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David Senra

David Senra

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Conversations with the greatest living founders.© 2025 Senra Show LLC Economics
Episodes
  • Scott Wu, Cognition

    Scott Wu, Cognition
    Jun 28 2026
    Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the company behind Devin, the world's first AI software engineer. Wu describes himself as "salty," a word he traces to second grade, when he competed in a seventh-grade math competition, lost, and never forgot it. Born in 1997 in Louisiana to a Chinese immigrant family, he grew up the little brother who hated losing at video games and turned that into a career. At the International Olympiad in Informatics he won three gold medals and placed first overall in 2014; he was the 2011 MathCounts national champion. He approaches building a company the way he approaches a strategy game: a tree search, calculating moves, working the decision tree toward victory. By his own account, competition is all he does. He dropped out of Harvard after two years, worked as a founding engineer at Scale AI, and co-founded Lunchclub before starting Cognition in August 2023 with fellow IOI gold medalists Steven Hao and Walden Yan. They built it in a New York apartment. Devin's annualized revenue then climbed from $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million by June 2025. In May 2026, Cognition raised at a $26 billion valuation. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/scott-wu Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Scott Wu’s Obsession With Winning (00:02:06) Competitive Programming, Games And Finding His People (00:04:24) Family, Go, And The Roots Of Scott’s Competitiveness (00:08:35) Why Losing Hurts More Than Winning Feels Good (00:09:38) What Winning With Devin Looks Like (00:12:55) Devin Today: The AI Software Engineer (00:13:52) Software As The Human-Computer Interface (00:18:45) Why AI Progress Is Hard To Intuit (00:20:39) Thinking About AI From First Principles (00:22:57) What Happens When Agents Can Work For Months (00:30:18) The Original Thesis Behind Cognition (00:31:12) Launching Devin And Handling Criticism (00:37:17) Finding Product-Market Fit In The Enterprise (00:42:41) How Cognition Deploys Devin Inside Large Companies (00:48:34) Measuring ROI Instead Of Token Spend (00:50:01) Why Cognition Wants To Be Model-Neutral (00:52:18) Why Focus Lets Startups Beat Giants (00:57:14) Independence, Acquisitions, And Building A Generational Company (01:00:27) Why Money Is Not The Goal (01:03:42) One Life: Going For It All Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters

    Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters
    Jun 21 2026
    Steve Stoute is the founder of Translation, the marketing company behind some of the most iconic brand work of the past 25 years, and UnitedMasters, the independent music distribution platform he launched in 2017. Stoute grew up in Queens in the 1980s, where hip-hop was his entire world. He worked his way into the music business, eventually managing Nas and becoming an executive at Sony and then Interscope under Jimmy Iovine. In 1999, at 29, he walked away from a $2 million salary to take a $150,000 job at the Arnell Group — trading income for education. He was there to learn the advertising business from the inside out. What he saw clearly was that Madison Avenue was using an old playbook, failing to see that artists were shaping fashion and other cultural trends. Stoute brokered Jay-Z's S. Carter shoe deal with Reebok — the first sneaker deal for a non-athlete — helped launch McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It" campaign, and came within one meeting of signing LeBron James. He watched an 18-year-old LeBron walk away from a $10 million signing bonus to bet on himself. It confirmed everything Stoute believed: the world had already changed, and the old gatekeepers just hadn't caught up yet. UnitedMasters was built on that same conviction — giving artists ownership of their masters and a direct line to their fans. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/steve-stoute Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra HubSpot: ⁠https://hubspot.com Chapters (00:00:00) Run Towards The Unknown (00:04:43) The Men In Black Glasses Nobody Got Paid For (00:07:34) Too Scared To Buy Apple At Nine Dollars (00:15:27) Black Consumers Buy What Isn't Marketed To Them (00:19:13) Betting On The Education, Not The Equity (00:21:39) A Music Video Is Just A TV Commercial (00:24:32) The First Non-Athlete Shoe Deal (00:27:25) LeBron Walks Away From Ten Million To Bet On Himself (00:30:35) Why Are You Giving It Away (00:35:18) If Artists Knew Their Fans They Wouldn't Need A Label (00:39:57) Prince Wrote Slave On His Face (00:46:01) How Jay-Z, Master P, And Wu-Tang Beat The System (00:50:44) The Power Of Repetition (00:54:13) Independent Artists Are The New Small Businesses (00:58:56) Fame And Talent Are Now At Odds (01:04:39) Ryan Coogler's Unprecedented Sinners Deal (01:09:25) Live At The Convergence Of Culture, Technology, And Storytelling (01:11:09) You Can Get Anything Done If You Don't Take Credit (01:12:53) Signing Kobe To Out-Rap Shaq (01:15:25) How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything (01:18:55) The Barefoot Standoff With Jay-Z (01:22:50) Getting Jay-Z To Write Still D.R.E. (01:28:08) Managing Nas, The Greatest Thing He Ever Did (01:31:00) Walking Into Queensbridge To Find Nas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 35 mins
  • Ed Catmull, Co-founder of Pixar

    Ed Catmull, Co-founder of Pixar
    Jun 14 2026
    Ed Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar and the former president of Disney Animation. He grew up in 1950s Utah wanting to animate for Disney. Convinced he couldn't draw well enough, he studied physics and computer science at the University of Utah instead, landing in one of the great talent incubators in computing history. In 1972, he animated his own left hand—one of the first 3D computer renderings ever made. Since childhood he had carried a single ambition: to make the first feature film animated entirely by computer. Reaching it took more than 20 years. George Lucas hired Catmull in 1979 to build a computer division at Lucasfilm. When Lucas needed cash, Steve Jobs bought that division in 1986 for $5 million and spun it out as Pixar. For years it sold imaging computers and lost money while Catmull and John Lasseter made short films to keep the dream alive. Jobs sank roughly $50 million of his own money into it. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first feature animated entirely by computer, and went public days later. Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up followed. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion and put Catmull in charge of both studios; he revived a faltering Disney Animation with films like Frozen. Catmull cared about the conditions that let creative work survive its own fragility. Every original idea, he argues, starts out ugly and broken, and management exists to protect it long enough to get good. At Pixar that meant the Braintrust: a room where directors got blunt feedback with no authority attached and the conversation stayed on the problem, never on who was right. He laid it all out in Creativity, Inc. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/ed-catmull Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Most Companies Are Full Of Shit (00:04:28) The Brain Trust Mechanism (00:10:13) Why Steve Jobs Was Banned From The Braintrust (00:17:48) Your Job Is To Manage The Dynamics (00:23:27) Betting The Company On Toy Story (00:24:35) Engineering Eisner's Worst Nightmare (00:36:51) Bob Iger's Crappy Hand (00:38:44) Why Disney Never Asked What Pixar Was Doing (00:43:48) Take The Hard Problem (00:44:38) The Director Can't Lose The Team (00:48:48) Quality Is The Best Business Plan (00:52:32) What Walt Disney Taught Him (00:59:25) George Lucas And The Motion Blur Problem (01:08:48) Now What's The Point Of My Life (01:13:31) How Much Of This Was Me (01:16:10) George Lucas Wanted The Whole Industry Healthy (01:25:11) Refusing To Let Anyone Feel Second Class (01:32:38) The Truck In The Building Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 35 mins
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