· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Like the technology changes way faster than human nature does and human behavior does. The bottleneck is changing actually what people do. [00:00:00] S1: And there are real hard technical problems, and like Rasmus and a bunch of our co-founders like Varun and founding engineers are Prateek, Taras, these are some of the best engineers. Any one of them could raise money from a top VC tomorrow to start their own company. Any one of them could go get offers at amazing, whether it's the labs or some amazing software company. You need people like that. These are really hard technical problems, and what they would tell you is it's really interesting work because it's not easy to figure out how to take 100-year-old businesses' systems and data and problems that are global with each customer having some different optimization that it needs, like in AmexGPT, for example, and somehow scaling that with Nexus and diffusing AI into that whole stack.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: Deel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, ElevenLabs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, "We built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world." Deel is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com/senra. That is deal.com/senra. Okay, so you're meeting all these entrepreneurs growing up. You grew up in an entrepreneurial family. These are family businesses. When did you start paying attention to finance, though, and that aspect of it?
· Alexander Taubman, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. So, I knew I was really interested in business, and I wanted to learn about capital markets, and I started my career at Goldman. That's where I met one of our co-founders, Zach, who helped introduce me to Rasmus, and sort of all this ended up coming together through that. But when I was at Goldman, I worked in the internal investment unit, which was called Special Situations Group. And it doesn't really exist in the same way because of regulation now, but at the time, it was a very cool group, which I can talk more about. But I sort of just fell in love with this whole idea of capital allocation, and I had some really amazing mentors there. And the whole idea of putting resources of the economy into the highest and best use, and the whole concept of capitalism, I just kind of fell in love with it, and capital allocation across industries. That was one of the beautiful things about SSG at Goldman at the time was the pitch to young people coming out of school was you get to sort of invest right away. We invest up and down the capital structure, from debt down to equity, public and private, across all industries. So I just got tremendous exposure at a young age to all these different types of businesses and ended up working on some really interesting investments there. Learned a ton by sort of not just observing, but also like getting to manage risk at a young age, which was a very unique experience. [00:00:00] S0: Young age is what, early 20s? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, I think I was like 22, 23. [00:00:00] S0: Okay.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Okay. [00:00:00] S1: And actually, I had a great mentor there who I later partnered with and worked with at Oaktree, a guy called Patrick McHaney, who empowered me very early, I think in my first year, to basically manage like a couple of hundred million of invested capital. I mean, he was helping me, of course, and he gave me a lot of guidance, but he empowered me to take real risks early in my career, and that was very formative for me. And I realized I loved investing. I loved allocating capital, and I loved businesses and learning about how the world works. To me, understanding how these different businesses work and all these industries is sort of like really understanding how the economy in America really functions. And so I love that, the intellectual curiosity of just learning more about how different things work. [00:00:00] S0: So wait, then you go to Oaktree. [00:00:00] S1: It's funny. People ask me about Long Lake. I never could have told you at any point in time that I was going to be doing what I'm doing today, but if you- [00:00:00] S0: Did you think you were going to found your own company, or you thought it was going to be a fund? Like, what'd you think it was going to be?
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: Did you think you were going to found your own company, or you thought it was going to be a fund? Like, what'd you think it was going to be? [00:00:00] S1: I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was very focused on just continuing to learn and get better and improve my skills. So after Goldman, I went to business school, and I actually, what I was going to say is my favorite case was Danaher. I've talked about Danaher. They're a big inspiration for us. The idea of like having that long-term compounding model where you have a structural advantage, you can operate the businesses better, you can have a better cost of capital, and you can have the best people and all that. [00:00:00] S0: Hold on, let's come back to Danaher- [00:00:00] S1: Yeah [00:00:00] S0: ... because I want to hear about that, Danaher, which you and I have talked about before, but also the other people that you guys look up to and you emulate. But you go to business school.
· David Senra, Alexander Taubman
[00:00:00] S0: ... because I want to hear about that, Danaher, which you and I have talked about before, but also the other people that you guys look up to and you emulate. But you go to business school. [00:00:00] S1: So I went to business school. I ended up interning. I'm just going chronological order, but I ended up interning at a holding company called Leucadia. So I was interested in holding companies, and then I spent some time hanging out with Josh at Thrive. So basically, I was always interested in technology and holding companies dating back 15 years. None of this clicked for me until much later. So I went to Oaktree after business school. I graduated, I decided I wanted to stick with investing, and partnered with the guy I mentioned, Patrick, and we worked directly with Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh, two legends of the investment world, to build kind of some new businesses for them. We had started Oaktree's first equity business. We ended up getting involved in some of their credit businesses and helping out with a few things and doing... We started several different products there and worked very closely with Howard and Bruce and just had a tremendous amount of fun, learned a lot from them. But the whole time, I knew I was not sort of fully expressing myself. I eventually wanted to start something, but I didn't know what it was. [00:00:00] S0: On your own. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: As a founder, even if it was going to be a fund or an investment company.