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Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly

Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly

Leaders Media

Chris and Dan are serial entrepreneurs who've built, sold, scaled & failed companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So, like, we get it - business is hard. But we also love it, it's fun! Fortunately- we've got an epic network of some of the most inspiring builders on the planet who aren't boring and will teach you everything you'd never learn in business school - and therefore everything you'll actually need to build yourself a better future and have some lols along the way. Contact: [email protected]
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Top 10 Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly - Life-changing session with world's top CEO coach Matt Mochary & Georgia Dienst - Dan Murray Serter
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01/31/23 • 76 min

What do the Founders and CEOs of Coinbase, OpenAI, Reddit, Brex, Notion... and even everyone’s favourite modern day venture capitalist0cum-philosopher Naval - have in common? They all have the same coach.

Matt Mochary is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, the author of the brilliant book The Great CEO within, which we highly recommend. But he is probably best known as one of the most in demand coaches on the planet. He has designed his own coaching framework called 'the Mochary Method' which he and his team of coaches use in their sessions with some of the world’s biggest tech CEOs.

You cannot book Matt, he’s generally too busy with his foundation, focused on giving back but Secret Leader’s host Dan Murray-Serter can be pretty persuasive and they came to a deal: Matt and a member of his team, Georgia Dienst, a CEO coach and former Director at Google X, would come on and show us what a coaching session using the Mochary Method was really like. With Dan as the guinea pig.

The session dramatically changed Dan’s real-life business, Heights. He decided to let go of 40% of his workforce after talking to them.

Why?

Listen to find out.

*The whole Mochary Method Curriculum, including the document Dan talks about in the podcast, ‘Product: What product to build? How to position it?’, is open source online. Here it is.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18FiJbYn53fTtPmphfdCKT2TMWH-8Y2L-MLqDk-MFV4s/edit#

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Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly - How I Failed: Trying to please the wrong people, with Founder Rob Fitzpatrick

How I Failed: Trying to please the wrong people, with Founder Rob Fitzpatrick

Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly

play

12/15/22 • 17 min

How do you know what to do when you’re just starting out?

In 2007, Rob Fitzpatrick and his two co-founders, were in their early twenties. They were programmers just out of academia and had an idea for a business. They were accepted to YCombinator in the same cohort as teams like Dropbox and Songkick. They got deals with big companies like Sony Music, MTV, and the BBC, were on national talk shows, got great press coverage and moved to London to be in the centre of their industry. But they died in their fourth year...

What went wrong? Listen to find out.

If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better?

Sponsor links:

quickbooks.co.uk/secretleaders

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Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly - Outbrain: closing a funding round with gunfire in the background -Co-Founder & Co-CEO Yaron Galai
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05/10/22 • 56 min

It’s pretty rare that investors have to ask the Founder they’re speaking to if they’re in a warzone, or insist they have to leave their country for somewhere a little more ‘peaceful’ but that’s exactly what happened to Yaron Galai, the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Outbrain. Yaron was a captain in the Israeli Navy before smashing it out the park with a few startups he founded.

Yaron’s latest company Outbrain (founded in 2006) is one you may not have heard of but you’ve probably used - they power recommended articles on loads of the world’s top news sites.

They nearly merged with their biggest competitor (Taboola) a year ago only for that deal to not work out and float instead on the Nasdaq for $1.25 billion.

As Yaron says, an exit is a great outcome but a terrible plan, so what was his plan? How has he got multiple exits under his belt? What are the secrets to his success?

We talk about:

  • The struggle for funding
  • Israeli military/life/work balance
  • Parents investing to make sure their children got paid
  • Exiting for $400m
  • Why it’s easier to make acquisitions when you’re public

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Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly - Duolingo Founder: Being a genius, inventing CAPTCHA & getting 500m users - Luis Von Ahn
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10/25/22 • 48 min

If you’re not one of their 500 million users, Duolingo is a phenomenally successful app where you practise a language in small chunks every day. Launched in 2012, it has become the number one language learning app and the most downloaded education app in the world. The company floated in 2021 and currently has a market cap of just under 4 billion dollars.

It’s rare for a founder to be brilliant at both invention and business but Luis Von Ahn, the Co-Founder and CEO of Duolingo, is one of them. Before Duolingo, he invented Captcha - those squiggly letters you have to write out to prove you’re not a computer. The guy’s a genius, and that’s a fact. He actually won an award for being one in 2006, the prestigious Macarthur Fellows Program award. It’s colloquially known as the genius grant, because it’s said you have to be one to get it.

Luis grew up in a single parent household in Guatemala. His mother spent all the money she could sending him to the best school she could afford. This experience, of seeing the difference between those who receive a good education and those who don’t, would later form the basis of Duolingo. But when Luis and his Co-Founder Severin started Duolingo in 2012 they had a big problem - how could they keep their users coming back? Listen to find out.

Show notes:

  • (01:50) - The beginning of Duolingo
  • (08:40) - Getting first interested in computers at 8 years old.
  • (11:15) - Inventing CAPTCHA
  • (16:00) - Selling reCAPTCHA to Google
  • (19:45) - How he handled suddenly becoming very rich
  • (23:30) - The key things they did right with Duolingo in the early days
  • (25:25) - How they got their users to stay motivated
  • (29:00) - Working out how to teach Gen Z
  • (33:00) - Why he doesn’t see Google Translate as a competitor
  • (35:40) - Using crowdsourcing as a tool to grow the business
  • (40:35) - His advice for other entrepreneurs

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Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders

Vanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleaders

Vertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code secretleaders: https://www.vertice.one/l/secretleaders

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Newsletter

Sign up here: https://secretleaders.email/

You can find our historic newsletters here: https://www.secretleaders.com/episodes

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Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly - An Uncommon Criminal - Bad Money X Secret Leaders

An Uncommon Criminal - Bad Money X Secret Leaders

Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly

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11/14/22 • 27 min

This a new one for us - we've just launched our first true crime show at Kindling Media (we make Secret Leaders).

It's called Bad Money and it's about the Hong Kong gangster, Big Spender. Obsessed with money, he went further than anyone before to get rich. In fact, he became so wealthy he could've had his own episode on Secret Leaders.

This is a story of how money and power really work - and this is the first episode.

You can listen to the rest of the show here: https://link.chtbl.com/badmoney_sl

Or search for Bad Money wherever you listen to your pods.

Hope you enjoy!

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What are your new year’s resolutions? Is money on your mind?

Being an entrepreneur can be a bit of an all or nothing game when it comes to money. You're into the creation process and are willing to sacrifice a lot. It can cost you much more than you earn, especially at the beginning, and often you have nothing for a long time. But, admitting that you want money and understanding how to take control of it can be difficult, it can feel like a taboo.

That’s why this episode features bestselling author of 'How to Own the World' and Founder of Plain English Finance, Andrew Craig. 'How to Own the World' is in its third edition and rarely out of the top books for personal finance on Amazon. Andrew originally self-published the book after becoming frustrated with the fact that so many people don’t understand the nuts and bolts of personal finance. He says we can all grow wealthier by developing some simple habits over the long term. A founder himself, Andrew understands the pressures entrepreneurs face but believes that everyone can better control their finances.

What does it mean to ‘own the world’? What is the ‘100 minus your age’ rule? And why does Andrew think it's better to rent rather than buy?

Listen to find out.

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Sponsors

Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders

Vanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleaders

Vertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code secretleaders: https://www.vertice.one/l/secretleaders

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Newsletter

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You can find our historic newsletters here: https://www.secretleaders.com/episodes

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Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly - How I Failed: I closed my business because my heart wasn’t in it - Jess Salamanca
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04/27/23 • 12 min

Jess Salamanca is the Founder of Moxie Club, a community for female Founders.

But before Moxie there was another business Jess started which could’ve been BIG. She had the opportunity to take it to a whole new level but instead decided to close it down.

What really happened?

--

If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. What would make the show better?

--

Sponsor links:

otta.com/secretleaders

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Alex Zaccaria is the Co-Founder & CEO of Linktree, a product that's so simple it’s difficult to imagine nobody thought of it before. It’s a kick yourself kind of product, especially now they are worth over a billion dollars.

Linktree solves a unique problem in the social media age. Most social sites like Instagram only allow you to have one link in your bio. For successful people, in all kinds of industries like music, picking that one link is a nightmare. Do you want to send your followers to your merchandise, to your website, to your tickets or wherever?

Linktree solves the problem by having one link to rule them all. You put your Linktree in your bio which when clicked on, displays various links to various things that you might want to promote.

Alex, his brother Anthony, and their business partner Nick Humphreys, created Linktree because they saw how much time they were wasting having to update individual bio links for their clients at their digital agency, Bolster.

After running the operation as a boot-strapped side-hustle for several years, things snowballed when singer-songwriter Alicia Keys joined the platform.

How the hell have did they turn that link site, a side project, into one of the top three fastest growing company in the world?

--

Sponsors

Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders

Vanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleaders

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You can find our historic newsletters here: https://www.secretleaders.com/episodes

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Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly - My Favourite Failure: I lost my company, job, had to sell my cars, house & move back in with my mum | Tay Sweat
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11/23/23 • 16 min

Tay Sweat is retired today having put a lot of the earnings from his fitness and supplement business into the stock market. But that was actually his second attempt at that business. He failed on his first go, and that knocked him back decades - back to an even worse position than he'd been in when he was a teenager. It would’ve broken a lot of people but Tay, well, he likes to sweat.

--

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You wouldn’t sign up for a terrible experience but they’re a breeding ground for the best stories, and the most personal growth. It’s no different for today’s guest and the usual host of Secret Leaders, Dan Murray-Serter, who opens up about his biggest traumas... which became the biggest turning points in his life.

This is the third chapter in our semi-regular series with Dan. If you haven’t listened to the first or second it’s worth doing that now because you’ll understand the periods he’s talking about in this episode.

Dan today has become pretty synonymous with the mental health space. His VC backed startup Heights is trying to create a new category of braincare - but he wasn’t always like this. In fact, he didn’t even think he had mental health issues despite having had a shopping list of problems over the years. When the penny dropped for Dan, it dropped hard.

Find out what Dan went through - and what he learnt about how to spend your time on this earth.

--

Sponsors

Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders

Vanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleaders

Vertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code secretleaders: https://www.vertice.one/l/secretleaders

--

Newsletter

Sign up here: https://secretleaders.email/

You can find our historic newsletters here: https://www.secretleaders.com/episodes

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FAQ

How many episodes does Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly have?

Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly currently has 393 episodes available.

What topics does Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly cover?

The podcast is about Podcasts, Education and Business.

What is the most popular episode on Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly?

The episode title 'How I Failed: Trying to please the wrong people, with Founder Rob Fitzpatrick' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly?

The average episode length on Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly is 44 minutes.

How often are episodes of Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly released?

Episodes of Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly are typically released every 5 days, 1 hour.

When was the first episode of Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly?

The first episode of Secret Leaders with Dan Murray-Serter & Chris Donnelly was released on Apr 24, 2017.

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