12 Podcasts Every Founder Should Listen to in 2026

I’m not going to give you the obvious list. You already know about How I Built This.

This is the list I’d actually give a founder friend in 2026. Twelve shows I personally listen to, each chosen because it teaches something specific that founders need. For each show I’ll tell you what it does for me, the best episode to start with, and the one quote I’ve taken from it that I keep coming back to.

I capture podcast notes in Margin (the app I built), so the quotes below are real, pulled from my own library. They’re imperfect, but they’re honest.

1. Acquired, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Why founders need it: Acquired is the most thorough business history podcast in existence. One company per episode, three to four hours, deeply researched. The premise, that you understand strategic decisions by walking through their context decade by decade, is exactly how founders should think about their own companies.

Start with: the Microsoft series, Part 1. (Or NVIDIA. Or TSMC. The Acquired catalog is the gift.)

One quote to remember: “The companies that look like overnight successes are companies that survived a long stretch where they looked like nothing.” (Paraphrased from one of the early Costco episodes.)

2. Founders, David Senra

Why founders need it: the biographies-as-podcast show. David reads founder biographies (Walt Disney, Rockefeller, Edwin Land, Estée Lauder, Steve Jobs) and reports back with extraordinary obsession. Every episode is dense.

What David has built is a kind of pattern library across hundreds of years of great company-building. The recurring shapes (early failures, obsessive focus, long stretches of being misunderstood) become a quiet permission structure for whatever phase you’re in.

Start with: the Walt Disney episode. Then John D. Rockefeller.

One quote to remember: “You’re not behind. The people you’re comparing yourself to had decades of false starts you’re not seeing.” (Paraphrased, recurs across many episodes.)

3. Invest Like the Best, Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Why founders need it: ILTB teaches you to think like an investor without becoming one. Patrick’s guests think at a strategic level that most operating advice misses. The conversations are about why companies work, which is exactly the question a founder should be asking about their own.

Start with: the Howard Marks episode on second-level thinking. Then the Charlie Munger episode.

One quote to remember: “You don’t get paid for difficult. You get paid for being right.” (Howard Marks.)

4. Cheeky Pint, Patrick Collison

Why founders need it: Patrick interviews founders, scientists, and operators at a high intellectual register. The conversations are pitched at the level where both people have read the same dense things and don’t need to explain the basics. For founders building serious technical companies, Cheeky Pint is the closest thing to overhearing the conversations you wish you were part of.

Start with: any of the founder-and-scientist episodes. The catalog rewards browsing.

One quote to remember: “The interesting question isn’t whether the thing is possible. It’s why nobody serious has tried.” (Paraphrased from one of the recent episodes.)

5. 20VC, Harry Stebbings

Why founders need it: Harry interviews investors and founders at a faster tempo than any other show. Multiple episodes a week, each with at least one or two specific lessons. Useful for staying current on what investors are actually thinking, which matters when you’re raising, hiring, or just trying to understand the meta.

Start with: any of the Vinod Khosla episodes. Then the Bill Gurley.

One quote to remember: “The thing nobody tells you about Series A is that the question you’ll have to answer isn’t whether your business works, it’s whether you’ve convinced yourself it works.” (Paraphrased from a Bill Gurley episode.)

6. In Depth, Brett Berson (First Round)

Why founders need it: the operating-detail podcast. Brett asks operators about specific functional decisions — hiring a VP of Sales, restructuring a team after a pivot, repricing a SaaS product. The conversations are tactical in the best way.

Start with: the Patrick Collison episode on Stripe’s hiring culture.

One quote to remember: “Hire on slope, not intercept.” (Patrick Collison. This is the single most useful sentence I’ve ever heard about hiring early people.)

7. Dwarkesh, Dwarkesh Patel

Why founders need it: if you’re building anything AI-adjacent, and in 2026, most founders are, Dwarkesh is the show. The interviews are with researchers, founders, and historians. Dwarkesh’s preparation is famously thorough. The conversations are sharper than what you’ll get on bigger AI podcasts because Dwarkesh isn’t afraid to ask the hard question.

Start with: the Patrick Collison episode. Then Sholto Douglas.

One quote to remember: “The bottleneck isn’t the model. The bottleneck is how quickly your organization can absorb what the model can do.” (Paraphrased from one of the more recent episodes.)

8. Grit, Joubin Mirzadegan (GV)

Why founders need it: Joubin interviews CEOs and operators specifically about the hard moments. Hiring failures. Near-death company experiences. Difficult board decisions. The show goes places other CEO interviews don’t because Joubin is good at sitting with discomfort.

For founders in the messy middle, this is the show that makes you feel less alone about the parts of the job nobody talks about publicly.

Start with: any of the recent CEO-of-a-public-company episodes.

One quote to remember: “Every founder has the moment where they realize the company isn’t going to work the way they planned. The good ones don’t quit. They just stop planning.” (Paraphrased.)

9. The Knowledge Project, Shane Parrish

Why founders need it: the most generally useful podcast on this list. Shane interviews thinkers across psychology, philosophy, business, and performance. The throughline is how to think better.

The Knowledge Project is the show that has changed my decision-making the most, even though it’s not a “founder” show. Founders make decisions for a living; sharpening that capability is the highest-leverage thing you can do.

Start with: the Naval Ravikant episode. Then the Daniel Kahneman.

One quote to remember: “The best way to be right is to be willing to be wrong, fast.” (Paraphrased from a Ray Dalio episode.)

10. Lenny’s Podcast, Lenny Rachitsky

Why founders need it: Lenny is the closest thing to a craft podcast for PMs, growth leaders, and operators. For early-stage founders especially, the advice is specific enough to apply on Monday morning. Not every episode lands, but the hit rate is high and the catalog is deep.

Start with: the Shreyas Doshi episode on product strategy.

One quote to remember: “Most product failures aren’t because the team built the wrong thing. They’re because the team built the right thing too slowly.” (Paraphrased from one of the growth episodes.)

11. The Logan Bartlett Show

Why founders need it: Logan (Redpoint) interviews founders, operators, and other investors with unusually sharp questions. The guest list skews toward people who don’t do many other podcasts. For founders thinking about company-building specifically, Logan asks the questions about the actual mechanics that other VCs are too polite to ask.

Start with: any of the late-stage founder episodes.

One quote to remember: “The number one mistake founders make in board meetings is performing. The board doesn’t need a performance. They need the truth.” (Paraphrased.)

12. Uncapped with Jack Altman

Why founders need it: the most informal, candid show on this list. Jack interviews founders and operators with a tone that’s closer to a phone call than a produced podcast. You hear things on Uncapped that founders wouldn’t say on a more formal show.

For founders who are tired of polished founder-podcast narratives, Uncapped is the antidote.

Start with: any episode where the guest is a sitting CEO talking about the present, not their highlight reel.

One quote to remember: “Most of the time the right move is obvious. The hard part is being honest about it.” (Paraphrased.)

How I’d actually deploy this list

Twelve podcasts is too many to listen to seriously. Nobody listens to twelve shows. The point of the list is to give you options.

If you can only listen to three, pick:

• Acquired (for context and history)
• Founders (for the long view across great company-builders)
• In Depth (for tactical operating)

If you can listen to six, add:

• The Knowledge Project (for general thinking)
• 20VC or Lenny’s (for industry pulse, your pick)
• Dwarkesh (for AI-frontier thinking)

If you want to listen to all twelve: you don’t actually have time to be a founder.

How to listen so that listening matters

A practical note: listening to founder podcasts is mostly wasted without capture.

The cumulative effect of 100 hours of great podcast conversation is significant, if you retain it. Most founders don’t. They listen, nod, walk home, forget. By month-end they remember the vibe of the conversations but not the specific moves that would actually be useful.

The fix is small: capture the moments. When something hits, mark it. Doesn’t matter how, voice memo, app, paper notebook.

Margin is what I built for this. Press and hold to capture; Spotify auto-pauses; on-device transcription; saved with the episode timestamp. The whole capture interaction is 3 seconds. The reason I built it was that I’d been listening to all twelve of the shows on this list for years and realized I was retaining a small fraction of what I’d heard. That seemed like a waste.

If you take one thing from this article, take this: pick the show, listen to one episode, and mark three moments. Whatever tool you use, just mark them. The list above is only as useful as the marks you make from it.

Selinay