first-principles
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Jonathan Cornelissen
Jonathan Cornelissen is a Belgian entrepreneur, PhD in financial econometrics, and the co-founder and founding CEO of DataCamp, the online data science education platform he started in 2013. Frustrated while teaching himself R during his doctorate, he built DataCamp to make data skills accessible through interactive, browser-based courses. Over six years as CEO he grew it to more than 10 million learners, 200,000 paying subscribers, 2,500 enterprise customers and over $50 million in annual recurring revenue. He authored an introductory R course completed by over a million learners. Since stepping back from the CEO role he has focused on angel investing across education, AI and crypto, and writes about company building, hiring and startup equity.
David Senra breaks down Peter Thiel's Zero to One
In this episode of the Founders podcast, David Senra revisits Peter Thiel and Blake Masters' book 'Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future' after a four-year gap, deliberately re-reading a fresh copy so his old highlights wouldn't influence him. He argues the book isn't a how-to manual but a prompt for your own thinking, whose central message is that founders should aim to build a 'creative monopoly'—a business so good no one else can offer a close substitute. Threading examples from Apple, Amazon, PayPal, Polaroid, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs, Senra explores Thiel's key ideas: thinking from first principles, the contrarian question, secrets, the power law, durability over growth, sales and distribution as product design, and the irreplaceable value of the founder.
Haojun Jia
Haojun Jia is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Principle, an AI-for-science startup building AI scientists that discover new materials and chemical reactions. He hatched the idea while finishing a physical chemistry PhD at MIT, where his research paired high-throughput quantum chemistry with machine learning to design catalysts. Deep Principle's platform - marketed as ReactiveAI and now the agentic tool Agent Mira - fuses deep learning with first-principles physics to compress the time and cost of materials R&D. The company has raised roughly $28 million across two rounds from investors including GL Ventures, Linear Capital, Vertex Ventures, and funds backed by Lenovo and Baidu. Jia was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 list in Healthcare & Science.