Learning with David Senra. What ‘Founders’ Teaches us about “Good Thinking”.
I recently came across the work of David Senra - Founders.
His podcast series represents a single minded focus on understanding the stories of the world’s greatest founders and business builders. But it is not a glorification of wealth and success - David has a beautifully rich perspective on what makes these people who they are, with all their complications and problematic legacies.
His insights tie closely back to my own obsession, with understanding good ideas - where they come from, and how we can improve the chances of having and executing on “good ideas”, while letting go of the bad ones.
I encourage you to listen to the full 82 minute interview with David Senra - Passion & Pain, on the joincolossus platform, and to enjoy my 5 minute take below as a starter plate.*
*note: the “founders" he discusses have had enormous/outsized commercial success over long time periods - i.e. they are an extreme subset of a cohort of founders. Given by nature all founders have fairly unique/extreme tendencies that most people find hard to relate to, we really are talking about the insights we can glean from an exceptionally small sliver of the human diversity pie. In other words, we hope to learn from them, not just copy them :)
Where does founder drive to succeed come from?
Most founders are in a deep fight against feelings of inferiority, of not “being enough”. This often stems from family history - parents who were absent, abusive parents, family struggles with money growing up, and so on.
It is important to note David himself has a difficult family history - he acknowledges he is the first male in generations to not end up in gaol. So perhaps, he is drawn to tell the stories of founders he can most relate to.
An example he gives is of Ferrari founder Enzo Ferrari. Enzo had applied for a job with Fiat when he was young, was rejected, and sat on a park bench crying at the time. 40 years later when he sold part of the Ferrari business to Fiat, with Ferrari an enormous global success by that time, he came back to that bench to honour the memory.
This single act might seem cliche, but coupled with a range of obsessive behaviours (not travelling, never flying or using a lift etc) paint a picture of a man so deeply committed to his work, it impacted his ability to live a life most would assume possible, or even “normal”. That depth of commitment was ultimately born out of fear of failure - the feeling he had crying on the bench after being rejected by Fiat
A wonderful quote comes from Francis Ford Coppola - “Embedded in the story of the son, is the story of the father”. His dad never made it as a musician, and so was incessantly scathing of successful musicians to Ford during his childhood years. Ford absorbed all that, decided he did not want to be like his dad, and this obsession to “make it” became a life long source of focus.
We hear about the Walmart Founder, who detested his parents and home life from a young age - this became a source of drive, to pursue interests outside of home. When he had his first, highly successful, small business taken from him by his landlord, it drove him to replicate his success elsewhere.
In short, relying on other people for motivation and drive isn’t enough. You need to have a very deep internal drive that can overcome the inevitable threats to business survival and success
What role does “the good idea” have in success?
Edison (or perhaps Kate Sanborn) famously said genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, and Patrick suggests that perhaps that is right in retrospect, when we look back on “success.”
But Patricks’ observation is that Good Ideas matter a lot - all the perspiration in the world can’t overcome a bad idea. His example is that most people could not create a competitor to McDonalds, but can run one of their franchises - in other words, good execution is much easier than having a good idea or creating something new from scratch.
This gels with my own thinking that good ideas are truly, exceptionally difficult - it is the bad ones that are easy, and the bad ones that give “ideas” a bad name.
Patrick and David seem to agree, that the best predictor of founder success is the market you are operating in - and really that is about matching idea, to macro forces at the time. You have to be early to catch the wind, but not so early you stagnate while waiting to set sail.
David also emphasises from his research on Founders, that the individual is dramatically important to success. This rationale touches on some of the insight that Kenneth Stanley: Picbreeder shares - the creation process is enhanced when it comes from an individual, not a group. Good founders are able to recruit excellent help early, but ultimately their individual insight and drive is what delivers success in the long run.
David talks about Edwin Land, a Steve jobs hero, and oracle like figure. It was Edwins’ idea, shared with Steve Jobs, to build a company at intersection of technology and liberal arts - and so apple as a brand and company as we know it was imbued with a soul. Did the idea make Apple what it was today? No doubt decades of consistent execution has helped, but at its essence, Apple is an expression of an idea, a truly excellent idea which came to the right person at the right time.
Interestingly, Edwin Land did not believe in good ideas coming from groups - “there is no group creativity or originality.” Instead he believes in an individuals capacity for greatness.
What are the defining characteristics of founders, beyond where their drive comes from?
In a nuanced way, I think this is where there is a lot of insight from the podcast that relates back to “good ideas” or “good thinking”.
Founders need a big ego, but know how to hide it: This is necessary for deep drive and deep conviction, but the best know know how to hide it or at least manage it. A big ego can stop, or limit otherwise fruitful collaborations. For example, there is the remarkable story of a young Jay Gould, who started to outgrow his older mentor/adviser in a business partnership. Feeling like his authority was threatened, the older man tried to manoeuvre Gould out of the business - in essence a hostile buy out of his shares. Seeing the move coming, Gould outwitted the older man, and managed to do the buying out himself.
The delicious quote is telling: “While they were talking so loud, my mind was running”. Good execution depends on prioritising time and reflection to think. In some ways, a focus on execution reveals a fragile ego, unwilling to contemplate the unthinkable or the unexpected. Or put another way, a big ego is not a problem per se - but a big ego, poorly managed is.
If something is worth doing, it is worth doing to excess: The idea of work life balance is very modern, and something that the extremely, commercially successful founders covered in the podcast, could not relate to.
Another way of expressing this, would be that good ideas demand persistence and ultimately excellent execution - it is the fundamental idea behind a company, perhaps even embodied as the soul of a start-up, that draws it forward. If execution is poor, it is quite possible that the idea itself was not powerful enough to draw those responsible for execution forward for long enough. David quotes Ernest Shackleton - By Endurance We Conquer, and yet it is telling the explorer had a horrible track record for commitment, outside of exploration. Why? Perhaps the idea matters to the execution, because they matter to the individual…
Get better at your job, when not doing your job: The founders all share a trait - an obsessive drive to observe, reflect and improve. There is a great Michael Jordan anecdote, who travelled overseas to see the US “dream team” at practice for the olympics, hoping to learn from how they train.
where do good ideas come from? they come from observation and reflection away from work. Michael was on the hunt for good training ideas. He didn’t find them by going to training himself… if you are looking for an idea that will help grow, enhance or simply refine your business or project, chances are you won’t find it by simply working in that business or project.
David shares his own method for this, that doubles as a productivity win - instead of working long hours during a work week and taking time off on weekends or holidays, he works everyday, but works less each day. So work is a hobby he enjoys everyday, with enough time everyday for family and friends, but also the reading and reflection time he needs to produce great podcasts on “work time.”