Biography

In this episode, ⁠Wouter⁠ sits down with ⁠Zach Lloyd⁠ , founder and CEO of ⁠Warp⁠ , the AI-powered terminal used by close to a million developers worldwide, to talk about what it takes to build in a market moving faster than anyone can plan for.   Before Warp, Zach spent over a decade at Google leading the team that took Google Sheets from a five-person experiment to over a billion users.   He the...

In this episode, Wouter sits down with Erik Bernhardsson , founder and CEO of Modal , the cloud compute platform that powers some of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world, including Lovable, Meta, and Chai.   Before Modal, Erik built Spotify's recommendation engine from scratch; then scaled Bolt's engineering team from 10 to 10,000 people in five years; and watched it nearly collapse when...

In this episode, Wouter sits down with Des Traynor , co-founder of Intercom and the mind behind Fin , one of the fastest-growing AI products in SaaS history, approaching $100M in revenue less than three years after launch.   Before Fin, Des was a PhD dropout who walked out of university and never came back — not because he failed, but because the opportunity in front of him was too interesting to...

In this episode, Wouter sits down with Connor Zwick, founder and CEO of Speak, to talk about building one of the most ambitious consumer AI companies in the world. Before Speak, Connor built an app in high school that became #1 in the App Store. But instead of taking VC money at 17, he spent years going deep on AI research. He then flew to South Korea, where 1% of GDP was spent on learning English...

In this episode, Wouter sits down with Shaan Puri, co-host of My First Million and serial entrepreneur, to talk about why grinding harder is often the wrong strategy—and what actually leads to outsized success. Before podcasts and exits, Shaan made a counterintuitive decision: he quit a $120k job, moved in with friends, and committed to a year of being strategically broke. Not because it was easy,...

In this episode, Wouter Teunissen sits down with Job van der Voort, founder and CEO of Remote.com, to unpack how he built one of the most valuable startups and what the future of company building looks like in the age of AI. Before Remote, Job studied neuroscience and psychology, then joined GitLab as one of its first employees, helping it scale into a multibillion-dollar company. But through that...

In this episode, Wouter Teunissen sits down with Harry Stebbings, founder of 20VC, to explore how he turned a teenage side project into one of venture capital’s most influential media empires. At just 18, Harry launched The Twenty Minute VC from his childhood bedroom. Within a few years, it became the go-to show for the world’s top investors and founders—from Sequoia to Stripe. That momentum becam...

Netflix shouldn’t exist today.  They should’ve been crushed with the 2001 dot-com crash. Yet they survived, even after laying off 40% of the company. Blockbuster Online was minutes away from stealing the entire market-share Netflix had painfully built up. Yet they survived. And after spending $100 Million of the companies $300 Million in cash on launching their own Netflix originals. Netflix someh...

The Robinhood Biography is a podcast about the 13 year history of how two Stanford Graduates (Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt) created the world's first mobile-first trading app, ushered in the age of retail-investing and slowly built out a super app. Robinhood today is worth over $120 Billion but after going public in 2021 at a $32 Billion valuation, the company stock dropped 80%!  This is, the histor...

In this episode, Wouter Teunissen sits down with Dylan Fox, the founder of AssemblyAI, to unpack how he built one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure companies from scratch. For decades, speech recognition was stuck in the past, clunky APIs, outdated models, and enterprise-only access. Dylan saw it up close while working as an engineer at Cisco. The tech was powerful, but it was buried under...

This episode is about Daniel Ek and the lessons I have learned from studying his life and the creation of Spotify. If you want to learn how to apply leverage to your company and life, how to create a product so compelling you turn an entire industry around from losing billions, to new all time highs…. then I think you’ll enjoy this.   Follow me on Twitter  Read the newsletter The Almanack of Naval...

The Spotify Biography is a podcast about the 20 year history, of the unlikely story of how two Swedish founders (Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon) created the most valuable music company in the world, against all odds. Turning Spotify into a $100 Billion Company, and saving the music industry against all odds.    This is, the history of Spotify, told in a narrative form in under 90 minutes   ----  ...

In this episode, Wouter Teunissen sits down with Nicolas Sharp to talk about his bold mission to reinvent how companies fundamentally operate. CRMs have been around for years—bloated, slow, and not built for makers. Nick saw the pain firsthand. After working in VC and starting a vertical CRM , he knew the tools meant to drive growth were actually slowing teams down. Most people tolerated them out...

In this episode, Tyler Denk sits down with Wouter Teunissen to talk about the incredible founder journey he has had starting beehiiv. After graduating college with $120K in student debt, Tyler Denk faced a tough choice: follow the safe path or take a leap of faith. Broke and living in his parents’ basement , he said yes to a freelance opportunity from a childhood friend—building early tech for the...

Before Blockworks became a $150 million media force, Jason Yanowitz was just a kid flipping baseball cards on eBay - discovering early what it meant to build leverage online. Raised in a countercultural, entrepreneurial family, Jason never saw the traditional nine-to-five as the only path. In 2017, Jason went to an event that'd change his life, as a result he quit his job, partnered with co-founde...

Before launching How to Take Over the World, Ben Wilson struggled with a job that drained him and a question that wouldn’t go away: What does it take to achieve greatness? He nearly failed out of high school, skipped SAT prep to play basketball, and had no grand plan - only a deep desire to stay free, follow his curiosity, and avoid the soul-crushing conformity of traditional paths. In college, he...

In less than 6 years, Ramp has become many companies go-to tool to help their business run more efficiently. “Time is money. Save both.” is the beautiful Ramp slogan, and that’s a key theme in all of Erics startups. In this episode I sat down with Eric Glyman, CEO and Co-Founder of Ramp, one of the hottest fintechs out there. And I believe, a company that will become one of the biggest in the worl...

The version of Andrew Wilkinson that made his first million wasn’t the same one who could actually enjoy it. Living on the constant desire “to make everything 20% better”, Andrew is a born entrepreneur. But that doesn’t mean he has always had things figured out. At one point, he was running five businesses and was at the end of his rope. Only then did he start figuring out what he really wanted hi...

Season 1 of Biography goes deep with six founders on the real story behind what they built - not the press release version. From being strategically broke to burning out, reinventing, and finding traction, this trailer previews what’s ahead. Featuring: Andrew Wilkinson, Shaan Puri, Tyler Denk, Ben Wilson, Jason Yanowitz, and Eric Glymann. New episodes weekly. Video on Spotify.