David Senra

Scicomm Media

0.0 (0)
Business
Updated weekly

Conversations with the greatest living founders.

12 hr ago

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 Technology Officer to Co-President before becoming Co-CEO alongside Alex Norström at the start of 2026. Spotify survived an existential challenge from Apple, which launched Apple Music in 2015 and told its teams internally they would kill Spotify within six months. Spotify's answer was a three-part strategy: a stronger free tier, superior personalization, and ubiquity across non-Apple hardware. All three bets paid out. The throughline in everything both Söderström and Spotify build is a conviction that media should be time well spent. Spotify surveyed users anonymously across major platforms and found that Gen Z valued roughly 90% of their time on Spotify, while regret rates on competing platforms topped 60%. That data formalized what had been an instinct: expand only into categories that are good for users — music, podcasts, audiobooks, fitness. He believes this is not just the right thing to do; it is what makes Spotify durable. His current bet is that AI gives every user a direct conversation with the product — and that Spotify should be first. He has been preparing since 2017, when he read the Transformer paper days after publication and evangelized internally. His principle: periods of change are when market share moves, and the companies that win are the ones that get there first. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/gustav-soderstrom Chapters (00:00:00) How Gustav Prepared To Become CEO (00:02:30) There Is No Right Org (00:05:06) Synchronized Swimming At Spotify (00:09:25) You Ship Your Org Chart (00:10:31) Why Apple's Functional Org Works (00:11:48) Tenure Is The Key (00:13:31) Oracle vs. Elon On Churn (00:16:41) Finding Your North Star (00:18:24) Choosing Pain For Distribution (00:19:21) Prioritize The User Over Yourself (00:23:05) The No Regrets Strategy (00:25:21) Building A Running Playlist With AI (00:27:35) Figuring Out What To Spend Your Life On (00:30:01) Being Honest About Doing Good (00:32:25) The Anti-Engagement Decision (00:34:50) Giving Users Control Of The Algorithm (00:37:57) The 1-9-90 Power Law (00:40:23) Getting Into AI Early (00:43:55) You Are Your Thoughts (00:48:22) Building Tools That Enhance Humanity (00:49:45) The Genius Of The Kindle (00:51:57) When Steve Jobs Came To Kill Spotify (00:54:24) Three Bets Against Apple (00:57:07) Building A Personal AI Agent (01:00:55) Premeditated Media (01:02:27) Who Tells You The Truth (01:05:16) The Vulcan Mind Meld Of Tenure (01:07:28) Hiring For Spikes And Fresh Blood (01:10:14) What Keeps Him Up At Night Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1hr 14min
31 May

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 Washington, D.C. to provide support to her father in his first term as President of the United States. During the four years in Washington, D.C., she helped in doubling the child tax credit for 40 million families, standing up the first national paid family leave plan for federal employees, passing nine pieces of legislation against human trafficking, and getting the Great American Outdoors Act signed — the largest environmental legislation since Teddy Roosevelt created the national parks. When it ended, she started over, and built again. She co-founded Planet Harvest, creating a market for the 40% of American fruits and vegetables discarded each year because they don't meet cosmetic specifications. She's building Sazan, a 1,400-hectare private island in the Mediterranean with five miles of beachfront. She's investing in founders at the frontier of AI, biotech, robotics, and space. And she's working with Elad Gil to create Alexandria AI, a project that will translate the world's great public-domain literature into every major language and give it away for free. She describes herself as mission-driven now, not achievement-driven. The difference, she says, took her decades to find. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/ivanka-trump Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Knowing What Excites You (00:02:02) The Sazan Island Project (00:07:18) Knowing Who You Are (00:13:06) Creating Stillness (00:16:30) Finding Mentors In Books (00:17:04) Avoid Competition Through Authenticity (00:21:05) Reading As An X-Ray Of The Soul (00:21:29) Phil Knight's Shoe Dog (00:24:55) Meaning Redeemed By Hardship (00:29:39) The Call To Government (00:31:16) Handing Back The Keys (00:41:42) The Reset In Miami (00:46:25) Less And Better (00:50:13) Finding The One Thread (00:55:54) Turning Waste Into An Asset (01:03:38) Democratizing The World's Great Books (01:12:07) Marry The Right Person (01:12:47) Deciding What To Build (01:16:23) No Contract Protects A Bad Partner (01:19:08) Opportunity Where Others See Nothing (01:21:34) Backing Fragile New Ideas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1hr 24min
24 May

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 didn't say "produced by." It said "reduced by" — a theological statement as much as a job title. His method has never changed: strip everything down until what remains has no place to hide, then protect whatever magic appears. He's applied it to Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eminem, The Strokes, Metallica, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and many other top artists. He describes himself as a lazy workaholic. The Zen exterior is real. So is the guy who spent the first 25 years of his career in a dark room 16 hours a day, seven days a week, waiting for a miracle to show up. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/rick-rubin Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Deel: https://deel.com/senra HubSpot: https://hubspot.com AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra Rick Rubin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rickrubin X: https://x.com/RickRubin Tetragrammaton: https://www.tetragrammaton.com The Creative Act: https://a.co/d/05FKl59a Substack: https://rickrubin.substack.com Chapters (00:00:00) Less Is More But Harder (00:02:00) Def Jam From The Dorm Room (00:04:00) Capturing Club Energy On Record (00:06:00) Going Deep On Influences (00:12:30) Why Reduced By Rick Rubin (00:14:00) Beatles Structure Meets Rap (00:16:00) The Ruthless Edit (00:19:30) Eminem: The Most Obsessive Artist (00:22:00) Lazy Workaholic (00:25:30) Protecting The Moment Of Magic (00:29:00) Dana White And Becoming A Podcaster (00:32:30) Professional Listener (00:44:00) Fishing And Showing Up (00:47:00) Johnny Cash And Constraints (00:55:30) Church Business vs. Banking Business (00:58:50) Run On Intuition Alone (01:01:00) Jay-Z vs. Eminem Process (01:04:30) In Service Of The Artist (01:09:00) Work As Diary Entries (01:13:30) Four Ways Success Destroys You (01:16:00) How To Sustain Success (01:21:00) The House On The Mountain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1hr 24min
17 May

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 intersection. In 2007, he used it to take over Take-Two Interactive with no money. The company had a chairman under indictment, four government investigations, and six months of cash left. Zelnick had written memos for Carl Icahn twice saying stay away. Then Icahn told him to read the bylaws. A plain vanilla Delaware charter allowed a board replacement if a majority of shares physically present at the annual meeting voted for it. Zelnick met the 10 hedge funds holding 70% of the stock, got commitments, walked in thinking he had 48%, discovered most had loaned their shares to short sellers, and won with 88%. The only asset worth keeping was GTA. His pitch to creative talent: we will fund your vision, stay out of your way, and run a company where nobody gets indicted. Market cap when he arrived: $700 million. Today: roughly $35 billion. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/strauss-zelnick Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Hostile Takeover With No Money (00:01:29) Becoming the New Media Guy (00:03:58) Lessons From Entertainment History (00:09:44) Why Hollywood Feared Games (00:11:52) Fox Turnaround and Barry Diller (00:20:54) Rupert Murdoch and High Stakes Calm (00:26:20) Taking the Leap to Crystal Dynamics (00:38:04) Bootstrapping Without Capital (00:43:57) Carl Icahn Connection (00:47:01) Take Two Proxy Coup (00:56:36) Turnaround Cost Cutting Playbook (01:01:37) Leading Creative Geniuses (01:06:24) Rationality Beats Magic (01:07:54) Borderlands Bet (01:09:28) GTA Timelines Pressure (01:11:22) Specific Goals Visualization (01:21:34) Service Leadership Mindset (01:31:52) Media Versus Entertainment (01:34:22) AI Productivity Reality (01:36:08) Why Hits Surprise Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1hr 39min
10 May

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 find a buyer. Fertitta slept on it, called back the next morning, and said: "Fuck it. Let's keep going." What saved the UFC was a reality show. White had watched The Contender and identified its fatal mistake: it edited the fights. You let the fans decide whether a fight is good or bad. Spike TV passed on The Ultimate Fighter. White came back with a new offer: the UFC would pay for everything; Spike would provide airtime. The season finale — Bonner vs. Griffin — ended with the crowd chanting for one more round. Spike executives pulled White into an alley and shook hands on a renewal written on a napkin. Because the UFC had funded the show, it owned it outright. The television deals tell the story: Spike at $35 million, Fox at $100 million, ESPN at $3 billion, Paramount at $7.7 billion. Each time, critics said the UFC had peaked. Each time, they were wrong. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/dana-white Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Axon by AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra HubSpot: https://hubspot.com Chapters (00:00:00) Founders Are the Best Storytellers (00:01:04) Buying the UFC for $2M (00:02:51) Excellence Is the Capacity to Take Pain (00:07:58) One Good Night's Sleep and "Fuck It, Let's Keep Going" (00:10:53) The Ultimate Fighter: A $10M Bet-It-All Moment (00:13:12) The Napkin Deal With Spike TV (00:22:00) Leaving Spike TV and the Phil Duman Story (00:28:24) First Event Profitable: What He Does Differently Now (00:32:30) Why Dana Sits Ringside Watching a Screen (00:34:07) Building a Team That Can Read His Mind (00:45:10) "Who the Fuck Are You and What Have You Done?" (00:51:55) Selling the UFC for $4+ Billion (00:57:32) Not Cutting a Single Employee During COVID (01:03:30) Firing a Sponsor Who Told Him How to Vote (01:07:45) There Is No Plan B (01:09:00) Joe Rogan: Doing the First 12 Fights for Free (01:12:37) Loyalty Is the Most Important Thing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1hr 13min
3 May

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) Why Every New Hire Needs His Approval (01:19:06) The Axon 2 Inflection Point (01:21:15) One Great Engineer Now Beats A Hundred Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1hr 26min
26 Apr

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, Baszucki left, hosted a libertarian talk radio show, drove across the West in a motorhome with his family, and eventually returned to a one-room office in Menlo Park with his old Knowledge Revolution engineer Erik Cassel. They began writing simulation code. The prototype was called DynaBlocks. It became Roblox. The platform launched in 2006, targeting kids and teenagers not just with games but with a canvas for building them. Growth was slow for years — then the pandemic made Roblox essential. In March 2021, the company listed directly on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation of more than $41 billion. Cassel, who had died of cancer in 2013, did not live to see it. Baszucki has always framed Roblox as something bigger than a gaming platform — a place for human co-experience where creators, many of them teenagers, build the content and share in the economics. He has pledged all additional CEO compensation to philanthropy, directing tens of millions toward bipolar disorder research — a cause tied to his own family's experience with the illness. Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Axon by AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra HubSpot: https://hubspot.com Chapters (00:00:00) Roblox Origin Story (00:01:14) Sabbatical and Intuition (00:03:36) Founder vs CEO Mindset (00:05:43) Building the Clock (00:07:57) Lifestyle Startup Phase (00:08:49) First Product Failure (00:15:48) Buying First Users (00:17:43) Studio Goes Live (00:18:53) Roblox vs YouTube (00:21:59) Beyond Games Vision (00:25:50) Roblox Operating System (00:33:55) Nine Companies Inside (00:36:19) Safety and Monetization (00:41:13) Robux Economy Loop (00:45:19) Creator to Entrepreneur (00:45:49) Chasing Photoreal Concurrency (00:49:11) Imaginary Competitor Mindset (00:50:08) Capital Efficiency Playbook (00:52:11) Performance As Growth (00:55:40) Owning The Stack (00:58:36) Roblox Infrastructure Engine (01:02:32) Safety And AI Moat (01:06:57) Data Ethics And NPC Testing (01:11:31) Creator Earnings Explosion (01:16:08) Marketplace And Transparency (01:20:01) Near Death Lessons (01:24:43) Ads And Creator Discovery (01:25:35) Closing Reflections Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1hr 28min
12 Apr

Evan Spiegel, Snap

Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat. At Stanford, he enrolled in the product design program. In 2011, in a class project, he and two classmates — Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy — sketched out the idea for an app where photos disappeared. The insight was counterintuitive: in an era when everyone was obsessed with permanence and curation online, ephemerality might be the point. They built it. Spiegel dropped out before graduation to run it full time. What followed was one of the most turbulent ascents in Silicon Valley history. Facebook tried to buy Snapchat in 2013 for $3 billion in cash. Spiegel, 23 years old, said no. The decision was mocked at the time and later vindicated. Snap went public in March 2017 at a $24 billion valuation, making Spiegel — still in his mid-twenties — one of the youngest self-made billionaires in history. Spiegel has always argued that Snap is a camera company — that the camera is the starting point for how the next generation communicates, not a feature, but the interface itself. Snapchat pioneered Stories, a format that Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube all copied within years. It pioneered augmented reality filters at consumer scale. It built a maps product that shows where your friends are in real time. Every one of those ideas was imitated. Now he's making his biggest bet yet. Snap's sixth-generation Spectacles are AR glasses — a genuine attempt to build the successor to the smartphone. They overlay digital information onto the real world in real time. Spiegel believes the camera on your face will eventually replace the screen in your pocket. He and his wife Miranda Kerr run the Spiegel Family Fund, focused on arts, education, and human rights. In 2022 alone, he gave $20 million to a scholarship program in Stockton and wiped out the student debt of an entire graduating class at Otis College of Art and Design. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/evan-spiegel Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Deel: https://deel.com/senra Axon by AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra HubSpot: https://hubspot.com Chapters (00:00:00) Edwin Land Influence (00:02:01) Art Science Upbringing (00:03:27) Computers And Connection (00:05:50) Smartphone Addiction Lens (00:09:30) Building For Humanity (00:13:15) From Internships To Snapchat (00:17:02) Snapchat vs. Social Media (00:18:38) Stories And Vertical Video (00:22:22) Uncompromising Kind Culture (00:28:34) Snap Leadership And Design (00:37:38) AI Supercharges Snap (00:41:57) No Moat In Software (00:42:31) Beating the Clone (00:43:50) Messaging Network Effects (00:44:58) Camera Out of Pocket (00:45:49) Specs Market Reality (00:48:28) AR Platform Explosion (00:52:14) Vision-Led Product Design (00:54:09) Why Not Luxottica (00:59:11) Owning the Stack (01:03:02) Snap the Middle Child (01:08:04) Crisis Without Burnout (01:10:02) Snapchat Plus Growth (01:12:54) Rebuilding the Ad Engine (01:19:03) Subscriptions Over Ads (01:21:14) Fighting Giants With AI (01:22:04) Why Hardware Stands Alone (01:25:29) Snap Lab Origins (01:25:59) New Apps Beyond Snapchat (01:28:29) Focus And Founder Drive (01:32:14) Surfacing Problems Fast (01:36:08) Flat Culture Meritocracy (01:39:36) Last Company And Giving Back (01:41:15) Turning Down Billions (01:48:51) Snapchat Funds New Computing (01:51:24) Crucible Year And Schedule (01:53:56) Stress Reframed Meditation (01:56:09) Explainer In Chief (01:57:07) Closing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1hr 58min

See All (24)

Trailer

David Senra

Nine years ago, I launched Founders. Today, I'm launching a new podcast called David Senra. The first episode goes live this Sunday, September 28. Subscribe wherever you watch or listen to podcasts. Founders will still come out every week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

19/09/2025

•

1 min