Podcast profile
By David Senra
Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work.
Latest episode
49 min
Topics
Company formation, founding, product-market fit, scaling, and startup operations.
Historical development of technologies, companies, industries, and computing culture.
Managing engineering organizations, teams, delivery, architecture, and technical leadership.
Formats
Structured stories using chronology, scenes, characters, and production.
Detailed examination of a company, product, system, incident, or technical decision.
Audience level
Assumes basic technology literacy and familiarity with common products, roles, and terminology.
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Episodes shown — 10 of 25
What I learned from reading Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man by Vance Trimble. I taught the boys how to do it." — Sam's father 4:34 — "Sam Walton plunged into this new world of merchandising with the keen and furious dedication of a quarterback who was one touchdown behind with two minutes to go."
What I learned from reading Bloomberg by Michael Bloomberg.
What I learned from reading The Mind of Napoleon by Napoleon. I am born and built for work. I have known the limitations of my legs, I have known the limitations of my eyes; I have never been able to know the limitations of my working capacity."
What I learned from reading Distant Force: A Memoir of the Teledyne Corporation and The Man Who Created It by George Roberts and The Outsiders by William Thorndike. Their inadequacy is not surprising.
Claude Hopkins was the greatest copywriter of all time. His ideas were so valuable that when he wrote them down in a book the founder of his advertising firm locked the manuscript in a safe for 20 years. When the book was finally published it sold over 8 million copies.
What I learned from rereading Bob Dylan's autobiography.
Claude Shannon changed your life and you probably don't even know it. Claude is the father of information theory. He transformed information into bits and created the intellectual foundation for computers, the Internet, digital media, high-speed communication, and Artificial Intelligence.
Raymond Plank founded Apache Corporation with just $250,000 in 1954. 50 years later his company was worth $50 billion.
Obsession is the engine of Nolan’s career. This episode examines Christopher Nolan’s life, working methods, and philosophy through The Nolan Variations by Tom Shone.
This episode discusses Joseph Wechsberg’s 1966 book, The Merchant Bankers. Rather than recounting the histories of families like the Rothschilds, Barings, Hambros, Warburgs, and Lehman Brothers, I wanted to extract the principles they shared. Merchant banking is fascinating.