『David Senra』のカバーアート

David Senra

David Senra

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Conversations with the greatest living founders.© 2025 Senra Show LLC 経済学
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  • Sam Altman on Building OpenAI & Betting on the Impossible
    2026/08/23
    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 chips, fabrication plants, data centers, power systems, finance, policy, supply chains and logistics—what he describes as potentially the most expensive infrastructure project in history. He argues OpenAI should function primarily as a platform: one direct interface to powerful AI and one application programming interface that lets people build on top of it. That strategy requires killing good ideas to preserve resources for the great ones. Altman expects AI capabilities to advance faster than society and the economy can absorb them. Human habits and institutional inertia will slow the transition, which he believes may make it smoother. He also expects human connection to become more valuable and AI to enable a major increase in small-business formation. His central concern is that AI should expand human agency rather than concentrate power in a small number of companies, people or models. He also explains how Y Combinator shaped OpenAI’s operating philosophy: make non-consensus bets, put technical people in charge, ship early, learn from reality and iterate. Yet OpenAI required breaking the classic startup playbook. The organization spent four and a half years without launching a product and had to invent ways to measure research progress without customer feedback. On its first day, roughly a dozen people gathered in Greg Brockman’s apartment and quickly realized they did not know what to do next. Years of what Altman calls “chaotic stumbling” eventually produced the research path that led to GPT. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/sam-altman Made possible by Ramp: https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Tobi Lütke, AI-Native Companies & Why Adoption Moves Slowly (00:05:45) Sam's Own Resistance to AI & the Missing iPhone Moment (00:10:00) Models, Compute, Power Laws & Non-Consensus Talent (00:18:37) From AI-Obsessed Kid to Founder, Investor & Back Again (00:23:19) Impossible Problems, Scientific Discovery & Human Connection (00:30:16) AI's Two Biggest Risks: Loss of Control & Centralized Power (00:33:09) Iterative Deployment, AI Safety & Learning From Reality (00:40:27) Why People Fear AI & the Coming Small-Business Boom (00:46:13) Context, Memory & the Next Way We Will Work With AI (00:49:17) OpenAI's Platform Strategy & Killing Good Ideas (00:53:20) Peter Thiel, Paul Graham & the Value of Nonlinear Thinkers (01:00:42) How Y Combinator Changed Startups & Shaped OpenAI (01:04:03) Learning More From Success & the Power of Repetition (01:09:45) Building OpenAI Without Customers, a Product or a Playbook (01:15:57) Letters to His Son & Preserving the Story Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 18 分
  • Travis Kalanick, Founder of Uber & Atoms
    2026/08/16
    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
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    1 時間 49 分
  • Lulu Cheng Meservey, Founder of Rostra
    2026/08/12
    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
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    1 時間 18 分
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