David Senra - In Service of Founders

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:10)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of PositiveSum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:39)
My guest today is David Senra. I hope David is familiar to many of you by now. His life's work is in service of founders. Every week for the past seven years, he has shared the lessons of history's greatest entrepreneurs on his podcast called Founders.
This time last year, David joined Colossus and we recorded an episode called Passion & Pain, which has become one of our most popular episodes ever. Today, we look back at what he's learned from the past 50 or so founders he's studied over the last 12 months, from Christopher Nolan to Enzo Ferrari to Napoleon.
As ever, I hope David inspires you to pursue your life's work with as much energy as he has. I also want to mention that David and I will be doing our first and probably only live show together in New York City on October 19th during Tech Week at Webster Hall. Tickets are selling pretty fast, so if you're interested in joining us, you can check out the link in the show notes. Please enjoy this great conversation with David Senra.
All right, David, we're exactly one year to the day, just realized this now, from the first time we released an episode together, which we called Passion & Pain was one of the biggest, most popular episodes we ever did. In the one year, a lot's happened. I can't believe it's only been one year. I'd love you to begin by just describing what happened in that one year, pre and post, and then the experience during the last 12 months. Just to bring everyone in on the story, it's been such a cool thing to watch from the bleachers for me, and I'm sure it's been incredibly fun for you. I hope it has.

**David Senra** (3:08)
Been the best year of my life. I think the thing that sticks out the most is how wrong I was about, the good idea I had was like, wait, let me lock myself in a room. Let me read compulsively. Let me follow my natural interests. Let me read biographies of some of the people that achieved the greatest things in the world.
And then once a week, sit down and record what I learned, what I was most interested about. The bad thing was putting a giant paywall in front of it and severely limiting the actual reach for all these like lessons of stories.
And then coming on to Colossus and you helping me in a year, the audience is like 50 times as large as it was. Doing the same amount of work, maybe even more because I'm still working seven days a week. I'm still completely obsessed with it. But just this idea was like, okay, I knew the information was good, but now it's out in the public. And then you get to actually see how what you're making influences some of the most successful people in the world. And then it opens up, I always say the beauty of podcasts, and you know this firsthand, is that they're unique experience generators.
And so like I go from toiling in relative obscurity for six years, doing something I'm completely passionate about, and then greatly amplifying. And then I find myself in Charlie Munger's dining room, in Charlie Munger's library. I find myself sitting across, eye to eye, having a two hour lunch with Sam Zell. These are things that I didn't ask for. I didn't try to even make happen. They came to me. And so that has been really the, in addition to reading another now 60 books, rereading some of the books that I have read previously. I think this idea is like that I've been hitting on is treating the world as an entire classroom. Conversations I have, the books I read, the podcasts I listen to, every single experience that I have, treating that as there's a lesson that can be applied to my work.