Artificially generatedWho the Heaven: we now look for the heaven in the person
Our biography series used to be called "Who the hell is". That hook was easy. From now on we go the other way.
Who the Heaven is our method for biographical work on founders, builders and people of the present: we work out the heaven this person carries, where they are happy, what they long for, and where that heaven scrapes against the world. The dark sides stay in. They are neither the first chapter nor the last. The reason for the switch is uncomfortable and measurable: outrage pays, and every extra negative word in a headline adds 2.3 percent clicks. That is why everybody does it, and that is why we will not do it any more.
For four issues the series was called "Who the hell is". The hook worked. The direction did not.
Jeff Dean, Travis Kalanick, Peter Steinberger, Eugene Schwartz. Four people we wrote about, and every time the devil sat in the headline. That is a clean opener: it promises that something unpleasant is coming.
In all four texts, the interesting part was never the unpleasant part. With Jeff Dean it was a person almost nobody outside his field knows, even though everyone uses his work every day. With Eugene Schwartz it was a copywriter who set an alarm for 7 a.m. and then wrote for 33 minutes straight. Hell was never the story. Hell was the title.
So we switch. Not as a marketing turn, but because the old question aims the search in the wrong direction. Whoever looks for the devil finds him. In everyone.
Effect of one extra word in a headline on the click rate. Measured on about 105,000 headline variants with 5.7 million clicks.
From a study in Nature Human Behaviour (2023). Alongside it: negative articles are shared 1.91 times as often, according to a second study. The zero line in the middle marks the point at which a headline does not upset anyone.
Not a halo. The place where this person stops fighting and starts building.
Heaven here means the state in which a person is themselves and it is going well. That is different for everyone: a workbench, a blank page at seven in the morning, a team that understood what was meant, a machine that runs for the first time, a problem that had been open for twenty years.
The questions that follow are simple and almost never asked. Where is this person happy? What do they take for paradise? What do they long for? What drives them when nobody is watching? Which moments in their life were warm?
Read a biography and you usually learn what someone achieved and whom they ran over on the way. What they loved is rarely in it.
Three questions that every piece has to answer. If one of them stays empty, the text is not finished.
These three questions are also why the series does not tip into hagiography. Anyone who answers Deep Care honestly will hit the places where someone walked over people for their cause. That then goes in, in its place.
The same trait that makes the work possible makes the person hard to be around. Almost always.
Whoever puts one thing above everything else puts other things behind. Whoever has standards nobody understands comes off as unbearable. Whoever has a vision that does not exist yet is talking about something that, for everyone else, is not there. From the outside that makes a clear picture: difficult, cold, selfish.
It gets interesting at the point where that reading feeds back. A person whose heaven is read as hell for long enough eventually stops explaining it. After that, only the behaviour is left, without the reason behind it. From then on the label is stable, and it is even partly true.
Our job is to open that loop once. Not to wash anyone clean. So that it becomes visible what was actually meant, before it got lost in translation.
We write about the ten percent of genius, not about the ninety percent social disaster.
That is a weighting decision, not a truth decision. The ninety percent are free to anyone, they are well documented and plenty of people work them. What is missing is clean work on the small remainder from which the work actually came.
This weighting has a condition: it only works if nothing is left out. A text that drops a person's victims is a forgery. So every piece states what happened, with names and numbers when there are names and numbers.
Six chapters, fixed order. The hell chapter sits in the middle, on purpose.
This order is the method itself. Rearrange it and you automatically get an outrage text again, no matter how friendly the individual sentences are.
The dark tile is the chapter most texts pull to the front. Here it sits fourth of six. If a person has no recognisable heaven, that is stated, and the text gets shorter.
David Senra reads founder biographies and pulls out what worked. We pull out what these people loved.
The Founders podcast is the best place for the question of which principles made a builder successful. Over 350 episodes, each from a worked-through biography. If you want to know how someone worked, that is the right address.
Our turn is a different question on the same material: what was this person's heaven? Not the method, but the state they needed the method for.
Both together make the picture. Principles without longing are an instruction manual. Longing without principles is kitsch.
| Founders | Who the Heaven | |
|---|---|---|
| Guiding question | How did they work? | What did they burn for? |
| Yield | transferable principles | a person understood |
| Dark sides | appear when they teach something | appear, in a fixed place |
| Ending | what you can apply tomorrow | what remains of this person |
Three ways Who the Heaven turns into advertising copy.
| Claim | Basket | Where from |
|---|---|---|
| Every extra negative word in a headline: plus 2.3 percent click rate | Fact | Nature Human Behaviour 2023, about 105,000 variants |
| Every extra positive word: minus 1.0 percent | Fact | the same study |
| Negative articles are shared 1.91 times as often | Fact | Scientific Reports 2024 |
| Four previous issues under "Who the hell is" | Fact | our own archive |
| "Most people carry a heaven in them" | Stance | working assumption of this series, expressly not a measurement |
| Link between being misunderstood and harder behaviour | Thesis | plausible, not evidenced here, checked person by person |
| Ten percent genius, ninety percent remainder | Image | a weighting, not a quota |
| Reading of the Founders podcast | Our reading | outside view, not agreed with them |
The four issues already published keep their titles. They are out, they are linked, and they will not be rewritten after the fact. From issue five the new name applies.
- Nature Human Behaviour: Negativity drives online news consumptionThe analysis of about 105,000 headline variants with 5.7 million clicks. Basis for Fig. 01.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4
- Scientific Reports: Negative online news articles are shared more to social mediaOn the sharing of negative articles, factor 1.91.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-71263-z
- Founders Podcast, David SenraOver 350 episodes on founder biographies. The reference point against which we define our turn.https://www.founderspodcast.com/
- McGrinsey Magazine: the four issues of the old seriesJeff Dean, Travis Kalanick, Peter Steinberger and Eugene Schwartz, published between July and August 2026.https://mcgrinsey.com/magazin/
As of 15 August 2026. This document describes the method and grows with it.
