Conversations with the greatest living founders.
Showing all 46 episodes · Only those about AI
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the Chairman Emeritus of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, the founder of Colossus, and the founder and CEO of Positive Sum. He is an investor, author, and podcaster who has devoted his career to understanding the…
Ari Emanuel is the co-founder of Endeavor, executive chair and CEO of TKO, executive chairman of WME Group, and founder of MARI. We talk about his $4.2 billion bet on the UFC, the ESPN deal that proved it right, lessons from Egon Durban…
Jeremy Stern is the editor-in-chief of Colossus, where he writes long-form profiles of leading entrepreneurs and investors. He goes behind the scenes of his reporting on Mark Zuckerberg, explaining how months of interviews revealed…
Alexander Taubman is the co-founder and CEO of Long Lake, a company that buys established service businesses and uses AI to improve how they operate. He explains Long Lake’s $6.3 billion deal for American Express Global Business Travel…
Ronnie Fieg is the founder, CEO and creative director of Kith. At 13, he turned down an envelope of cash at his bar mitzvah to ask his cousin for a job, then spent 15 years working his way up from stock boy to buyer at David Z. He explains…
Peter Rahal is the co-founder of RXBAR, David Protein, and Medici Brands. After selling RXBAR for $600 million, he tried investing and quickly discovered he was miserable watching other people run companies. He explains why he returned to…
Luca Ferrari is a co-founder of Bending Spoons, the technology company he built with his partners by rethinking how software businesses should hire, operate and allocate capital. He explains why Bending Spoons aspires to build “the best…
Mati Staniszewski is the co-founder of ElevenLabs, an AI audio company he started in 2022 with his longtime friend Piotr Dąbkowski. He explains how a frustration with poorly dubbed content in Poland led them to build frontier speech…
Zach Dell is the co-founder of Base Power, an energy company on a mission to make electricity more affordable and reliable. His starting insight was that home batteries had the wrong business model. Companies sold expensive backup systems…
Doug Leone spent 26 years helping lead Sequoia Capital through successive eras of technological change. Born in Italy, he came to the United States without speaking English and carried the insecurity of an outsider into his career. That…
Torsten Reil has spent his career working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, simulation and entrepreneurship. He began as a biologist studying neural networks and complex systems before founding NaturalMotion, whose technology…
Sam Altman has spent his career at the intersection of startups, investing and artificial intelligence. He says he was fascinated by AI as a child in St. Louis, studied it in college and eventually helped start OpenAI in 2015 after…
Travis Kalanick is best known for co-founding Uber and building it into one of the world’s largest transportation platforms. Before Uber, he spent years building Red Swoosh under extreme financial pressure. He says he took no salary for…
Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder of Rostra and one of the world's most trusted communication strategists, supporting companies such as Anduril, Shopify, Cognition, and Coinbase. In 2016, she co-founded TrailRunner International with Jim…
Michael Ovitz is the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the most powerful and influential talent agencies in Hollywood history, built on a revolutionary approach to representation that fundamentally transformed the…
Micky Malka is the founder of Ribbit Capital and the co-founder of Node, the first gallery built for digital artists. He calls himself an entrepreneur at heart and an investor by design — a line vague enough to defy labeling, which is the…
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is the creator of Ruby on Rails and the co-founder of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE. He has spent 25 years building a software business around one condition: no one gets to tell him…
Jeff Zalaznick is co-founder of Major Food Group, the hospitality company behind Carbone, ZZ's, Torrisi, The Grill, and The Pool. He has opened 77 restaurants and bars and 76 are still operating and profitable. He is now building Major…
Eric Glyman is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ramp, the financial-infrastructure platform valued at $44 billion used by over 70,000 businesses to run payments, expenses and accounting from a single place.
Jonathan Ross is the founder of Groq and the inventor of the Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), now a senior executive at NVIDIA following the company's $20 billion partnership with Groq.
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the company behind Devin, the world's first AI software engineer.
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.
Ed Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar and the former president of Disney Animation.
Gustav Söderström is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Spotify, the world's largest streaming platform, with more than 760 million users across 180 countries.
Ivanka Trump grew up on construction sites and in boardrooms, learning what it takes to be a builder. At just 22 years old, she started doing real estate for a Brooklyn developer. She notched small wins with construction crews and learned…
Rick Rubin grew up on Long Island obsessed with music — arena rock at 13, punk by high school, then hip-hop when it was still a street movement you could only hear at one club in New York City. The records coming out didn't sound like the…
Strauss Zelnick has spent 40 years doing the same thing: finding where new technology is about to supercharge an old business, and getting there first.
Dana White grew up watching CEOs read canned statements written by lawyers. He decided early he would never do that.
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David Baszucki is the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the platform where tens of millions of people gather daily to play, build, and socialize inside user-generated virtual worlds.
Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat.
Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, the largest food delivery platform in the United States.
Eric Jorgenson is an investor, author, and the CEO of Scribe Media — best known for his mission to distill the ideas of the world's most consequential thinkers into books anyone can read.
Marc Andreessen is the co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world.
Brian Armstrong is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, the publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange and one of the most recognized names in the digital asset industry.
Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the software company behind Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE. Fried is widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in modern product development, remote work, and business philosophy.
Jimmy Iovine is the co-founder of Interscope Records, Beats by Dre, and the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy. Iovine is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the modern music industry.
Tobi Lütke is the co-founder of Shopify, where he has served as the company's CEO since 2008.
John Mackey is the co-founder of Whole Foods Market, where he also served as the company's CEO for 44 years (1980–2022). More recently, Mackey is the co-founder of Love.Life, a wellness company focused on a holistic approach to health. He…
James Dyson is the founder and chairman of Dyson, a technology-led company present in 84 markets worldwide. He is an inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who has devoted his life to solving problems through new technologies.
Michael Ovitz is the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the most powerful and influential talent agencies in Hollywood history, built on a revolutionary approach to representation that fundamentally transformed the…
Todd Graves is the founder and CEO of Raising Cane's, one of America's most successful and fastest-growing restaurant chains built on a radically simple concept that nearly everyone told him would fail.
Brad Jacobs is the chairman and CEO of QXO, Inc., and the founder of eight separate billion-dollar companies including XPO Logistics, United Rentals and United Waste.
Michael Dell is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies.
Daniel Ek is the co-founder and CEO of Spotify.
Nine years ago, I launched Founders.
