David Senra

→ WHAT IT COVERS Kurt MacAlpine, CEO of Corient, explains how he built the world's largest multifamily office managing $525 billion by restructuring wealth management as a true professional services partnership. Starting as CEO of Canadian asset manager CI Financial at age 39, he dismantled the industry's advisor-centric commission model and replaced it with a conflict-free, fee-only fiduciary structure spanning 15 jurisdictions globally.

→ WHAT IT COVERS David Senra interviews Ben Wilson, creator of the How to Take Over the World podcast, who has stage four neuroendocrine carcinoma and four children under five. They examine through-line traits across Napoleon, Steve Jobs, Joan of Arc, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and others — extracting frameworks on zeal, trade-offs, obsession, and singular focus.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Alexandr Wang describes building Muse, Meta's personal AI agent, from a February 2025 prototype to the fastest-growing consumer AI app ever. He covers the seven-month refinement process, the under-200-person team structure, viral marketing tactics, and the Scale AI acquisition deal that brought him to Meta to rebuild its AI lab from scratch.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ari Emanuel, CEO of WME and TKO, traces the deal-making chain that built a sports and entertainment empire — from acquiring William Morris for $44M in buyouts, purchasing UFC for $4.2B, and closing a landmark ESPN deal — while detailing the personal transformation from rage-driven operator to purposeful leader. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Overpay to close:** When bidding against Peter Turner for IMG at $1.9B, Egon Durban advised Emanuel to offer $2.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Writer Jeremy Stern discusses his long-form profiles of Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Scott Wu, and Josh Kushner with David Senra. Stern explains his process of spending five to six months per piece, interviewing up to 40 sources, and how his interest begins with a cultural question before finding the right person to illuminate it.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Alexander Taubman explains how Long Lake, a three-year-old firm he co-founded, acquires established service businesses across five verticals—HOA management, HR services, specialty tax, infrastructure, and travel—then deploys Nexus, its proprietary AI platform, to drive revenue growth. The firm just acquired American Express Global Business Travel for $6.3 billion.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ronnie Fieg, founder and CEO of Kith, traces his path from a 13-year-old stockroom worker in Jamaica, Queens to building a global streetwear and lifestyle brand. He covers product philosophy, distribution control, physical retail strategy, brand expansion into hospitality, and why passion-first entrepreneurship consistently outperforms revenue-first thinking across 31 years in the footwear and apparel industry.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Peter Rahal, who sold RXBAR for $600M while retaining 90% ownership, details his failed attempt at investing, his three-year path back to founding David Protein, and how the company reached $300M in revenue within two years by acquiring a patented fat-replacement ingredient and building a decentralized multi-brand CPG platform called Medici Brands. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Operator vs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Luca Ferrari, co-founder of Bending Spoons, details how his company acquires distressed digital brands like Evernote and Meetup, then transforms them using centralized talent science, a proprietary 50-tool operating system, and a culture built on extreme ownership and relentless simplification. Bending Spoons currently runs approximately $3 billion in annual revenue across 50+ acquired businesses.

→ WHAT IT COVERS ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski explains how he and co-founder Piotr built a focused audio AI research-and-product company from 2022, starting with dubbing and evolving into a platform serving voice agents, marketing, and accessibility across industries including FinTech, healthcare, and telecom, with Deutsche Telekom as a deeply integrated enterprise customer.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Zach Dell, founder of Base Power Company, explains how distributed home battery storage can solve America's grid capacity crisis. U.S. electricity demand is projected to grow at 10% annually versus the historical 2%, driven by AI infrastructure. Base's strategy centers on owning batteries on homes, selling electricity not hardware, and achieving cost advantage through vertical integration.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Doug Leone, former Sequoia Capital managing partner, returns to the firm at 69 after stepping down at 65, describing himself as a "low-level analyst" starting over. He covers how fear drives decades-long dominance, his three investment filters, board construction mistakes, trust as a business accelerant, and why AI makes him feel further behind after 90 days back. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Fear as forward motion:** Leone uses fear as a performance trigger rather than a deterrent.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Torsten Reil, co-founder of European defense AI company Helsing, covers the transformation of modern warfare through autonomous drones and AI-controlled fighter jets, explains how 100,000 strike drones could deter a land war in Europe, and details how Helsing scaled from founding to a program of record in under 30 months. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Autonomous Drone Warfare:** Tanks and traditional artillery are becoming obsolete on the modern battlefield.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Sam Altman joins David Senra to discuss building OpenAI from 12 people in an apartment with no whiteboard to a billion weekly users, covering the parallels between startup investing and AI research, why economic inertia slows technological adoption, and how power-law thinking shapes decisions on compute, research bets, and product focus.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber and new physical AI company Atoms, covers the frameworks he used to scale Uber across 70+ countries, the China-Didi war, how government-sanctioned taxi cartels shaped Uber's regulatory battles, his fundraising auction process, the Benchmark coup that removed him, and Atoms' mission to automate mining, food production, and logistics one industry at a time.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Lulu Cheng Meservey, founder of communications firm Rostra, explains her "Go Direct" framework for founders building movements around counterintuitive technologies. Drawing from her work with Anduril, Shopify, and Ramp, she outlines why traditional PR is obsolete and how founders must control their own narrative to recruit talent, attract customers, and outmaneuver incumbents.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Michael Ovitz, CAA co-founder, speaks with David Senra about the universal principles underlying success across entertainment and technology. Ovitz draws parallels between packaging Hollywood talent in the 1970s–90s and backing AI-era founders today, while detailing his current bid to take Universal Music Group private alongside Bill Ackman.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Micky Malka, founder of Ribbit Capital, shares how rebel thinking, infinite game philosophy, and decade-long founder relationships drive his investment approach. He traces patterns from building Lemon Bank in Brazil in 2003 through partnering with Walmart on OnePay, and explains why every company is becoming a token factory in the AI era.

→ WHAT IT COVERS David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of 37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails, covers building profitable software without venture capital, the discipline of radical product simplicity, how constraints produce better work than unlimited resources, his switch from Mac to Linux, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke's early AI conviction, and why independence from investors and customers represents the ultimate creative freedom.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Jeff Zalaznick, co-founder of Major Food Group, traces the path from JPMorgan analyst to building 77 restaurants with a 76-out-of-77 success rate. He covers the $40 million restoration of the historic Four Seasons restaurant space, the founding of Carbone, and MFG's expansion into private members clubs, branded residential towers, and consumer packaged goods.