The Robin Hallsten Experience

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 ignore. That instinct for making painful U-turns became the thread running through everything Intercom has done since.   In this conversation, Des talks about why Intercom gave back $50M in revenue on purpose, why most SaaS companies trying to survive AI are taking the path that'll kill them, why most AI products are broken because they shipped on time, and why the alternative to making painful decisions isn't safety, it's a peaceful, long, slow death.   If you're building with AI, leading a team through this era, or trying to make high-stakes decisions when nobody knows what's coming next, this one's for you.   This e

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 and nobody could actually speak. That decision set the foundation for everything that followed. In this conversation, Connor shares lessons on finding product market fit, the danger of magical thinking, building with AI before anyone cared, and why the consumer AI goldrush is just getting started. If you're a founder building in AI, this one will hit hard. This episode is presented by Rho, the all-in-one banking platform for startups. Thousands of startups like Perplexity, Product Hunt, and more use Rho. You get everything you need to manage your startup's cash. Exclusively for Biography Pod listeners and viewe

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, but because it maximised learning, adventure, and freedom. That decision set the foundation for everything that followed. In this conversation, Shaan shares stories from selling his company to Twitch/Amazon, lessons from his father, insights from people like Naval Ravikant, Warren Buffet, MrBeast, Derek Sivers, and hard-earned beliefs about choosing projects, partners, and environments that compound over time. I really enjoyed this conversation because it is about choosing better games, increasing your odds, and designing a life where effort compounds instead of drains you. If you’ve ever felt stuck doing “the right

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 journey, he saw a problem few were solving: hiring globally was still a nightmare. So in 2019, he and Co-Founder Marcelo Lebre started Remote.com to fix i and to make it easy for any company, anywhere, to employ anyone in the world. In this conversation, we talk about: - Why every founder should “virtually integrate” their business. - How to scale from 5 to 2,000 employees without losing focus. - What studying neuroscience taught Job about luck, judgment, and decision-making. - When to raise money (and when not to) I really enjoyed this conversation, Job was incredibly kind and thoughtful. We talk about everything,

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 became the foundation for 20VC Fund, which has now raised more than $800 million to back early-stage startups. Harry’s story is one of relentless curiosity and consistency. He shares what he’s learned from interviewing thousands of founders, how he built trust with Silicon Valley’s elite before ever setting foot there, and why he believes the key to success isn’t speed—it’s stamina. Today, 20VC isn’t just a podcast. It’s a bridge between storytelling and capital allocation—an inside look at how the best founders think, decide, and build. This episode is presented by Rho , the all-in-one banking platform for startups. Thou

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 somehow, survived. This episode covers the entire history of the company, how Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded the company as a DVD-rental business. Grew the company and created one of the most valuable businesses by going all-in on digital streaming.    This is, the history of Netflix, told in a narrative form.   Follow me on Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/WouterTeunissen⁠  Read the newsletter:  ⁠https://biography.beehiiv.com/⁠  Email me if you have any questions: thebiographypodcast@gmail.com

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 history of Spotify, told in a narrative form in under 105 minutes.   Follow me on Twitter: https://x.com/WouterTeunissen  Read the newsletter:  https://biography.beehiiv.com/     

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 layers of friction. Developers wanted to build with voice, but everything about the process made it painful. Instead of waiting for the giants to fix it, Dylan left his job and started AssemblyAI as a solo founder. lone. The vision was to allow developers to easily tap into world-class speech models with a simple API call. Ensuring transcription, summarization, and audio intelligence were as easy to integrate as Stripe or Twilio. The journey wasn’t glamorous. Dylan bootstrapped early models from his apartment, competing with Big Tech on compute, data, and talent. But through persistence and a relentless focus on deve

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   Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:00  Technology for Technology's sake. 07:04 Work backwards from the customer experience. 10:54 You must have an opinion on the future (even if it’s flexible) 12:25 If you have conviction. Self-Fund your project 16:27 Constraints = Growth  18:41 Assistants hold the keys to the kingdom  20:25 Partner up when necessary 22:38 Great ambition attracts great talent. 24:00 Running a great meeting,  24:20 Leadership,   25:57 Time (Energy) Management,  27:52 Incentives and motivating people,  28:40 Financial Engineering Genius 30:01 The power of showmanship. 32:09 What you should listen to next.

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   ----   I spent 4 months.  Reading.  Researching. Writing and Scripting this podcast. This is the most comprehensive, narrative recounting of the company's history.    For more context. Two things changed my life this year. Eric Glyman being kind enough to say yes to do a podcast with me in March (it's the first episode on the channel).   And the podcasting greats Patrick O' Shaughnessy, and David Senra , giving me advice for this podcast.   ( "Difference for the sake of it in everything” – James Dyson)   That’s why I’m going in this new direction. I’m doubling down on my natural drift. Namely; Distilling Company Historie

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 of necessity, not love.Instead of accepting that status quo, Nick went back to first principles.   What if a CRM wasn’t just a database but a living system—fast, flexible, and designed like the best consumer apps?   What if teams could collaborate in real time, building workflows as easily as spreadsheets, but with the power of a true system of record?With that vision, he founded Attio. It wasn’t an easy sell. Reinventing a category dominated by billion-dollar incumbents meant years of skeptical investors and complex engineering problems.Today, Attio has raised over $116 Million and is proving that the CRM doesn’t h

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 newsletter Morning Brew. With just 49 cents in his bank account, he bluffed his way into the role, pulling all-nighters to teach himself what he didn't know and barely holding it together. But he didn’t quit. He built fast, listened hard, and proved himself through execution, not credentials. When Morning Brew offered him a full-time role, Tyler turned down a signed Deloitte offer, a girlfriend, and a lease in D.C. for a shot at something riskier—but more meaningful. He chose asymmetric upside over certainty. That mindset—betting on himself, learning through doing, and minimizing regret—became his foundation as an e

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-founder Mike Ippolito, and within 60 days, BlockWorks hosted its first event. Every success since has been iterative: from cold-emailing thousands of people to sell tickets, to surviving an 80% revenue drop, to now to raising $12M to go all-in on building at the intersection of media and tech. Blockworks was bootstrapped and survived and has become a $150M powerhouse. I sat down to talk to Jason about his founder journey, lessons for company builders, frameworks for hiring and scaling a company and how BlockWorks is on a clear trajectory to do over $100M a year in revenue. Follow: Wouter - @WouterTeunissen on X Jason - @Ja

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 hustled. He double-majored in political science and economics, ran a scrappy but successful campaign for student body VP, and found that success often comes not from being the smartest, but from knocking on more doors, both literally and figuratively. But after several years across consulting and marketing roles, that spark faded. He was relying on stimulants to focus, sleeping pills to recover, and still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was drifting further from a life that mattered. Then, one morning in 2018, while reading a biography of Napoleon and listening to a podcast, he felt a visceral, painful energy - w

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 world. I talk with Eric about what it was like growing up in Las Vegas, his first retail job where he learned about the misalignment of incentives. We talk about Eric's time at Harvard, being rejected by YC, his first startup Paribus and it’s ups and downs along with the founding story of Ramp. Eric’s journey reminds us that the best ideas often come not from chasing trends, but from staying curious, noticing what others ignore, and having the guts to follow frustration to innovation. If you’re serious about improving your business this is a 2 hour masterclass. Follow: Wouter - @WouterTeunissen on X Eric - @Eglyman on X

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 his life to look like. Andrew shares the decisive mindset shifts that helped him attract opportunity instead of having to chase it. A key takeaway? The biggest opportunities to make money are in relationships. Andrew explains how going out of your way to meet the right people and creating a friendship funnel radically transforms your trajectory as a founder. He also gets real about how he breaks down his week to stay productive, purposeful, along with all of the tech and tools he uses. If you’ve ever struggled with burnout, fear of failure, or uncertainty about your next steps, this episode will be really valuable for

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.