David Senra will tell you he doesn’t care if you listen to his podcast. And he means it.
For five and a half years after he launched Founders in 2016, almost nobody did listen. He read one business biography per week—hard copy, with a pen and a six-inch ruler and a stack of Post-its— photographed his annotations, recorded his thoughts alone in a room, and published the result. No audience. No income. No feedback worth mentioning.
“I told everyone, from day one, even with a single listener, that I was going to do this whether anybody listened or not,” he told me over FaceTime the first time we spoke.
The proof is in the RSS feed. Hidden inside the code for Founders is a single line still bearing the podcast’s original title: “Autotelic”—a word that means an activity done purely for its own sake. Senra chose the name when he launched the show and never changed it, not even after the audience arrived.
Courtesy of David Senra
