Fortt Knox

147 - New Life for Fortt Knox on LinkedIn and YouTube. See You There! Sep 26, 2020

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonfortt/detail/recent-activity/

https://www.youtube.com/c/forttknox

I should have posted this way earlier, but I've been getting questions. Here's the skinny: Fortt Knox is not dead. It's just been reborn. Instead of living in your favorite podcast app, Fortt Knox now lives on LinkedIn and YouTube.

Now you can see video of my interviews, and engage with a broader community of Fortt Knox viewers. I stream my interviews live, and the recordings are there for on-demand viewing. I also serve up curated insights from the interviews -- there's something new from Fortt Knox in my Jon Fortt LinkedIn feed just about every weekday, and pretty often on the Fortt Knox channel on YouTube, too.

Beyond that, Fortt Knox is taking on new life -- it's a weekly newsletter distributed through my profile on LinkedIn's platform. So if you don't have time to check in with me every day, you can get a weekly roundup of the latest goings on in tech, leadership and innovation, and find out what's coming next. So get on LinkedIn and subscribe, and that will be delivered right to your inbox.

Still, I know a lot of listeners will be bummed that the podcast part has gone away. You might be wondering why. It comes down to this: I want to hear from you. Interact with you. Podcasts are great as a passive medium, but they're a little too passive for where I want to take this. The new format is rich with video, and gives lots of opportunity for you to share the experience with others and interact with me.

So that's it! Look, LinkedIn isn't just for job hunting, and it's not just for self promoters and techies. It's a great platform for everyone who wants to get insight into how to do work better. And no, that's not a paid endorsement. Nobody paid me to move this to LinkedIn. It just happens to be the best platform for what I want to do with Fortt Knox. So: Thanks for being on the ride thus far, and I hope to see you on LinkedIn and YouTube.

146 - AWS CEO Andy Jassy on JEDI, the Cloud's Future and More Dec 07, 2019

In the late 1990s, Andy Jassy pitched a wild idea to his boss and mentor, Jeff Bezos: What if Amazon developed another business, delivering computing power and storage .

Two decades later, it stands as Amazon’s most profitable division – one that Jassy continues to lead as CEO of Amazon Web Services. I sat down with Jassy in a broadcast exclusive at the company’s annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to talk about Amazon’s lead in the cloud today, the controversy surrounding the Pentagon’s awarding of the highly sought-after JEDI contract to Microsoft (and Amazon’s lawsuit in response), the lessons learned from the company’s failed HQ2 attempt in New York City and more.

145 - Trump and Apple’s CEO Talk Business in Texas Nov 23, 2019

A walk to remember. Apple CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump in Texas this week, and it’s a high stakes photo op. They’re at the factory in Austin Texas where Apple’s Mac Pro computer is assembled.

Cook no doubt wants to make it hard for the president to put tariffs on Mac Pro components. Cook has said unless they continue to be exempt from tariffs, he’ll have to move manufacturing completely to China.

The president wants to push Apple and U.S. CEOs more broadly to manufacture here instead of in China.

But I think this whole scene is a bit of a sham. I’ll tell you why.

Joining me this week, Ina Fried, chief tech correspondent at Axios.

We’ve got more than Trump and Cook, we’ve got Disney Plus hacking, Microsoft teaming up on Slack, and more.

144 - A Fresh Look at Design: Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva Nov 10, 2019

I was on the road this week, doing a little tour of California. Three cities in three days. San Francisco Monday, L.A. Tuesday, San Diego Wednesday. Adobe’s MAX conference was this week in LA, where the creative software giant unveils its latest features.

Well, everybody’s got challengers, and one of Adobe’s is a startup called Canva. Canva has emerged to help regular folks add high-end creative flair to their presentations. Even better, it was founded by a young woman in Australia who was looking for a way to make yearbooks in the digital era. It turned into something much bigger than she envisioned. I sat down with Melanie Perkins at the New York Stock Exchange recently to talk about how how her design project turned into a profitable, venture-backed brand that’s earned praise from legendary tech watcher and investor Mary Meeker among others.

This week, my one-on-one with the co-founder and CEO of Canva, Melanie Perkins.

143 - Microsoft JEDI: The Empire Strikes Back; with Morgan Brennan Nov 02, 2019

It's the biggest single cloud contract … possibly ever. Definitely the most talked about. The Pentagon's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract. JEDI, going to: Microsoft late last week. The Empire Strikes Back.

The JEDI contract is worth up to 10 billion dollars over 10 years, but just as valuable as the money: It's worth bragging rights and street cred. This was supposed to be Amazon's contract to lose. Amazon practically invented enterprise cloud computing 14 years ago with AWS. When the Pentagon put out the requirements for the contract a year and a half ago, some competitors cried foul that it was too tailored to Amazon.

Is this a game changer in the cloud wars?

With me this week, co-anchor of CNBC's Squawk Alley, Morgan Brennan.

142 - Mr. Zuckerberg Goes to Washington: with John Stanton and Farhad Manjoo Oct 26, 2019

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Washington this week arguing for Libra, the digital currency his company created and wants to build around. This after he last week made the case in front of an audience at Georgetown University that Facebook’s future, its past, its reason for being are all tied up in free speech.

With me this week for another bite out of this Facebook and free speech debate: John Stanton, the cofounder of the Save Journalism Project, and Farhad Manjoo, columnist for the New York Times.

141 - Tech's Free Speech Challenge Oct 19, 2019

Tech just can’t get away from politics.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has a bone to pick with Facebook. Mainly its standards for political ads. After Facebook refused to take down a Trump Campaign ad that accused former vice president Joe Biden of wrongdoing connected to his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine, Warren fired back. She posted her own Facebook ad that started with a false claim that Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg have endorsed Trump for re-election.

A little farther afield, Activision Blizzard is caught out in the storm of controversy around Hong Kong. Chung Ng Wai, a Hearthstone player, was removed from a tournament, denied prize money and banned for a year for saying in a post-game interview, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!” ATVI has since softened a little, saying they’ll let him have his 10,000 dollars prize money and ban him for just six months.

With me this week to talk free speech and more: from LA, Mike Jackson is CEO and principal at Motus One and founder of 2050 Marketing. Here in New York, Nilay Patel is editor in chief of The Verge.

140 - Savings and Startups: Credit Carma CEO Ken Lin; Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman Oct 13, 2019

It’s hard to save money these days – and I’m not talking about the new phones and earbuds that come out this time of year and tempt you to spend. Interest rates are really low. Which is great if you’re borrowing to buy a house or a car, but not so awesome if you want to save. The interest rate for the typical U.S. savings account is 9 hundredths of a percent.

But! All is not lost. For a long time there have been higher rates for savers, even from mainstream banks. Now a young and scrappy group of tech startups are pushing the boundaries further with interest rates at about 2% – that’s 20 times higher than average. It’s the difference between earning 16 bucks a month on 10 thousand dollars in savings, or earning just 75 cents.

That’s just the beginning. There are cheaper ways to trade stocks, ways to make money off of credit cards. Today we’re going to help you put a plan together.

With me this week, CNBC’s personal finance expert Sharon Epperson. And Kenneth Lin, CEO of Credit Karma, which has just announced it’s launching one of these high-yield savings accounts. Later, Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman.

139 - Microsoft's Dual-Screen Surface: Winner? With Patrick Moorhead Oct 06, 2019

We’ve got a blockbuster hardware announcement this week … from Microsoft. The biggest hardware risk the company has taken since Xbox. Surface Neo, two screens with a hinge in between, coming next year. And there’s more. Surface Pro X, arguably the first ARM-based computer to run full Windows 10.

Has Microsoft changed the game here? Or are these cool gadgets that won’t really sell?

With me this week, one of my favorite guys to talk hardware, Pat Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategies. Let’s talk Microsoft vs. the rest of the field and then hit some other headlines in consumer electronics.

138 - When to Fire a Founder, with Walter Isaacson and Steven Levy Sep 28, 2019

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann resigned from the CEO role this week, in the face of skepticism about the coworking startup’s plans to go public. There are questions about the business model – we’ve addressed some of those here on Fortt Knox. There are questions about his eccentric leadership style. And there are questions about the way he’s maintained control of the company while taking lots of money out of it.

WeWork is in the headlines this week, but we’ve lived through versions of this story before. Uber’s board of directors pushed co-founder Travis Kalanick out of the CEO role to get the IPO done. The Google founders brought in Eric Schmidt early on as CEO to act as adult supervision. The biggie: Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was effectively forced out of Apple in the ‘80s only to come back a decade later to save the company.

We love founders. Their stories and personalities live at the heart of companies. But sometimes they’ve got to go. When? When is firing a founder a mistake?

With me this week, tech chronicler Steven Levy of Wired magazine, who has covered big companies, big ideas, big personalities – his most recent book was about Google. Also with me, Walter Isaacson, biographer of great founders and inventors including Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci.

137 - Employees or Contractors? Gig Economy’s Labor Crisis Sep 21, 2019

Days ago California lawmakers passed a bill, AB5, that would force more companies to treat more workers as employees, not contractors. What’s the big deal?

The gig economy. Whether it’s Uber and Lyft, or Postmates and Doordash, or TaskRabbit and Instacart, a slew of companies have grown up in the smartphone era with a radical idea. When just about everyone has a smartphone and a credit card, you can assemble a workforce on a moment’s notice, pay workers electronically, and let them be independent contractors. They can work as much or as little as they want!

But just because employers can do this doesn’t mean they should. And that’s what we’re going to debate today.

With me this week: Two professionals who have driven for Uber and Lyft and have different opinions about what should happen here.

Karim Bayumi is out of LA. He says drivers like him – he’s driven 5 to 6 days a week for the platforms – deserve the protections of employee status, and the companies can’t be trusted to provide that without a law.

Harry Campbell is a former part-time Uber and Lyft driver who’s known as the Rideshare Guy. He’s got a blog that focuses on the driver community, a YouTube channel, a podcast – and he says forcing companies to treat drivers as employees is the wrong way to go.

136 - Apple's iPhone 11 and More: Boom or Bust? Sep 14, 2019

Apple's iPhone extravaganza is still the biggest product event of the year for a simple reason: The iPhone remains the single most successful hardware product of the PC era. We can talk about whether sales are growing or not, whether Apple is innovating or not. But Apple still sells more premium phones every year than anyone else. So what happened this week? Three new iPhones announced, the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and Pro Max. A new Apple Watch with a screen that doesn't turn off. A new entry-level iPad. And two services at $4.99 a month, Apple Arcade and Apple TV Plus. What does all of this mean? Should you pay $300 more for three cameras on the back instead of two? Does the watch update matter? And can Apple out-HBO HBO? With me this week: A great lineup of people who know their stuff. Walt Mossberg, the godfather of tech reviews, is going to talk big picture from DC. Tech analyst extraordinaire Pat Moorhead and tech strategist Shelly Palmer are going to sift through and tell us which they think are the most significant. And then CNBC's own Julia Boorstin is going to join us from LA to give the view from Hollywood Apple's subscription moves.

135 - Can Tech Save the NFL? Plus, Rapper Jim Jones on His New Pot Venture Sep 10, 2019

The National Football League was on the brink last year. Not of death – let’s not talk crazy, now – but of the type of loss of relevance that has humbled baseball and boxing over the past generation or so.

But now as the NFL's 100th season kicks off this week, there's a sense of fresh energy. And I would argue that if football's going to make a full comeback, technology is going to have to play a big role.

First, a word about where we've been. Football was the undisputed champ of the major sports leagues, popularity-wise. But between critical tweets from President Trump, fans angry about players kneeling during the anthem, fans angry that Colin Kaepernick doesn't have a job after kneeling, concerns about player concussions and safety, the spotlight was withering.

Now things appear to be turning. The NFL struck a deal with Jay-Z's Roc Nation to promote music and merchandise that will benefit social justice causes, possibly addressing the move for player activism. The owners and players are already at the table for collective bargaining, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told CNBC this week, in hopes of presenting a strong case to both broadcast and streaming partners. ESports is gaining in popularity, potentially boosting the brand of the real game. And legal sports betting, enabled by smartphones, has some fans paying closer attention than ever.

With me this week: CNBC's sports guy, Eric Chemi.

Also on this week's podcast:

How to say this: Rapper Jim Jones is known to his fans as an avid smoker of marijuana. It's so much a part of his brand that he's hoping to leverage that reputation into a business. His business associate Alex Todd, a jeweler with celebrity clientele, has launched a cannabis brand called Saucey Farms and Extracts. And Jones has a line within Saucey called CAPO.

I talked to both of them about how a hobby is turning into a business.

134 - Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt; Plus, Marvel’s Spider-Man Divorce and Streaming Wars Aug 31, 2019

Summer’s coming to a close, and that means the streaming wars are about to get a lot more real. Apple released a trailer for The Morning Show, one of the big series slated to hit its Apple TV Plus service this fall. Disney just gave us more details behind its slate of shows for the Disney Plus service that launches in November; and Disney and Sony get a movie divorce … and Sony gets custody of Spider-Man.

And later on the 1-on-1: Peter Reinhardt is the CEO of Segment, a startup that helps companies make sense of customer data. The company has raised more than $280 million and is worth more than $1 billion, but the path hasn't always been smooth.

133 - Goodbye IPO, Hello Direct Listing? Aug 27, 2019

15 years ago this week, Google had its IPO. Initial Public Offering. That means shares of its stock were available to buy for the first time. I was working as a tech reporter in Silicon Valley at the time and remember it was a big deal for a couple of reasons. One, Google’s IPO was a glimmer of hope after the dotcom bust. Two, Google was trying to reinvent the IPO by making it more transparent. They used a process called a Dutch Auction. Today the IPO hasn’t changed for the most part. But maybe it’s about to. Prominent venture capitalist Michael Mortiz of Sequoia Capital wrote an op-Ed this week arguing that Slack and Spotify are leading the way to a better day where Wall Street fat cats won’t control and mystify the process of going public. But what would that mean for mom-and-pop investors? What would it mean for startup employees looking to make good? This week to talk the future of the IPO I’ve got Mr. IPO, Jay Ritter, University of Florida Cordell Professor of Finance. Also joining me later on here at the Nasdaq I’ve got Kevin Delaney, Quartz Editor in Chief; and from San Francisco, Connie Loizos, TechCrunch Silicon Valley Editor and my former colleague at a certain newspaper in Silicon Valley.

132 - The WeWork IPO: Why the Controversy? Aug 17, 2019

I’ve got a business idea. I’m going to take out loans to rent a bunch of apartments around the world. Two-year leases. Then I’m going to decorate them with a super-cool modern vibe … snacks, premium soaps, entertainment spaces… and Airbnb them by the week and half week to vacationers and business travelers for less than they’d pay for a hotel room.

But wait, you say. You’re signing up for two-year leases and only getting commitments in the days and weeks. What if the economy goes bad? What if your landlords raise the rent? What if you try to grow too fast, and your loan payments go up?

Funny you should ask. WeWork’s parent company just filed for an IPO this week, and WeWork’s business model sounds a lot like the one I just described, only it’s office space, not apartments. Is it a good bet?

We’re gonna talk WeWork, we’re gonna talk Viacom/CBS, Disney/Fox, Yahoo/Tumblr, Twitch/Mixr – all kinds of things that come in twos.

131 - Apple Card: How the Cash and Features Stack Up Aug 11, 2019

Let's talk money. Apple, the tech giant, the iPhone maker, this week launched … a credit card. That's right, Apple Card, linked to Apple Pay. Apple's pitch with the card? It starts with cash and goes deep with security and design.

This week we're going to take a closer look at the card and the app … which I have seen up close. And we're going to compare it to the deals and features you can get elsewhere. Is it really a good deal?

With me this week: Sara Rathner from NerdWallet – a site that studies these kinds of things – and joining us a bit later, CNBC's Dierdre Bosa.

130 - Monopoly: Are Apple, Google, Facebook & Amazon Fair Game? Aug 03, 2019

The problem with the Monopoly board game is that only one person ends up happy in the last half hour of the game, and everyone else is miserable.

If you believe tech critics, some of the biggest companies in the industry have figured out a way around this unhappy ending in real life: Each one of these multi-billion-dollar juggernauts has its own mini-monopoly. Google gets to rule search engines, Facebook gets social networks, Amazon gets e-commerce and Apple gets expensive phones … made by Apple … or something. I really don't get any of the arguments that Apple has a monopoly on anything.

Why does this matter?

One could argue – and I know this because I'm about to – that the tech companies that are in the antitrust crosshairs are more central to our everyday lives than any group of accused monopolists in history. This isn't a bunch of railroads or oil companies. This is the app you use all day to talk to your friends and family. The phone you use to fire up that app. The service you use to search for the theme gift for a 10-year wedding anniversary, and the store you use to buy the gift.

If these companies are found to be monopolists ... and they're found to be abusing their monopoly power … they could get broken up or otherwise restricted.

Should that happen? We're going to help you decide. With me today to figure it out, some legal firepower:

Doug Melamed is a professor at Stanford Law School and before that was general counsel at Intel. A couple of decades ago he served at the U.S. Department of Justice as Acting Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division.

Dina Srinivasan is an antitrust Scholar and an author of the paper: “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook.”

129 - Facebook’s $5 billion speeding ticket, with NYT's Farhad Manjoo Jul 27, 2019

Five billion dollars. That’s how much Facebook will have to fork over to the government under a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. It’s the biggest fine for violating user privacy by a wide margin – 200 times bigger than the previous record, according to the FTC chair.

If I got hit with a 5 billion dollar speeding ticket, it would hurt. I’m not going to lie. But some are already saying the settlement doesn’t go far enough.

So. After this settlement, can Facebook say it has paid its debt to society? Or did Zuckerberg and company just make out like bandits?

And: What does this say about privacy regulators’ ability to effectively walk the beat in Silicon Valley?

With me this week to shake me out of my vacation-induced stupor: Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times.

128 - Putting a Dollar Value on Personal Data, with CNBC's Josh Lipton Jun 29, 2019

Here’s the thing: It’s really hard to put a dollar value on the data that you or I deliver to internet platforms. What’s the value of a tweet? A Facebook profile that tells my birthday and links to my closest relatives?

It’s even hard to put a value on the data the platforms have on all of us. Sure, it’s probably worth billions of dollars. But how many billions? Does the value of data go up over time like a house, or down over time, like a car?

Our first topic is the value of data, because Democratic Senator Mark Warner and Republican Senator Josh Hawley want to require big tech companies to report the value of our data, like an asset, and would instruct the Securities and Exchange Commission to come up with a formula for calculating how much the data is worth.

Joining me to discuss that and a lot more: CNBC’s own Josh Lipton.

127 - Life Lessons and an Elephant Attack: Great Stories from Great Minds Jun 23, 2019

Julie Sweet today leads the North American business at Accenture, a global consulting giant. Years ago, she was a high school sophomore with the gift of gab, entering various debate and speech competitions for the prize money, building her own scholarship fund. She wasn't doing it for kicks; at times growing up in Southern California she had just one pair of shoes, or one pair of pants that fit. Her father painted cars for a living, and her mother was a hairdresser.

One particular contest at the Lions Club had come down to a final showdown between Julie and another girl. Julie lost. Stung by the injustice of it – she felt her speech had been better – she griped to her father on the way home.

—

To say Tom Siebel has had an interesting life would be putting it mildly. He’s a billionaire entrepreneur, a tech visionary, and the survivor of an elephant attack eight years ago that, by the odds, should have killed him.

Several doctors told him he would never walk again, much less sail competitively. But he does.

So what do you learn about life when you’ve stared down death in the form of a five-ton elephant, been crushed by that elephant, and lived to tell the tale?

What do you learn when you’ve invented one of the first killer workplace apps of the PC era, and sold it for about 6 billion dollars?

—

When he was 14 years old growing up in West Philadelphia, Troy Carter started promoting parties at a neighbor's house and charging for entry. He did the DJing himself to save money.

Today he's one of the most respected visionaries at the intersection of two industries: Music and tech.

Carter wears a lot of hats. He's been a manager, working with the likes of John Legend, Lady Gaga and Meghan Trainor. He's an investor, a general partner at venture capital firm Cross Culture Ventures. And he's a connector.

126 - Jeff Wilke, Amazon CEO of Global Consumer, Exclusive from re:MARS Jun 08, 2019

Amazon has three people who hold the title of CEO. There's Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO. Then there are two deputies: Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, the cloud business. And Jeff Wilke, CEO of global consumer.

Jeff Wilke got the title CEO of global consumer three years ago, and hadn't done a broadcast interview since – until this week, when he sat down with me for CNBC. Wilke's been with Amazon for 20 years, and now runs the core business of e-commerce and physical retail. The massive global logistics operation, the billions of items shipped – all that reports up to him.

I talked to Jeff Wilke in Las Vegas at Amazon's first re:MARS event; MARS stands for machine learning, automation, robotics and space. Later on in his keynote, Wilke gave an update on Amazon's plan to deliver packages by drone. He didn't spill the beans on that plan in this interview, but he does talk about Amazon's ambition to keep delivering Prime packages faster and faster – in even less than a day.

125 - Apple WWDC Preview, and Tech's Labor Unrest; with Walt Mossberg Jun 02, 2019

We’re past Memorial Day, and that means two things: barbecue season, and software season.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, WWDC, kicks off Monday. It’s an event where Apple gathers engineers from everywhere to announce its vision for the future of software, and to answer their questions about how to make today’s apps work better.

Who cares? Well, if you use an iPhone, iPad, Mac, you’re probably getting new software, even if you don’t buy a new device. And if you’re a tech watcher, you get some hints about what’s coming in the next generations of iPhones and iPads.

Joining me to talk Apple, tech labor and more, I’ve got the father of tech reviews, a pioneer in tech journalism, Walt Mossberg.

124 - Huawei, T-Mobile, and Winning at All Costs May 26, 2019

Ever get so mad in an argument that you forget what it’s about? Just so focused on the other person being wrong that you forget what your point was in the first place?

A couple of developments in tech this week bring exactly that to mind. The Trump Administration’s blacklisting of Huawei and the outcry over FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s blessing for the marriage of T-Mobile and Sprint.

Huawei is China’s biggest tech player, kind of like what Samsung is in South Korea. Huawei makes phones, they make networking equipment. The Trump Administration says they also make a security risk for U.S. 5G networks. Huawei’s leadership is too close to the Chinese government, they say, and so no U.S. companies should buy their equipment or otherwise do business with them. I say that’s a flawed security strategy and we’re going to talk about why.

Joining me to do exactly that: Kevin Delaney, Editor in Chief at Quartz.

123 - Is SoftBank Spoiling Silicon Valley? May 18, 2019

You ever hear about kids taking a gap year after high school? A gap year. It's when they don't go straight to college and don't get a job, they … do something else. Maybe travel to Europe, or hike the Appalachian Trail. Gap years cost money, so mostly rich kids do them. For other people they’re called “being unemployed,” or “vagrancy.”

But! For kids whose parents can afford it? A gap year can be a beautiful period of self-discovery. Or it can be a ticket to delay responsibility.

What does this have to do with tech? Uber just went public days ago, after waiting a long time. Which is kind of like finally starting college after that gap year. How did the stock do? Terrible. Like straight Fs. Priced at the low end of the range, trading 10 percent below that.

I blame the parents. SoftBank and its 100-billion-dollar Vision Fund have been slinging billions of dollars around Silicon Valley like gap years after Andover, helping startups delay their IPOs. The question today? Is SoftBank spoiling the kids?

122 - The Uber IPO Show; Plus, Amnon Shashua on Intel's Driverless Challenge May 11, 2019

Uber had an action-packed IPO that did NOT go the way a lot of people expected. And in the lead-up to that, I got a visit from one of the smartest guys in the world in the field of computer vision – which is an important facet of driverless cars. This week on Fortt Knox, Ina Fried of Axios joins me to talk Uber, and Amnon Shashua of Mobileye tells how he went from college professor to billionaire entrepreneur … who is still a college professor.

121 - The Endgame in Streaming for Disney; Plus, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger May 06, 2019

Is Endgame just the beginning? Disney has its eyes on the prize in the streaming wars, and now that it’s clocked the biggest movie opening ever – by a mile – all the pieces might be falling into place.

I now consider myself to be something of an Avengers Endgame expert. I saw it in Orlando on vacation Friday, then got stranded in Vegas for work Monday and saw it again. Don’t ask.

And basically Disney couldn’t ask for a better setup for the launch of its streaming strategy this fall. This year it’s closing out two of the top-grossing movie franchises of all time: Avengers and the Star Wars Skywalker saga. This as some of the biggest names in tech, including Apple, Google and Amazon, are also suiting up to do battle in streaming.

Also: I sat down with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to talk about innovation, tech's impact on society, and the challenges of being a person of faith while leading a Silicon Valley company.

120 - Apple's Qualcomm Truce, IPO Fever; with The Verge's Casey Newton Apr 22, 2019

I grew up in Washington, DC in the ‘80s. And 4 out of 5 playground fights ended before they started. Oh, there was plenty of trash talk – name calling, threats, even pushing. But when it was time to throw down? Most kids didn’t really want that busted lip.

This week we saw that same story play out in the multi-billion-dollar world of tech. Apple was gonna teach Qualcomm a lesson. Qualcomm wasn’t scared. Yesterday, minutes into their high-stakes court battle, the giants settled.

With me to break down the most important stuff happening in tech: Casey Newton of The Verge.

119 - Winning in the Markets and on the Court: John Rogers, Jr., Ariel Investments founder & CEO Apr 13, 2019

John Rogers, Jr. Is Chairman and CEO of Ariel Investments. It has $13 billion under management. It's the largest black-owned investment firm in the country, and he's been running it more than 35 years.

This week, my conversation with John. We talk about a lot of stuff, including why he likes to eat one meal a day at McDonald’s, and how he once beat Michael Jordan playing basketball, 1-on-1. Seriously. It’s on YouTube.

118 - IBM CEO Ginni Rometty on A.I. and the Future of Work Apr 06, 2019

This week I spent some time talking to Ginni Rometty, the chairman and CEO of IBM.

I've been wanting to do a CNBC and Fortt Knox interview with Ginni for years now, and this year, it finally all came together. As a matter of fact, she and I have been making up for lost time. She's been kind enough to sit down with me three times: in January after her keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in February at IBM's Think conference in San Francisco, and this week at CNBC's first Future of Work event of the year in New York. We've got a rhythm going.

After our on-stage interview tackling artificial intelligence, workforce training and more, she joined me for a dive into how IBM is addressing those challenges specifically, and how the themes of technology shifts, equity and discomfort fit her own journey.

This is a quick talk by Fortt Knox standards – but it's packed. Ginni doesn't waste words. Still, she left me wanting more, and I'll wager you'll feel the same. I can guarantee I'll try to get her to spend some time with me on Fortt Knox again.

117 - Apple's New Services: Will They Work? Kevin Delaney, Stephanie Mehta, Rebekah Saltsman Mar 30, 2019

Apple TV Plus. Apple News Plus. Apple Arcade. Apple Card. We still don’t have all the details, like pricing and mechanics, but Apple CEO Tim Cook hosted Hollywood royalty at the company’s Cupertino headquarters this week. The promise: a new model for digital commerce and digital content that emphasizes privacy over targeting and subscriptions over ads.

But is Apple too late? And for publishers and producers who have been burned by the big platforms before, is this time different?

Joining me to dig for answers, Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief and co-CEO at Quartz; Stephanie Mehta, editor of Fast Company; and Rebekah Saltsman, CEO of Finji, the game studio behind Overland.

116 - Beyond the College Cheating Scandal: Plus, Frank Calderoni, Anaplan CEO Mar 23, 2019

Twenty-five years ago today I was probably really stressed out about the college application and admissions process.

Things have arguably gotten tougher since then for students trying to chart their futures. And the headlines this month don’t help.

The U.S. Department of Justice charged 50 people last week in a multi-million-dollar scheme that allowed rich parents to cheat the college admissions system. By faking standardized test scores and bribing athletics officials, those parents managed to get their kids into elite schools like Georgetown, Stanford, Yale, and USC.

But what if you don’t want to commit a crime but still want to succeed in life? What’s the plan? We’re going to discuss.

With me this week: Michael Reilly, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers; C.J. Farley, author of the new book Around Harvard Square, and the father of two teenagers; Adam Brownlee, an investment theory instructor at Western Kentucky University who has done the math on whether an Ivy League degree is worth the cost; and CNBC wealth editor Robert Frank.

Also on the podcast: Frank Calderoni is the CEO of software company Anaplan, and he’s the former CFO of companies including Cisco, Red Hat and SanDisk.

115 - Should Big Tech Break Up? Plus, Playwright Dominique Morisseau Mar 16, 2019

Have tech companies gotten so big that it’s bad for the economy? Senator Elizabeth Warren says so. She’s proposing to break up not one, but several tech giants, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. She says they shouldn’t be allowed to both run distributor platforms and compete on them. It’s like being an umpire and a team owner at the same time.

Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek not calling for a breakup, but he is calling for an overhaul – specifically when it comes to Apple. He’s pointing to the same issue Warren is: Apple is charging Spotify to operate on its App Store, but then also competing with Spotify in the same store.

So. Is there a problem here? Should big tech be broken up? If not, should regulators step in to change the rules?

This week I’m joined by Wired senior writer Lauren Goode; and here with me, New York Times Tech columnist Kevin Roose.

Joining us in just a bit, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, Author of new book: “From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future”

Later on the podcast: Dominique Morisseau is a playwright, a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, and her musical “Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations” opens on Broadway this Thursday. A unique innovator shares her journey and you don’t want to miss it.

114 - Fortnite vs. Apex Legends, Plus Ciena CEO Gary Smith Mar 09, 2019

You’ve probably heard of Fortnite. It’s a game and more than a game – a cultural moment that’s swept in with all the force of Pokémon Go, and arguably more of the staying power. There’s the game itself, but there are the dances, the addictions.

Now, here’s a twist: Fortnite has competition. Electronic Arts a month ago dropped Apex Legends, its own free-to-play multiplayer team combat game, and it MIGHT be hotter than Fortnite. It has grown as much in a month as Fortnite did in four. Fortnite’s developer is already copying features.

So. What makes this style of game so different from what came before? How big is the money involved? And how does it fit into the future of eSports?

Plus:

Gary Smith grew up in Birmingham, then the industrial heart of the United Kingdom. Both of his parents worked in factories. For career day, the high school took the kids to a coal mine and a steelworks. Smith wasn't inspired.

Smith is now the CEO of Ciena, a networking company with a market value over $6 billion. But at the time, he didn't reject a future in mining because of high-tech dreams. In a recent conversation, Smith told me that after high school, he moved to London to pursue a dream of becoming a photographer; he took commercial photos of buildings, and also shot weddings and other events.

Only by wading into the job market and trying to make it did he discover technology, and figure out what skills he would need.

113 - Opening Tech: The Diversity Challenge. With Anu Duggal, Female Founders Fund; Kathryn Finney, Digital Undivided; Ruben Harris, Career Karma Mar 02, 2019

There’s little question that technology – software – is shaping the future of our work, our play, and even how we form opinions. But who is shaping that technology?

It’s been quite an economic run. The stock market’s been climbing for a decade, and in that time, tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook have gone from underdogs to overlords. Even as that’s happened, employees and observers have settled on a nagging question: Is there room for more women and minorities on the campuses and in the startups where this future is crafted?

With me in New York this week, Anu Duggal, founding partner at Female Founders Fund. Joining me from Atlanta, Kathryn Finney, founder and managing director at Digital Undivided, which encourages entrepreneurship among black and Latina women. And from San Francisco, Ruben Harris is CEO of Career Karma, host of the Breaking Into Startups podcast.

112 - Amazon Leaves NYC: Good or Bad? With Anand Giridharadas and Robert Frank Feb 16, 2019

So long, New York! Amazon has pulled out of its commitment to build a massive campus and bring 25,000 to 40,000 high-paying jobs to Long Island City in Queens. On Valentines Day!

Roses are red / violets are blue / you’re not getting / my HQ2 – Love, Jeff

What went wrong? Why the breakup?

First of all, some critics were mad that New York offered 3 billion dollars in tax incentives to lure Amazon in the first place. Most businesses just come here because they want to be in New York and pay the taxes.

Second, you’ve got the union issues. Amazon flat out said, we’re not going to want our employees to unionize.

But still. It wasn’t as if the working class in Queens was rising up in protest against the Amazon deal. A poll by the Siena College Research Institute found 56 percent of New Yorkers wanted it, Democrats and Independents more than Republicans. Blacks and Latinos favored the deal more than any other group.

So what gives? And what does it mean for future deals between billionaire-run corporations and cities?

Joining me: Anand Giridharadas, author of  “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and CNBC Wealth Editor Robert Frank.

111 - Is Facebook Really That Bad? Roger McNamee and Antonio Garcia Martinez Feb 09, 2019

Facebook is worth almost a half trillion dollars. It has more than 2 billion users who log in at least once a month. It has a famous CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, hailed in Silicon Valley as a Bill Gates for the Internet age – the suburban Harvard kid who dropped out of Harvard to start a company and change the world.

Facebook also has problems. Its once non-controversial mission of connecting the world has taken a dark turn. Connecting the world to what, exactly? After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and controversies over how Facebook gave partners access to user data, there’s a question hanging out there. Is Facebook unwittingly connecting the world to too much misinformation, political manipulation, or worse? Or does the good that happens on Facebook outweigh the bad?

With me this week: Roger McNamee. He’s an early investor in Facebook. He’s an early adviser to Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook has made him a lot of money. And he’s the author of a new book out this week: “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.” He says Facebook is bad for America.

Also with me: Antonio Garcia Martinez, former Facebook employee, and author of “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley.” He does not think Facebook is bad for America.

110 - #Nevertweet: Time to Cut Back on Social? Farhad Manjoo, Jeff Jarvis, Chris Moody, Jaron Lanier Feb 02, 2019

Apple this week pulled a Facebook app from the App Store. It’s called Facebook Research, and its purpose was to let Facebook watch everything that users did on the phone. Apple says the snooping app is too invasive, even if users had consented to letting Facebook watch their every move.

Which raises the question: How much social media is too much? Are we giving these platforms too much data? Are we posting stuff too quickly without thinking about it? Is it time to step back?

With me this week, Farhad Manjoo, a New York Times columnist who recently wrote a column about the response to the controversy around Covington Catholic students, and how that inspired him to change his Twitter behavior.

Also with me, Jeff Jarvis, professor at the City University of New York and longtime journalism commentator. Chris Moody is a former data strategy VP at Twitter, currently a partner at investment firm Foundry Group. And later, Jaron Lanier, noted computer scientist, and researcher at Microsoft.

109 - Fender CEO Andy Mooney; Plus, in the Netflix Era, What Makes a Show Valuable? Jan 26, 2019

He did this the hard way – grew up playing guitar in a band, skipped college, became an accountant by testing into the profession and, after he got into the corporate world, made a lateral move into marketing. He is Andy Mooney, the CEO of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation.

Mooney and Fender are trying to change the way we look at musical instruments, and the process of buying one and learning to play. It all made sense after he told me his role in the Disney Princess concept becoming a global marketing phenomenon.

Also: The game has changed. It used to be, a movie was valuable if it had a big showing at the box office, though there was the occasional film that did big rental business but didn’t do much in theaters. For more on that, see the entire careers of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen after Full House. And then for TV, much of the same: A show is big if it gets people to watch commercials or buy cable.

108 - Behance Founder Scott Belsky; Plus, Walter Isaacson and Jim Stewart on the Future of Journalism Jan 21, 2019

Scott Belsky didn’t drop out of college, didn’t go straight into being an entrepreneur – he had an idea about what a certain group of customers needed, and he kept tweaking his approach until he built the right thing. That thing, Behance, is a professional network for artists. Kind of like a LinkedIn for visual people. He sold it to Adobe for $150 million. That in itself is pretty cool. But maybe more impressive is what he’s done since. He helped kickstart Adobe’s move to software at a service and invested early in a bunch of hot startups like Uber, Pinterest, Warby Parker and Sweetgreen. Now he’s back at Adobe, leading the development of creative cloud products.

Scott Belsky is the author of The Messy Middle, a book about the challenges between starting something and declaring it a big success. I loved this conversation. Here’s Scott Belsky.

107 - What Really Mattered at CES 2019, with Julia Boorstin, AMD, IBM, Mobileye, Verizon Jan 12, 2019

The Consumer Electronics Show, CES, is how tech starts the year. It’s a massive event in Vegas with halls full of booths, wall-to-wall people, and companies competing to convince the world that they own the future.

Julia Boorstin and I were there for CNBC, interviewing executives, taking in the news, now we’re going to break down what it all means.

This year there is no single hit product to take over for the smartphone. And unlike the past few, there’s no contender. We know drones aren’t really going mainstream. Virtual and augmented reality aren’t either. Artificial intelligence is fun, and 100 million Alexa-powered devices have been sold by Amazon and its partners, but no one’s getting rich off of selling voice-powered devices.

At the same time, we’ve got 5G, fifth-generation wireless on the horizon, and big ideas like autonomous driving and quantum computing. Julia and I got into all of that in Vegas.

106 - WW CEO Mindy Grossman; Plus, Wellness and Fitness Tech for 2019 Jan 05, 2019

Wellness, fitness, nutrition – all of it is getting a makeover in this age of mobile tech.

Now you can book doctor appointments on an app, get your blood drawn and the results back in 20 minutes. You can give your doctor access to your genetic code and get truly personalized service.

Your stationary bike can connect to the Internet to motivate you.

But how much is too much? And what are the best services to check out?

We have got just the show to kick off the year, whether you do resolutions or not. Joining me today, CNBC reporters Chrissy Farr and Diana Olick. And I’m thrilled to have WW CEO Mindy Grossman here with me. What’s WW? It’s the artist formerly known as Weight Watchers.

105 - UpWork CEO Stephane Kasriel: Is the Full-Time Job A Dinosaur? Dec 29, 2018

The economy is in a very odd place right now. The overall numbers are great in the United States. Unemployment is low, growth is decent, several companies have been raising the wages of blue-collar employees.

But at the same time, stable, full-time jobs with benefits can be hard to come by. To make ends meet and improve their quality of life, lots of people are joining the gig economy, or doing other kinds of temporary work.

These observations about the state of work and the economy led me to a conversation with Stephane Kasriel, the CEO of Upwork. Upwork is a digital platform where people who have skills can put those skills out for hire, either by the project or on a longer-term basis. I met Stephane at CNBC’s Productivity at Work event, where he gave a talk about how employment is changing. We took it further, to talk about geopolitics, his journey as an executive, and what today’s workers need to know to seize control of their careers.

104 - Intel interim CEO Bob Swan; Plus, Real Estate Insight for 2019 Dec 22, 2018

When Intel found itself without a CEO, the board of directors turned to Bob Swan, the chief financial officer, to keep the company running. That was six months ago. A few days ago Swan and I sat down at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York to discuss a tumultuous year, an ongoing transformation, his path to the top of corporate finance, and more.

But first, on the Fortt Knox live show this week, it’s the most expensive purchase many of us even consider: a place to live.

As we head into 2019, a complicated landscape in real estate: For a decade in a rebounding U.S. economy amid cheap loans, home prices have marched steadily higher. When the market bottomed in February 2009, the median sale price for a home was $140,000. Last month it was nearly $258,000.

That might sound OK if you’re looking to sell a home, but not so fast: Interest rates are creeping higher, reducing how much buyers can borrow. And the number of homes for sale is rising, giving shoppers more homes to choose from. Are we heading into a healthier housing market? Or a more dangerous one?

Joining me to talk real estate I have the very best: CNBC’s Diana Olick, Realtor.com CEO Ryan O’Hara, and real estate agent Josh Flagg of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles. Season 11 kicks off January 3.

103 - Three Tech Controversies from 2018: Digital Data, Fun and Money Dec 16, 2018

As 2018 draws to a close, a panel of journalists looks back at some of the defining controversies of the year. Digital data became a flashpoint as more people considered the implications of smartphone apps that literally track our every move. Digital fun came into question as parents heightened their concerns about kids glued to screens. And digital money experienced a crash, as the price of a Bitcoin dropped from nearly $20,000 to less than $3,500.

Ina Fried of Axios, Ed Lee of the New York Times and Josh Lipton of CNBC join Jon Fortt to explore how those issues played out in 2018, and what's likely next in 2019.

102 - Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block; Plus Your Game Plan for Consumer Cloud Dec 08, 2018

Keith Block spent a long career at Oracle before joining Salesforce five years ago. This summer he became co-CEO alongside Marc Benioff, the company’s chairman and cofounder.

I spent time with Block at CNBC’s Capital@Work event this week in San Francisco, talking strategy, his background, and more.

Plus: Not many people are getting a cloud for Christmas. But … chances are a lot of the stuff you do get is going to require that you buy online storage sometime down the line. You’ve got to back up those holiday photos and videos eventually, in case your hard drive fails or your phone gets lost, or just to free up space!

So. Today we talk cloud, to save you money. Joining me to break it down, Rob Marvin is Associate Features Editor at PCMAG.com. Jefferson Graham is a tech columnist for USA Today. And Jordan Novet is a tech reporter for CNBC.com.

101 - AWS CEO Andy Jassy: The Plan to Stay Ahead in the Cloud Dec 01, 2018

Andy Jassy started the cloud business at Amazon, and still runs it. As AWS re:Invent, Amazon's annual cloud conference, I talked to him about Amazon's cloud strategy, global tech momentum, rivalries with other tech giants, and more.

100 - Max Levchin, PayPal co-founder and Affirm CEO: Disrupting Money (Again) Nov 24, 2018

Max Levchin learned to write code out of necessity. His mother's necessity, specifically.

Levchin co-founded PayPal, reaped a windfall from its IPO and sale, and became one of the best-connected investor/entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But before all that, he was a teenage refugee from the Soviet Union, figuring out how to make his mark at the dawning of the consumer Internet era.

Before the family had left Ukraine in the early 1990s, Soviet officials had given Levchin's mother a poorly translated programming manual, a PC, and a mandate: Learn to program it. Mother and son took turns reading each other the manual, and by the time they moved to the U.S., both knew how to code.

99 - KIND Snacks Founder Daniel Lubetzky; Plus, Outsmart the Holiday Season Nov 17, 2018

KIND Snacks today is a business valued in the billions of dollars, but this wasn't Daniel Lubetzky's first food company. That would be PeaceWorks – a venture with the lofty goal of bringing Jews and Arabs together through mutually beneficial trade.

What they have in common is a strong sense of mission. KIND bars come in mostly clear packaging, intentionally showing buyers exactly what's inside. Lubetzky started out selling $100 worth of bars at a time – he says he now sells more than 1 billion in a year – and he believes in making a simple, straightforward promise about the ingredients inside.

In our conversation for the Fortt Knox 1-on-1 this week, I talked to Lubetzky about how his family's legacy as Holocaust survivors informs the way he thinks about entrepreneurship and mission. He also talks about mistakes he made along the way.

Also in this week's episode:

It’s upon us: the holiday season. I don’t know about you, but I got an email come-on from Amazon about early Black Friday deals the day after Halloween. Talk about scary.

So: If you’re an entrepreneur, how do you break through the noise this holiday season? If you’re a shopper, how will you get the best deals?

Joining me to untangle this retail riddle I’ve got a great panel of experts:

Adam Glassman is creative director at O Magazine, and has been preparing for this season for more than six months. Stephen Sadove is former chairman and CEO of Saks, and an adviser to Mastercard. And Lauren Hirsch is a retail reporter with us at CNBC.com.

98 - BlackBerry CEO John Chen; Plus, How to Beat Amazon Nov 10, 2018

The theme this week is "underdogs." John Chen has history in this department: His parents escaped communist China to Hong Kong, and his father had to work jobs beneath his education level so Chen could have a shot at a better life. At age 17 he came to the United States to finish high school. After he entered the workforce, Chen hit a roadblock. It wasn't common at the time for engineers to get promoted into broader management positions, and he was still growing in his comfort with communicating as a leader in English, his second language.

Fast-forward to today, and Chen has been CEO of BlackBerry for five years. He has taken the company from a dying smartphone maker to a stable provider of security and automotive software. And it's not Chen's first turnaround; after becoming CEO of Sybase in 1998, he led a reinvention that saved the company.

In all of my years covering Chen, I'd never heard his personal story. For the Fortt Knox 1-on-1 this week, I finally get to the root of why Chen is so comfortable playing the long game when it comes to leadership ... and how it ties back into the sacrifices he saw as an immigrant and the son of refugees.

97 - Panera CEO Blaine Hurst; Plus, Why Parents Must Make A Screen Time Strategy Nov 03, 2018

Panera had a problem. At lunchtime, customers were mobbing the counters to order and pick up, and it was a mess. It was frustrating for everyone involved, and management knew they were probably missing out on sales because of it.

The company's founder turned to Blaine Hurst to lead the search for a solution. As the company's chief technology officer, he put together a team to make Panera a leader in digital ordering and fast pickup. First through a website and in-store kiosks and now through mobile ordering and delivery, those tech efforts have paid off. The company now books more than $1 billion worth of digital orders a year, and digital is more than a quarter of total sales.

To talk about how he got there, I sat down with Hurst for this week's Fortt Knox 1-on-1. The answer isn't what I expected. There was no getting buy-in from across the company about what the problem was before the team crafted a solution. And now that he's the CEO and not the CTO, he's had to shift his methods somewhat.

Plus:

Richard Freed is a child and adolescent psychologist, and the author of Wired Child: Reclaiming Childhood in a Digital Age; he joined me from San Francisco. Anya Kamenetz is lead education blogger for NPR, and author of The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life; she joined me in New York. And Katherine Omerod is a social media influencer and author of Why Social Media Is Ruining Your Life; she joined me from London. In our conversation I got feedback and a few pointers on how other parents can set boundaries. Be a friend and share this episode with a parent you know.

96 - Luis von Ahn, Duolingo CEO: Could Language Be Key to Closing the Wealth Gap? Oct 27, 2018

Luis von Ahn is familiar with the idea that education is a great equalizer, but the reality he’s observed is different. More often than not, the opportunity for an exceptional education is available only to the wealthy – and it makes them even wealthier.

So what can be done about it?

Von Ahn was born in Guatemala, where much of the population is poor. So after he struck it rich selling a company to Google, he decided to build technology that really does address the wealth gap, by targeting one type of education that does make a difference: language.

That was the genesis of Duolingo. Today, it has touched 300 million users, and has both ad-supported and subscription versions.

95 - HotelTonight CEO Sam Shank, Plus Cannabis Goes Legal in Canada Oct 19, 2018

This week, Canada legalized pot. That’s a big deal because it’s the largest country to do it, and because it’s a major milestone in one of the most impressive rebranding exercises in a generation. When I was growing up, many warned against marijuana as a gateway drug, the province of hippies and slackers. Now it’s becoming a multi-billion-dollar global industry, and Elon Musk is toking during a podcast. Seems like an appropriate time to polish off that old meme: “We would like to congratulate drugs, for winning the War On Drugs.”

For the Fortt Knox 1-on-1 this week, I bring you my conversation with Sam Shank, cofounder and CEO of HotelTonight. That business is another example of seizing the moment. Shank had achieved smaller success with a travel technology businesses in the past, but this one was timed to a revolution when it came to life eight years ago. The idea: a smartphone app that finds you last-minute deals on hotel rooms. At first, you couldn't book any further out than a week in advance.

The concept has evolved significantly since then. Today, it’s not just on smartphones, and you can now book three months in advance. The startup has raised more than $100 million. Shank has some advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, intriguing insights into why HotelTonight needed to start the way it did, and an update on the prospects of an IPO for the company.

94 - Carnival CEO Arnold Donald: Achieve Despite the Doubters Oct 13, 2018

Arnold Donald has led cruise company Carnival for five years – the company is now worth $40 billion. Before that, Donald had a long career at Monsanto. His path to the top of a publicly traded company is unique. He's one of the few African American Fortune 500 CEOs, and rose to his position from roots growing up in segregated Louisiana in the 1950s and '60s.

93 - New Rules of the PC Market: A Practical Buying Guide, with Patrick Moorhead Oct 06, 2018

Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategies joins on how to buy a PC in 2018.

92 - SiriusXM Buying Pandora, and A New Cloud Alliance: Tim Westergren, Pandora Co-founder Sep 29, 2018

Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren joins to talk the future of subscriptions online.

91 - What the Most Successful Founders Have in Common: Maynard Webb, Scott Galloway, Robert Frank Sep 22, 2018

We’ve got a fascination with founders in our culture – people who start stuff. Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates.

I’ve had a new generation of founders here on Fortt Knox: Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake, and Guild Education founder Rachel Carlson to name a couple.

So this week we’re going to dig into what successful founders do right, and what we can learn from them. Because hey: The way I look at it, even if you’re not starting the next Apple, the chances are pretty good that a lot of us have started something, or will before too long. Maybe it’s a small business – a major project on your job.

My guests: CNBC Wealth Editor Robert Frank, who has chronicled the ways of successful entrepreneurs for many years now. And the irrepressible Scott Galloway, Professor at NYU’s Stern School of business, author of New York Times bestseller The Four, which examines the animating ideas behind Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

This week for the Fortt Knox one-on-one I’ve also got Maynard Webb. He’s former Board Chairman at Yahoo, former CEO of LiveOps, chief operating officer at eBay, and board member at Visa and Salesforce.

90 - Analyzing the New iPhone XS Max & Apple Watch with Chrissy Farr, Josh Lipton, Jillian Manus Sep 15, 2018

Three new iPhone Xs and a watch that's a cleared medical device: That's what Apple announced at its biggest event of the year.

But what does it mean for Apple? Which, if any, of this stuff is worth buying?

Jon Fortt breaks it down with Christina Farr, CNBC.com health reporter who has been breaking stories left and right on Apple's health advancements; Jillian Manus, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and CNBC tech correspondent Josh Lipton.

89 - Nike’s Gamble; Facebook & Twitter Go to Washington. With Charles Duhigg & Ellen Pao Sep 08, 2018

Big week for social media.

Colin Kaepernick tweets his new Nike ad, Nike retweets, and it’s on. Did Nike just make a big mistake, or did it lock in the loyalty of a valuable customer base?

Plus, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey go to Capitol Hill and … I know what you’re thinking, no, Dorsey didn’t go for a Civil War battle reenactment, though with that beard he’d make a dashing Rufus King – I’m just saying – with a bow tie? That’s fresh.

No, they went for a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, to talk about what they’re doing to make sure foreign powers aren’t futzing around with our Midterm elections, which are coming up in just two months.

This is Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I am Jon Fortt of CNBC.

Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning contributor to the New York Times Magazine joins me; he has covered the legal upheaval coming to the social space. And Ellen Pao, CEO of Project Include, former CEO of Reddit, and canary in the “Me Too” coal mine joins us.

88 - How to Get Pay-Boosting Skills Without Going Broke Aug 25, 2018

The economy's supposed to be really good, if you look at the official numbers. According to the U.S. labor department the unemployment rate was under 4 percent in July, which is a level that a lot of people used to consider "full employment." Everybody who wants a job has one.

Except … not really.

The system isn't working the way it's supposed to for working people. Here's what I mean. Typically in the past, when so many people have jobs, pay goes up. I mean, how else are you going to get people to work for you if everybody has a job. You've got to pay them more.

But that's not happening – at least not anywhere near at the level it should be. The Labor Department reported last month that if you look at median weekly earnings, and you factor in inflation, the typical worker is just treading water.

And what about the future? Having a job and making a living are not the same thing. The cost of a four-year degree rose about 25 percent in the last decade according to the College Board, to $34,740 a year. Meanwhile student loan debt Is exploding.

So: wages flat. Traditional schooling expensive. We haven’t even talked about the cost of raising a family if that’s your thing. What are you going to do if you’re not already in the job you want to be doing for the rest of your life?

Today we’re going to find the smart way to navigate all this. Getting the skills for a better job or higher pay without crushing your bank account and going deep in debt.

Welcome to Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I am Jon Fortt at the Nasdaq Marketsite in New York’s Times Square.

Joining me on the show today to help you make your plan: Here with me at the Nasdaq, Laura Pappano is an education reporter who lives and breathes this stuff, writing in the New York Times, the Hechinger Report and more.

Joining us from Denver, Rachel Carlson cofounder and CEO of Guild Education, a company that helps employers offer education as a benefit to employees, kind of like healthcare – clients include WalMart, Lowe’s, Taco Bell and Chipotle.

And finally, joining us from Cambridge Massachusetts, Anant Agarwal is an MIT professor and CEO of EDX, a free-to-learn platform.

87 - Dinesh Paliwal, Harman CEO. Alex Jones & Media’s Wild Summer Aug 18, 2018

The conversation with Harman CEO Dinesh Paliwal begins at 27:58.

Free speech is getting exhausting. It’s a game of online publishing whack-a-mole as wingnut Alex Jones, of Infowars fame, finally gets suspended from Twitter, only to direct his audience to Tumblr. How should those of us who still love America feel about the amount of crazy that’s going on in the media game these days?

MoviePass is testing its business model … on Solo. Borrowing a page from Darth Vader’s Cloud City book of negotiating tactics, movie theater subscription company MoviePass is altering the terms of your deal – pray they don’t alter it further.

And skinny bundles are the new skinny jeans. In further evidence of a trend I like to call “The Great Rebundling,” digital distributors and content companies are hooking up faster than you can say, “Ban Alex Jones.” The latest to swipe right on each other: Verizon doing a deal for free Apple Music and Samsung doing a deal to pre-load Spotify on all its devices.

Last but not least, for the Fortt Knox one-on-one this week I’ve got Dinesh Paliwal, CEO of Harman International, the high-end audio company Samsung bought for 8 billion dollars last year. He’s talking straight about the future of music formats and the right way to play business hardball with China.

Welcome to Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I am Jon Fortt at the Nasdaq Marketsite in New York’s Times Square.

Joining me on the show today to break down the headlines: I’ve got Ed Lee of the New York Times. Dan McComas, former senior vice president of product at Reddit. And joining me a bit later, Brent Lang, the senior film editor at Variety; and Cherie Hu, columnist at Billboard.

86 - Startup or Corporate Giant? How to Decide What Kind of Employer Fits You Aug 11, 2018

I've got something different for you this week: A big conversation about work. As in, where should you work? What kind of company: Big or small? Young or established?

The idea for this episode came from my CNBC colleague Sharon Epperson, who's just great. Sharon covers personal finance, and I'll often stop at her desk and strategize about work and life.

Sharon did a piece on how to land a job at a startup, and I wanted to expand the topic to, should you take a job at a startup, even if you can? So I huddled with CNBC producer Evan Falk, as I do every week to talk about Fortt Knox Live, and we decided to put a show together. Get Sharon, a couple of top-flight venture capital investors, and I wanted to get some students and recent graduates, too. I mean, they're the target audience for this stuff, right?

So that's what we did.

One more thing, and this is important: So we're about two years into Fortt Knox, and it's grown a lot – I want to thank you, the podcast listeners, and also the live show viewers on all our platforms including Facebook, Periscope, YouTube, and the CNBC apps on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. For the past two years, I've been basically working on two different shows: The Fortt Knox Podcast, here … and Fortt Knox Live, which streams on Wednesdays. The podcast is mostly one-on-one interviews, and the live show is mostly broader conversations tackling technology, society and culture.

My guests are two venture capitalists: Jeff Richards, managing partner at GGV Capital, and Graham Brown, partner at Lerer Hippeau. Three students: Ahmad Eshghyar, an MBA candidate at Yale; Roni Barak Ventura, a doctoral candidate at NYU; and Raymond Willey, an MBA candidate at Baruch College. And one CNBC colleague, Sharon Epperson.

85 - Roger Lynch, Pandora CEO and Sling TV co-founder: The Great Rebundling Jul 21, 2018

Pandora, the music streaming service, has a culture that's heavily musical. So as a new CEO of the company, it helps that Roger Lynch not only plays guitar, but he actually still plays live gigs with a band.

Lynch sat down with me above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, before the opening bell. He's been in the job for less than a year – and he's got his work cut out for him. Spotify just went public, and has grabbed a lot of attention. Meanwhile, many of the most powerful companies in tech are competing with him in the market, including a few little names like Apple, Amazon and Google. How does he plan to win?

Lynch started out a scientist, became and investment banker, and found his groove as an entrepreneur – he's the founding CEO of video streaming pioneer Sling TV.

84 - George Kurian, NetApp CEO: A Twin and a Team Builder Jul 14, 2018

George Kurian is the CEO of NetApp, a storage technology company whose stock market value is more than $20 billion. Normally I like to start off talking about what makes my guests unique. But in this case, George has a lot in common with another Silicon Valley tech executive named Kurian – his twin brother Thomas is president at Oracle.

George and I could spend a lot of time talking about how unlikely it is that anyone climbs to the top level of a multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley tech company, much less that two brothers would do it. We did talk about that a bit. But we also talked about strategy, and the challenges he's faced leading in a period of rapid change.

I sat down with George Kurian at the New York Stock Exchange, three years into his tenure as NetApp CEO.

83 - Ex-CEOs: Intel, Ford, Qualcomm, WPP – Revisiting Bosses Now Gone Jul 09, 2018

Nothing is forever. Especially when it comes to running a multi-billion-dollar public company. This week, in a Fortt Knox podcast special, we're going to do a little retrospective … interviews with CEOs who, for now at least, are no longer CEOs.

I've been doing this podcast for more than a year and a half, so I've sat down with dozens and dozens of top executives, founders and entrepreneurs. Inevitably, change happens. Sometimes the company's board of directors wants a new strategic direction. Sometimes power struggles erupt. Sometimes personal failings come to light.

This time, the lessons from the highest achievers come with an asterisk. Just because you reach the top of an organization doesn't mean you'll stay there. I would add another: Just because these execs are no longer in their old jobs, don't assume they're done. When Steve Jobs was shoved out of Apple in the '80s, he went on to found NeXT, build Pixar, and return to Apple. Mark Hurd was ushered out of HP and landed what turned out to be a better gig at Oracle.

We start with Brian Krzanich, who was CEO at Intel until three weeks ago. That's when Intel's board of directors learned he'd had a relationship with an Intel employee that violated company policy. I got to know Krzanich when he took over the CEO job from Paul Otellini. Brian likes to be called BK, and I quickly learned that he's most comfortable holding onto his identity as an engineer rather than thinking of himself as a corporate executive. The most memorable part of my conversation with him in January 2017: When he revealed a different kind of mistake earlier in his career that almost cost him his job at Intel.

Mark Fields is another executive who'd spent a long time at his company and climbed to the top before his exit. The bottom line on his departure: The stock wasn't doing well, and some within the company lost patience. Fields was in the CEO seat about three years, and my CNBC colleague Jim Cramer thinks he wasn't given enough time to really make his mark. When Mark and I talked in April of last year about his path to the top of Ford, he said he developed a reputation for volunteering to tackle big problems:

Speaking of boardroom drama, Qualcomm right now has one of the most dizzying situations in techland. The company's locked in a legal battle with Apple over patent payments, it just fended off a hostile takeover attempt from rival Broadcom with an assist from the U.S. federal government, and former CEO and chairman Paul Jacobs – the son of founder Irwin Jacobs – left the board and is trying to raise money to take the company private. Paul Jacobs sat down with me in June of last year and talked about his commitment to Qualcomm. If you think he might give up his fight where the company's concerned, just listen to this:

Sir Martin Sorrell built WPP by putting together various ad firms and PR businesses into an empire the likes of which the industry had never seen. He resigned from the company in April with allegations swirling about personal misconduct and misuse of company resources. He has denied those allegations, and is in the process of relaunching his career with a new venture called S4 Capital.

82 - Michael Reitblat, Forter CEO: Defending Against the New Digital Organized Crime Jul 02, 2018

Digital fraud is a big business. The same trends that are powering the cloud computing era – global brands, pay-per-use pricing, open-source collaboration – are making thieves rich, too.

Michael Reitblat is fighting that trend. As co-founder and CEO of Forter, he's trying to keep retailers from getting fooled by credit card scammers. It's a journey that began when he was a teenage hacker, through college and startup dreams, to working on his second startup.

At the Nasdaq Marketsite I talked to Reitblat about the state of organized crime online, and what innovators can do about it.

81 - Tobi Lütke, Shopify founder and CEO: Snowboards Don't Sell in Spring Jun 23, 2018

Tobi Lütke is the founder and CEO of Shopify, a public company worth $17 billion. The shopping landscape is changing fast, with new tax laws, same-day delivery, in-store pickup and mobile payments adding new twists and capabilities all the time. Lutke, and Shopify, provide technology tools to simplify all that for merchants.

I talked with Lütke recently at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square, as talk of tariffs and taxes are swirling. We talked about what's allowed Shopify's stock to double in a year, and how he went from a teenage German apprentice to a Canadian entrepreneur … who's now a billionaire on paper, by the way.

80 - Q-Tip, the Abstract: Championing Creativity in the Digital Age Jun 16, 2018

Q-Tip. The Abstract. He’s not going to say it about himself outside of the the playful banter of a rhyme, so I’ll say it: He’s one of the most recognizable voices and influential minds in the history of hip-hop music.

Q-Tip is probably best known as part of A Tribe Called Quest, a group that emerged in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Hits like “Can I Kick It?” “Scenario” and “Bonita Applebum” cemented Tribe’s place as innovators, both in their lyrical cadence and the way they used sampling and a broad mix of musical genres to make something new.

A Tribe Called Quest released its final album in November 2016. Member Phife Dog, Malik Taylor, passed away from diabetes complications earlier that year. I talked to Tip about his new music, his other creative efforts, mourning Phife, and the state of the music business.

79 - Scott Wagner, GoDaddy CEO: Big Plans for Small Businesses Jun 03, 2018

Few companies have gone through the kind of image transformation GoDaddy has over the past decade.

Back in 2005, GoDaddy launched its first commercial that used women in revealing outfits and sexually suggestive themes to sell web services. Wagner became GoDaddy's CEO at the beginning of this year, and those commercials are long gone.

Today's GoDaddy bears little resemblance to the one of a decade ago, which is probably a good thing given how cultural winds have shifted. I talked to Wagner about his journey to the CEO seat, and what he's working to do with the products and culture.

I got some time with Scott Wagner at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. We talked about leadership, culture, and what it will take for small businesses to thrive in this latest wave of the digital economy. We also streamed the conversation live on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the CNBC apps on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.

78 - Anthony Wood, Roku founder & CEO: Continual Reinvention May 26, 2018

Today it's a $4-billion publicly-traded company. It's synonymous with streaming video, going head-to-head with Apple, Amazon, Google and lately Netflix, in the cord-cutting era. But Roku's been around for more than 15 years. That means it's older than YouTube.

Anthony Wood, the founder and CEO, hasn't followed a straight line to get Roku where it is. He's gone through a few different business models. He got some help from Netflix. Now he's defying the odds and talking about Roku's latest strategic moves.

I met Anthony Wood at Roku's New York office in Midtown Manhattan. We talked about his journey as an entrepreneur – from selling used golf balls as a kid to his big move to Silicon Valley. He also gives his take on what's next in this golden age of TV.

77 - Kay Koplovitz, founder of USA Network: The Tools to Break Barriers May 19, 2018

A little more than 40 years ago, there was a live event that changed television forever. Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier. A boxing match: "The Thrilla in Manilla."

But the men in the ring weren't the only ones with big career stakes on the line. A 30-year-old entrepreneur named Kay Koplovitz had waited about a decade for this moment. She was the driving force behind making the fight the first live satellite broadcast. It changed the cable industry forever, and laid the groundwork for her to become the first woman to head a television network – one she launched two years later – USA Network.

Kay Koplovitz today is a venture capital investor, a board member, and an advocate for women in business. I got some time with her on a busy day at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to talk about her journey, and lessons for the rest of us who – maybe in our jobs, maybe with some new venture – are trying to do what's never been done.

76 - Bastian Lehmann, Postmates CEO: Forget About Plan A May 14, 2018

Sometimes Plan A doesn’t work out. You’ve got to be ready to improvise.

That’s one of the themes in Bastian Lehman’s story. He had a different career path in mind, but ended up settling for entrepreneurship. So far it’s going pretty well. He’s the cofounder and CEO of Postmates, a delivery startup that’s part of this race to remake the way we shop. He's raised about a quarter billion dollars.

Postmates was originally supposed to be doing furniture delivery. That didn’t work out for some interesting reasons. When I sat down with Bastian Lehmann at the New York Stock Exchange, I got a fresh appreciation for why the ability to make smart adjustments is often better than being able to divine the future.

75 - Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO: The Vision for Power in Cloud and AI May 07, 2018

I’ve never had a repeat guest on Fortt Knox in the year and a half I’ve been doing this. That’s not because there’s a rule against it, I just never had a compelling reason to.

That changes this week.

A few days ago I flew out to Seattle and then went up to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, and sat down with CEO Satya Nadella. Satya was my guest in October, when his book "Hit Refresh" came out. It was a big deal because Nadella has dramatically changed the perception and trajectory of one of the world's most iconic companies, and most people had no clue who he is. "Hit Refresh" was his big moment of public definition, both for his vision for Microsoft and for himself as a leader.

Satya wasn't new to me, though. We first met about seven years ago, before he was CEO, on one of his trips to Silicon Valley. I was CNBC's tech correspondent, he was in charge of Microsoft's Server and Tools division, which at the time most people outside of the tech industry thought was a boring backwater. The bright spotlight was on phones, PCs, Xbox, even search. Little did the masses know that the future was in cloud, and Satya Nadella's division would keep Microsoft relevant.

So – fast forward to today, May 2018. Microsoft has its Build developer conference in Seattle, and Satya took some time ahead of it to talk about his vision for the company's platforms; his chief rivals in the cloud, Amazon and Google; his views on data privacy after Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal; his view on U.S. trade tensions with China, and a lot more.

A quick correction – when I'm ribbing him in the beginning about his book tour, I say he was in Better Homes and Gardens. It was actually Good Housekeeping. Go figure.

74 - Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral founder and CEO: A Multi-Billion-Dollar Midlife Crisis Apr 28, 2018

Vlad Shmunis just wasn't an enthusiastic employee. Didn't like following directions. And he had ideas – lots of ideas. Eventually, something had to give. So the entrepreneurial engineer took a leap, even though family members said he was nuts.

How'd that work out? Well today, Vlad Shmunis is the founder and CEO of RingCentral, a Silicon Valley company at the intersection of communication and cloud. The company went public just under five years ago. Today it's worth more than $5 billion.

If you're a long-time Fortt Knox listener, you're going to sense a pattern. Vlad is the third CEO I've had on who grew up in the former Soviet Union and eventually found his way to the U.S. There was Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov, Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn, and now Vlad. Their stories are all pretty different in key details, but similar in some important core ways, when it comes to education, values and … please listen for this one … the family's approach to risk.

If you or someone you know is thinking about taking a leap to start your own thing, but you're not quite sure, listen to Vlad's story.

73 - Rafat Ali, Skift founder & CEO: A Long Journey to Paid Content and Beyond Apr 21, 2018

Rafat Ali has done something remarkable in an era where it's really tough to make money telling people the truth. He built and sold PaidContent, a site that covered the digital media revolution with trenchant foresight. And now he's built Skift, an information company focused on the travel and dining industries.

I sat down with Rafat Ali at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to get an insider's look at how you revolutionize a crumbling industry. Rafat's a guy whose career I've sort of passively followed as a journalist for a long time. When I was writing for a newspaper in Silicon Valley 18 years ago, I saw him toughing it out on the opposite coast. As he's jumped into entrepreneurial ventures, I leaped from newspapers, to magazines, to broadcast, while crafting my own digital projects. Like Fortt Knox.

Anyway, part of the brilliance of Rafat Ali is his ability to draw lessons from one industry that are prophetic in another. So even if you're not into media or travel, there's something in here for you.

72 - Rob Solomon, GoFundMe CEO: This Leader Bet the Farm on Generosity Apr 14, 2018

GoFundMe is a generosity powerhouse – it's helped people raise a total of more than 5 billion dollars for all kinds of causes and pet projects. Rob Solomon is its CEO. Late last year, Solomon made a bold move – GoFundMe no longer takes an automatic cut of the money people raise. Now GoFundMe itself runs purely on donations.

Solomon didn't think he wanted to be the CEO of GoFundMe when he first got the offer – he saw people using it to raise money for cat toys – but he soon changed his tune. I talked to him about the future of using tech to do good, the primacy of trust in today's landscape, and his advice for Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who's facing his own trust crisis.

71 - Tim Ryan, PwC U.S. Chairman: Tech is Reshaping the Dynamics of Global Business Mar 30, 2018

Tim Ryan grew up in a working-class family in Boston, where his early jobs included a paper route and a job at a grocery. He’s now the U.S. chairman of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the global accounting firm known as one of the big 4 auditors. In 2016 it was ranked as the fifth largest private employer in America.

Whether it’s the changing political landscape, the headaches companies face over protecting data, or getting the right envelopes at the Oscars, PwC handles issues large and small – and a lot of it crosses Ryan’s desk.

I sat down with Tim Ryan at PwC’s office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan to talk about the challenges facing global business, and his own rise from blue-collar roots to the top level of a company that touches many of the world’s most powerful companies.

70 - Tony Xu, DoorDash CEO: It's About Data, Not Just Food or Delivery Mar 24, 2018

This week on the podcast? DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu. He just raised more than half a billion dollars to build out his business.

There’s this idea out there that today’s consumers are lazy, and that’s why we're getting stuff delivered all the time. The thing is, I don’t know about you – but the reason why I’m ordering so much delivery is because I’m so busy.

That’s where DoorDash comes in. The company was cooked up by four students at Stanford four and a half years ago. One of the four, Tony Xu, is the company's 33-year-old CEO.

Xu was in New York recently after raising a monster round of funding – $535 million. I sat down with him at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square to find out what he's really building, and why he thinks he can beat Grubhub, Amazon, Google, and a lot more rivals lining up to take him on.

69 - Danny Govberg, Watchbox CEO: Tech Didn't Kill the Luxury Watch Business After All Mar 17, 2018

Everybody loves a David and Goliath story. The problem is, in business these days, the David is usually a family business, and the Goliath is some technology-juicing giant. Goliath is usually winning.

So here's a story that returns to classic form: Danny Govberg is the CEO of Govberg Jewelers in Philadelphia – and he's also the CEO of Watchbox, an app and website that's shaking up the world of luxury watches. By Govberg's count, he's selling at a rate of $200 million worth of watches this year between the two businesses, much of it in brands like Rolex, Patek Phillipe and Omega – brands that run in the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars per watch. And he says he's growing more than 30% a year.

All of this is happening while the popular narrative is stacked against him. Supposedly hardly anyone wears watches anymore, and for those that do, the Apple Watch and Samsung Watch are running roughshod over the market. Well? That's not the whole story.

I met Danny Govberg at the Breitling Boutique on Madison Avenue in Manhattan – you'll hear the sounds of the store and some construction next door. We talked about how the business evolved from his immigrant grandfather's beginnings as a watchmaker, and why technology is growing his old family business while it's killing others.

68 - Abe Ankumah, Nyansa cofounder & CEO: Building on a Legacy of Entrepreneurship Mar 10, 2018

Abe Ankumah had never touched a computer before he arrived at Caltech in 1997, but quickly became captivated and decided to major in computer science. Now he’s the cofounder and CEO of Nyansa, a Silicon Valley startup that monitors the health of wireless networks.

An immigrant from Ghana, raised by hopeful entrepreneurs, he has the kind of story that has fueled Silicon Valley for decades.

I met Abe at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square and talked to him about his journey, and the experiences that paved the way for what he's working on now.

67 - Oren Jacob, PullString cofounder & CEO: Teaching Alexa to Be a Better Conversationalist Mar 03, 2018

Oren Jacob saw Star Wars as a kid, and fell in love with the idea of bringing together technology and storytelling to create something entirely new.

Today, he’s the cofounder and CEO of PullString, a tech startup that teaches software how to have conversation. That could mean helping companies build an Alexa skill for Amazon’s Echo, or allowing Hello Barbie to talk.

I caught up with Oren at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, where he spoke to leaders in the tech world about laying the groundwork for the future of voice interaction with computers.

He told me how his early fascination with Star Wars led him to an internship and first career at Pixar – before he decided to start his own thing.

66 - Matt Meeker, Bark co-founder: Super-Serving the Pet Economy Feb 24, 2018

Boutique treats and toys for dogs, it turns out, are a big business. Bark was co-founded by Matt Meeker, who's now its CEO. It's the seller of the subscription BarkBox. And it expects to do a quarter billion dollars in sales in 2018.

Americans spend about $70 billion a year on their pets; that’s part of the reason why General Mills just announced that it plans to pay $8 billion for pet food maker Blue Buffalo. And it’s part of the reason why I went to see Matt Meeker at Bark’s headquarters in New York City’s Chinatown, and learn how he saw this pet-pampering mega-trend coming six years ago.

When you’re pursuing a big idea, it’s important to keep refining it, and questioning your assumptions. That’s one of the things I took away from Matt’s story.

65 - Rob Bernshteyn, Coupa CEO: Saving Your Way to Success Feb 17, 2018

Frugality is baked into Rob Bernshteyn’s life experience. His family immigrated from Russia when he was a kid, and he used savings from a paper route to start a baseball card business … which helped pay for his college education. In his mid-30s, after an executive role at SuccessFactors, a tech company that went public, Rob’s entrepreneurial itch became overwhelming, and he used his modest IPO windfall to launch Coupa.

Coupa’s mission? What else — help businesses save money through smart software.

Rob and I met at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to talk about how far Coupa’s come — it’s now a public company worth $2 billion — and how he got there.

64 - Ron Shaich, Panera founder: Raise the Minimum Wage, Build for the Long Term, and Other Heresies Feb 10, 2018

Who doesn't like to eat? Maybe my seven-year-old … he'd rather talk at the table … but the rest of us, when we're hungry, want something right now, and something that's not going to induce a lot of guilt.

That, in a nutshell, is what has given birth to the fast casual movement over the past 20-plus years, and this week, I want you to join me for my conversation with the father of fast casual, Ron Shaich. Before there was Chipotle or Dig Inn, there was Panera Bread. Founded in Missouri in 1987, it now boasts more than two thousand locations. But Shaich, one of the founders, was selling cookies when he first got into the restaurant business. And he's got some insights to share about the journey.

I got some time with Ron Shaich to talk technology, and quality, and wages, and more. We had half of this conversation on Fortt Knox Live, which you can catch Wednesdays at 2 pm, and see by the way on YouTube, and the CNBC app on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. Also, Ron and I kept the conversation going exclusively for this podcast, so there are parts that are new here, even if you watched live.

63 - Kaz Hirai, Sony CEO: Leading a Japanese Company With Global Challenges Feb 03, 2018

Kaz Hirai has been the CEO of Sony for six years, and the company just announced that he'll be stepping aside and taking the title of Chairman in April.

That means he's been the CEO at Sony for much of time that I've been at CNBC. And in that span I've sat down with him most every year at the Consumer Electronics Show, a sprawling event in Las Vegas where the world's gadget giants gather every year.

Funny thing about Hirai – he stepped in to take the reins at Sony at a moment when the sky was falling in on the company. Apple's iPod and iTunes had snatched the digital music mantle away from the Japanese giant, and Samsung had seized Sony’s crown in TVs. Hirai leaves the CEO seat with the company pretty clearly better off than when he started.

I sat down as usual with Hirai at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, but this time, for both CNBC live and for the Fortt Knox podcast. We discussed Sony's latest products in phones, TV, and the return of that robot dog, Aibo – but I also talked to him about the multicultural life experience that prepared him to be CEO in this turbulent era.

62 - Adena Friedman, Nasdaq CEO: Build A Career With Smart Adjustments Jan 27, 2018

You don’t have to be playing the markets every day to know that stocks have been doing very well lately – and not just lately, for about nine years now.

That means you might be hearing a bit more about stock exchanges. Which brings us to my next guest. Adena Friedman is the first woman to lead a global stock exchange. She’s the CEO of Nasdaq, a job she’s held for a year.

To get there, she’s had to chart a path where there was none. For example, it meant choosing what was right for her family over what seemed like the more obvious career decision – and making it all work anyway.

I sat down with Adena Friedman – where else? At the Nasdaq, in New York’s Times Square. We talked about the roads not taken, and the new landscape for female entrepreneurs.

61 - Al Kelly, Visa CEO: Career Shifts, Bitcoin, and the Future of Money Jan 20, 2018

Imagine you've worked 23 years at a company, up to the top. You're being groomed to be the next CEO. And then the current CEO tells you – actually, he's not leaving anytime soon.

That's the position Al Kelly was in nine years ago at American Express. What happened next is a textbook case in how to handle career curveballs. Today Kelly is the CEO of Visa, and has great things to say about Ken Chenault, who’s retiring as CEO of American Express. Kelly also has great insight into what's happening in the world of money, from Bitcoin to Apple Pay.

I sat down with Kelly recently at the National Retail Federation conference in New York. Visa is a big company, worth more than a quarter trillion dollars, and its technology touches a staggering number of the payment transactions happening around the world. We talk about that – plus his career, which has taken him around some interesting corners.

60 - Daymond John, investor & entrepreneur: From FUBU to Shark Tank Jan 13, 2018

Daymond John grew up in Queens, New York. He wasn’t the best student – he would later be diagnosed with dyslexia – but he did have an eye for fashion and a talent for connecting with people.

Today, you’ll know him as one of the sharks on Shark Tank – a popular show on ABC and CNBC where entrepreneurs pitch their companies to a superstar panel of investors. That show is in its ninth season. Contestants want not just his money, but perhaps more important, Daymond John’s advice and unique connections.

Daymond John is also out with a new book this month, Rise and Grind, analyzing the key habits of successful people. He sat down with me to tell how he rose from sewing clothes in his mother’s house, to becoming an investor and TV star, and what he’s learning now.

59 - Carter Reum, co-founder, VEEV Spirits: Family and Business Sometimes Mix Nicely Jan 07, 2018

Whether it’s sports, college, or work at Goldman Sachs, Carter Reum and his brother Courtney have always had a tendency to do things together.

But it’s still pretty surprising that the two Midwestern guys managed to start a company together selling specialty alcohol … make millions of dollars … and now coach and invest in other entrepreneurs.

They’ve written a book about it – together, of course. Shortcut Your Startup is available January 16, and tries to turn conventional business advice on its head.

The Reum brothers don’t have a rags-to-riches story – they grew up outside of Chicago with a dad who was CEO of a manufacturing company and a Mom who had an MBA from Columbia. It is a story of teamwork, invention, and the guts to abandon what’s comfortable – budding careers in finance at Goldman Sachs – to pursue something potentially great. And I think that makes it a perfect story for the start of a new year.

58 - Shan Sinha, Highfive CEO: An Entrepreneur's Winding Path to Success Dec 23, 2017

Success doesn’t usually come along a simple path, and that was definitely true for Shan Sinha. He was raised by a single mom in Texas, fell in love with technology, went to M.I.T., dropped out to do a startup, and …

Failed.

He went back to M.I.T. But of course that’s not the end of the story, or he wouldn’t be on this podcast. He got a job at Microsoft, left to start another company, and this time struck gold – by eventually selling that company to Google in 2010. Now he’s the founder and CEO of yet another business – Highfive, a video conferencing outfit that’s breaking new ground.

I don’t like straight lines. My career hasn’t traveled in one, and chances are, yours hasn’t either. So I love when I get to explore the stories of people who started out at a disadvantage. Or struck out a few times before hitting that home run. That, I can learn from.

57 - Tien Tzuo, Zuora CEO: Inventing an Engine for the Subscription Economy Dec 17, 2017

We used to buy things. Remember that? Hard drives, hit singles, our favorite movies. But for now at least, the hot trend is subscriptions.

Instead of buying hard drives, we subscribe to cloud storage from Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Dropbox. For music there’s Spotify. For movies there’s Netflix. And it seems a new subscription service is born every minute.

They say that during a gold rush, the surest way to strike it rich is to sell picks and shovels. That’s what Tien Tzuo is doing in this new subscription economy. His company, Zuora, is the engine that powers the subscription process for companies like Box, SurveyMonkey and TripAdvisor.

I talked to Tien Tzuo about how he founded Zuora, and grew it into a company that’s raised nearly a quarter of a billion dollars and is pushing for more growth. He’s got some unique ideas about managing people, and stepping out on your own.

56 - Justin Dent, GenFKD co-founder: Can We Save Young America from Financial Ruin? Dec 09, 2017

Justin Dent is the co-founder and executive director of GenFKD, a non-profit dedicated to getting Millennials smarter about their finances before it’s too late. He’s a Millennial himself – he graduated from the University of Maryland just a couple of years ago.

Dent didn’t come from money, and neither did I – we’re both African Americans, though from different generations, who grew up on the East Coast and had to fight the odds to get into a better financial position.

With the tax changes that are wending their way through Congress and the questions about who they’ll help or hurt, it’s worth having a bit of an American family meeting, and thinking about just how we got into this sorry state, and how we get out. Dent is taking a bold step at a young age, toward doing exactly that.

55 - Andy Jassy, Amazon Web Services CEO: The Father of the Cloud Dec 02, 2017

About 13 years ago, Andy Jassy had a big, big idea. What if you could rent computing power and storage over the Internet instead of having to buy a whole bunch of computing equipment?

Jassy worked for Amazon.com at the time, as the technical assistant to one Jeff Bezos – the founder and CEO of Amazon. He told Jeff about the idea. They decided to do it. And now, more than a decade later, Andy Jassy has not only built a business that brings in 16 billion dollars a year. He and his team also essentially invented the business of cloud computing, and upended the tech world in the process.

I flew out to Las Vegas this week to have a chat with Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services. The company was having its annual re:Invent conference, where software programmers from around the world gather to hear the latest cloud tools Amazon is looking to put in their hands.

I wanted to hear from him about how he got started at Amazon; how he worked with his boss, Jeff Bezos, to launch a business that has turned out to be Amazon's biggest profit-maker; what his strategy is now, and just how massive he thinks it all can get.

54 - Earl "Butch" Graves, Jr., Black Enterprise CEO: An American Brand In A New Generation Nov 25, 2017

Growing up in the black community in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there were a few things you'd take for granted: We learned Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing, also known as the Negro National Anthem, in school. We learned there was practically nothing George Washington Carver couldn’t do with a soybean. And a middle class black family was likely to have at least four magazines in the house: Ebony and Jet, of course. And if they were a little fancy, Essence and Black Enterprise. These days, magazines aren’t what they used to be. Like many digital publishers, Black Enterprise is undergoing a reinvention, becoming less a publication and more a live events business. Back in October I interviewed Intel's CEO at a Black Enterprise tech event outside San Francisco – an event that showcased the brand's push to evolve beyond the printed page. Earl Graves, Jr. -- he's known as "Butch" -- is the son of the founder of Black Enterprise. Now he's the CEO. I sat down with him to talk about how the brand was born, how it's trying to evolve in a digital world, and what the future looks like for minority entrepreneurs.

53 - Katrina Lake, Stitch Fix founder & CEO: Giving Shopping, and Leadership, a Makeover Nov 18, 2017

Katrina Lake is the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix. And as of today, at 34 years old, she is probably the youngest woman to take her company public – ever.

Stitch Fix is a San Francisco company that combines data-crunching computers with human stylists on a mission to send you the perfect outfit. On Friday the company went public on the Nasdaq stock market at a market value of more than $1 billion, and I was there for CNBC, covering the remarkable story.

Katrina Lake sat down with me at the Nasdaq in Times Square minutes after shares of Stitch Fix started trading for the first time – you can hear the buzz of Stitch Fix employees and customers in the background as we talk.

The first part of our conversation was live on CNBC's Squawk Alley, which I co-anchor weekdays on the network. She took some time after that portion to talk more about how she developed the idea for the company, why she still works as a stylist on the platform, and why the story of how she overcame sexual harassment from an investor is especially resonant today.

52 - David Morken, Bandwidth CEO: From Marine to Tech IPO Founder Nov 11, 2017

Hot technology companies tend to be based in Silicon Valley. They tend to be founded by eager undergrads or Harvard or Stanford business school alums. And these days, their leadership tends to lean strongly to the left politically.

Bandwidth is different.

Bandwidth is a business communication software company based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Co-founder and CEO David Morken served in the Marine Corps and went to law school. And he doesn't hide his Christian faith – while he says he also encourages his employees who have different belief systems to be authentic at work, too.

Bandwidth had its IPO on the Nasdaq on November 10, the day before Veterans Day and birthday of the Marine Corps. Morken timed it intentionally. The company is worth more than 300 million dollars, and Morken is determined to keep it independent and based in North Carolina. We talked about how the Marines prepared him to be an entrepreneur, why he believes student debt is a drag on the country's future, and how he handles today's divisive culture wars.

51 - Aaron Levie, Box CEO: A College Dropout Builds a Billion-Dollar Cloud Nov 05, 2017

It’s a familiar story in tech history: college friends stumble onto a big idea, drop out to pursue it, build a company, make mistakes, and eventually take that company public and make millions of dollars. That’s Apple, that’s Microsoft, that’s Facebook – and that’s Box.

Aaron Levie is the cofounder and CEO of Box, a company founded at the dawning of the cloud era. The basic idea: Wouldn’t it be great if we could store all kinds of digital files on the internet and teams could work on them at the same time, instead of emailing them around?

The answer is yes. That would be great. And Levie and his friends built a company now worth nearly $3 billion proving it.

The cloud thing seems obvious now, but when Levie was 20 years old and co-founded Box 12 years ago, it was far from it. I started covering him and the company in the early years of that journey, and I sat down with him days ago at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to catch up. At the wizened old age of 32, Aaron’s got a fresh take on advice he should have heeded, and where Silicon Valley needs to go next.

50 - Troy Carter, Atom Factory founder and Spotify exec: The Man Who Helped Shape Gaga, Trainor, Legend Oct 28, 2017

When he was 14 years old growing up in West Philadelphia, Troy Carter started promoting parties at a neighbor's house and charging for entry. He did the DJing himself to save money.

Today he's one of the most respected visionaries at the intersection of two industries: Music and tech.

Carter wears a lot of hats. He's been a manager, working with the likes of John Legend, Lady Gaga and Meghan Trainor. He's an investor, a general partner at venture capital firm Cross Culture Ventures. And he's a connector. As global head of creator services at Spotify, he's ushering artists into the streaming age.

I met up with Troy Carter recently outside of San Francisco at the Black Enterprise Tech ConneXt Summit. We talked about his path from rags, to riches, to rags, and back again – and how a high school dropout learned to reinvent himself, and an industry.

49 - Rachel Carlson, Guild Education CEO: A Startup Betting on Human Intelligence Oct 21, 2017

In case you haven't noticed, there are some big challenges facing the American worker. Unless you're in the top 20 percent salary-wise, if you've kept the same job, chances are you haven't gotten a big raise in the last decade or two.

The answer? There are arguments about whether a higher minimum wage would be a good fix, or a dramatic shift in tax policy. Rachel Carlson has a different idea.

Carlson is the co-founder and CEO of Guild Education, a startup that helps companies like Taco Bell to offer college tuition assistance as a benefit to their employees. Carlson has a unique blend of experiences – working in government, starting companies in Silicon Valley, and going to school on the other side of the tracks as a kid – that give her an intriguing perspective.

I sat down with Rachel Carlson to learn what's so hard about getting America's working class salaries rising again – and why the answers might be different than you think.

48 - Chamath Palihapitiya, Social Capital CEO: The Beauty of a Calculated Risk Oct 14, 2017

Chamath Palihapitiya is one of the most sought-after investors in Silicon Valley. It's because he has a knack for figuring out how things work. At Facebook, he led the team that studied our online behavior and figured out how to grow that service from 50 million users when he joined in 2007, to 700 million users when he left four years later.

Now as the CEO of venture investing firm Social Capital, he's working on something different: cracking the code to understand how tech is changing our world – and maybe make a few billion dollars in the process. It's quite a journey for Palihapitiya. He grew up poor, an immigrant from Sri Lanka, with a knack for numbers, a talent for gambling, and the proverbial deck stacked against him.

I visited Chamath at Social Capital's offices in Palo Alto, California to get an up-close look at how he thinks. One of his deepest insights? Getting the right answer is overrated. Real growth happens from examining our wrong answers.

47 - Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Publishing founder: Tech's Explainer-In-Chief Tackles the Future Oct 07, 2017

Tim O'Reilly had never come in contact with a computer until after college, when a friend asked him to help write a technical manual.

It's quite a turn, then, that he has become a promethean figure in Silicon Valley. Like the mythical titan who stole fire from the gods and brought it to mankind, O'Reilly's publishing empire, his conferences and learning platforms have demystified computer languages and tectonic shifts.

He literally wrote the book on the Internet, the Internet User's Guide & Catalog, the first popular tome about the subject. He and his events birthed terms like "open source" and "web 2.0," which have become enduring parts of the tech lexicon. His MAKE magazine arguably launched the broader maker movement of hands-on crafters and tinkerers.

So naturally I wanted to sit down with Tim to talk about his new book, WTF: What's the Future, and Why It's Up to Us. In it, he has strong words for the Internet-driven tech industry he helped to shape, and some insight for workers like us trying to navigate the new digital landscape.

46 - Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO: Hit Refresh with the Power of Empathy Sep 30, 2017

Satya Nadella is the third CEO of Microsoft. He's also a husband and a father of special-needs kids. He's an immigrant.

And he's pretty close to doing something that, until he took the job just over three and a half years ago, most people in tech – heck, most people at Microsoft – thought was impossible.

That near-impossible task is a cultural revival of a once-dominant tech giant that was losing its grip on its soul. Under Nadella's leadership morale is up, and so is product quality and the stock price. The question is whether all of that can stick.

Satya sat down with me at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square in New York, where he stopped through to promote his new book, Hit Refresh, about the revival he's attempting at Microsoft. The conversation for my Fortt Knox podcast offers a fresh look at one of the most influential technology leaders in the world today, who's engineering a cultural rebirth that few thought possible – while also being a dad who faces some unique challenges helping his kids reach their full potential.

45 - Louis Hernandez, Jr., Avid CEO: The Storyteller's Dilemma Sep 23, 2017

Louis Hernandez Jr. is the CEO of Avid Technology, a company that makes tools for editing video and audio, and writing music.

Avid is facing hard times as rival Adobe grows stronger with Premiere and other creative suite tools, and as more software moves to the cloud.

Hernandez is unique for a lot of reasons. One of them is that he's the Latino CEO of a publicly traded technology company. He recently wrote a book, The Storyteller's Dilemma, about the way technology is changing the media market.

Louis talked to me about his path to the C -suite, his vision for the future of storytelling, and the factors that made his story so different from many of his cousins in the LA area where he grew up.

44 - Rachel Drori, Daily Harvest founder & CEO: Never An Easy Time to Do A Hard Thing Sep 16, 2017

Rachel Drori comes from from a long line of entrepreneurs – her immigrant grandparents started a business when they got to the United States. Even more unique: Her mother started a business too, so she grew up around women founders. Today she's the founder and CEO of Daily Harvest, a young startup that sits at the intersection of nutrition and convenience. You think starting a business is hard? Well, it is. But Rachel started Daily Harvest when she was seven months pregnant, then raised investment funds for the business when she was pregnant. Her story is instructive for anyone who has wondered whether now is the right time to take a big career leap.

43 - Njavwa Mutambo, Musanga Logistics CEO: Orphan to Entrepreneur Sep 10, 2017

Njavwa Mutambo is the CEO of Musanga Logistics, a delivery company in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia. Technology has the potential to transform economies in Africa, empower small businesses, lower costs – but before any of that can happen, there are some basic challenges. One of those is the cost of delivery. That's where Njavwa, and Musanga Logistics come in. He's using bicycle couriers and people who own trucks and need side-work, Uber-style – to connect people in Zambia like it's never been done before. I invited Njavwa to CNBC's bureau at One Market Street in San Francisco. He described his vision for bringing more sophisticated e-commerce to the African continent, his path from impoverished orphan to tech entrepreneur, and what he learned from seeing Silicon Valley – and America – up close for the first time.

42 - Ben Chestnut, MailChimp co-founder: A Layoff Pushed Him to Success Sep 02, 2017

Seventeen years ago, life gave Ben Chestnut the push to start the company that became MailChimp. He was in web design. He got laid off. His employer offered him another job, but he knew: this was his chance to build his own thing. Today if you run a small business or you're into marketing, you've probably heard of MailChimp. For everyone else, it's the way a lot of people reach their customers' email inboxes. Newsletters, offers for special sales, you name it – MailChimp is in the tricky game of helping companies reach the people who actually want to be reached. Today, Ben Chestnut's team has more than 14 million users, and had more than $400 million in sales last year. Ben himself? An introvert. A soft-spoken guy who has perfected the art of capitalizing on the wrong answer and getting to the right one.

41 - Reid Hoffman, investor & entrepreneur: How a Master of Scale Climbed to the Top Aug 26, 2017

There is no one in Silicon Valley who's more connected than Reid Hoffman. That might be because he plays all of the connector roles, sometimes at once. He's a venture capitalist, at Greylock. He's an entrepreneur who co-founded LinkedIn, and sold it for 26 billion dollars last year. Reid's net worth is estimated to be north of 3 billion dollars. Now he has a seat on the board of directors at Microsoft. After teaching a class at Stanford, Reid started a podcast, Masters of Scale, that's about the art and craft of building monster businesses. Reid is deeply qualified on that subject. He was a founding board member at PayPal, and early on became its chief operating officer. That also makes him part of an eclectic group of characters known as the "PayPal Mafia" former PayPal employees who went on to dizzying success. Members include Elon Musk, YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, investor Peter Theil, and entrepreneur Max Levchin, to name a few. I spent some time with Reid Hoffman last week when I flew out to San Francisco to moderate a debate. It wasn't politics: Reid was debating his friend Tim O'Reilly on the merits of spending gobs of investor money to build startups into dominant forces. You can watch the debate on Twitter. Look up my @jonfortt. Or head over to YouTube and watch at the Fortt Knox channel. After the debate, Reid sat down with me on the 17th floor of LinkedIn headquarters to talk about how he scaled from a pre-teen who was ambivalent about school into one of tech's most prolific builders.

40 - Julie Sweet, Accenture CEO of North America: The Beauty of Reinvention Aug 12, 2017

This is a conversation about reinvention. Not just once, but over and over. Julie Sweet leads the North American business at Accenture, a global consulting giant that employs more than 400,000 people and produced more than $32 billion in sales last year. Julie's territory made up almost exactly half of that total. I'm not really sure how most people become consultants. Ideally they get good at something, then show other people how to do it better. Julie's path was different. She was a lawyer – a partner at one of those swanky firms: Cravath, Swaine & Moore – and left that to be the top lawyer at Accenture, which you might also know by its old name, Arthur Andersen Consulting. She parlayed that job … into a bigger job. And that's the key detail here. Julie has a history of doing that sort of thing, and I wanted to find out how. I sat down with Julie Sweet just this week at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to talk about her path to the C-suite of one of the world's top consulting firms, and how her father, who painted cars for a living, set the no-excuses example that helped her get there.

39 - Tristan Walker, Walker & Company Brands founder & CEO: A Black Entrepreneur in Silicon Valley Aug 06, 2017

Tristan Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker and Company Brands. He's 33 years old. In this episode I somewhat jokingly say that growing up, he was an odd kid, because of the surface contradictions. He's a business mind who made a name for himself when he joined a mobile technology startup, but his first company focuses on skin and hair care. He grew up in a working-class family in New York, and his father was killed when he was young – but he went to a boarding school. His most prominent investors? Andreessen Horowitz, the marquee Silicon Valley venture capital firm – but he and I speak plainly about Silicon Valley's diversity challenges. I recently visited Tristan Walker at the offices of Walker & Company Brands in Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. This episode was special for me, because, let's be frank: There aren't many African-American technology journalists in this business. I'm one. There aren't many African-American entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, and Tristan is arguably the best-known. I'm seven years older than Tristan, but we're of a similar generation. We've been a part of this era of sweeping change, and seen what's missing ... and who's missing.

38 - Jason Calacanis, investor: The Brooklyn Kid Turned Angel Jul 30, 2017

Brooklyn in the 70s and 80s. Today, he says, his net worth is somewhere north of 100 million dollars. That's not because he's an entrepreneur, though he has started a handful of companies. Jason got rich as an entrepreneur. But he got really, really rich by investing in the crazy ideas … of other entrepreneurs. He just wrote a book: Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups. He says he can tell you how he did it, and give you pointers so that – maybe you can do it, too. In the tech world, we call these people "angel investors." They're usually the first money into a startup, giving six figures or less – just enough to keep an idea going while the founder figures out whether it's big enough to attract millions from venture capitalists. The downside of being an angel investor: It's really risky. You're probably going to lose the money you put into 90% of startups. The upside: If you get a couple of winners, they can be huge wins. And get this: because of the way regulations are changing, you can now become an angel investor, from the comfort of your computer. You can pool your money with other angels.

37 - Brad Smith, Microsoft president: If You Change the World, You Change the Law Jul 24, 2017

Brad Smith has been at Microsoft for nearly 25 years, and has been the top lawyer there for 15. He now holds the title of president, also running corporate affairs and working alongside CEO Satya Nadella. Brad led Microsoft's legal defense against David Boies and the U.S. government a generation ago. You might have heard of that infamous antitrust case against Microsoft. Today he's fighting for Microsoft's right to shield certain customer data in the cloud. Brad and I did a panel together at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado recently about the global threat from hackers. After that we sat down and pushed record, and had a conversation for Fortt Knox. Three things you're going to hear from Brad Smith: How his upbringing shaped his view of the world, how as a young lawyer he used technology to advance his career, and how to learn from massive upheaval – like the government's antitrust case against Microsoft 20 years ago – which I think it's fair to say changed Microsoft, the tech industry, and Brad Smith's career, forever. That's where the title of this episode comes from: If you change the world, you change the law. Two decades later, Brad has a take on the Microsoft case that I just find profound: And perhaps a near-prophetic warning to today's other world-changers, including Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google – and advice you and I can apply, too.

36 - Anil Chakravarthy & Bruce Chizen, Informatica: Even CEOs Need Mentors Jul 17, 2017

Think of this as getting to audit a little bit of a leadership master class. Bruce Chizen has the kind of unique executive experience that would fill a book of business school case studies. As the CEO of Adobe – the company that makes Photoshop, Premiere and more – Bruce mentored his replacement, Shantanu Narayen – and he often sat across the bargaining table from Apple CEO Steve Jobs. That's when I met him, as a young reporter in Silicon Valley, nearly 20 years ago now. Today, Bruce sits on many boards of directors, most notably the board of Oracle – run by the one and only Larry Ellison. At the same time, Bruce is executive chairman at Informatica. Informatica works with businesses to manage the trove of data they store in the cloud. There, he's working with new CEO Anil Chakravarthy on navigating a tricky job. Not only does Anil have to inspire the rank and file, he's got to develop his lieutenants and manage a board of directors stacked with impatient private equity investors.

35 - Danielle Weisberg & Carly Zakin, The Skimm cofounders: Millennial Mavericks Jul 10, 2017

This week on the podcast: Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, co-founders and co-CEOs of the Skimm. Their core product? The Daily Skimm, a newsletter targeting millennial women that keeps you up to date on what's happening in the world. They didn't invent the daily newsletter by a long shot, but Weisberg and Zakin are working the kind of magic with it that should make every media executive in the world sit up and take notice. Here's a little context: The New York Times announced recently that it has 13 million subscriptions to its 50 newsletters. Weisberg and Zakin have 5 million subscribers who open their one newsletter multiple times per week. I caught up with Carly and Danielle at The Skimm's headquarters on 23rd Street in Manhattan, to talk about their journey as business partners and friends, the roots of their entrepreneurial drive, and today's unique challenges for women in the startup game.

34 - Mike Tuchen, Talend CEO: A Teen Adrift Becomes A CEO Jul 02, 2017

Mike Tuchen is the CEO of Talend, a company with a billion-dollar market value. It helps customers take advantage of their data and apply it effectively. But before kicking off a career that's included an executive stint at Microsoft and a turn as CEO of Rapid7, he was nearly kicked out of boarding school and had to figure out how to make a contribution as the runt of his Brown University rowing team. Tuchen joined the Fortt Knox podcast to share a story that's not your typical wunderkind-makes-good tale. His story shows that when the pressure is on, believing in your unique talent can be the key to tilting the odds in your favor.

33 - Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm chairman: Building a Powerhouse for the Smartphone Era Jun 25, 2017

It's been about 10 years since the debut of the modern smartphone, when Apple's iPhone first went on sale. One of the companies that has most defined this decade? Qualcomm. Leading the charge at Qualcomm for most of that time has been executive chairman Paul Jacobs. His father Irwin co-founded the company, and Paul helped build it into a power broker in mobile computing. Qualcomm designs the chips that serve as the brains for most premium Android phones, and its patented technology is in pretty much every smartphone on the market. That has earned the company a stock market value that's now over $160 billion. I sat down with Paul Jacobs at CNBC headquarters for a conversation about some of his defining moments, and what's next.

32 - Uber's Wake-Up Call for Leaders: Deirdre Bosa, Mike Isaac, Vivek Wadhwa Jun 18, 2017

It's a story of ambition, innovation, management gone wrong: Uber. It's been a ride-hailing game changer, but also a cautionary tale, so this week on Fortt Knox Live, I brought together an expert panel to discuss the latest news and what it means for Silicon Valley. Mike Issac of the New York Times, Vivek Wadhwa of Carnegie Mellon, and my colleague Deirdre Bosa of CNBC joined me in San Francisco this week to break down the big changes coming for Uber's management, and what the rest of us can learn. Here's our conversation:

31 - Steve Ballmer, L.A. Clippers owner: Living Large After Microsoft Jun 10, 2017

There's a story about former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer throwing a chair across his office and hitting a table with it. This story has become a piece of Silicon Valley lore. Now, Microsoft is not in Silicon Valley. It's in Washington State, near Seattle. But the story is a piece of Silicon Valley lore because of the reason Steve Ballmer allegedly threw the infamous chair. He wasn't aiming at a person. He didn't hate his table. He was fired up, because one of his engineers was leaving to take a job at Google. Google! And Google IS in Silicon Valley. The guy is passionate. One project he's spending time on in retirement: USAFacts. It's a trove of information about where our federal tax dollars really go – you can find it at USAFacts.org, and play with the numbers yourself. Ballmer started digging after his wife asked him to get more involved in the family foundation's charitable work. Ballmer is passionate about making sure kids have the opportunity to do better than their parents did financially. I asked him if that passion is what motivated him to do a massive data project.

30 - Tom Siebel, CEO of C3 IoT: Billionaire vs. Elephant Jun 03, 2017

To say Tom Siebel has had an interesting life would be putting it mildly. He’s a billionaire, a tech visionary, and the survivor of an elephant goring eight years ago that, by the odds, should have killed him. Several doctors told Siebel he would never walk again, much less sail competitively. But he does. So what do you learn about life when you’ve stared down death in the form of a five-ton elephant, been crushed by that elephant, and lived to tell the tale? What do you learn when you’ve invented one of the first killer workplace apps of the PC era, then sold it for about $6 billion dollars? After you’ve made all that, survived all that, why, at 64 years old, are you still inventing? Tom Siebel, now the CEO of C3 IoT, sat down with me for the at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to share some insight into what’s made him tick – and what’s helped him succeed.

29 - Nicole Eagan, Darktrace CEO: Riding Out the Boom/Bust Cycles May 29, 2017

Today she sits at the helm of a promising cybersecurity company. But first Nicole Eagan had to survive the dotcom bust. Eagan is CEO of Darktrace, a startup that battles hackers using software that gets smarter over time. Invented by mathematicians and former British intelligence operatives, the technology, much like a human immune system, looks for signs of odd behavior in a client's network. Eagan and Darktrace are on the cutting edge not only in security, but also in a gender-balanced tech workforce. Eagan says half of her employees are women. She knows how unusual that is, having operated in Silicon Valley through booms and busts … as an enterprise tech worker, a venture capitalist, and now as an executive. Nicole Eagan sat down with Fortt Knox to share lessons from efforts that worked, and efforts that didn't.

28 - Kevin Busque, TaskRabbit co-founder & Guideline CEO: Married to the Game May 21, 2017

You've probably heard of TaskRabbit – the online service lets you pay a contractor to run an errand, clean an apartment, put together an Ikea bookshelf – any number of odd jobs. Before there was Uber or Airbnb, TaskRabbit birthed the so-called "gig economy." You might not know that Kevin Busque co-founded TaskRabbit with his wife, Leah, who he is quick to admit was the brains behind the operation all along. In an unusual twist on the typical Silicon Valley story, Kevin and Leah were high school sweethearts, married right after college. They worked at the same company more than once, bootstrapped a business together, and eventually moved across the country to realize the Silicon Valley dream. Leah served as CEO of TaskRabbit for years, and is now executive chairman. Kevin recently launched a new venture, Guideline, a 401(k) platform.

27 - Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov: Solitary Genius Is Not Enough May 16, 2017

Kirill Tatarinov grew up in the former Soviet Union, the son of a government computer architect. The family didn't swallow state propaganda: His grandfather once spent ten years in a soviet gulag.

To achieve his dreams, young Kirill would have to get out and move to the other side of the world.

Tatarinov is now the CEO of Citrix Systems, a tech company with tools that make it easier to share information and get work done from anywhere. His journey to this point – to leading a company with a $13-billion-dollar stock market valuation – includes stops in Israel and Australia, working for startups and for Microsoft.

It also included a wake-up call about what it really takes to drive a company toward success.

26 - Michael Dell, Dell CEO: Starting a Business and Keeping it Going May 07, 2017

Michael Dell founded his company 33 years ago, in his freshman dorm room at the University of Texas, Austin. He had $1,000 to buy PC parts, and took orders over the phone. After that, it ballooned like crazy – and made Dell Computer one of the fastest-growing companies ever. The stock price went on a dizzying tear throughout the 1990s, roughly doubling most years throughout the decade. It also made Michael Dell a multi-billionaire. Since then, the path hasn't been easy. The era of gonzo growth in personal computers and corporate servers – Dell's bread and butter – is over. Now attention has turned to smartphones and cloud computing. Sensing weakness, legendary investor Carl Icahn tried to buy out the company four years ago, which probably would have resulted in it breaking into pieces. Michael Dell fought him and won, taking his namesake company private, and then making it bigger than ever.

25 - Alexandra Lebenthal, Lebenthal & Co. CEO: Taking On Wall Street's Boys' Club Apr 30, 2017

Alexandra Lebenthal is a third-generation Wall Street power broker. Her grandparents started Lebenthal & Co. 92 years ago, helping to redefine the municipal bond business. Her company has seen better days – she's in the process of selling much of it to South Street Securities Holdings, though she'll maintain control of the corporate bond operation. Through the years, Lebenthal has shown a steadfast determination to maintain the family business, and to blaze a path in the boys-club world of finance. I sat down with her to talk about growing up in New York's financial world, her view of gender imbalances in the corporate world, and how she feels now that her college-age daughter has surprised her by deciding to follow in her footsteps.

24 - Mark Fields, Ford CEO: Be Sure the Sleeves Match the Cuffs Apr 23, 2017

For Ford CEO Mark Fields, the love of cars started early; he still remembers the set of Matchbox cars his dad bought him for his 6th birthday.

Of course, love of cars alone wasn't going to get him to the helm of the second-largest U.S. automaker, and a brand that's been around for more than a century. That would take a mix of competitive spirit, adaptability, and a knack for getting teams to focus quickly.

Mark Fields leads a company that last year sold more than 6.6 million cars, bringing in more than $141 billion from vehicle sales. In the era of Uber and Tesla that's getting harder by the day.

I sat down with Fields to talk about some of Ford's latest efforts, and his own journey to the top.

23 - Ajit Pai, FCC chairman: The Most Influential Man on the Internet Apr 15, 2017

Ajit Pai doesn't come across as the sort of guy who'd be crossing swords with Silicon Valley. Question him about controversial topics and his answers come quickly, but always tempered by a Midwestern sincerity. Among the current crop of communication industry regulators, he was the first on Twitter. But yes, Pai is a controversial figure in the tech world. President Trump appointed him chairman of the regulatory body, and one of his first moves was to roll back regulations that would have prevented broadband providers from using your Internet browsing history to sell you advertising. I asked him about that – and more – for Fortt Knox.

22 - Jeff Lawson, Twilio CEO: First Get Started, Then Get Smarter Apr 09, 2017

Among the many business lessons Jeff Lawson has learned, there's this: Don't expect to get things done if you wait until you're perfectly prepared. Lawson is co-founder and CEO of Twilio, a company that makes it easy for apps to contact you. (Ever wonder how you can send a text to your Uber driver in the app, or get one in OpenTable when your seat is ready? Twilio does that.) Twilio went public last summer at the New York Stock Exchange, and is now worth about $2.5 billion. As it pushes to make apps communicate better, the scrappy San Francisco company has developed a culture that favors boldness and taking initiative, and frowns on perfectionism. I caught up with Twilio's CEO at a tech conference in Barcelona, Spain to talk about his journey from curious kid in the Detroit suburbs to CEO of a public tech company. Among the things I love about Lawson's story? It's about the setbacks as much as the successes, and learning along the way.

21 - Bracken Darrell, Logitech CEO: Innovation From Spotting Details & Asking Questions Apr 02, 2017

Not many executives can say they've studied the finer points of everything from deodorant and washing machines, to Bluetooth speakers and gaming keyboards. Bracken Darrell can. Darrell is CEO of Logitech, a company that once specialized in mainstream PC mice and keyboards. One of the remarkable things about him is his appetite for learning. His curiosity has led him from a modest upbringing in Western Kentucky, to leading one of the smartphone era's most remarkable turnaround stories. I sat down with Darrell for the Fortt Knox podcast to find out how his upbringing shaped him, and how his curiosity helped him find his way to the C-suite. Logitech's stock has quadrupled since he took over four years ago; the company's now worth $5.5 billion.

20 - Katie Jacobs Stanton, Color CMO: Be the Exception to the Rule Mar 26, 2017

Katie Jacobs Stanton knows how to create her own options. Stanton, a veteran of Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and a presidential administration, now serves as chief marketing officer of genetic testing startup Color Genomics. Her professional journey from East Coast to West, and back and forth again, has given her rare insight into the workplace cultures that shape us today. I sat down with her for the Fortt Knox podcast to talk about the environment for women in tech, and her journey to the executive ranks in Silicon Valley.

19 - Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP CEO: How To Make Your Second Act An Empire Mar 19, 2017

Sir Martin Sorrell is arguably the most important advertising executive in the world. As CEO of WPP Group, he oversees a global marketing machine that he's assembled over more than 30 years. His group companies include J Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, and more than 100 others. Clients include two of every three Fortune Global 500 companies. When I sat down with him for the Fortt Knox podcast, I wanted to talk about his childhood, his career, and the pivotal choices he made. He didn't disappoint.

18 - Tom Steyer, investor and activist: A Billionaire's Surprising Rules of Winning Mar 13, 2017

Tom Steyer became a billionaire by solving puzzles. That wasn't his technical job description – he actually founded Farallon Capital, a hedge fund in San Francisco, 30 years ago. As an investor, two signature moves stand out: One, he got his alma mater, Yale, to invest a portion of its endowment with him; the success of that arrangement sparked a trend. Two, he often made his own luck by investing deeply in countries and industries. As Steyer scouted unusual investments in unexpected places, he followed some basic rules. Now that Steyer has set his sights on politics and policy – he's rumored to be considering a run for California governor – I sat down with him for Fortt Knox. He gave me some of his best insights on how to succeed, and why he's fighting the new administration in Washington, D.C.

17 - Michael Phelps, Olympic champion: The Toughest Battle Is in Your Mind Mar 04, 2017

We love to have these debates about who's the greatest of all time in any given sport; maybe it's because you don't even have to be an expert to get in on them. All you need to know is the yardstick for success. Serena Williams or Steffi Graf? Tom Brady or Joe Montana? That's what makes Michael Phelps special. There's no debate. He's the greatest swimmer and most decorated Olympian of all time. He won 28 medals over four different Olympic Games, 23 of them gold. The question is, how? Well, Michael Phelps is not a fish. Doctors have shot down the notion that his abnormal wingspan and flexible joints give him an outsized advantage. It turns out, Phelps worked hard on his craft. He also does a few mental exercises that the rest of us would do well to emulate. I sat down with him for the Fortt Knox podcast to get some of his best insights.

16 - Sue Decker, Raftr founder: The Woman Who Advised Steve Jobs & Warren Buffett Feb 25, 2017

More than a decade ago, Steve Jobs asked Sue Decker to be the chief financial officer at Pixar. Decker said no. She did, however, join Pixar's board of directors. At the time, Decker ran finance at Yahoo. The decline of Yahoo has become the stuff of Silicon Valley legend; today the company is in the process of getting absorbed into Verizon, at a fraction of its former value. Sue Decker, on the other hand, has done just fine in the eight years since she left the Internet company. This is Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I'm Jon Fortt. This is a weekly podcast bringing you the highest achievers from business, entertainment, philanthropy, and sport. We're going to learn how the very best climbed to the top, and pull out lessons along the way. If that sounds good to you, make this a habit: subscribe on Apple's Podcast app or Google Play. And once you've done that, tell a friend — these talks are definitely conversation starters. Sue Decker is one of the few people that some of the top U.S. companies seek for guidance. Aside from Pixar, she has also served on the boards of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, chip giant Intel, retail powerhouse Costco, and others. On her path to those board rooms, Decker has gained a rare perspective on what works – and what doesn't – when you're trying to work your way up. I sat down with her on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to talk about her new startup, and her path to success.

15 - Bayard Winthrop, American Giant founder: Clothes Made in the U.S.A. Feb 20, 2017

Bayard Winthrop got his inspiration from Silicon Valley. If we could put a touch-screen computer in the palm of everyone's hand, why couldn't we actually make the next great American clothing brand … in America? So five years ago, Winthrop shipped his first American Giant sweatshirt, made in the U.S.A. from domestic cotton. Now he's producing thousands of shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, and sweatpants for men and women every month. And it's not all lounge gear: he's just introduced the brand's first cotton dress. This is Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I'm Jon Fortt. This is a weekly podcast bringing you the highest achievers from business, entertainment, philanthropy, and sport. I'm going to learn how the very best climbed to the top, and take notes to help you up the mountain. If that sounds good to you, make this a habit: subscribe on Apple's Podcast app or Google Play. And once you've done that, tell a friend — these talks are definitely conversation starters. There's lots of talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America these days. American Giant is actually doing it, and doing it the hard way. The company owns its factories in North Carolina where Winthrop says he employs hundreds of workers sewing clothes.

14 - Gene Simmons, KISS: How to Future-Proof Your Brand Feb 13, 2017

Gene Simmons is the most outrageous member of one of the most outrageous bands of all time: KISS. There's a lot more to KISS than shock. It's the number-one gold-record-earning group ever, at 30, when you include the four solo albums that band members released on the same day in 1978. Fourteen albums went platinum. This is a band that's known for its hits: "I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day" seems like it's a phrase as old as rock itself. The band is known just as much for its look. There's the black and white face paint, the pyrotechnics, and a few details that are signature Gene Simmons. There's the blood-spitting, the axe guitar, and of course the tongue so long it's almost a fifth band member. And guess what: They're still touring. This is Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I'm Jon Fortt. I sat down with Gene Simmons at the Studio Hotel in New York, to talk business and marketing. Simmons is a guy who not only managed to launch an iconic brand in his early 20s, he and cofounder Paul Stanley remade it several times along the way with different band members, different looks, and a voracious appetite for merchandising. A disclaimer here: This episode has some explicit lyrics sprinkled in. By Gene, not me. So maybe don't listen with the kids in the car. Up to you.

13 - Darren Walker, Ford Foundation president: What It Will Take to Heal the Culture Feb 06, 2017

The key to understanding this moment in American history, in black history, is empathy. That's what Darren Walker is saying. And one could argue that if anybody's positioned to understand this dizzying landscape, he is. Walker grew up poor in rural Texas, became one of the first kids in the Head Start program, and made it big on Wall Street in the 1980s. But his true calling was even bigger: He's now president at the Ford Foundation, an $11-billion philanthropy giant that's aiming to address social justice and inequality around the globe.

12 - Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, Charles Schwab Foundation president: Empowering Women to Invest with Confidence Jan 30, 2017

When you see Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz's name, you might assume the daughter of Charles Schwab grew up quite privileged. After all, the Schwab name has become synonymous with wealth management. Didn't she end up working in the industry by default? Actually, no. Schwab-Pomerantz's parents divorced when she was a child, and her father's firm didn't become a financial force until she was well into her 20s. She was already there working with clients when Bank of America bought the company in 1983, and continued after the company split off again four years later. Today, Schwab-Pomerantz is Chairman of the Charles Schwab Foundation, and a senior vice president at the $56-billion company. She's a certified financial planner, and focuses on reaching out to groups like women, minorities and young people, who tend to have less experience managing their personal finances. I talked to Schwab-Pomerantz for the Fortt Knox podcast to get a sense of her personal journey – successes and mistakes – and also to dig out a lot of practical money tips for professionals who are trying to save for the future while planning big purchases and even raising a family. It's January, after all. There's still time to make good on those money resolutions.

11 - John Legere, T-Mobile USA CEO: CEOs Can't Say That Jan 23, 2017

How's this for authenticity: T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere has no qualms about dropping an f-bomb right in the middle of a press conference. He was taunting his rivals on Twitter long before that became the new standard in diplomacy. More important than all of that, Legere is growing the rolls at the third-largest U.S. wireless carrier at a dizzying clip – T-Mobile added 2.3 million subscribers in the first nine months of last year. AT&T and Verizon might be bigger, but T-Mobile is bold, scrappy, and changing the rules of the game. That's why for the latest episode of the Fortt Knox podcast I sat down with Legere to talk about how he decided to be a different kind of CEO, and why. More: http://forttknox.com

10 - Drew Powell, actor, Gotham: Chasing Down Your Dream Jan 16, 2017

There's something hulking and sinister about him on screen that makes the bad-guy thing just work. As Butch Gilzean (and Solomon Grundy) in Fox's hit series Gotham, Drew Powell represents the old-time brutal criminal who paved the way for the super villains of Batman's prime to take over. Gotham, the Batman backstory, tees up the second half of its third season this week (1/16, FOX, 8 p.m.). In light of the occasion, I asked Powell to sit down with me for Fortt Knox to share his own backstory. It's worth paying attention. For kids with visions of stardom, Hollywood dreams rank up there near hoop dreams in the unlikely category. There are only so many hit shows on TV, and so many recurring roles. So how did Powell make it? There's not a formula, exactly, but there are a few lessons for anyone pursuing a passion that has long odds.

9 - Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO: The Boss's Favorite Mistake Jan 09, 2017

Twenty-five years ago, the man who is now CEO of the world's largest maker of computer chips was an engineer at the company. And he made an error that almost got him fired. "I wiped out the output of an entire factory for a week," Intel CEO Brian Krzanich tells me in the latest episode of the Fortt Knox podcast. "I'm lucky to be employed at Intel, sometimes I say." But instead of dooming him, his handling of the problem influenced the company culture, helping to birth a system called "Copy Exactly" that's become a part of its identity. Krzanich went on to make a name for himself as the executive responsible for all of Intel's factories, a job that prepared him to be CEO.

8 - Rory O'Malley, actor, Hamilton and The Book of Mormon: The Show Must Go On Jan 02, 2017

A new year's a time for goals and dreams. A time to make things happen. A time to roll with life's setbacks and turn things around. Broadway veteran Rory O'Malley (The Book of Mormon) did that in spades in 2016. The year started with him landing a lead role as Bill Gates in a musical, Nerds, that was supposed to make its Broadway debut in the spring. But just as the cast had finished learning the production, an investor pulled the plug. How's this for a turnaround? With his schedule suddenly cleared, O'Malley ended up landing the role of King George III in the smash hit Hamilton, which had just become a cultural force. In the latest episode of the Fortt Knox Podcast, as O'Malley shares his story, he also offers some tips that will help you get the most out of the year ahead.

7 - Diana Aviv, Feeding America CEO: A Holiday Lesson on Leading with Heart & Head Dec 23, 2016

A car accident convinced a teenaged Diana Aviv that she had to leave home and fight for the poor and forgotten. One she caused. "As I pulled out, I hit him, and he went into the air and did somersaults and crashed to the ground," she remembers. She, a white Jewish teen, had hit a black bicyclist in apartheid South Africa in the early 1970s. "When we went to the police station, I went to the white entrance and he had to wait and go in the black entrance. And the police officer said to me, 'You tell me whatever you like, and that's what will be what happened.' And I decided I couldn't live in a society where I couldn't take the consequences of my actions, which was to get in trouble because of what I'd done. ... This was as contaminating to me as it was for him. Just, the consequences were easier for me – but they weren't, because how could I live with myself? And I decided then that I had to leave." Today, Aviv is CEO of Feeding America, the third largest charity in America by donation value, at more than $2 billion annually. As I learned when I sat down with her for the Fortt Knox podcast, her journey to that position is a study in how leading with your emotions as well as your head can bring world-changing results.

6 - Sanjay Poonen of VMware & Jay Simons of Atlassian: Two Unique Paths to Power Dec 19, 2016

Sanjay Poonen grew up lower-middle class in India and pushed past rejection to become one of the most respected executives in Silicon Valley; he's now chief operating officer at VMware. Jay Simons' detour before law school took him playing piano across Asia – and inspired him to ditch law for tech, where today he's president at Atlassian, one of the industry's hot young companies. For most of us, the path to success isn't going to be a straight line. But those who make it learn a lot of lessons you can't capture on a résumé. So what qualities separate the best from the average? I sat down with Poonen and Simons for the latest episode of the Fortt Knox Podcast, and the two executives shared some wisdom from their journeys that should help others along the way.

5 - Sebastian Bach, actor and musician: Lessons Beyond Skid Row Dec 12, 2016

Sebastian Bach is a big dude. You know how celebrities are always supposed to be smaller than you think? Jon Bon Jovi's about my height, and I'm 5'8". I met him in a restaurant in San Jose, Ca. a decade ago. Sebastian, the ex-Skid Row frontman, is huge. 6'3". We're at 30 Rock, the NBC Universal mothership in New York, where he's just popped out of shooting a segment with Access Hollywood. He's kindly agreed to meet me after, in what feels like a giant closet, because it's quiet, and you know, I'm recording a podcast. Here's a guy who joined a band in the mid-'80s, debut album went multi platinum, second album debuted at number one. He was the prettiest of the metal pretty boys, and he earned a bad-boy reputation, too. But the most remarkable thing? He changed. Skid Row broke up after Sebastian booked them as an opening act for KISS, which the other band members thought was beneath them. And of course, after Sebastian himself attracted a lot of the wrong kind of controversy with his temper and his mouth. That didn't help. But that was just the beginning of his story. Bach went on as a solo act, did some reality TV, and did four major turns on Broadway. He scored a recurring role on Gilmore Girls. Along the way, he picked up a few lessons he shared with me on Fortt Knox.

4 - Bradley Whitford, actor & agitator: Life Imitates Art Dec 05, 2016

Actor Bradley Whitford talks his latest project with National Geographic, healing the political divide, and what you see him in next. In Fortt Knox's Podcast Edition, CNBC's Jon Fortt talks with leaders and influencers who make things happen. For the Live Edition of the show, check out Jon Fortt's Facebook Page.

3 - Thanksgiving, and the Muslim Branch of My Evangelical Family Nov 28, 2016

This week on the Fortt Knox podcast, I want to get a little personal. Instead of hearing from a business leader or celebrity as usual, you're going to hear from someone closer to home. My home. The United States right now is struggling with how to respond to the scourge of terrorism -- and how to relate to Muslim Americans here at home. It's something my family has a unique bit of experience with. And this being the days after the Thanksgiving holiday, and after a presidential election, it's a good time to reflect on family. And the country. The voice you heard at the beginning of this episode was my cousin on my dad's side. Omar. I'm a Christian. My faith is an important part of my life. I try to study my Bible regularly, I attend church weekly. My father is a retired pastor and chaplain. My grandfather was a pastor, too. Omar and his siblings are Muslim. His parents converted before he was born. It's fair to say religion has always been a source of tension in our family, but especially over the last 20 years. Through it all, we've tried -- with mixed results -- to keep the family together. So I asked Omar if he would sit down and talk to me for Fortt Knox about something we can all relate to at a time like this: The struggle to find common ground in the face of fundamental differences.

2 - Lisa Su, AMD CEO: Beyond the Glass Cliff Nov 21, 2016

Lisa Su, AMD CEO, on how she went from engineer to the corner office. In Fortt Knox's Podcast Edition, CNBC's Jon Fortt talks with leaders and influencers who make things happen. For the Live Edition of the show, check out Jon Fortt's Facebook Page.

1 - Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder: Why Thomas Jefferson Would Love Reddit Nov 13, 2016

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, on how he got where he is and what makes him tick. In Fortt Knox's Podcast Edition, CNBC's Jon Fortt talks with leaders and influencers who make things happen. For the Live Edition of the show (which debuts the week of 11/14), check out Jon Fortt's Facebook Page.

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