Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I found this guy who tweeted something a couple days ago, whenever it was hilarious, he goes, most people's alarm clock is David Goggins telling them to wake up and get after it. My alarm clock is David Senra yelling at me, telling me to be like Edwin Land. I was like, all right, repetition works.

**David Rosenthal** (0:17)
Is it you, is it you, is it you? Is it you, is it you, is it you?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:31)
Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:39)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:40)
We are your hosts. Today's episode is our next installment of Acquired Sessions, a video format on YouTube that we started playing with last year. Our guest today is David Senra of the Founders Podcast. David is quite possibly the only person we know who is more obsessed than us with business history and the lessons that great founders teach us. David, David Senra, that is, has read hundreds of founder biographies and done deep episodes on them all.

**David Rosenthal** (1:10)
I don't know that I'm at hundreds yet as me, David, but I'm definitely in dozens. I aspire to be at hundreds, but David Senra is just one of our closest podcaster friends and friends period out there. His show is awesome. Here on this episode, we had him out to my living room here in San Francisco, and we had just a awesome, really fun multi-hour conversation just like the ones that he and I have scheduled every month on Zoom when the mics are off. It was super organic, super unstructured. We covered a ton of ground, including that I think two nights before we recorded, David was just coming up from LA where he had dinner with Charlie Munger. And so we spent a lot of time talking about that. Charlie's influence on David, his and Warren's influence on all three of us. A bunch of thoughts on advice generally. And as you can imagine, David just sprinkled dozens and dozens of historical examples and founder stories throughout the episode.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:09)
It is crazy. Every time someone's making a point, he'll dive in. This is just like that thing Edwin Land said that one time.

**David Rosenthal** (2:15)
Or David Ogilvie or Coco Chanel or who have you.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:19)
David is definitely close with the eminent dead.
I will say, after editing this episode, I had one enormous takeaway. David Senra is really, really into podcasting. So get fired up to meet him on his level. All right, quick things. Go follow ACQ2, brand new show. Search any podcast player available for free. Become an LP. There is voting going on right now for our next episode, which LPs all have input on. And for every new LP that joins, we will shoot you an email to your inbox, voting closes about a week after this comes out, and we are straight up picking whatever you tell us the next episode should be with really no editorial from us. So help us direct the next episode. Join the Slack. It is one of the only places on the internet with this super high level of incredibly thoughtful discussion by well-connected, kind folks with a deep appreciation for history. People meet co-founders, they find jobs, and they get nuanced takes on the news of the day in there. So join at Acquired.fm slash Slack. Lastly, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Now, on to Acquired Sessions. So David, do you want to tell us who you had dinner with the other night?

**David Senra** (3:36)
I had a three-hour dinner with Charlie Munger.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:39)
That is awesome.

**David Senra** (3:40)
Where I could ask him any questions that you want. Well, first of all, I guess we should back up. It's like there's a reason that he's so admired, right, by so many people.
But for me, particularly, you get to meet a lot of really interesting people because of the work that we do, right? And so that's like a blessing and something that I know we've had conversations in the past that we deeply appreciate. But Charlie is a different level for me. Like, I literally think of him like the wise grandfather I never had. You know, I've met all kinds of people. I don't really get like nervous or starstruck. I was legitimately like shaking the day before. I was like, I cannot believe. I didn't want to tell that many people because like, there's no way this is going to happen. Like, I won't believe it till it actually happens. We do very similar work, right? Where it's like, how many people have spent six, seven years, tens of thousands of hours reading hundreds of books about the history of entrepreneurship and investing and then not only reading it, taking notes on it, making a podcast.