steve-jobs
(3)
Why Steve Jobs needed a second beginning
Leaving Apple gave Steve Jobs two unfamiliar classrooms: a computer company called NeXT and an animation studio called Pixar. The return that followed carried lessons a product launch could never teach.
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.
Joel Podolny
Joel Podolny is an economic sociologist turned operator who has spent his career on a single question: how do people actually learn to lead? Handpicked by Steve Jobs in 2008 to build Apple University from scratch, he spent over a decade teaching Apple's executives to think like the company. Before that he was the youngest dean of the Yale School of Management and a tenured professor at Stanford and Harvard. Today he is co-founder and CEO of Honor Education, a San Francisco startup putting human connection at the center of online learning.