threads: https://www.threads.com/@davidsenra Spotify: https://spti.fi/TVrr557 Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4msoZtb Website: https://www.davidsenra.com 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 #davidsenra #pixar
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How Spotify Competes With Apple, Google & Amazon — And Wins | Spotify Co-CEO Gustav Söderström
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.
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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.
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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...
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The Man Behind Grand Theft Auto 6: Strauss Zelnick
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.
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Dana White: Building the UFC & A Combat Sports Empire
Dana White grew up watching CEOs read canned statements written by lawyers. He decided early he would never do that.
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Bootstrapping a Business to $5 Billion in Free Cash Flow | AppLovin’s Adam Foroughi
Adam Foroughi is the co-founder and CEO of AppLovin, the AI-powered advertising platform that became one of the most impressive stock stories in recent history.
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Roblox’s David Baszucki Built the Biggest Playground on Earth
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.
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Evan Spiegel, Snapchat: Building a Multi-Billion Dollar Company
Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat.
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Tony Xu of DoorDash: Surviving 1,000 Days of Startup Hell
Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, the largest food delivery platform in the United States.
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How Elon Thinks
Eric Jorgenson is an investor, author, and the CEO of Scribe Media — best known for his mission to distill the ideas of the world's most consequential thinkers into books anyone can read.
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Marc Andreessen: The World Is More Malleable Than You Think
Marc Andreessen is the co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz (@a16z), one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world.
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Brian Armstrong: Iron in His Veins
Brian Armstrong is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, the publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange and one of the most recognized names in the digital asset industry.
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Jason Fried: Your Only Competition Is Your Costs
Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the software company behind Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE. Fried is widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in modern product development, remote work, and business philosophy.
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Building Interscope Records & Beats by Dre | Jimmy Iovine
Jimmy Iovine is the co-founder of Interscope Records, Beats by Dre, and the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy. Iovine is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the modern music industry.
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Tobi Lütke: 21 Years of Building Shopify
Tobi Lütke is the co-founder of Shopify, where he has served as the company's CEO since 2008.
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John Mackey: 44 Years of Building Whole Foods
John Mackey is the co-founder of Whole Foods Market, where he also served as the company's CEO for 44 years (1980–2022). More recently, Mackey is the co-founder of Love.Life, a wellness company focused on a holistic approach to health. He is an entrepreneur, author and advocate for conscious capi...
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My Conversation With Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Founder of Colossus & Positive Sum | David Senra
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the Chairman Emeritus of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, the founder of Colossus, and the founder and CEO of Positive Sum. He is an investor, author, and podcaster who has devoted his career to understanding the world's best investors and entrepreneurs.
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James Dyson: 5,127 Prototypes
James Dyson is the founder and chairman of Dyson, a technology-led company present in 84 markets worldwide. He is an inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who has devoted his life to solving problems through new technologies.
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CAA Co-founder Michael Ovitz: Failure Is Not an Option
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.
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How Todd Graves Built Raising Cane's
Todd Graves is the founder and CEO of Raising Cane's, one of America's most successful and fastest-growing restaurant chains built on a radically simple concept that nearly everyone told him would fail.
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How Brad Jacobs Built 8 Billion-Dollar Companies
Brad Jacobs is the chairman and CEO of QXO, Inc., and the founder of eight separate billion-dollar companies including XPO Logistics, United Rentals and United Waste.
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Michael Dell, Dell Technologies | David Senra
Michael Dell is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies.
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Daniel Ek, Spotify | David Senra
Daniel Ek is the co-founder and CEO of Spotify.
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Welcome to David Senra
Nine years ago, I launched Founders (@founderspodcast1).