David Senra on What Drives Founders, What It Costs Them & When They Should Sell

Takeaways

• The best founders chase a mission, not money. Senra's favourites, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford, were on a mission larger than themselves ², chasing it with monomaniacal focus and high agency ³.
• There is no work-life balance, only trade-offs. Galloway says his working life from 22 to 42 cost him his hair and his first marriage, and he calls it worth it ⁴. Senra points to Revolut, Europe's largest private company, whose chief executive gives 99.5% of his time to work ⁷.
• Start from strength, not market size. Senra agrees entrepreneurs should start from what they are uniquely good at rather than a total addressable market calculation ⁸. Much of it cannot be sketched into a formula, so pick something you like and stay in the game long enough to get lucky ⁹.
• Being different beats being better. Dyson's view is that you can build a business just by being different, not necessarily better ¹⁰. He built 5,127 prototypes before the first cyclonic vacuum met his standards ¹¹, against companies making $500m a year from vacuum bags ¹².
• Sell when the business is jamming. Galloway says to do the opposite of your emotions, so when the business is jamming and an inbound offer arrives, you hire a banker ⁵. He usually owned 30 to 50% at exit, because he gave equity away rather than raising more rounds ¹³.
• Owners who hoard equity stunt their businesses. Galloway says small businesses get stuck because owners assume mid- and lower-level employees do not want to be rich, when in fact they want equity and outsized compensation ¹⁴. He gives employees two to three times the equity a venture-backed startup would ¹⁵.

Why Senra will never sell

1. Senra says the start-scale-and-sell path is a good route to wealth when a business is for economic security, but a life's work should never be sold ⁶.
2. He has podcasted for over ten years, and for the first five and a half years nobody listened at all ¹⁶.
3. Joe Coulombe regretted selling Trader Joe's, and died the week after Becoming Trader Joe was published ¹⁷.
4. John Mackey sold Whole Foods to Amazon for $13-14bn, worried about a business he had worked on for forty years ¹⁸. Amazon executives later told him to shut up, which Senra says was devastating ¹⁹.