The David Senra moat is getting deeper and wider
The Founders podcast has become a non-negotiable staple in my limited content diet since I discovered it in early 2023. It was actually the catalyst that set me in the direction of moving on from a decade-plus career in investment banking (let that be a reflection of its value).
But when David Senra, the host of Founders, recently announced his new show (it is simply called David Senra), I was disappointed.
Founders is a solo show. David reads about history’s greatest entrepreneurs and then talks to us about their stories. He focuses on founders of the past (the eminent dead), or founders who may still be living today but the story arc or success of their business is firmly established. He infuses his unique taste and passion, surfaces insights from each founder and business and makes connections to the other 400 (and counting) founders he’s studied.
The product is one of the highest quality products I use. It’s business history as a service. I can’t believe it’s free.
The David Senra show is a new show, where David will have conversations with "the greatest living founders." The first episode came out Sunday, which was a conversation with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify.
I tend to like businesses with a single, maniacal focus on what they do best. It’s simple and it works. It’s the business application of Charlie Munger’s idea of “take a simple idea and take it seriously.”
One widely recognized example is Costco. They have focused maniacally on maintaining a 14-15% gross margin on all products. This value drives more customers, which drives more scale, which drives an improved ability for Costco to purchase more cheaply and lower prices. They simply do not deviate from holding margin at this level, no matter how tempting. This value, perpetually passed on to its customers, is the core of what makes Costco a great business.
Singular focus is actually a common thread among history’s greatest entrepreneurs: they have a maniacal focus on exploiting that one thing they do best. When they deviate from that one thing, they start to dilute that core value offering. A potential beginning of the end.
So that’s where my mind went when I heard about the new show – the David Senra show is a deviation and distraction from Founders. Maybe the beginning of the end.
It’s obvious that David himself believes in this singular focus idea when you listen to him. Making a new, top-notch show is probably not a small time or energy commitment. It could slow the cadence of Founders episodes from the one-per-week target (and in fact, this has recently happened) or jeopardize the quality we’ve come to expect.
David recently talked about this on The Tim Ferriss Show:
“Everybody’s like, ‘We talked about this multiple times. Why don’t you do something else?’ I like doing this. I will keep doing this…if you asked me two years ago, I said, “There’s no way I’m going to do another podcast.”
So what changed?
I think he realized he’s delivering even more value from something he’s already doing and would be doing anyway. It gives him energy. And it sprung naturally because today's greatest living entrepreneurs sought him out.
If you think about David Senra as a business – which he, and his podcasts, definitely are – it starts to make sense. At the bottom, I experiment with breaking this down, but first, let's consider a question:
Why is the David Senra moat getting deeper and wider?
One reason is it’s a commitment to intimately get to know his most interested customers: today’s leading entrepreneurs. Getting to know your customers intimately is always good business and it will seep into future iterations of the product, new Founders episodes.
Another reason is that the David Senra show is a natural byproduct of Founders. I trust it’s not a grab for more revenue. The new show wasn’t created to grow the business. It was created because today’s leading entrepreneurs seek him out to interact with the human encyclopedia of business history and lessons. David was having these conversations naturally anyway. Now they are recorded (of course, they are not going to be totally fly-on-the-wall 100% authentic but my hope is they'll be close).
“It’s the weirdest unintended hack ever to build a world-class network of just read a bunch of history and they’ll come get you…I’ve never sent a cold DM in my life, ever. I’ve never sent a cold email in my life.”
A third reason is that listening to conversations from today’s greatest living founders is one step closer to applying the lessons in our own lives.
While Founders is an entertainment product, the better value is using it as a learning product. David often says that “learning is changing your behavior.” This means action. That part of the value is there for the taking, but it is on you.
If we understand how living successful founders have implemented the lessons of business history, it feels more tangible or attainable to us. We hear their interpretations of the lessons. We hear their questions. It adds texture to the history. We can contextualize the lessons in today’s world.
Put simply, it’s obvious that the experience as a Founders listener just got better.
An analogy that comes to mind: Founders is the Mac, the David Senra show is the iPhone. I’m sure there are many valid critiques of this analogy, but the point is that the David Senra show is a second manifestation of an essence that hasn’t changed and won't change.
The first David Senra conversation with Daniel Ek did not disappoint.
Looking at David Senra as a business
| Element of a Great Business | What it Means | David Senra (Founders, David Senra) |
|---|---|---|
| High and Lasting Return on Resources | Each unit of growth has minimal or virtually zero incremental cost. These growth opportunities last decades. | A podcast episode or video is recorded once, but can be listened to an infinite number of times. Each incremental dollar of ad revenue or subscription costs virtually nothing. David is one guy. It doesn't take a team of thousands. The content is evergreen content. As long as businesses are around, business history is valuable. It's smart to listen to the same episode at least once per year if it resonates. |
| One and Only | The product is a unique blend of human taste and high-quality standard backed by a relentless focus to uphold this taste and quality. There is no substitute. There is no rival of quality. | David is obsessed with his craft (he laughs to himself and it's a solo podcast!). His blend of taste and quality cannot be replicated. He makes Founders for himself. He has successfully "productized" himself (see Naval Ravikant's thoughts on building wealth). Singularly focused on providing business history as a service. The breadth and depth of his knowledge compounds. |
| Self-begetting Growth | Through relentless focus on the core value offering, the business begets its own growth. The business cannot help but get stronger as it grows. | Business is a complex, adaptive system, so business lessons are best learned by collecting numerous cases and drawing connections and comparisons in your mind. The value as a listener of Founders comes from repetition and stacking the case load. Once you start listening, the best thing to do is keep listening. Word of mouth exponentially markets the content for free. The content attracts the very listeners or customers most capable of sustaining it, because they are applying the lessons. |
| Customer Fanaticism | Customers get much more value than they're paying for. Customers feel the nonmonetary parts of value. Customers cannot imagine life without the product. Growth of the product happens through passionate word of mouth. | Listeners, including me, can't believe it's free. The value exchange is inconceivably in the listener's favor. I paid for one of the original lifetime passes to Founders Notes and I still feel this. A founder's biography is incredible leverage in and of itself – a lifetime of business lessons condensed into a book that can be read in hours. David adds an order of magnitude of leverage – a repository of 400+ lifetimes of business lessons condensed into 1-hour episodes. |
| Earned Trust | Trust is built within a community, among people. Trust is held among the creator, the people who grow the original creation, its customers and its partners. Communities cannot help but arise because there's an exchange of value that transcends monetary value. It enhances lives. | Listeners trust that the nonmonetary exchange of value will last for decades. Dee Hock in his memoir: "The nonmonetary exchange of value is the most effective, constructive system ever devised. Evolution and nature have been perfecting it for thousands of millennia." Today's founders can't help but reach out to David…there is no better validation for the product. Todd Graves on David's work: "It's important work and it's more important the bigger your company gets." David makes content for the sake of it. |
Referenced resources:
Tim Ferriss