What does it take to build a long-lasting, highly impactful business that changes the world? That question was the focus of the Alloy 2024 keynote from Founders Podcast host David Senra.

If you aren’t familiar, Founders is one of the top business podcasts. David has been recording this podcast for eight years, with a pretty simple premise:

Every week he reads a biography of an entrepreneur and shares ideas and insights you can use in your own work.

At Alloy, David shared 50 insights and ideas from one of his favorite entrepreneurs — Walmart Founder and CEO Sam Walton — and his autobiography, "Made In America." David shared his own takes on the celebrated entrepreneur’s life and work along with some other successful executives he admires.

As a founder and former CEO myself, I was scrawling notes down the entire talk. As an avid reader and business history nerd, I love taking a look back at iconic founders and businesses that have stood the test of time.

I thought I would sum up five of my favorite takeaways and themes from David’s talk for any entrepreneur or leader, as they endeavor to build their own generational company. 

1) Relentless self-belief comes first.

One of the first themes David shared about Sam Walton was his relentless self-belief.

Before he opened his first store or sold their his product, Sam had this incredible self-belief. I think we often call this the entrepreneur’s self-delusion or hopeless optimism, but I loved the way that David described it. That self-belief came before Sam’s ability (and certainly before his track record).

Sam believed in himself and his team more than anyone.

Ambition, resilience, and passion are essential to succeed. But, without confidence in themselves and their vision, entrepreneurs won't have courage to even start their companies, let alone build thriving, transformative businesses.

One of my favorite quotes of all-time around startups and entrepreneurship comes from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.

On a 2023 episode of the Acquired Podcast (another one of my favorite podcasts), he spoke about the entrepreneur’s delusion and how, if we knew how hard it was going to be from the beginning, we wouldn’t do it.

“That is the superpower of an entrepreneur — to this day, I trick my brain into thinking, ‘How hard can it be?,’” Jensen said. “Because you have to.” If you want to see the full clip from that interview, check it out below:

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2) Entrepreneurship is the best game in the world.

I can’t emphasize this enough: If you are in the business of startups and entrepreneurship, we are the luckiest people on planet earth.

Even when going through the toughest challenges and hardships, I always feel blessed and very lucky to get to wake up every day trying to do the impossible and go from zero to one.

It is truly the best game in the world, and the entrepreneurs who overlook that are the ones who start to lose themselves and lose sight of what really matters. 

David took it one step further even to say that the best entrepreneurs’ exit strategy isn’t an IPO or acquisition — it’s death. “Investors have a portfolio,” David noted. “You have one life. Don't sell your best idea.”

It’s a morbid and pretty extreme way of looking at it, but I think the point there is worth noting.

3) Time carries the most weight.

Don’t interrupt the compounding. If you have a strong business, recognize that all the money is in the future. Understand it takes years (or even decades) for early-stage startups to become world-changing businesses.

Do the little things right today because they compound over time, and that makes all the difference.

4) Repeat what works.

David quoted another famous entrepreneur and business leader, Charlie Munger, and his “fundamental algorithm of life.” Charlie said, “Repeat what works. We just started repeating the things that worked.”

Sam Walton embodied that in many ways with Walmart. It seems so simple, but we often lose sight of that in always trying to find the new, new thing or next innovation horizon. Sometimes, the answer is already in front of us.

I think this is true in many aspects of marketing and branding as well. Repetition is king when it comes to your brand and your message. You tire of your message much earlier than your audience ever will. Repeat your message and your story so much that you get sick of it.

That is the only way to ensure it sticks. 

5) Indifference is your worst enemy.

Opposition isn’t your enemy. It's indifference.

The most successful founders are charismatic, obsessive leaders whose energy and passion inspire everyone at their companies. They get complete buy-in from employees because they routinely show they care deeply about their business, mission, and customers.

Your competitors aren’t going to be what kills your company. It’s going to be an indifference in the market. You see this all the time in closed-lost deal reviews — the most common alternative someone uses is the status quo or non-decision.

Go after an opportunity and a market that matters enough that indifference is not an option.

‍Notable quotes from Founders Podcast host David Senra's Alloy 2024 keynote

There were so many good takeaways and lessons from David’s talk. I’d highly recommend watching the entire keynote below to hear more of his 50 lessons from Sam Walton on creating world-changing businesses.

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On the need to believe in yourself and your business idea‍

“People think you should do something great and then you should have belief in yourself. I'm like, ‘No, no, no — that's backwards.’ It's completely the opposite. It's belief comes before ability.

In all these stories and all the biographies you're reading, all the entrepreneurs that you admire, way before they had a track record, right? We admired them after the track record, after you could point to their body of work. Way before that, it starts with relentless self-belief.

And the reason I think this is so important is because I'm an evangelist for reading biographies, obviously, but I'm also an evangelist for entrepreneurs. I don’t think we have an epidemic of overconfidence.

We have an epidemic of people that don't believe in themselves enough that they even try to start a company.”

On the value of focus and cost-efficiency‍

“One of the worst habits that new entrepreneurs have is they raise a bunch of money, and then they listen to their investors, and investors — if you're with the wrong ones — all they want you to do is grow, grow, grow, regardless of the expense, just to mark up the investment. That's not the same thing as building a business that lasts for a very long time.

I feel that, in the 100,000 pages that I've read, if I had to summarize it into two things, first, it'd be focus. Most people are incapable of focusing on what they're doing for a long period of time. And two, it's a line from Andrew Carnegie's biography. It says, ‘Gentlemen, watch your costs.’

Sam Walton is saying the same thing in a different way. Run a tight organization. Watch your costs. Do not have excess people.”

On accumulating as much knowledge about your industry as possible‍

“Sam Walton said, ‘I went to the library, and I checked out every book on retailing.’ He didn't say I checked out a single book. He didn't say I checked out two books or three books. He said, ‘I devoured an entire library.’

I did a bunch of podcasts on Winston Churchill. They talked about his information-consumption habits compared to the other politicians of parliament. They would read the newspaper. He would devour entire shelves.

A lot of entrepreneurs say, ‘Why isn't this working out?’ It's like, ‘You haven't done enough!’ Like, ‘You lack effort!’ This idea is you have to build this encyclopedic base of knowledge about your industry. This does not mean you have to be smarter. It just means you have to collect more information.

There should not be another person on the planet that knows more about your industry than you.”

On building a business that’s authentic to you and your passion‍

“There's only one correct way to build a company, and that is in a way that's authentic to you.

I'm not Sam Walton. I don't want to build retail. I don't want to build a huge organization. I want to sit in a room and read books, then evangelize what I'm learning, and then build a podcast, because I think podcasts are a miracle.

My point being, when you have a guy like this who says, ‘Not a day has gone by in my entire adult life that I'm not thinking about this,’ that means he's built a business that's authentic to him. That's it.

There's a line about this that Jay-Z said. ‘Don't go with the flow — be the flow.’ Whatever you're intensely interested in, what you cannot stop thinking about. I'm not going with the flow. I am the flow. You have to know who you are, and then you have to make sure that you build a business that's authentic to you.

Many times, it's going to take trying out multiple different businesses, multiple different business models to really feel like what you want to do and what you don't want to do.”