Heroes

 Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, Says Data Security Is No Longer Just A Concern For CIOs.

How Cybersecurity Became A Top Priority For Business Leaders

Photo Illustration by Fortune. Photo provided by Palo Alto Networks. 

Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Diane Brady. You know, one of the things that's fascinating, the perk you sit and you get into rooms, we don't get to go in terms of talking to CEO S about the vulnerabilities. And I say CEO S deliberately because it feels like this is an issue that has really left just the CIO or the CTO. Give me a sense as to what, what are they thinking about and how, how is the threat environment changing? Because we're right in the middle of this obsession with digital transition. What are you hearing? We can't seem to buy ingest and deploy enough technology today. I mean, you look at what's going on with A I. People are buying GP US. They're trying to put up A I data centers, everybody's in a frenzy. How do I use LL MS in my infrastructure? So you, you think you just sort of just sat down and settled down and say, oh my God, thank God. We've moved to the public cloud and they sit there and say, oh my God, look what's next A I, so I think every CEO has some sort of large technology project on their agenda and the number one risk now slowly and steadily continues to be cyber. And that's what we talked about. The sort of explosion of, you know, tax service, explosion of our connectivity to our customers that's causing that to become a large rift. So it's kind of impossible to get away from a conversation around cyber security at your board, at your management team. It's still a bit of a black box to be honest. But you know, it's like, it's like I know I have a problem, I don't know how to solve it, but I know I have a problem. I need to pay attention. So I think we're at that phase where CEO S are aware, this is a problem. Some of them are hoping it doesn't happen to them because it happened to somebody else in their industry. But they call the cio and technology guys and say, hey, do we have, do we have a solution for this? And you know, like most of the life, we always say, yes, we've got this covered. But the question is how well do you have it covered? You've lived through these, you know, boom and bust cycles. Obviously, we've seen this acceleration of technology innovation, but we talk about A I as if it's some incredibly profound pivot point where now, you know, put on your seat belt, here we go. It's gonna be the most transformative thing since whatever, what do you think? There's that cliche that we always seem to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term, right? You go back to 1999. You know, if you remember the internet sort of boom where all you needed was a domain name and you were a number of clicks to find your money. The world wasn't a frenzy. You know, the NASDAQ was 5000 at that point in time, it came crashing down to 3000. So there was that sort of exuberance associated with this revolutionary technology called internet. Now, I don't think we were wrong if you go back and say, what did we imagine in 1999 I think any domain you thought you bought actually exists today. There's a business around it. So these real businesses, some of the largest business in the world are driven by the emergence of the internet. So it was just, we were early, I think we're the same, same sort of cycle with A I. There is tremendous amounts of enthusiasm. There is sort of like this notion that if you build it, they will come and we're all busy building it. And I think it's following the same cycle that we saw with the internet first. You need the infrastructure. That's why you're seeing the sort of the, the the infrastructure players in A I are gonna do. Well, in the current term, you look at all the chip manufacturers that people talk about energy, people talk about the need for data centers. So you see the infrastructure part, you know, the the technology is still a little ways from all of us embracing it fully and going and deploying it. But I think uh you know, we feel a little left out because cybersecurity was on the top of mind for CEO S six months ago. It's possibly A I now, right? Because like they all want to talk about A I, they all want to be smarter about it. They're all worried that if I miss the I trend, you know, is there a new Amazon and I become the old Ecommerce company? I'd love to walk through a little bit. The perspective you bring you from T Mobile, you mentioned your time at Google. You were in, I believe almost two years at Softbank. How, how did those experiences? Well, let me just ask some of those pivot points maybe in your career. That kind of took you to where you are now. My first job in the US was a fidelity. It was 1992. Uh and it was uh one of those session moments where it was very hard to get a job. So I had to literally apply to 400 plus places to see like somebody would hire me. And I, I had the funniest experiences and we had a recruiter on the phone saying, oh, can you tell me, we don't know. That course is offered in Northwestern. I'm like, no, I went to Northeast. Oh, excuse me, let me check and boom. Like, so like people, you know, all kinds of stuff happened and I was lucky that I, you know, I applied to Fidelity with seven different people. Thankfully, they had no common hr system at that point in time. So people said no, uh the seventh person didn't know that six. I said no. So they had me come interview and, and I was lucky enough to get hired. And then I ended up going to work at Deutsche Telecom in all places because I've met the CEO by being a telecom analyst and he says you should go work for me. So I did and then a little set up little entrepreneurial roots in there. So I go, I go start a mobile internet company. This is like the before the iphone existed. We used to have these really clunky phones from Nokia, which used to try and give you mobile internet access when people say you crazy. Um I did that and then I worked at Deutsche Telecom and T Mobile for four years in Germany. I used to commute from London to Germany trying to see if I wanted to be an operational executive in a mobile telecom company, which I did. And then I was home and a friend of mine walked up and said, you know what? There's this company from California, which just went public in a very strange reverse dutch auction, which nobody should do. And they're looking for somebody to work in Europe. They have a small 5000 square foot office. And so how it is rented or so was Chief Business Officer. That's not a title, you hear very often. What does that mean? You know, I started in Europe. I was lucky enough that Larry and Sergey were traveling through Europe. Uh Coincidentally they interviewed me there. I had a great boss of me who interviewed me and they decided that uh they'd have me run Google Europe and you know, there was an amazing market. Uh We had lots of great people who worked there. Many of them are still at Google and run large parts of Google. And we were able to make Europe grow and stabilize uh Google's European presence to such a degree that, you know, they uh asked me to come from the rest of the world and including Europe from here because when my peers were Tim Armstrong and Cheryl went on to have amazing careers in different places and maybe I was the last man standing. So here I was, uh I came to California in 2009 and I spent five years doing anything but products because, you know, it's like Eric was my boss for a while and Larry was my boss for a while. And Larry wanted to focus on the technology part. So go go take care of the business stuff. We had a great CFO great have legal and I kind of did everything that wasn't product. So it was sales marketing, customer support, business development deals. I was lucky I was blessed because you know, here I was working for an amazing technology company going to perhaps the biggest growth phase and, and I had, I had sort of the privilege of observing from that lens how the world was accepting technology, accepting the emergence of big tech, I guess at that point in time, it is great.

The World Wide Technology CEO Talks About What He Learned As A Soccer Player That Helped Him In His Career.

How Jim Kavanaugh Went From Olympian To CEO

Photo Illustration by Fortune. Photo provided by World Wide Technology. 

Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Diane Brady being called a systems integrator, you know, is, is fine. But uh I would say the some same time different people describe us different ways because we do cover a lot of ground. You know, on one hand, we're a value added reseller of technology equipment has been working with Cisco for almost 30 years now, worked with John when he was the CEO and now Chuck with him being the CEO worldwide has evolved from what I would say is a fairly simple value-added reseller to literally being a value-added reseller growing, not just locally here in growing domestically growing globally, but adding services in the first services sector that we added was around networking. But then from there, we we expanded that portfolio in a pretty significant way. Uh adding voice video networking, compute storage, cyber, software development, uh consulting advisory services uh along with now A I uh digital transformation that you know, is, is relevant to just about every company in the world. People forget that Cisco was once the most valuable company on the planet at that point, right. By market cap and then, then it wasn't, I think it lost probably about 90% of its value. So I, we all talk about bubbles now and we talk about bubbles. We often refer to the.com bubble as the bubble that uh you know, everybody fears will happen again. What does that teach you? Well, I would say that uh being willing to understand that there will be tough times and you need to roll up your sleeves. And depending on where you are in the life cycle of your company, you want to try to create a balance sheet or a structure that you don't put everything at risk every day that if a domino falls the wrong way, it literally can put you out of business. So as much as you can, you want to create, I would say some reserves and some capacity. But when you're in the early stages of growing a business, sometimes you don't have that luxury when you glossed over very quickly. Um that you were an Olympian, you played pro soccer for a few years. I I want, let's pause a second there because that is incredibly cool, obviously incredible discipline you get as an athlete. But can you tell me some of your favorite moments? I mean, this is an Olympics here. I'm talking to a former Olympian here. What is it like to compete at that level? Yeah, the competition is it is uh eye opening. Uh you know, and, and as you move from every level and you play, you know, and compete with, with people at different levels. It, it was such a, it was such a great experience. I grew up, my dad was a bricklayer. Uh my mom, you know, really, uh was a stay at home mom for most, most of our upbringing. So we came from a, a pretty modest upbringing. Uh And then, you know, making the, uh the Pan Am an Olympic team back in 83. And telling me, OK, for that point, I traveled with the team for almost 15 months and the experience was just amazing considering I've never really traveled out of Saint Louis. And at that point, now I'm traveling all over the world. The first tournament we played in was in Seoul, Korea. You know, that was the President's Cup. We had another tournament in Beijing, you know, a great wall cup in China and then all over Europe, Central America, Pan Am Games in Caracas. So it was such a great experience of one, just the people on the team, meeting different people, but then meeting people and competing with just really world class players around the world. How do you lead? Um Now versus when you started, I know there is a size component, but maybe in essence, that what I'm really asking is, where do you get the most joy from your job? You know, the strength that you play to? Because you, you go deep, but at the same time, you have to take that big view and connect the dots for a leader to be able to go deep and really understand what your business does and really how the sausage is made. I think it's very important. But at the same time, it's not your job as a leader to stay in the detail. It's to understand what you do have an appreciation for that. But then you need to rise up to the 30,000 ft level and make sure that you're setting the right vision and mission and direction for the organization. So I think there's this uh ability I believe for leaders is to be able to set that vision, that mission and the direction, but also have a, a true understanding, an authentic understanding of the work that needs to be done to drive the execution because vision and mission with no execution is nothing and, and you need to be able to bring those together. And from my perspective when you do that and you do that with, you know, ambitious, passionate people. Uh That's where the real excitement, that's where I get inspired when I see the, the amazing teams and the people coming together to do amazing things.

<p>So, so let me take one step back. I'll address the overall business agenda. But first, let me address Silicon Valley. I mean, I do live in San Francisco and I've lived in California for 40 years or more. And people love to write about people in Silicon Valley who are actually Republicans and support Mr Trump. It's sort of a man bites, dog bites, dog story. Andre and Horowitz came out too, right? And so, but to a very large extent, the Valley remains what I would consider it. Moderate Democrats, very business oriented, very data driven, very liberal, socially and overwhelmingly in my mind, still supportive of Kamala Harris for the next president. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Diane Brady. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm here with Tom Steyer. Tom. Thank you for being here, Diane. It's great to be here with you. You built this massive hedge fund, would it go from 6 million to more than 20 billion, I think in 25 years? So kudos to you for that talk a little bit about the role of government because let's, I don't want you know, I know that you ran obviously to be the Democratic candidate in the last election. Um The Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act, clearly those have been factors potentially as catalysts towards the green economy. How important is it that we get a certain regime in? Because business is moving in this direction anyway, I mean, I wrote a book basically making the point that this is an economic opportunity and the only way it's gonna happen is by winning in the marketplace. So I'm an absolute believer in business and absolute believer in capitalism. But having said that this has to be a public, private partnership. So if we can take a step back and talk about why we're talking about this at all, why are we going, do we need to talk about an energy transition? Why is this not just something that happens in the world of commerce without any conversation or poli politization, very simply the world has run on fossil fuels for a long time and they use of fossil fuels is very highly correlated with an increase in incomes for the people in those countries. So you can go back and see that we've gotten a lot richer as a people, not just in the United States, but around the world. As we've used fossil fuels. There was no intention to emit CO2. There was no intention to create global warming. There was no intention to have un you know, vast unintended consequences but we did. So the real issue here is we have a, a huge industry polluting in a very destructive way which they never intended to do but which they're not paying for and they love it and who wouldn't? So it's like, of course they do. But the issue is when we talk about government. Ok. What is the IRA? It was basically subsidies for clean industries. So instead of taxing polluters, they're paying people to produce things that don't pollute. It's kind of a tax on its head, a subsidy for non polluters because a straight marketplace won't work. One thing. One quote I like from your book that um you're skeptical of any solution that requires humanity's collective heart to grow three sizes, nice solution to the grinch there. But, but talk is our instinct to, to do the right thing. Is it just inertia? I mean, well, let me say this and I'll give you an example because this actually is happening. The the statistic I think I like to use the most. Is this one in last year, 2023 of new electricity generation globally, 86% of it was renewable. 14% of it was fossil fuels. So the business case is compelling and the reason people did that no one did that to be nice. Abs there was no person who said I'm willing to pay higher for clean energy. It, it turns out that solar and wind are much, much much cheaper than natural gas. And that is a, that is a disparity that is only gonna widen if you look at the co you know, as we all know, there is a $14,000 Chinese plug in hybrid that will go 1200 from byd. My point being look, technology beats dead dinosaurs. And that is a spread batteries got 80% cheaper in the last decade. They'll get 80% cheaper. Again, this decade, solar costs are down to a penny per kilowatt hour. Are they gonna go lower? Yes. So that's the power of innovation and that's the power of business and commerce and you know, intentionality. Yes, that's gonna, but there's a lot more to it than that. And the question is, how fast do we deploy the existing technologies? How do we create and deploy the new technologies in the problems that haven't been? So, can I go back to when you were because you started on Wall Street and you know, it, you put it that way, but would you have been able to make money through the nineties through the early in, in any kind of investment or is it really that this moment in time? Because gal and I started in 2021 was putting solar panels on the roof of the White House in the 19 seventies. That energy was far more expensive than fossil fuel energy. He was and he was doing it for different reasons. He was doing it because of the oil embargo. Nowadays, it's much cheaper. I mean, what's happened is the costs have crossed in new technologies. There's a thing called the S curve. So it's like you go along trying to get better than the existing technology and when the cost curves and the efficiencies cross, so now the new technology is better, it goes up like almost in a straight line and it levels out about 80%. And that's going back to, you know, replacing quail oil in the 18 forties. I want to pause because you are in San Francisco, you know, so not necessarily of Silicon Valley but around there. And Silicon Valley has had um been lukewarm at best to the Democrats, not because of the climate issues, but more because of antitrust and other regulatory issues. Uh I know you're not in the government. I don't want to make you a spokesperson for government, but how do you think about the overall business agenda? So, so let me take one step back, I'll address the overall business agenda. But first let me address Silicon Valley. I mean, I do live in San Francisco and I've lived in California for 40 years or more and people love to write about people in Silicon Valley who are actually Republicans and support Mr Trump. It's sort of a man bites, dog bites, dog story and, and Horowitz came out too, right? And so, but to a very large extent, the Valley remains what I would consider it. Moderate democrats, very business oriented, very data driven, very liberal, socially and overwhelmingly in my mind, still supportive of Kamala Harris for the next president. There are a group of people, many of whom have actually left Silicon Valley and now live in Austin or Miami who are, who don't like the way California is run, who don't like high taxes and who are, as you said, worried about antitrust. Having said that when I look back at what is, you know, creates business success in my mind, the times when America was growing the fastest, we had very, very high marginal tax rates, very high, much higher than today, maybe double today during Eisenhower, during Kennedy during LBJ, we had really high marginal tax rates in this country. We didn't have the disparity in income. If you look at the simple, how much does the CEO of a company make compared to how much does the lowest worker in that company make? Three or 400 times? It, it was a fraction of that, it was a much more equal society in multiple ways. So I'm confident that this idea of low taxes, low government, everybody get out of the way. I mean, it just doesn't work. That is not the means for a successful society. If you look state by state, how people have done? Look, I mean, people are very mad at California who don't live in California, but California has a really high, we're the fifth biggest economy in the world. We have incredibly successful businesses. You know. So to me, the, the, this whole idea that cut taxes, cut, government cut taxes, cut government cut support, get rid of education, that can't help get rid of, you know, eee everything. I don't think that makes any sense and, and so it, it has never worked. That's not what the data says. But if you have an income stream of X dollars and you can either tax it at 50% or 25 people are like, I much prefer 25. That's much better. Exactly. Human nature comes into play one thing that maybe it's a symptom of the polarized times we're in. But business leaders are often remarkably silent on political issues with one because you get very attacked. Now it's quite transparent, you know, things go viral. I was speaking to Steve Baller the other day about his USA facts that he's trying to get out there to correct misinformation. I'd love to get your thoughts. Obviously, I know you've been in the political arena, but what is the role of business leaders in speaking up about these topics, climate change or otherwise? Well, let me say what I would like my role to be and how I perceive as a professional investor and professional business person, how, how I would like to and of course, I have my opinions just like the other 330 million Americans. But what I would like to do is have enough granular information that I can share accurately with elected officials and people in government so they can make better decisions. So if we, you know, I'm obviously focused on the energy transition and on climate. And I want, I know that people in Washington DC can't go to venture capital meetings on Sand Hill Road, but I can't but are facts. What drive decision making in Washington? Not always I take your point, but I want the people who are making decisions to know the facts and it's, it's, they can't get them on their own that they just 24 hours in the day, they have a full time job, they can't do it. I view what I would like to do is to be able to say this is what we're seeing. These are the actual numbers. You should know this is what solar costs, this is where it's going, these are where batteries are going. You're, you're looking at this technology for direct air capture. This is what we see in terms of the cost per ton of sequestration. This is what we see in terms of scalability. You can believe it or not, you can get your own experts. But we've looked at this seriously. We're putting, you know, we're investing basis on our research. That's what we see. You should, you know, it's interesting, we always talk about what the private sector can bring to the public sector, you know, efficiency, facts, getting things done. We rarely talk about what the public sector can bring to the private sector in terms of how you get things done. I'm curious even your time on the campaign trail, were there any lessons gleaned from that, that you've taken into the world of business? And you can see this very granularly this year, the people who are running corporations, particularly public corporations believe that their career success, their jobs, their pay and their integrity, very importantly is based on increasing earnings for their shareholders. And so any time they're telling you that there's something more important to them than increasing earnings for their shareholders. I would check my, you know, watch to see if they lifted it. They have a job to do with an integrity and responsibility to take seriously. Those are not people who should be setting the agenda for this country. They should be setting the facts, they should be implementing, they should be working within the framework that elected officials who are the embodiment of the people set. And so look, elected officials have a different responsibility, their job, their integrity, their success, their reputation involves getting re elected or elected in the first place, which means satisfying people that they're representing in a significant way. That's their job. And so I don't, I try not to mix up those two different things. And I think that any time you see someone in one of those spheres, talking about how they're really concerned about the other sphere. Decision making is different too, right? So different. And so I, I view it as it's gotta be the way the United States has traditionally worked is we're a democratic society, the will of the people rules, they set the rules, they should set the rules. That's our morality and integrity. And within that box business people work. So you call yourself an optimist. Let's let's drill down on that a little bit. Let's talk about the optimistic investor. Where are you putting, where are your biggest bets? Right now? My old friend and partner Katie and I Katie Hall and I started a multi strategy investment firm to invest into the energy transition in multiple strategies. So that includes venture and growth and includes real estate buying buildings and turning them to net zero. But you know, it involves public stocks, but it we have plans to do many strategies because we believe this transition, as I said, inevitably has to happen is happening very fast that it's a huge tailwind to investing so that there is a strong commercial argument. This is a place where people, professional investors with great experience can marry that to domain expertise, specific knowledge of these markets and get very good returns and also have great impact as a citizen, I suppose. Are you worried about the state of democracy right now? We obviously from my standpoint, we have someone who has a real chance to be president who has said, who tried to overturn the last election. You paid $10 million I think to try. And with the impeachment battle, I remember that I, who I think is, you know, who has been convicted of 34 felonies, who has made multiple statements about what he would do in terms of the law and in terms of future elections, if he's elected, it's a little hard to read between all the very confusing statements, but clearly somebody who, you know, it's not someone who loves elections, not someone who loves democracy and not someone who respects it. So am I worried about that? I think that that would be, you know, a big threat to democracy. Do I believe that the American people will get back their democracy if we ever lose it? Yes, I believe it's built into us in a very deep way. It is built into me in a very deep way and I'd be willing to go very far piece to try and make sure we secure it. But is there someone running for president who has said things that are profoundly undemocratic and has made threats to our democracy repeatedly and said, you know, talked about things who's going and then has lived up to it in the past. I think we all know that it's true. So that's scary. Is there anything else on your radar right now? You want to put on ours. So I would say this, I do think the technology is better than people understand in terms of climate, our ability to solve these problems is much better than people understand. It's also true that the news from the natural world which I follow obsessively is worse than people understand. And in some cases, far worse and far scarier than people understand. Adaptability is as much as fighting climate change. So I know this is a real race between what's going, the deterioration of the natural world that we all rely on and the incredible progress in the technological world. But if we win that race and you step back and think about where we're going to be as a hu as human beings, as Americans, we will be able to create a much better world than we've ever imagined. You know, in terms of health, in terms of education, in terms of equality, in terms of all the important parts about life, you're gonna have an ability given the other advances that we're making, which are incredible to really provide a way of living for the people in America and including people all over the world. That is really almost better than we can imagine. And that's why I'm so focused on trying to make sure that we have a sustainable natural world because we do depend on it. And if we don't, then all we're not going to have time to focus on this because we're going to live in a chaotic, dangerous, unhealthy and scary world living to 100 doesn't make much difference if you can't go outside and, and I'll give you 11 small example. I mean, one of the things that the UN projects is that on the course we are going, we will have 20 to 25 million climate refugees per year. Syria had 5 million refugees partly related to climate and that completely roiled Europe as they moved into different countries in Europe, 20 to 25 million refugees a year every year. That is something that is a profound threat to the security of our political systems around the world. So let's drill down a little on the actual technologies that you're investing in that you think are exciting right now. So let me say this, we are deploying a lot of existing technologies like wind and solar and evs and batteries that everybody knows about that are getting much better. But we all know that what people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of new technologies being developed, not only to see if they work, but to see if they work at a price that works for customers. And you know, that is a real difference. So for instance, one of the things that I find fascinating is for a long time, we've had what's called geothermal energy that's basically hot water under the earth. So if you think about old faithful and Yellowstone, the water comes up, it's hot, it's energy you can use it. You know, just the way you can use natural gas or wind or solar. What's changed is people are now using basically techniques from oil and gas to go down 5000 ft, not 500 ft, but 5000 ft. And they're able to get completely clean, baseload energy. So there's no question about when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine. It's always there. Baseload energy that is completely clean emits no CO2 and which is commercial so it can be done at a price that competes. Now, there's a real question about how big this can be, but this is one of 100 technologies where you go like, oh God breaking down plastic. I've seen a lot of those as well. There is there, I've seen techniques on plastics that are amazing. We know there's plastic pollution. We recycle only 6% of plastics, only 6% to 94% does not get recycled. So the question is gonna be, how are we, first of all going to pick it out, sort it and reuse it. There are amazing technologies going on in that involving all kinds of different, you know, skills and really incredible new machines. So as we see this, it's exciting to know that there's a machine that can look at this and pick out 10,000 different items. It's in humans can't do that. That's incredible. So let me clar you invest in. So you're not investing seed capital. First of all, you're, you're investing in these companies. Are you helping them to replicate its scale? Is that part of what we're doing? Multi strategy? So we do do seed, we do do venture and growth, we do do real estate. I mean, what, what we're trying to do is figure out strategies where basically we can be really profitable in decarbonization. We're not concessionary. We never, we're not asking people not to get good returns. We're not at all concessionary. In fact, we believe this transition is a tail wind that has to happen, doesn't mean every company will succeed. You still have to be a professional investor. You have to have domain expertise in this area, you have to marry the two and that's the structure and doing good doesn't mean you can't make a good return. If you're not getting a good return, you're not going to get a chance to do good for us. Thank you so much for having me.</p>

Tom Steyer, longtime Democratic fundraiser, has now set his sights on investing in companies with climate impact.

Meet The Hedge Fund Founder Now Taking On Climate Change

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photo provided by Galvanize Climate Solutions. 

Tom Steyer has now set his sights on investing in companies with climate impact.

So, so let me take one step back. I'll address the overall business agenda. But first, let me address Silicon Valley. I mean, I do live in San Francisco and I've lived in California for 40 years or more. And people love to write about people in Silicon Valley who are actually Republicans and support Mr Trump. It's sort of a man bites, dog bites, dog story. Andre and Horowitz came out too, right? And so, but to a very large extent, the Valley remains what I would consider it. Moderate Democrats, very business oriented, very data driven, very liberal, socially and overwhelmingly in my mind, still supportive of Kamala Harris for the next president. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Diane Brady. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm here with Tom Steyer. Tom. Thank you for being here, Diane. It's great to be here with you. You built this massive hedge fund, would it go from 6 million to more than 20 billion, I think in 25 years? So kudos to you for that talk a little bit about the role of government because let's, I don't want you know, I know that you ran obviously to be the Democratic candidate in the last election. Um The Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act, clearly those have been factors potentially as catalysts towards the green economy. How important is it that we get a certain regime in? Because business is moving in this direction anyway, I mean, I wrote a book basically making the point that this is an economic opportunity and the only way it's gonna happen is by winning in the marketplace. So I'm an absolute believer in business and absolute believer in capitalism. But having said that this has to be a public, private partnership. So if we can take a step back and talk about why we're talking about this at all, why are we going, do we need to talk about an energy transition? Why is this not just something that happens in the world of commerce without any conversation or poli politization, very simply the world has run on fossil fuels for a long time and they use of fossil fuels is very highly correlated with an increase in incomes for the people in those countries. So you can go back and see that we've gotten a lot richer as a people, not just in the United States, but around the world. As we've used fossil fuels. There was no intention to emit CO2. There was no intention to create global warming. There was no intention to have un you know, vast unintended consequences but we did. So the real issue here is we have a, a huge industry polluting in a very destructive way which they never intended to do but which they're not paying for and they love it and who wouldn't? So it's like, of course they do. But the issue is when we talk about government. Ok. What is the IRA? It was basically subsidies for clean industries. So instead of taxing polluters, they're paying people to produce things that don't pollute. It's kind of a tax on its head, a subsidy for non polluters because a straight marketplace won't work. One thing. One quote I like from your book that um you're skeptical of any solution that requires humanity's collective heart to grow three sizes, nice solution to the grinch there. But, but talk is our instinct to, to do the right thing. Is it just inertia? I mean, well, let me say this and I'll give you an example because this actually is happening. The the statistic I think I like to use the most. Is this one in last year, 2023 of new electricity generation globally, 86% of it was renewable. 14% of it was fossil fuels. So the business case is compelling and the reason people did that no one did that to be nice. Abs there was no person who said I'm willing to pay higher for clean energy. It, it turns out that solar and wind are much, much much cheaper than natural gas. And that is a, that is a disparity that is only gonna widen if you look at the co you know, as we all know, there is a $14,000 Chinese plug in hybrid that will go 1200 from byd. My point being look, technology beats dead dinosaurs. And that is a spread batteries got 80% cheaper in the last decade. They'll get 80% cheaper. Again, this decade, solar costs are down to a penny per kilowatt hour. Are they gonna go lower? Yes. So that's the power of innovation and that's the power of business and commerce and you know, intentionality. Yes, that's gonna, but there's a lot more to it than that. And the question is, how fast do we deploy the existing technologies? How do we create and deploy the new technologies in the problems that haven't been? So, can I go back to when you were because you started on Wall Street and you know, it, you put it that way, but would you have been able to make money through the nineties through the early in, in any kind of investment or is it really that this moment in time? Because gal and I started in 2021 was putting solar panels on the roof of the White House in the 19 seventies. That energy was far more expensive than fossil fuel energy. He was and he was doing it for different reasons. He was doing it because of the oil embargo. Nowadays, it's much cheaper. I mean, what's happened is the costs have crossed in new technologies. There's a thing called the S curve. So it's like you go along trying to get better than the existing technology and when the cost curves and the efficiencies cross, so now the new technology is better, it goes up like almost in a straight line and it levels out about 80%. And that's going back to, you know, replacing quail oil in the 18 forties. I want to pause because you are in San Francisco, you know, so not necessarily of Silicon Valley but around there. And Silicon Valley has had um been lukewarm at best to the Democrats, not because of the climate issues, but more because of antitrust and other regulatory issues. Uh I know you're not in the government. I don't want to make you a spokesperson for government, but how do you think about the overall business agenda? So, so let me take one step back, I'll address the overall business agenda. But first let me address Silicon Valley. I mean, I do live in San Francisco and I've lived in California for 40 years or more and people love to write about people in Silicon Valley who are actually Republicans and support Mr Trump. It's sort of a man bites, dog bites, dog story and, and Horowitz came out too, right? And so, but to a very large extent, the Valley remains what I would consider it. Moderate democrats, very business oriented, very data driven, very liberal, socially and overwhelmingly in my mind, still supportive of Kamala Harris for the next president. There are a group of people, many of whom have actually left Silicon Valley and now live in Austin or Miami who are, who don't like the way California is run, who don't like high taxes and who are, as you said, worried about antitrust. Having said that when I look back at what is, you know, creates business success in my mind, the times when America was growing the fastest, we had very, very high marginal tax rates, very high, much higher than today, maybe double today during Eisenhower, during Kennedy during LBJ, we had really high marginal tax rates in this country. We didn't have the disparity in income. If you look at the simple, how much does the CEO of a company make compared to how much does the lowest worker in that company make? Three or 400 times? It, it was a fraction of that, it was a much more equal society in multiple ways. So I'm confident that this idea of low taxes, low government, everybody get out of the way. I mean, it just doesn't work. That is not the means for a successful society. If you look state by state, how people have done? Look, I mean, people are very mad at California who don't live in California, but California has a really high, we're the fifth biggest economy in the world. We have incredibly successful businesses. You know. So to me, the, the, this whole idea that cut taxes, cut, government cut taxes, cut government cut support, get rid of education, that can't help get rid of, you know, eee everything. I don't think that makes any sense and, and so it, it has never worked. That's not what the data says. But if you have an income stream of X dollars and you can either tax it at 50% or 25 people are like, I much prefer 25. That's much better. Exactly. Human nature comes into play one thing that maybe it's a symptom of the polarized times we're in. But business leaders are often remarkably silent on political issues with one because you get very attacked. Now it's quite transparent, you know, things go viral. I was speaking to Steve Baller the other day about his USA facts that he's trying to get out there to correct misinformation. I'd love to get your thoughts. Obviously, I know you've been in the political arena, but what is the role of business leaders in speaking up about these topics, climate change or otherwise? Well, let me say what I would like my role to be and how I perceive as a professional investor and professional business person, how, how I would like to and of course, I have my opinions just like the other 330 million Americans. But what I would like to do is have enough granular information that I can share accurately with elected officials and people in government so they can make better decisions. So if we, you know, I'm obviously focused on the energy transition and on climate. And I want, I know that people in Washington DC can't go to venture capital meetings on Sand Hill Road, but I can't but are facts. What drive decision making in Washington? Not always I take your point, but I want the people who are making decisions to know the facts and it's, it's, they can't get them on their own that they just 24 hours in the day, they have a full time job, they can't do it. I view what I would like to do is to be able to say this is what we're seeing. These are the actual numbers. You should know this is what solar costs, this is where it's going, these are where batteries are going. You're, you're looking at this technology for direct air capture. This is what we see in terms of the cost per ton of sequestration. This is what we see in terms of scalability. You can believe it or not, you can get your own experts. But we've looked at this seriously. We're putting, you know, we're investing basis on our research. That's what we see. You should, you know, it's interesting, we always talk about what the private sector can bring to the public sector, you know, efficiency, facts, getting things done. We rarely talk about what the public sector can bring to the private sector in terms of how you get things done. I'm curious even your time on the campaign trail, were there any lessons gleaned from that, that you've taken into the world of business? And you can see this very granularly this year, the people who are running corporations, particularly public corporations believe that their career success, their jobs, their pay and their integrity, very importantly is based on increasing earnings for their shareholders. And so any time they're telling you that there's something more important to them than increasing earnings for their shareholders. I would check my, you know, watch to see if they lifted it. They have a job to do with an integrity and responsibility to take seriously. Those are not people who should be setting the agenda for this country. They should be setting the facts, they should be implementing, they should be working within the framework that elected officials who are the embodiment of the people set. And so look, elected officials have a different responsibility, their job, their integrity, their success, their reputation involves getting re elected or elected in the first place, which means satisfying people that they're representing in a significant way. That's their job. And so I don't, I try not to mix up those two different things. And I think that any time you see someone in one of those spheres, talking about how they're really concerned about the other sphere. Decision making is different too, right? So different. And so I, I view it as it's gotta be the way the United States has traditionally worked is we're a democratic society, the will of the people rules, they set the rules, they should set the rules. That's our morality and integrity. And within that box business people work. So you call yourself an optimist. Let's let's drill down on that a little bit. Let's talk about the optimistic investor. Where are you putting, where are your biggest bets? Right now? My old friend and partner Katie and I Katie Hall and I started a multi strategy investment firm to invest into the energy transition in multiple strategies. So that includes venture and growth and includes real estate buying buildings and turning them to net zero. But you know, it involves public stocks, but it we have plans to do many strategies because we believe this transition, as I said, inevitably has to happen is happening very fast that it's a huge tailwind to investing so that there is a strong commercial argument. This is a place where people, professional investors with great experience can marry that to domain expertise, specific knowledge of these markets and get very good returns and also have great impact as a citizen, I suppose. Are you worried about the state of democracy right now? We obviously from my standpoint, we have someone who has a real chance to be president who has said, who tried to overturn the last election. You paid $10 million I think to try. And with the impeachment battle, I remember that I, who I think is, you know, who has been convicted of 34 felonies, who has made multiple statements about what he would do in terms of the law and in terms of future elections, if he's elected, it's a little hard to read between all the very confusing statements, but clearly somebody who, you know, it's not someone who loves elections, not someone who loves democracy and not someone who respects it. So am I worried about that? I think that that would be, you know, a big threat to democracy. Do I believe that the American people will get back their democracy if we ever lose it? Yes, I believe it's built into us in a very deep way. It is built into me in a very deep way and I'd be willing to go very far piece to try and make sure we secure it. But is there someone running for president who has said things that are profoundly undemocratic and has made threats to our democracy repeatedly and said, you know, talked about things who's going and then has lived up to it in the past. I think we all know that it's true. So that's scary. Is there anything else on your radar right now? You want to put on ours. So I would say this, I do think the technology is better than people understand in terms of climate, our ability to solve these problems is much better than people understand. It's also true that the news from the natural world which I follow obsessively is worse than people understand. And in some cases, far worse and far scarier than people understand. Adaptability is as much as fighting climate change. So I know this is a real race between what's going, the deterioration of the natural world that we all rely on and the incredible progress in the technological world. But if we win that race and you step back and think about where we're going to be as a hu as human beings, as Americans, we will be able to create a much better world than we've ever imagined. You know, in terms of health, in terms of education, in terms of equality, in terms of all the important parts about life, you're gonna have an ability given the other advances that we're making, which are incredible to really provide a way of living for the people in America and including people all over the world. That is really almost better than we can imagine. And that's why I'm so focused on trying to make sure that we have a sustainable natural world because we do depend on it. And if we don't, then all we're not going to have time to focus on this because we're going to live in a chaotic, dangerous, unhealthy and scary world living to 100 doesn't make much difference if you can't go outside and, and I'll give you 11 small example. I mean, one of the things that the UN projects is that on the course we are going, we will have 20 to 25 million climate refugees per year. Syria had 5 million refugees partly related to climate and that completely roiled Europe as they moved into different countries in Europe, 20 to 25 million refugees a year every year. That is something that is a profound threat to the security of our political systems around the world. So let's drill down a little on the actual technologies that you're investing in that you think are exciting right now. So let me say this, we are deploying a lot of existing technologies like wind and solar and evs and batteries that everybody knows about that are getting much better. But we all know that what people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of new technologies being developed, not only to see if they work, but to see if they work at a price that works for customers. And you know, that is a real difference. So for instance, one of the things that I find fascinating is for a long time, we've had what's called geothermal energy that's basically hot water under the earth. So if you think about old faithful and Yellowstone, the water comes up, it's hot, it's energy you can use it. You know, just the way you can use natural gas or wind or solar. What's changed is people are now using basically techniques from oil and gas to go down 5000 ft, not 500 ft, but 5000 ft. And they're able to get completely clean, baseload energy. So there's no question about when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine. It's always there. Baseload energy that is completely clean emits no CO2 and which is commercial so it can be done at a price that competes. Now, there's a real question about how big this can be, but this is one of 100 technologies where you go like, oh God breaking down plastic. I've seen a lot of those as well. There is there, I've seen techniques on plastics that are amazing. We know there's plastic pollution. We recycle only 6% of plastics, only 6% to 94% does not get recycled. So the question is gonna be, how are we, first of all going to pick it out, sort it and reuse it. There are amazing technologies going on in that involving all kinds of different, you know, skills and really incredible new machines. So as we see this, it's exciting to know that there's a machine that can look at this and pick out 10,000 different items. It's in humans can't do that. That's incredible. So let me clar you invest in. So you're not investing seed capital. First of all, you're, you're investing in these companies. Are you helping them to replicate its scale? Is that part of what we're doing? Multi strategy? So we do do seed, we do do venture and growth, we do do real estate. I mean, what, what we're trying to do is figure out strategies where basically we can be really profitable in decarbonization. We're not concessionary. We never, we're not asking people not to get good returns. We're not at all concessionary. In fact, we believe this transition is a tail wind that has to happen, doesn't mean every company will succeed. You still have to be a professional investor. You have to have domain expertise in this area, you have to marry the two and that's the structure and doing good doesn't mean you can't make a good return. If you're not getting a good return, you're not going to get a chance to do good for us. Thank you so much for having me.

JCPenney CEO Mark Rosen Says Fashion Is Core For The Company.

Inside JCPenney's Recipe For Retail Success

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photo provided by JCPenney

Iranian American immigrant Artemis Patrick’s background shaped her ideas around beauty, which now inform her decisions as Sephora’s North America CEO. Over the years, she’s watched beauty trends change through social media, and hopes to educate younger consumers on making the best choices for their health.

Iranian Immigrant to the C-Suite: How Sephora’s North American CEO Is Shaping the Beauty Industry

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photograph provided by Sephora.

Iranian American immigrant Artemis Patrick’s background shaped her ideas around beauty, which now inform her decisions as Sephora’s North America CEO.

Iranian Immigrant to C-Suite: How Sephora’s North American CEO Is Shaping the Beauty Industry

Isn't that funny? Everything is, I think back to when I was 1314 and going to the mall and I'm dropping my daughter off at the mall. And I remember a few years ago thinking is that ever going to happen again? And it is, and it's happening in, in, in a big way. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Mikal Avram and I'm Diane Brady listeners will be familiar with the Sephora brand, but they may not be familiar with you. So I want to start by actually asking you to tell us a little bit about you. I was born in Iran. So I immigrated to the US in 1979 when I was seven years old. And you know, at that time, I didn't actually speak any English. It was very difficult for my family and I, and then my mom went back to Iran and unfortunately, this was during the Iranian hostage crisis. So she got stuck there and my father was not able to take care of me. So I ended up moving into a group home and then grew up with foster parents since I was 10 years old. And so I really think that very much shaped who I am not just as a person but as a leader. Um, and especially if you think about, you know, the world of beauty and historically, um, how, you know, there was one definition of beauty, especially when I was growing up in the eighties and I certainly did not fit that mold. So, um, it has really, really guided, um how I think about beauty, how I think about um belonging. Uh and I think that that's always sort of been my north, my north star, obviously, Sephora is an incredibly strong brand. Um I have 12 and 14 year old girls, so I, I limit but I'm, I'm curious like, how would you characterize this moment in time in which you stepped into this role? What, what are the, you know, there's been so much uh very fast evolution in the retail space and the ecommerce space with tech over the last few years and different, you know, consumer trends that seem to be evolving so quickly. So how would you characterize where things are today for Sephora? Yeah, I mean, I have a 13 year old girl. So, so I feel you um you know, I would say what's, what's incredible about beauty is uh it's always had this, this tactile um feeling of, you know, connection and belonging and being able to try new things. I, I think the inherent love of beauty among every generation um across all ages has always been there, obviously, what has evolved is access and social media. And I do think this idea and understanding of, of specifically skin care. Uh I, I know that I probably did not take the best care of my skin um when I was younger and I see my daughter packing up her super group in her backpack and, you know, that's, that's exciting and, but that's because of, you know, tiktok and um other forms in youtube and other forms of social media. Um and, and the speed at which things come to light is, is just, you know, it's, it's mind boggling and I have been at before for 18 years. So I've seen different evolutions of this. Certainly, I remember when Instagram first launched and I remember contouring, it was just like I was thinking to myself, how many contour kits do people need? Right. And, and so we, we've seen it before. It, it's not new in that sense, but it is in terms of the speed and the democratization of it all and just the access to all the information around ingredients and a deep understanding of what people are putting on their skin, on their hair, on their body, sticking with the topic of, of kids shopping in Sephora. There has been some concern over what young girls are putting on their faces. Like, do they really need retinol? Do they really need some of the stronger uh, products or anti-aging stuff like that. What do you, what's Sephora's response to that? And what do you see as your responsibility for educating younger shoppers? Well, I believe we have a huge responsibility as well as our hundreds of brands to educate the consumer on what is right for, for their skin, regardless of their age. And where I think that we have a competitive advantage is our beauty advisors. We have 25,000, incredibly well trained, unbiased noncom commissioned uh beauty advisors. So it's actually been a really easy pivot for us to focus those educational moments of which we have many um specifically on skin care and skincare ingredients. So that is where we are seeing um you know, a lot of the chatter and the noise and making sure that they know, yes, you need, you know, at a certain age, you need to wash your face, you need sunscreen and you need some moisturizer. But no, you don't need retinol. Um and making sure that, that we share that information. Um you know, at the end of the day, there is only so much, you know, a sales person can do, we can educate and then beyond that, um it really is the responsibility of the consumer. But I feel that we are very well placed to at least be able to share our knowledge on that and make sure that they understand what, what they are buying, what kind of technology do you think has really moved the needle in the store to create a better shopping experience? One of the the core tenants of everything we always do from a tech perspective is that it has to enhance the consumer experience. So I'll give you an example of that is our proprietary skin scan where we do almost 100,000 scans a week, the 70% conversion rate. So what happens is the consumer can come in and we have this proprietary tool and it essentially looks at the scan and it will make a foundation match. Um At the same time, it also goes through a skin diagnostic and tells you whether your skin is oily or dry and makes product recommendations. So that is not something a consumer will do on their own. That is a conversation starter between our beauty advisor and the client and that to us is what is really exciting about technology. Um So that's how we really think about it. How do you enhance the consumer experience? How do you make it easier for our beauty advisors to have those conversations and create that really human connection? So it's digital for the sake of human the way I sort of think about it.

To celebrate his new book Mastering AI, Fortune AI editor Jeremy Kahn chats with Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell about the promises and perils of artificial intelligence. Kahn offers dramatic predictions of AI’s impact over the next decade, from reshaping our economy and the way we work, learn, and create to unknitting our social fabric, jeopardizing our democracy, and fundamentally altering the way we think.

Do you trust OpenAI? ‘No, and none of us should’

To celebrate his new book Mastering AI, Fortune AI editor Jeremy Kahn chats with editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell about the promises and perils of artificial intelligence.

To celebrate his new book Mastering AI, Fortune AI editor Jeremy Kahn chats with Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell about the promises and perils of artificial intelligence. 

From selling six of his own companies to serving as president of Tesla and COO of Lyft, Jon McNeill, now CEO of DVx Ventures, shares his journey as an entrepreneur and reveals the secrets to his success.

How a former Tesla and Lyft executive is trying to reinvent venture capital

Came from a uh a family without much means. Uh And so that meant that we had to buy our own clothes and shoes, uh Even early on. And so in, in first grade, second grade, I was hustling uh trying to earn money so I could buy clothes and shoes for school. And so I started a little lawn mowing business that grew into a big landscaping business. By the time I was in high school, I paid for my first car and I had employees that I had to pay and marketing. I had to do and billing I had to do. And I actually, I fell in love with business as a kid because it gave me independence. I kept that up. When I was in college. I worked at the trading Exchanges in Chicago. Started a few businesses in college. I fell deeper in love with business. I went to school in Chicago and was one of the first kids hired out of the big 10 to join Bain and company as a consultant and spent two years there. And then they were starting bain capital. They started just a few years before I got there. But they were really starting to ramp it up. So I spent a bunch of time with what is today being ventures and then was encouraged that I was an entrepreneur actually. And so I found a company to start and jumped out and started my first company and we started it literally from our kitchen table and it was a software business. We grew it to, to 40 million in a RR in 18 months. It was a crazy ride and we sold it to a public company. And then I did that five more times in a row. I guess I qualify as a serial entrepreneur. And uh then through a crazy series of events, met Elon Musk and um decided to join the be best practitioner of my craft on the planet uh as an entrepreneur, he's kind of unmatched. Um And so helped grow Tesla from 2 billion in revenue to or 20 billion in revenue and then helped take left public as coo and then jumped out to do something I've been planning on doing or planning for for years. And that is starting a platform to create companies. My granddad had a auto repair shop uh attached to his farming land uh in, in Iowa. And I spent summers there and uh and I learned to fix cars and I loved it actually and I loved it. I loved how tangible it was. Uh And so then as I started to build skills and business. I started to see all the opportunities especially for software in the automotive industry. And so a number of my companies have that be running through it. And I think it comes back to my grandpa's auto shop. So Elon had been talking with a, a dear friend of mine, Sheryl Sandberg about becoming uh president Tesla. And uh she called me one day and said, I'm not the right person for this, but I think you might be. So uh she introduced me to Elon, uh Elon and I uh immediately dove into a couple of challenges he was facing in manufacturing and then sales and as we started to get to know each other, both of us really enjoyed being around each other. I was certainly energized by him. And so I joined Tesla and it was about 1.8 billion in sales. And the biggest challenge was the demand challenge. Actually, they were learning how to produce cars at higher volume but didn't have nearly the demand that they needed to have. And so I dove in and went to stores uh so I could try to figure out what might be happening. I went to eight different stores took eight different test drives and nobody called me back. And so I called the head of uh sales ops. I said, can you tell me why I'm not being called back? I've used a different email addresses and I somehow have they caught up with me. And he said, he said, no, I can't see in the system why you wouldn't be called back. And I said, well, can you just run a report for me real fast? It tells me how many people we've done a test drive for that haven't been called back. And he said, sure, call me back in two hours. And he said, um, I can't believe this. Like, we've done 10,000 test drives in the last month and a half and 10,000 people haven't been called back. And I said, how many cars do you need to sell this quarter? And he said 12,000. And I said, I have a feeling why you think you have a demand problem. So let's shut off any new leads that people get until they call back all their test drives. And we did that within a few hours and sales went up. Uh, and this was before I even worked at Tesla. So I had to call Elon and say, hey, look, I may have overstepped my boundaries here. I don't even work for you yet, but here's what I found and here's what I did. And there was this long silence on the end of the phone, the long silence that Elon is kind of famous for, and I didn't know how to interpret it because I didn't know it very well yet. And after a long silence, he broke in and said, I think you're gonna fit in here just fine. I I didn't have any examples to draw on where you're taking a company from roughly 2 billion in revenue to 20 billion in revenue in 36 months. There wasn't any case studies for that. And so we all had to be super creative and scrappy uh which is what we did together as a team, but it was crazy times too. Uh especially as we got closer and closer to model three production. The balance sheet was super stressed. We were running out of cash and we had to get model three out to replenish the balance sheet and we were operating the company on less than a quarter of cash. It was a balance of absolute euphoria as you're growing a company, but absolute stress too as, as things are highly pressurized, we would fit in the of cars together a lot because he had a, an approach that was kind of a Vulcan mind meld he wanted in his words, if we had the same inputs, he wanted the same decision to come out of both of us. We would riff on business ideas. And uh and so I started to get a little jealous because he was able to go do things like Neuralink and the boring company and said to him, hey, like I'd like to scratch the stitch too. And he said, what do you have in mind? And I said, well, there's a lot of things we could do to change the car business from an episodic sale. We sell to a customer once every four or 5 to 6 years, we could turn that into a recurring run rate or revenue business. So an A RR business and he said, how would you do that? And I said, well, I'd sell insurance embedded in the car. I'd sell infotainment subscriptions, uh uh autonomy subscriptions, et cetera. So he gave me the chance to be an entrepreneur inside of Tesla. We grew a pretty significant insurance business, a pretty significant subscription business in infotainment and autonomy as well. I learned a few things. One is setting really high bars and high goals. And Elon is famous for his super ambitious goals for people and then really holding folks accountable to those on a weekly basis, but also giving them the tools to be successful. So it wasn't just throwing people to the wolves, it was really supporting them. I think what I also learned was all the stuff I learned about putting scaffolding in companies that was helpful to growth, worked at scale. And so that gave me the confidence then to go help other companies at scale. After Tesla, I joined largely to help to be a part of the team would build the muscle to get them public. And it was an exciting process to go through for sure what all companies have to do is really internally start to build the kinds of processes and scaffolding that help them with certainty, make their quarters. Once you're public, it's very different from being private. There's no gimmes, no mulligans if you miss, uh, your stock value is gonna be decimated. So you have to be prepared not to miss. And that's most of the work in terms of getting a company ready to be public. And that can get down as simple as kind of the weekly sessions you're having on demand and supply balance to make sure that you're hitting your forecasts and then financial planning to make sure that you're getting a forecast is hittable. So all of those things go together to be able to, to, to prove to a company internally that it can win and it's ready to be public. I think autonomy is going to play out really in, in two ways. One is uh in Robo Taxi, but there has been this view that there's this panacea. If uh if you replace the driver with a with a computer, the cost change uh and the cost they change for the better and therefore profitability for people like Uber and Lyft will go up for companies like Uber and Lyft will increase. And the fact of the matter is is that the driver today brings the car, so the network doesn't pay for the car, the driver cleans the car, the driver maintains the car, the driver fuels the car, that's all going to be the responsibility of somebody. And So even though there's this panacea of, hey, the driver's cost drops out of the P and L and therefore the profitability soars. I think it's a panacea that gets replaced with fleet cost that somebody has to bear. And so I think there's an, there is a path in robo taxi. Uh but it may be not as attractive as it seemed at the beginning in parallel to that, we're kind of at a moment where cars of today may be compared to like flip phones. And so I think uh personal autonomous vehicles are every bit as interesting as uh as the Robo taxi story. But we've got to get to uh autonomous vehicles first and that's proved to be a, a climb with a lot of false summits in the US. We have roughly 50,000 traffic fatalities a year and 95% of those are caused by human error. So the whole goal of autonomy is eliminating those fatalities. It's 50,000 families that don't go through a tragedy, but it turns out our, our roads are some of the safest in the world. So if you expand out the traffic fatality count globally, it's 1.5 million people die annually in traffic accidents that are human, largely human cause. And so the reason to do autonomy is just that it's to eliminate fatalities. Number one, number two, it's to give mobility to people that don't have mobility options. Today, I have a friend who's blind. Uh And when we introduced uh autonomy at Tesla, he called me immediately and said, when am I going to be able to take my first drive by myself? When am I going to be able to drive a car? And that stuck with me? Uh And so he's been a motivation for my involvement in autonomy because there will be people that today don't have the mobility option to drive a car by themselves. He'll be able to hop in a car and go where he wants for the first time in his life. Safety has got to come first. And so what Cruz has done is really expand a safety first culture. There were a lot of voices within Cruz that were demanding safety be the primary consideration or expansion and growth. And we totally agree with that at GM. So we've taken the best of GM resources to help crews pivot that culture to be safety first because when you're doing breakthrough technology like this, it's important to make advancements. But you've absolutely got to do that with a framework that says we're going to keep people safe as we do this. The safety team has a seat at the senior management table and they've got, they've got a veto right on what gets released and what doesn't get released. And so that safety capability and talent has been elevated to the highest level of care. There's this concept in manufacturing that, that's now common it was taught to us by the Japanese. And that is that any individual worker, if they see something going wrong can stop the production line. Where's the big deal? Uh When you stop the production line at a car factory, you're talking about millions of dollars an hour uh uh results in that stoppage. So it's a big deal to hand that capability uh or that agency to a worker. And so that's at the heart of the cultural change. Uh at cruise is, is enabling people to pull the cord and essentially stop the line. I've got a lot of confidence in the cruise team. They're returning to the mission, they're returning to the roads with autonomous driving because they've got more data and really more experience than anyone else in the autonomy space now with the safety first mentality and framework. And I think it's going to be the best of both worlds in terms of a very bright future for the cruise team. DVX ventures is, is a little bit different. We're a company creation platform and we were formed because I had this vision of being able to systematically create companies from scratch. Like I'd done six times in a row before I'd done joined Tesla. So during that journey of starting and scaling and then getting liquidity on six companies. I slur it right down like how you take a company from zero to a million in sales, a million to 10 million, etc and, uh, and develop these playbooks. And so DVX really was burst out of those playbooks to say, uh, could we start companies from scratch, scale them and really have impact on the economy. Technology is we start with three things have to be true. First is you got to have a big market that's provable. The second is you have to have significant profit pools that makes it worth your while. And the third is we've got to have a moat or an angle that we think is super unique to us so that we can win. And if we've got those three, uh we're essentially an idea, generation factors. And when those ideas pop, then we start to put product out in the market and start to experiment with a feedback loop from the market really quickly. Uh and those that gain traction, then we eventually turn into companies uh and then hire teams and scale them. We describe ourselves as as venture capital 2.0 in the sense that we are not investors, we are hands on operators. Uh And so, uh when we launch a company, one of the partners is the first CEO. And so the companies I launch, I'm the first ce these companies, we're that hands on and then we build the team around us and eventually step out as CEO. And so we're able to spot what good product looks like, what good markets look like, what good people look like. What good tech looks like. We know that because we've been operators and we can help build that into the company from the very start. So what we try to do is really de risk an idea and get a company started and then can hand the baton to a really experienced entrepreneur or even an entrepreneur with potential that can grow that company into something really special. So there are two ways that uh that V CS make money. One is for the fees that they charge for the amount of dollars they have under management. And the second is, is the upside in the company. And what's evolved over the past five or 10 years is VC motivation has become more and more fee oriented in the sense that they want to raise more and more capital to generate fees. The problem is, is that, that's a kind of a risk free model. And at the core of venture, we want to take a risk, we want to take the appropriate risk. And so we feel like DVX, like uh there's a, there's an evolving trend towards uh putting our money where our mouth is and we call this VC 2.0. And so we don't charge our investors fees. We take like them a share of the upside. And so we are completely aligned with them uh in that the only way we make money is if they make money. And I think we're going to see more and more of that in the VC market as investors get wise to the need to have a, an investing partner who takes appropriate risk and is compensated by succeeding rather than merely collecting fees, I think. Well, there are, there are more than 1000 unicorns that are uh that are waiting to get public, but there are it, it today's pace, 30 to 50 companies to get public. And so that means that a year. So that means that uh out of those 1000 plus uni unicorns, uh a lot of those aren't going to get public or get bought. Uh And so the incentives have to be aligned in the future so that uh the venture investors are taking the same risk really as their, as their investors and are getting paid for successful outcomes versus getting paid for evaluation. We've got a cybersecurity company that has really innovative technology, unique technology where we can see in this inside the stack of a company of a company's software and that allows us to spot vulnerabilities for them. We score those vulnerabilities and hand them back a daily health scorecard about how they're doing with their cyber risk. And that company is our fastest growing company. It's hit the ground running and it is taken off. We've got a clean tech company where we asked ourselves the question, could we save 40 percent of the energy costs of buildings in the US and developed a really super simple firmware solution that stays on top of thermostats that really provides technology that helps that building save 40 percent of its energy cost. A company called Kirby that, that brings software to dealers. So dealers can do mobile service so any dealer can look like Tesla in the sense that they can come fix your car at your home, at your office, uh like uh like magic E and then disappear after your car is fixed. So you didn't have to take your car anywhere to get it fixed. The biggest impact on my experience in my career in leadership has been to have mentors. It is an unfair advantage and I didn't realize this when it was happening at the time. But I had a mentor in my first job uh in high school. I had a mentor in my uh in my first job out of college and a mentor in my first company. All of those mentors made me better. Uh And then I learned like to grab mentors both vertically and horizontally vertically. People that have uh that have seen the movie before they're ahead of you on the journey, maybe by 5, 1015 years. Uh and then horizontal member uh mentors uh fellow CEO S fellow leaders in your uh in your kind of market and maybe same age range and experience where you can bounce things off of each other. Uh You may not be able to bounce off of your colleagues, your peers, your boss. And for me, the biggest leadership hack is having mentors. The worst piece of advice I've gotten is to build a company for an outcome. In other words, build a company for a big valuation. What you need to do instead is build a great product that people love and the company will follow. Uh and you'll have a great big company at the end of the day. But if you end up pursuing the wrong goal first, which is just get big, you tend to cut corners on the product and the company doesn't tend to last. And so I think the worst piece of advice I've got is, is just build big. Uh, I'd rather build great.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski knew GenAI was going to be a big deal, so he rushed to get on Sam Altman’s calendar when OpenAI began getting some recognition. Now, according to Siemiatkowski, the companies have a productive partnership—and even share a Slack channel.

Klarna CEO on how OpenAI partnership has allowed the company to stay ahead of the curve

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photograph provided by Klarna.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski knew GenAI was going to be a big deal, so he rushed to get on Sam Altman’s calendar when OpenAI began getting some recognition. 

Klarna CEO on how OpenAI partnership has allowed the company to stay ahead of the curve


At plan. Now, we were like, um as many other, I think entrepreneurs and founders and founder led companies, you know, when you start the business, you're all about building a product. But then you start thinking about how do you organize yourself and all that. And then you look around and you read these books, like management books, like good to great or you know, all these different books, you're like, what, what do we do from that? And then you read in the newspaper, it says Google just launched 20% of creative time, which used to be big thing, you know, back in the days and like, we have to do 20% of created time for everyone and we did that and nothing happened and, you know, we put Coca Cola in the rooms free Coca Cola, ping pong tables like, and, and you know, lego in the conference rooms like we did it all right. And we've been trying and testing all of the things that like you read in the press, like you're reading too many management, I think. Exactly that was my conclusion as well. Eventually. But it took some time to reach that, you know, reach that realization. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Mi Avram and I'm Diane Brady. When I think about clarinet, I can't, I'm hard pressed to think of a bigger fan of generative A I to the point where you actually put out a press release, I think in your first month talking about how, um you know, I think it was the equivalent of 700 full time agents through chat GP T talk about how transformative that has been for you. I mean, I think it's amazing. I first of all, I would like to say something, which is that I'm actually one of the people who are kind of skeptical about new technologies. And like people have been asking me about crypto obviously for a lot of years. And I always said like if I can't convince my mom to use it, I don't understand the value of it. And so like I did, I never got my mom to understand why she would have a Bitcoin and I still haven't convinced her but she does use. But there you go. And, and so I think when Jen A I came out, it was very clear from day one that this actually has practical application, we can use it, but it's difficult to get it to practical application because it's a new technology, you have to figure it out. And as much as you will see a lot of noise currently about people doing press releases about this and that product launches, few things we have seen have actually come to like serious uh you know, results that have business impact. And so when we achieve that with uh the customer service experience, where actually the A I chat has a similar and many times higher customer satisfaction than people interacting with human agents. We felt that that was quite an interesting data point and we wanted to share that because at the same point of time, we feel a little bit that society is not necessarily and politicians are not necessarily taking enough consideration to the implications that will have on jobs, which is why obviously sharing that 700 number, we knew it was somewhat controversial and then we will create some like people with, you know, open, you know, they would, you know, react to it. But at the same point of time, we said, look in, in the short term, we hire big uh customer service companies, they have hundreds of thousands of employees. They're just going to, when we have less errands, they're going to send errands as well. These people will still have jobs. But in the longer term, in the few coming years, this will have severe and you know, big implications for society. And we think it's time to think about that more proactively. We understand you uh allowed Sam Altman from open A I um to basically use Klarna like an A I sandbox. Um So I'm just curious to hear how that relationship started. Obviously, we're seeing open A I spark some really interesting partnerships. This is definitely one of them. So tell us about it when I tried it myself first in November a little bit more than a year ago. Now, I was like, wow, this was like a Google experience back 20 years ago when I tried Google first time. But even better, I would say to some degree and like, it became very obvious to me that Sam and open A, I would be a company that would be very hard to reach very soon and a great relationship. So I was like, I better move off before it's too late. So I made sure to get the, yeah, exactly. Get on the calendar. I took a trip to San Francisco basically only to see Sam and I managed to still, it was kind of funny because I think initially the meeting was two hours and by the time I arrived it was only 30 minutes. So it was kind of a good impression of like how fast open A I's calendar were shrinking due to the interest in the company. But I think the, the point we had a meeting and I said, look, I want to be a great partner and I know, you know, afterwards I heard a little bit they were like, really a European bank. Are they going to be one of our most like forward leaning partners. But since then we created joint slack channel and we've had like a lot of good interactions and like just testing and you know, saying we want to try that, we want to try that and provide a lot of like good meaningful feedback to them about how the API S work and what could be working better. And I think it's, it's helped establish us as a, as a good partner of theirs. There's such a mixing maturity of application and utilization of A I cross companies. You'll have everything from people like are very much leaning in to like people that are still like, oh this, I'm not sure how this is going to work. And is it, what about data? What about hallucinations? What about this and that? But for the people leaning in, there's a capacity issue, like there's a clear capacity issue where like there's not enough electricity, there's not a lot of, you know, uh there's not a lot of processing power. And so like leaning in and making sure to be a customer that's actually, you know, we just want to buy and we want to make sure we're easy to work with actually benefits us in that case because it becomes easier to get, you know, access to the processing power that we need. And so it's been very helpful for us since I think it just allows us to stay slightly ahead of the curve. Uh which is what we're trying to do. You're the first person I know who's used the Toyota way applied to something that's not manufacturing. I think of tape on the floor and very kind of distinct modular management practices to apply it to the financial services sector is really interesting. Well, and I think it's very fun that you say that because I, I'm not going to say which company this was, but I talked to one of the largest banks in the world and their chairman is from the manufacturing industry and he was quite disappointed that the bank that he was a chairman of wasn't like more applying these practices. I think to some degree, the thing with banking, right? Which is interesting. And I think there was a research that showed that like bank is banking is the only industry in the last 150 years that basically has zero productivity gains in the last 150 years, right? Like as opposed to manufacturing a lot of huge price. And I think the reason for that is because we regulated banks so much, there's actually a very limited competition to be fair. Like once you reach that size, the competition is actually quite limited. And so as a consequence, the excess wealth that is created has been distributed to the employees of the banks and the shareholders, right? Which is why we also used to have these tremendously high compensation. Now after 2007, it's come down a little bit but, and so there hasn't been that strong incentive and as much as officially banks are so well regulated with policies and instructions, like in a lot of banks, those compliance parts live a parallel life to reality. Um, which is also why we're still seeing things happening and things blowing up now and then. Um, so I think that like really applying them in practice is, is actually an interesting challenge and, and, and has a lot of opportunity in itself.

Murati sat down with editor-at-large Michal Lev-Ram at a Fortune MPW dinner in San Francisco to discuss the Apple partnership, new CFO Sarah Friar, customer trust and safety, how she found her love for AI, and more.

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati responds to Elon Musk calling Apple partnership ‘creepy spyware’

Murati sat down with editor-at-large Michal Lev-Ram at a Fortune MPW dinner in San Francisco to discuss the Apple partnership, and more.

Mira, thank you for being here with us. I know you must be a little bit busy. Um So I have like a gazillion questions for Mira, but we have 20 minutes. So I just wanna set everybody's expectations. We're going to stick to a few topics including um some uh recent news and some areas that Mira oversees as, as CTO. Um And hopefully we can dive into some of those. Um I think my, my first question for you actually is just given how insanely busy and given the barrage of news that, you know, some good, some bad. Um You joined around six years ago, I think um at that time, it was a very different organization. You were relatively speaking, kind of, you know, under the uh off the radar. Um Do you ever miss those days of being able to be head down and doing the work? I mean, we're still very much heads down doing the work. It's just that the work has evolved. Uh And it's not just about the research is also now that, you know, research has progressed so far, it's also about figuring out how do we bring this into the world in a way that's helpful and safe. Um So the mission remains the same, but we made a lot of progress on research and the work has extended. Um And yes, there is a lot of public attention on it as well. Um, which can feel unusual when you're working on technology and building products. Um But, you know, it's also very much necessary given the importance of what we're doing and is good. OK. Um Let's go back even further. Um For those who don't know your trajectory, um give us kind of the, the, the, the highlights I know you grew up in Albania at a time when even uh decent access to the internet wasn't a given. How did your interest in A I start? And what do we need to know about? What led you to your current role? I've always been interested in math and physics. And so my, my background uh is very much math heavy. And uh I went on to study engineering work in aerospace and then in automotive at Tesla. And that sort of, that's where I started to get more and more interested in applications of A I in the real world through self-driving cars. Um And then I went on to apply A I and computer vision and um um applications of virtual reality and augmented reality sort of trying to understand how do you create a new interface where you interact with information in a more natural way more intuitive. Um And that's, that's sort of where I was pushing the applications of A I in the real world in different domains. Um And then, you know, thought about how do I, how do I learn a lot about A I? And um at the time I was considering, you know, um applications of A I in different domains and thought ultimately what I wanted to do the most was learn about general artificial intelligence and really diving deep into research. Um And then from there understanding what, what we could do with it in the real world. Um And I was really attracted to open mission, uh which is, you know, at the time opening, I was a nonprofit and now we're a cap profit, but the mission is still the same. Uh If the company B and OK, um I wanna get into some of the, the latest news and again, there's, there's a lot. Um but um I know Maram mentioned Sarah Fryar. Um you hired on just yesterday, the company announced that you have a new um chief product officer and um CFO. And um I think probably a lot of the women in this room are familiar with Sarah. Um She is a seasoned uh public company executive, both, you know, former CEO and CFO. And I feel like it's kind of like when you get married and the next day someone asks you, when are you gonna have kids? Uh this is like you hire a seasoned publicly public company executive. And the next day people ask you, does it, what should we be reading into this as an IP O in the, in the midst, what, how should we be uh deciphering these hires? What does it mean for the company? What it really means is that we're, you know, in this next phase of the company where we're serving hundreds millions of users and developers and companies out there. And, you know, we need to have the most competent and best executives, helping us to grow in this next phase of the company. And we're very excited about Sarah and Kevin and the skills and uh the leadership they bring into the company. OK. Um I had a feeling you wouldn't say anything about the IP O. Um So I want to talk about um the news with Apple. Um I'm guessing everybody saw this or you wouldn't live in this area. Um um But so I help us like unpack a little bit. Um you know, from a technology perspective, just how differentiated and significant this is. Um I know Apple and this is Apple, not open is, but Apple referred to it as the most advanced security architecture ever deployed for cloud A I compute at scale. Um First of all, do you, do you agree with that for this integration um with Apple Intelligence and again, just help us understand what's going on behind the scenes that theoretically makes it so private and secure. Um Well, so the partnership with Apple is we're super excited about it because it's such a great opportunity for us to bring our technology to as many people out there as possible in a very seamless way where, you know, they don't have to switch devices, they can interact with, you know, the technology comes to you in the best way possible and safest way possible. Um And the partnership with Apple is very aligned, we care very deeply about privacy and safety of our products. Um and how we develop the technology and how we ultimately deploy it. So that's very much um we're very much in alignment and it's, it's going to push us forward in a better direction. Um So Apple obviously is, you know, has been known for uh taking a privacy and, and, you know, secure approach um to roll out. Do you think that for people who have anxiety about interacting with gen A I products, not just chat GP T, do you think that this kind of helps uh uh you know, push in that general direction of more trust? Ultimately, we have to do a lot to build um trust around A I in general, right? There are so many aspects to it. Um And I think this partnership is uh hopefully, you know, something that, that moves the needle in the right direction as we bring A I into so many products and different integrations. And um specifically with our partnership, you know, people can log into charge GP T or through their Apple account. And we have, um, you know, the, the product policies that apply to either Cha GP T or Apple. Um But, you know, we both strongly believe in privacy and safety of the products. Um We will not be logging information through the um Apple accounts. Um But you know, when people log in on CHA GP T, then we will be, we will be, and, and, and you know, they have not specifically opted out from us being able to uh look at the data. Then in that case, I in in those cases, we will um we will be looking at the data and when people have specifically opted out, then we will not be looking at the data more broadly. We do not train on uh any customer data in general um or you know, other or, or data where people have, have specifically opted out. And by the way, does, on that note, the fact that the models can't train on the da user data um of of Apple os users. Um I mean is that a downside here uh to pushing forward the ability for these models to keep training and that's a lot of data. Um I'm look the the reality is that we have to do the right thing for the users. And it's very important that people are trusting the technologies and the products in which they're deployed. And it's important for people to have control over their data, how it's used and very, very important for them to understand how it's used and where it's used. Um So that comes first and that's a priority regardless of the impact that it has in how, how much, how much it drives the technology forward or, and all. So you're gonna have to forgive me because I'm gonna quote Elon Musk. Um I'm sorry, but uh but he is one person that has, is, is not uh in agreement with this being a model for privacy and security. He called the integration creepy spyware. What's your response to that? Huh. Don't care. That's, that's his opinion. I, I mean, I'm not, yeah, I uh obviously, I don't think so. We don't think so. Uh And we care deeply about the privacy of our users and about the safety of our products and how we're developing and deploy this technology. Um Our track record in deploying the technology safely is very strong. We've done that with G BT 34. We're doing the same thing with 40, right now, and we're trying to be as transparent as possible with the public and communicate how we're making decisions with a preparedness framework that shares how we think about frontier models and our approach to safety there. Um And we will continue to be transparent through the preparedness framework through things like the spec where I don't think anyone else has such a developed and transparent framework for what happens with model behavior. Um It's, you know, from the high level rules all the way to very technical decisions and how complex they are. Uh We're sharing that with, with the public and we're providing an opportunity for people to provide input. And we're also working on um a lot of experimental ways to gather input from non users as well. Um I think these are the important things, the work is not done, we have a lot more to do here. Um And not just opening eye, I think the whole industry in sort of explaining what's going on with the technology, um creating more participation, more agency. But we have to start with actually explaining because the biggest risk is that stakeholders um misunderstand the technology. So in the, in the midst of all of um these developments and you know, current partnerships um that, that you guys are striking, um you are also currently training a new model, a new A I model which is expected to bring the company closer to A G I. And I know you spend a great deal of time thinking about this. Um And, and also thinking through worst case scenarios, best case scenarios, like I'm curious, um you know, and I think probably everybody in this room is very curious about what that future looks like. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you um think about it. Um how you scenario plan for it and what's like the the the mirror case scenario like what's the ideal view of this future in, in your view? Um So my framework for thinking about the progress that we're making uh and where this technology is going is that it's definitely going to be incredibly transformative technology. Um And it requires a lot of work, not just from the companies that are developing and deploying these technologies, but also from uh other stakeholders like civil society, media, um governments regulators, the general public people in every domain. You know, we, we have to create some sort of shared responsibility around the general preparedness for bringing this technology into the, into the world. But in order to have shared responsibility, we need to understand it and we need to make it very accessible. Um And so we've been focusing on this, this last two parts, making it accessible. Um engaging with people educating with educating various stakeholders on what what the technology means, what it's capable of. Uh The, the most recent thing we did was the release with the release of GB D 40 which is our only model. Um We made it accessible to everyone for free. And you know, I I don't think I don't think there is um enough emphasis on, on how unique that is for the stage where the technology is today in the sense that, you know, inside the labs, we have these capable models and, you know, they're not that far ahead from what the public has access to for free. And that's a completely different trajectory for bringing technology into the world that what we've seen historically. And it's a great opportunity because it brings people along. It gives them uh intuitive sense for the capabilities and risks and allows people to prepare for the advent of this, of, of bringing advanced A I into the world. And obviously, the opportunities are huge. Now, it's, it's normal that we talk a lot about the risks uh because they're so important. Uh But also we wouldn't do this if we didn't believe that the opportunities here are huge. I personally think that there are incredible. Um There is just this incredible promise with advanced A I and health care and education. We're just kind of touching on some of these capabilities and opportunities with personalized tutors like from Khan Academy. But you can imagine that, you know, anyone in the world, in the most remote areas, they would have access to custom tutoring that is, you know, personalized to the way they think to their um cultural background, to their interests. And that's just amazing. Like we normally don't really think about how we learn or how we think until, you know, 10 years of education or so on. And it's just such a missed opportunity. And I really do believe that if you can push human knowledge forward, you can push society and civilization forward. Um And I mean, there's so many opportunities in health care, um, thinking about solutions in climate change. There's a long list of things that we haven't tackled. And I think, uh bringing this advanced A I systems in the world will help us a lot. Um And obviously, you know, there's, there are always risks whenever you have something so powerful, you have to deal with, with the downsides with the misuse. Um And if you think about the world around us, you know, it's all engineering and engineering carries risks and we have learned to, you know, build systems and build um build trust and uh to figure out how to, how to make engineering safe around us, you know, the buildings, the roads, the bridges, everything. Um And so this is quite similar where we have to build all this infrastructure that we trust and makes the deployment of these technologies safe and useful. Um And it's actually very congruent with business needs because people want products that they can trust and that are safe. So, and I wanna ask you one more question just on the safety side, um this is moving so fast, faster than bridge building and, you know, uh real life infrastructure. Um I know you oversee safety, the safety teams. Um and one of the things that uh when you were on our cover last year, we talked about was your belief that the unique structure at open A I provides the necessary guardrails to make sure that you have safety in mind. Obviously, there's been a lot of scrutiny, there was a lot of upheaval late last year. It's hard to remember that you were interim CEO for uh for a little while there. Um because so much had has happened, tell us uh why and how uh you think that you believe that the right guard rails, the right structure on the safety side is still in place. Um I assume you believe that or you wouldn't be there at this point. Well, so uh I, I think you're referring to the board structure, right? OK. Um So the way that opening I was set up was, you know, the question has always been what is the best administrative structure, the best incentive structure, alignment and design? So the company can fulfill its mission in the best possible way. And there have been a couple of iterations, you know, as, as we, as we work towards the mission and we learn more. It is a process of discovery. I mean, we're literally in the pursuit of discovery, we're doing research and with that, you have to kind of learn and adjust and make changes. So there was the initial change from nonprofit to cap profit um in order, you know, to actually be able to fund the supercomputers and hire talent while, you know, putting the mission first. And so that is the goal always to put the mission first. Um But as we discovered in November, you know, with a nonprofit board structure that we had, it doesn't put um the, the non profit board structure didn't have accountability to anyone but themselves. Um And we're building and deploying the technology that will affect everyone. So, ideally, there would be, you know, some sort of accountability on, on, on the board as well. And uh our, our current board uh which is very ex experience in nonprofit and uh larger companies. They are doing a lot of thinking on the governance structure and what is the best way that you can balance the incentives and put the mission first while having a lot of accountability? Ok. Well, as I said, we will not get to uh uh you know, a tiny fraction even of the questions I'd love to ask you, but I really, really appreciate you taking time um and, and sitting here and just being so thoughtful. Um There's so much interest in what you guys are doing and we appreciate you coming here and talking to us and thank you so much with that. We'll let everybody eat. Um Thank you so much. Thank you, Mia.

CEO Robin Vince says investments in technology and culture are key for the 240-year-old bank.

How BNY, founded by Alexander Hamilton, became a $50 trillion bank for other banks

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photograph provided by BNY.

We're surrounded by documents of your history that highlight some of the key points of that 240 years and including Alexander Hamilton's ledger right over there. It's an impressive display. That was his account. We have President Washington's account for those two years when this was in fact the capital of the United States. We have Warrant number one, which is particularly fun. They call it the origin story of the $35 trillion worth of national debt today. Welcome to leadership next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm Mia Well, we've been part of the fabric of the United States and actually the world's financial system for a lot of our time, we lent the first money to the new nation to help uh the nation get going. And so that's where we started. We've been involved in helping to enable infrastructure of various kinds, New York City subways, Erie Canal all over the course of us history. And then when we went global and we've been in countries around the world for 50 60 70 years. Uh in some cases serving clients around the world for over 100 years, 40% of our revenues come from outside the US. We now view our business as serving our clients by managing money, moving money and keeping it safe. And we provide a whole range of financial services to clients under those headings. But it's kind of like plumbing. Right. I mean, there's no, there's no corner uh, Bank of New York Mellon. You know, I, I see JP Morgan. I see city, I don't see Bank of New York Mellon on my corner. We're not a retail bank if that's what you mean by corner, but we're really ever present in the financial system. We power platforms for our clients that really support the pensions of the world, the savers of the world, the investors of the world all through the financial system. And so we have $50 trillion or thereabouts of assets under custody and administration. We touch about 20% of all investable assets in the world. So you may not see us on the corner front, but we are probably part of your financial life. How do you think about culture and what is the culture of bank, New York people often ask me, uh you know, what is your focus on strategy? How do you think about the importance of it? And actually my answer to that is to sort of borrow the quote from, from, from another culture, really does eat strategy for breakfast. And I'll add to that by saying and execution, eat strategy for lunch. Because without people and without the right alignment and without the right sense of purpose around what we're doing and without a sense of we're really trying to nurture a learning environment and environment which is really focused on being high performing, no company can succeed. And that's one of the things that I've really loved about Bny Mellon, we have a culture that's incredibly client centric and that holds the firm also in high regard. People cherish our history. We've got this 240 years of having really powered financial markets and people take a lot of pride in that. It's people coming here wanting to be part of the financial system, part of improving things, helping make things work better for individuals and companies all around the world. And there's a lot of culture in that. So with a footprint that large um Bank of New York, Maryland has to be central to the safety and soundness of our financial system. Um Resilience has been a big theme for companies over the course of the last few years. We've seen lots of ups and downs uh geopolitical threats that trans can translate into cyber threats. Um We've had financial uh uh uneasiness. How do you, your job is to make sure that the financial system survives through all of that. How do you do it? Well, you said the most important word Alan, which is resilience. We view resilience as a commercial attribute for our company. But it really is also table stakes for a large modern day participant in capital markets. And we had plenty of lessons of that last year when we look back to 2023 the ups and downs in some of the smaller and medium sized banks in the United States that occurred some of the ups and downs and expectations for interest rates. We had geopolitical events that either started or continuing. So there are plenty of things going on in the world and you only get to be 240 years old. If you think about things, what lies around the corner really being prepared and recognizing that resilience really matters? Yeah. So can we talk a little bit about cybersecurity because obviously that's part of the geopolitical threat. Uh uh Russia, China, Iran, all sources of cyber threats. Um New technology is accelerating the possibility of those threats. I hear people talking about quantum, the day quantum comes there will be a quantum leap in cyber threats. Uh How do you keep up with the rapid escalation of the threats? Well, cyber is an incredibly important topic uh for any large company, any government, by the way, for individuals as well, talk a lot about fishing and smashing these things are their own version of a cyber online threat. And so everybody needs to pay close attention to making sure that they're well protected. Now, for our part as a company, of course, we spend a lot of money, devote a lot of attention to making sure that we are being prepared. And we're thinking about what lies ahead in defending against the various different threats that come along. We're also focused on helping our clients to do those things because we have the benefit of a scale that allows our clients to be able to rely on us for some of those things. And they find a lot of comfort in the fact that we are trying to think steps ahead on the board for that.

From 60-year old Coach bags to Delta’s first passenger plane, take a trip down memory lane at some of corporate America’s most well-known brands.

Take a tour of some of businesses' biggest archives

In the archive, we have over 25,000 items. This includes all the original catalogs, all the handbags, all the ready to wear pieces, anything that has a coach stamp on it comes through the archives. Behind me is Delta's first passenger service. Airplane carried five people had wicker seats and was not pressurized. Think about how much laundry has changed over the past 200 years, you know, doing laundry in a tub with bars of soap to then using early powders and flakes and you know, the beginning appliances to then moving to liquids to then moving to pods, still similar chores, but better technologies. And we want to make sure that we capture that evolution in the archives. A lot of the larger companies, particularly those with long histories have both archives and museums and that is to inspire employees to make them feel like they belong to something bigger to themselves. And it's also a way to guide the C SUITE when they're having to do decision making. And that can include things like how was a crisis handled a decade ago. It serves also innovation. So whether you're a designer, a coach or somebody trying to find a new twist on shaving cream at PNG. And so it's a mix of both and that's why companies invest money and hire actually real historians with masters and doctorates in history. Delta has both a museum that's open to the public and is actually a very popular tourist attraction in Atlanta as well as archives. It has things like press releases, minutes from board meetings, presentations from strategy sessions, etcetera, etcetera that are important for the corporate history aspect of it. As the manager of the archives, I take care of Delta Airlines corporate archives that they have been collecting um since the 19 fifties. This is actually a piece of glassware. This is from Delta's first alcoholic beverage service. So this would have held champagne in the late fifties. Delta started, they called Royal Beverage Service and this is such a fun menu. Delta started as a crop dusting company actually in Macon, Georgia, which a lot of people don't realize in 1925 quickly moved to Monroe Louisiana and the name Delta was actually coined by Catherine Fitzgerald. She was known as Miss Fits. So she was the longtime assistant to the principal founder of Delta Ce Woolman. Delta started passenger service in 1929 then this kind of airplane. Um we actually have one, a similar one in the museum behind me is the travel air and it was Delta's first passenger service. Airplane carried five people had wicker seats and was not pressurized. I'm Kelly Moore, executive Director of the Delta Flight Museum here in Atlanta, Georgia. In my opinion, the most interesting piece is Spirit of Delta A 767 aircraft ship 102 that was purchased by employees, friends and members of the community and donated to Delta. She was dedicated on December 15th, 1982 and she flew for 30 years and we are in the first-class cabin which doesn't look anything like the first-class cabins of today. She has IFE that is on a screen mounted to the front of the cabin. We no longer use overhead projectors. One of my favorite things about uh, this airplane that you don't see anymore are the telephones and I can remember seeing people use them. You would slide your credit card and I can't remember what it was per minute, but it was some crazy amount per minute. So behind me, we have then and nail. We have the first class seats from the 19 sixties conveyor 880. You can see the bucket seats from the sixties and then behind me on this side, on my left is the life flat seats of today on the A 350. I prefer the life flat. This is my absolute favorite Delta uniform. It's dubbed the Huntsman 1969 to 70 summer uniform. You can see it comes with its own smock, its own belt, its own hat coach was founded in 1941. It started as a men's wallets and briefcase company originally from a baseball glove, leather, from a baseball glove that was repurposed. Of course, over the decades that has evolved its single against category are women's handbags. And it really hit the big time in the sixties when they hired a designer called Bonnie Cash and who absolutely revolutionized coach and brought it closer to the world of luxury and fashion and not just, you know, functional well made wallets. She was an absolutely trailblazing designer with the locks on her bags that continued to inspire design to this very day. This is the turn lock which was created in the 19 sixties by Bonnie Cash in. And the fun fact about this is that she was inspired by her 19 forties convertible and that the turn lock was what kept the top on of her car. So she redesigned it and placed it on a bag and that's why we have this today. My name is Ryan Borg and I am the manager of the coach archives in the archive. We have over 25,000 items. This includes all the original catalogs, all the handbags, all the ready to wear pieces, anything that has a coach stamp on it comes through the archive. The archive is primarily used by our design teams. They will come down here and look at all the bags for inspiration and that could be from proportions of the bag constructions of the bag and how they were constructed back in the sixties or seventies, but also for color and for the structure and the integrity of the leather. So in this case, here, we start with our 19 forties and 19 fifties collection. Uh when Miles Kahn first started coach um and that continues in this whole case with our 19 sixties, which is when Bonnie Cash and first started in 1962. Uh This is her first bag that she did for us. The shopping bag she did not like seeing women carrying around a brown paper bag down Fifth Avenue. So she designed this more lux shopping bag for people to carry their luxury items in one task for the archivist at coach to do is to source out bags that are rare to find bags that we don't have yet or currently looking for. And one bag in particular is the chubby clutch from 1964 where I recently found this through outside vendors who are willing to part with it. So this is our case of the 19 seventies bag collection. Bonnie Cashen designed up until 1973. At this time. In my opinion, she made one of the most iconic bags for coach, which is the devils. As you can see here. This is a bag that we still design and create today with little to zero modifications. You see how the handbags both reflect and push fashion as you get a sense from the sixties to now, it's really a lot of fun. Um, you know, you obviously have to be there with somebody, but I can match on my own. I could easily spend hours looking at all these products. Procter and Gamble has been around for decades and is the largest consumer products manufactured in the United States. They're behind all sorts of products, Tide and Charmin Gillette, etc, Procter and Gamble is a giant and has always had innovation in its blood. There's a lot more competition now for conser products. And so the pressure to innovate more quickly is great. The P and G Heritage Center collects preserves and shares all the great stories and objects and products and innovations from our past as a catalyst to inspire the employees as they work on the future. My name is Shane Meeker. I am the P and G company historian and corporate storyteller. The origin story of PNG really goes back to two people, an English candle maker named William Proctor and an Irish soap maker named James Gamble. And they end up coming over to Cincinnati, looking to start up their respective businesses and ended up actually becoming partners because they married sisters and it was their father in law's idea that they should join forces. And in 1837 they officially became Proctor and Gamble selling both soap and candles. Not only do we have the original partnership agreement, but we've got some very old handle cases including also some original bars of soap too from around that time period. So a day in the life in the Heritage Center is not only virtual and online requests coming from our employees but also employees just stopping in looking through the artifacts, going through the timelines asking about the stories. And we're pulling everything from photos to content to information that we then can send to them, so they can use that to research the projects that they're doing now. So we have a lot of great artifacts here. But one of the most fun is one of the mock ups of the original prototype for the Swiffer Wet Jet. And that story honestly goes back to consumer. As boss for us, we had started doing some in-home research around mopping. And while watching a consumer mop, she looked at the researchers and said, hey, I tell you if you really want to clean up something, please clean up the closet that I have to put all this mopping stuff in that then became the insight that would turn into creating this great all in one solution that we call Swiffer wetjet. And when you look at the prototype, it's really fun because it leverages areas of our expertise in different categories. Our hard surface cleaning expertise with Mr Clean while also leveraging our absorbency and non woven expertise in pampers, diapers and always pads. The wall of failures is one of our most popular exhibits in the archives and it's really centered around a growth mindset way of thinking because, you know, quite honestly, if you're not failing, you're probably not innovating. And so, you know, being around for 187 years, we try to save all of the projects that we can and all the learnings from them. And just because an idea fails, doesn't mean it's a bad idea. You know, there's so many things that could have influenced that from everything, from habit to technology, to business model, to consumer behavior, to whatever. And so for example, Tide Pods I pod is an incredible success for us that we launched in 2012. But believe it or not, the first actual unit dose detergent that we launched was called Tide Ready Packs in 1960 and that failed. So what you're looking at is 52 years of learning from failure and tempting new and different innovations to get there, just like in other spheres of life, history tends to repeat itself. And I think these archives and these museums really guide companies in harnessing their history so they can continue making products that are contemporary. I think what this shows though is that things move in cycles, what is old is new again if you do it intelligently and in a well guided way, which is what I think all these facilities help these companies to do.

A year into the job, David Risher talks innovation at Lyft, plus lessons learned from the recent earnings error.

Lyft's CEO says the company will be profitable soon

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photograph provided by Lyft.

David Risher talks innovation at Lyft, plus lessons learned from the recent earnings error.

Brands are so interesting and reputations are so interesting because they take a long time to build and once you've got them, they actually persist for, for many years. So I was just by the way at fortune, we know that for sure, hard to, hard to kill a good brand. Once, once you are, you guys trying? No, we're not anymore. But there probably been times in our past when we were trying. Pretty hard. Welcome to leadership next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm Mia, this is a hyper competitive business. You're like Coke and Pepsi or maybe more like Hertz and Avis or something. And, you know, I know when I'm, when I'm getting a car, I just want the car to be there fast. I don't care who it comes from. So what is the nature? It's a fairly undifferentiated pro uh product. What, what, what can you do? What is, what, what, how do you really make ground against Uber in this battle? Yeah, it turns out you can do a lot and it's interesting because so first of all, you know, really focusing on the customer really makes a difference. So I'll give you some examples. When I started, the company had started to focus a little bit too much on Wall Street and a little bit too little on its own riders and drivers. And so, you know, if I'm honest, we were paying our drivers not quite uh competitive rates. We were uh charging our riders a little bit more, uh under the hopes of making more money faster. Just a bad strategy. Just because to your point, a lot of people, they'll say, you know, who's going to get me there less expensively, who's going to get me there faster. So when I, when I look forward, you know, over the year, you know, just fixing some of the basics really, really helps and I'll give you, you know, an example a year ago our of what we call our pin eta difference. So let's say the gap between how fast you might be picked up and the other guy versus us might have been three or four minutes, which is significant if you're in a hurry now, it's 10 seconds. Now it's 10 seconds. So when you get to the point where it's 10 seconds, now, you can start to compete on other things, you can start to compete on women Plus Connect, which we launched, which is a product that's women, choose women. You can start to compete on faster airport pickup where people are very stressed about getting to the airport. So it's sort of a couple stage thing. You got to make sure you're focused on your customers. You gotta fix the basics to give yourself permission to do some of the other more innovative things. And then you can start to innovate and give people a real reason to choose one or the other instead of having them. Think it's kind of the same thing is, uh, transparency part of it too. I mean, I, I would assume that drivers care very much about that. Have you made changes there? Absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, that's exactly it. So I have AAA public email address. Uh It's David at lyft.com and, and, and drivers, right? And they're very clear about what it is that they like and they're also very clear about what bugs them. And so, but again, customer obsession, right? So our drivers are our customers. So we have to pay attention to what bugs them and the lack of transparency really bothers them, you know, they start to kind of come up with all sorts of theories of what's going on. So now, and this again is a relatively new feature where actually I just rolled it out over the last, you know, six weeks or so. At the end of every week, you, you get a full statement that, that literally starts with how much riders pay because that was the thing that would bug them so much is they would say, you know, I got a, a, you know, a trip where a rider paid me 50 bucks and I only made 10 and it's like, but what, what is that? So anyway, so now we show them, you know, the complete statement, uh, literally everything that rider paid, everything that they got, all their tips, all the tools, all the different, you know, things. And then again, if it's ever less than 70% after those pass through fees, we literally send them a check, we send them a check. And again, this driver group, I talked to the other day, they said I couldn't believe it. The first time I got a rebate, you know, it was sort of like getting a tax rebate. It was, it was great. So David, you're, you're, you're focusing on customers, you're focusing on riders, you're focusing less on shareholders. But at the end of the day, you do have to make money and you haven't yet. Uh uh How do you feel about progress towards that goal? And the reason is because our, our mantra is customer obsession drives profitable growth. So, you know, let's look at the other numbers for a second. So, um, so first on the growth side, you know, the first quarter that I was, uh CEO we grew about 10% year on year, then we grew about 17% then we were about 20% then we grew about 26%. So those are the first four quarters. So we're growing. So then the question is, what are we doing it profitably? Well, as you point out, we haven't made gap profitability yet, but it is absolutely on the, you know, on the road map, we were free cash flow positive last quarter. That's Q four of 2023 we will be free cash flow positive this entire year. Absolutely. We've promised it to Wall Street and when you look at our losses, they are diminishing to the point where they're really quite small right now. And most Wall Street analysts show us turning a profit quite soon. So we are absolutely on that path. Some of it was very hard decisions. You know, one of my first decision was, was obviously very difficult uh involving cutting about 26% of our staff, which is very difficult to do incredibly hard, uh you know, kind of heart wrenching uh work, but you, you have to do it if you're gonna be able to lower your prices and pay drivers more, you know, and, and, and, and now we're being very disciplined, very disciplined quarter after quarter. Our listeners would never forgive us if we didn't ask you about the EBITA mistake because it was such a fascinating moment. It was a misplaced zero in a press release that caused the, the stock to soar came back down. You now have class action lawsuits. What did you learn from that? Did you learn anything? Was there we were there any? Oh Yeah, we learned, we learned a lot. Yeah, I mean, the first thing I have to say and I said this before, I'll say it again. That's on me, that's on me. And I want people really to understand that when you're a leader of the organization, no, makes a mistake. It's your problem. And so now I will also say, man did our team hustle and, and what happened, what happened literally was an extra zero that got inserted into an early version of the press release and it just rolled forward. And this despite literally no exaggeration of hundreds of people's hundreds of people's eyes, including my own seeing it over and over again. But what happened, it was in a forecast piece which gets a little less scrutiny than the backwards looking stuff, the basis point versus percentage. I mean, they are very, very different words, but unfortunately, they mean something very, very different. And so, and we literally found it in real time as we were reading out the, um the, the, the sort of earnings report and we changed it within two minutes, I think. And all of a sudden our legal team again and actually our policy team jumped into action so very, very quick response. Absolutely fantastic. And I certainly learned how fast the team can work when it, when it is under that kind of pressure. Now, uh what have, what have we also learned? Well, we've learned that even though we have really exactly the same process that every other public company has all sorts of eyes, it wasn't sufficient, it wasn't sufficient. So, what are we doing? We actually now have a process. We're just about to go through this as our next earnings come out where we take all of our materials. We now give them to an outside third party we've hired to do exactly this and what they do is without having any other context. They look, not just to sort of double check the numbers, but they try to build the model that our press release and earnings statement is suggesting they build and then look at what that model results in. And then we compare that back to our internal models. And if those models are vary by anything that significant, we know there is a problem along the way.

Brainstorm AI San Francisco 2024

Colin Kaepernick, Founder and CEO, Lumi; Super Bowl Quarterback, San Francisco 49ers Interviewer: Andrew Nusca, Fortune

Brainstorm AI 2024: Colin Kaepernick’s Next Revolution 

Hey Collin, how's it going? It's great. How are you? Good, good. We uh we got a lot to talk about my friend. Um So why don't you explain the origins of loom me? Because I was fascinated to find out that it's really focused around comic book, illustrators, graphic novels, things like that. And I thought Colin Kaepernick, so please indulge us. Yeah. So part of this came out of 10 years building a media company, five years building a publishing company um and seeing the challenges that creators face. But the other part was I grew up on comics. Um And we had a whole stash of comic books. We had boxes and boxes of them. Um My brother is actually the one who really got me into them. He's 10 years older than me. Um We used to have a sounds a little sketchy now, but there was a house down the couple blocks away, we ride our bikes to and the living room was just comic books. Um So we go through and grab the ones we wanted and go back home. Um But as I went deeper down creating graphic novels, being on the publishing side and seeing the challenges that creator are facing, whether it's writers, illustrators, anchor, um colorists. Uh What we found is a lot of them are living paycheck to paycheck project to project. They actually aren't creating things that they want to. Um Because they're just looking for that next gig and a lot of them have their own ideas that they want to bring to life and are just looking for the avenue and opportunity to do so. Is your company focused around the kind of creative tool and support part, the distribution part? Because that's important with publishing too, where does it come into play if you're one of those folks? Yeah, both of those. OK. Um So very focused on creating that tool set for creators to give you A I assistance where and if you need it. Um So you can go on the platform and create and never touch A I if you don't want to or you can use it through the process to help you. Um And then that is distributed directly on the platform. Um trying to solve that distribution issue that a lot of creators face. How does this company make money? Because that's the number one question when you're talking about media and publishing? Absolutely. Um So a few different ways, the first way is we do a monthly subscription. Um that's our immediate revenue generator. But as we look more broadly, we have on-demand publishing for physical publishing publishing. We've realized creators want that they need it. Um And it's a way for us to do that profitably from the first copy sold, which is a anybody that has worked in the publishing industry. Um you know, it has a very difficult space to work in and be profitable. So we solve that. And then the last piece is we help with the merchandizing of the stories that they're creating. And I've released graphic novel, multiple children's books. Um I talked to a bunch of artists around this and what we've realized a lot of them aren't merchandizing very well. And I actually didn't merchandise my own uh projects because it wasn't an easy process to be able to do that. So that's something that we're looking to solve for them as well, right? What's harder publishing for football? Depends which part. I mean, the physical tool, football definitely harder. Um figuring out how to be profitable and scale a publishing company is no small fee. Yeah. Fair, fair, fair, fair. So what is the status of Lumi right now? Where are you at in terms of a product? Where are you headed? Yeah. So right now we have a product beta testers on the platform. Um Interesting enough, we actually have contracts with school signed right now. Um And they're looking to use that as something to advance learning um project based learning to help literacy, literacy rates, um student voice, student engagement. Um So seeing a lot of traction there in use cases that they want to elevate students with. How are your uh how is your company handling? Ip we've talked about uh copyright and, and concerns about that on this stage already today. Um I think that's the big question throughout the industry, how we look at is creators own everything that they create on the platform, anything that they bring to the platform they own. We're not touching that we don't wanna touch it. We wanna be a space where creators are owning the content because that gives them longevity. And if we're serving them in the best way possible, that creates a much more reciprocal relationship. Um And it also pushes us to be the best company that we could beat for creators. Um We don't want anybody controlled or constrained by that. So that's a great point around that. If someone creates a breakout comic or graphic novel, they could take that and sell it to Netflix or Disney or any other platforms, nothing that we're doing on our end to restrict that in any way. Got it. I'm going to come to the audience for questions in just a minute. But I want to ask you one more. You've already raised funds for this company uh that took you on a, you know, the, the show uh with investors. What did you learn from that experience? Um Yeah, very similar experience to playing football. Um Oh, please go on. Yeah, so what you realize is you aren't gonna be everybody's cup of tea. Um, in football when I was getting drafted, even when I was going to college, you always looked at, it only takes one, you need one person to believe in you and then that gets the ball rolling. Um And ultimately, you want to have a chance to be in the game. We found some great investors that support us in that way. Um So any other founders or people looking to raise funds? I, you're going to get a lot of nose through that process, keep going and just look for that one person that truly believes in you and is going to support you. Yeah. All right. Let's go to the audience for questions, please. Questions for calling. Oh, yes. Right up here. Well, please wait for the uh the mic your name and who you're with when you get it. Thank you. Thank you. So, uh Lorenza Ple and I work or have worked for a while with the economist. So I think it's great what you're doing, especially uh you know, trying to help the community and to people with low resources, to create content to sell, etcetera. Um So I'm curious to, especially because I've worked for a long time, mobile apps, engagement subscriptions, etcetera. Uh Yeah, I would like to understand what do you think is the best way uh to, you know, grow your platform, but at the same time making sure that it's affordable for people uh with low resources. And uh are you partnering with any other, let's say third party companies that will help you perhaps or get them like free credits? Like, I don't know, like to publish on Amazon books or to, you know, like get some sort of partnerships with, with publications to uh yeah, help uh help those with low income. Thank you. Yeah, that's a great question. Um So that's actually part of the foundation of why we built the platform. Um So right now, subscriptions start 20 to $75 a month. So we take a tiered approach to make sure we're trying to give access to people who may be financially constrained. Um The other part to step back and look at the difference in where we're at on this is if you look at the lowest bar of where creators are typically entering a publishing space today, typically is through a Kickstarter and they're raising 5 to $10,000 to get a project off the ground. Um So we're drastically lowering that barrier. Now, if you look at projects that I've done in the past, typically, you're looking at a six figure investment and you're looking at a two plus year production timeline um before it ever sees the light of day. So we're trying to break down both the expense and the speed of creation for creators to be able to get their ideas out into the world. Right on another question for Colin, please. Yes. Right up here in the front. Hey, Steven Steven Wolf Beta. I'm the CEO of AL Fund company. But before that I started a kids media company focused on diverse kids media called Nandos. And one of the great areas for creators to really monetize their I pe is actually with merchandizing. Do you envision the platform actually expanding into products and giving the ability to actually have storefronts? Um Just because there's so much more to just the content, it's actually all the merchandise. 1 1000% you are, you are dead on with how we are thinking about it. Um No, one of the things that we realize is the people who are consuming the content, the people who are buying the books are also the people that are most likely to buy the merchandise, like it's a natural progression. Um Most people aren't doing it. Um And the ones who are actually, they don't love the process of doing it. They just do it as a means to an end. Um So we want to help simplify that process all the way through for the creator from creation, taking that idea to a finished product, to the publishing, to the merchandizing. So one, they can create the things they actually want to. And two, they don't have to worry about the being the business owner, the operator handling all the logistics. Um Every creator we've talked to they're like, I just want to create, I don't want to do those things, but a lot of them end up doing it because they have to today and those are barriers that we can break down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. II, I understand that mindset very well. Let me ask you a question. Colin um, you know, you've gone on this, uh, this journey po you know, post, post football every morning, by the way, you still training, of course, OK. You heard it here. He's still training. I was, I was training before I got on my flight to come out here. Now you're making me feel bad. OK. So, so, II I would love to understand, you know, who you see as a mentor for this part of your career, whether that's in Silicon Valley or somewhere else. That's a great question. Um I think there have been a few different people that have really helped me get to where I'm at today. Um One has been in the VC community, Ben Horowitz has been great person to lean on. It's given me phenomenal insight. Um Williams has been another one who has really helped me my thinking. Um Having the opportunity to sit on the board of medium has been incredibly insightful and very helpful for my own development. Um And the other one just thinking about where I'm at today is Alexis Christina, the 776 team um who is our lead investors. They're incredibly brilliant and also great people. Um so to be able to have them to lean on and ask for guidance. Um And also just pick their brains on things that we're working on. Um how we can scale things more effectively, how we can reach, reach creators more effectively. Um Especially when you have someone like Alexis who's built reddit. Um You know, you have a great person to be able to lean on in that regard and an enthusiastic one. All right. Well, let's go for one, one more question. I think there was one over here, but I cannot recall. Oh, it's way over here. Yes. Hey, Carol. Hi, I'm Carol Vanda. I chair um responsible A I for Mars Incorporated. But outside of that, I'm actually an author. So I have a question because I know a lot of authors have negative feelings when it comes to A I, they feel that it's stealing their copyright, their IP how do you overcome those objections to launch Loy? And thanks for your great work. Oh, of course. Um Phenomenal question. And we have talked to a lot of writers about it. Um I think one is understanding that A I isn't going to do the work for you. Um Two is understanding that most of the writers are already using A I, they just don't know it as A I, um we talked to a lot of writers that hesitant, they wanted to see the platform, what it was um as we talked to them and they showed us their workflow, most of them are using grammarly um and the A I in their workflow already then as we get them on the platform and they see how it actually works and how we're looking to engage with them. Um We aren't looking to do the work for them and we're looking to be there to be helpful in that process if they need help brainstorming ideas, if they're struggling and, you know, they hit writer's block and they're looking for, where can I go with this? Where can I take it? Um So we're looking to help them through that process, but they also have the opportunity to use it as much or as little as they want. And that's one of the things that was really important for us. Um, both on the writers and the illustrator side is making sure that they have the opportunity to opt out if they want to, um, or engage when they do want to. Fantastic Colin, thank you so much for joining Fortune Brainstorm A I Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Ok.

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Brainstorm Design 2024

Bob Dennis, Senior Director of Creative Studio & Resort Development, Universal Beijing Resort, In conversation with Nicholas Gordon, Editor, Asia Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Designing Memories

Bob Dennis, Senior Director of Creative Studio & Resort Development, Universal Beijing Resort, In conversation with Nicholas Gordon, Editor, Asia FORTUNE  

So I thought there would be a fireplace. Uh Fortune invited me to a fireside chat. So I thought there would be a fireplace. But we brought is, is how is is wordplay part of your tool kit for memorable experiences. Yeah, it's immersion. Don't you feel cozy? So we're, we're going to get into your thoughts on park design, how to build immersive experiences, how to leverage emotions. But I have to ask, I'm a fervent player of video games. What was it like for Universal to work with Nintendo? Oh Amazing. First of all, Miyamoto. So is a genius and uh it's a learning curve for both of us. Uh because in the world of video games, it's digital and our world is physical with steel and concrete. Um So it's a learning curve on both sides but an amazing partnership. So, so as mentioned, you know, you've worked in this space for over 30 years. I believe your first gig was working for a San Rio theme park back in 1988. How has theme park design changed over the decades? Well, I'm old. So um when we were designing theme parks back in the eighties we didn't have any computers, we didn't have computer assisted design. It was all done with a pencil and then ink and then of course you pulled your prints. Um But everything was exhibition then and the industry has changed so much that now it's immersion. Um And we're getting better and better at that, but we've been doing immersion since before the term was even coined. So, I mean, let's split at that. I mean, given your long experience kind of working with immersive experiences, you know, before, was a buzzword that people used. You know, how do you actually create such an immersive memorable experience? What's your toolkit? And I believe we have some slides, maybe even some audience engagement a little bit as we go through this. So I think the table stakes because of where we are, it's a good reference. The table stakes are excellent storytelling and of course, um you'll hear this often today. Um visual stimulation, sensory input. So you need a, you need a beautiful picture, but you also need a logical story that the guests can connect to and find their place in what it is that you're trying to present. So that's cable stakes and where you have to go further is you have to, you want people to connect to the story you have and most people forget about emotion. So every memorable experience can be done by senses here in Macau, you get a sense of awe, a sense of grandeur. But what's missing to make it an episodal autobiographical memory is emotion. So the best connection is always made through emotions and often people confuse feelings with emotions. So there's a million colors and everything that we do happens here, it happens inside the brain, regardless of how good your design is or how grand your experience is, all of it has to be encoded so that we have an experience without the memory. What's the point? Right? So most people don't realize that with three colors, you can make a million, a million different colors with eight basic emotions. You can also make a million different feelings. And it's very important to understand the difference between emotions and feelings. OK? Can you guys guess what this emotion is? We don't need mics, you can just yell it out just fine play along, right? So this is obviously joy. I created these images um to trick you in a minute. Um But yeah, these are facial expressions uh that evoke that particular chemistry happening in your limbic system. So you understand joy, the opposite of joy. Of course, the next one, sadness, right? And after sadness, I'll, I'll see if you can guess this one. This is the trick. Most of you are thinking love, however, love is not an emotion. Love is a feeling that is a combination of several emotions. It could be joy, sadness, disgust, right? And um these all come together in a symphony inside our brain that we equate with the feeling of love. So it's trust, trust is the emotion. This one is a good one discussed, right? This is baked into our limbic system for your survival. Um And so memories that are formed along with this emotion are deeply encoded anger when we have a perceived wrong. Um These also are strongly recorded, not as moments but as experiences. So they're, they're like little videos instead of a snapshot. If somebody makes you afraid, you will retell this experience over and over again in great detail. OK? Anybody anger, right? Same process. So every oh they made me so mad and then they'll tell you every little detail because it's been recorded as an autobiographical memory. It was, it was an experience. OK? This one, this one, Alfred Hitchcock was a master at this. We use it often too um anticipation. And then finally, uh this is where you take your redirect. So if you use the emotion of anticipation, the brain starts creating all kinds of scenarios on its own and it engages deeply in the frontal cortex. And what this does is creates more engagement and people are doing their own self reflection. And then of course, you do the redirect, you take them into a way that they did not expect the outcome to be and we get surprised. So we have these eight emotions then how are you kind of putting them all together? And leverage them into a memorable experience. I mean, some of these emotions make sense for a theme park setting, joy, surprise anticipation, even fear, some feel a little bit, you know, maybe not quite as easy to put into an entertainment setting like discussed. So how are you leveraging all of these emotions together to kind of tell a story in the real world? It's a good point. So you don't want to manipulate people and you don't want to use uh emotions as trickery. So it has to be authentic. And so I think most designers forget about engineering those emotions in putting together a recipe or a symphony that causes crescendos and date crescendos. And that, that working together engages the person into a story and they, they're all useful, but some, we use more than others, obviously joy. Um There's a great one, anticipation. We try to stay away from fear and disgust, but they're used, we, we do use them. Um I want you to dive a bit deeper about kind of adapting these ideas, you know, a lot of universal zone properties, the properties of your partners like Warner for Harry Potter or Nintendo. These are things that exist on the page or on the screen. They don't exist in the real world. You know, as much as some of us would love magic to exist in the real world. It, it it doesn't. But how do you take these things that only exist? You know, in fiction basically and make them work as a real world experience. So this is why I'm losing my hair. Um So our, our creatives um Miyamoto Song JK Rowling, um They're amazing at creating worlds in print or production designers like Stuart Craig for film and they can pretty much create anything that they can imagine. So our job is to take that world and those stories and connect our guests to those characters. But we have to do it with steel and concrete building codes, safety requirements, throughput, operability. Um Basically, we shouldn't do anything because it's almost impossible. And yet we have many parts around the world that do just that. So um it, it's very difficult to, to translate, but we're very fortunate because we work with our IP partners and the films are there, we only get three or four minutes to, to kind of get people through that experience. Um And so we do a lot of callbacks, a lot of bringing up things that they saw or remembered in the film. And we have to do that in a way they can touch it. So a gag has to work every time, every day for years, not just to catch it, capture it on film. So I would say we use all the sciences um and all the arts and that our attractions are some of the most sophisticated machines there are. And I think that when you go to a theme Park. We don't want you to know that we try to keep that secret, but it's a fact. Um I want to stick on this film point for a second and how it connects particularly to one memory I have of going to Universal Studios, Japan when I was a very small child. I still remember seeing the Water World Exhibit for those who don't know. Water World is a 1995 film starring Kevin Costner. Um I'll say reactions to the film were mixed and being charitable. Um But I dare say the attraction is more, is, is, is more famous than the film at this point. Um It's in, it's in many of um universal parks. Um And so kind of why do you think this attraction in particular is so popular? And how does it fit in your philosophy for immersion and experience? We actually have some video that you can have talked for a bit first. It's a very good example. So the film mixed reviews on the film II, I don't think it was a blockbuster. Um But we were able to take uh from that film and use the emotions that are created by it and do a stunt spectacular. So not only was it visual, which is great and great sound and great lighting and great special effects, but everything is real. We don't use projections, there's real flames, we set the entire lagoon on fire and you will feel the heat from that and you will get wet. Um But in the story itself, we also engage many of the emotions, you may be angry at the villain. Um You feel some joy. So I think that the theme park experience in this example um has outlived the film and we're gonna show a little bit of it what actually happens on screen. Um So I want to talk about kind of another stakeholder in this discussion. We've talked about designers universal, we've talked about it partners, but there's also the fans um these are worlds with uh I'm going to call them very devoted fan bases, very passionate fan bases. That's true of Harry Potter. It's true of Nintendo, it's true of your um your peers at Disney, you have to work in Star Wars. Fans are passionate, they are also a little nuts. Um And so how do you kind of design these experiences in a way to kind of give fans what they want to make it memorable for them, but also managing expectations and managing it for those who maybe haven't read every single book a dozen times. So I think as designers, we often get caught up in our own story and um we, we wanna engage our visitors to remember what they want to experience. So at Universal, we really believe our guests are co creators. We engage often and constantly with those, not just the deep fans, but with uh the people that may not be deep fans, it's very important to get that feedback so that you're telling the story that they can get, that you're telling the story that they want to experience and that you don't get too stuck in what you want. Um So it has to be more objective, a little less subjective and constantly engaging with the feedback from the fans and we love hearing from them. Um And you're right, some of them are a little crazy, but we love that kind of crazy. Um You know, just kind of, it's gonna bring a kind of more examples of rides we've worked on. I mean, what's maybe another one of these exciting rides that you've worked on that really kind of shows your philosophy on, on designing immersive and memorable experiences. So the the awards are, are Industry's Oscars and we received it last year for Jurassic World Adventure. You all have to come to Beijing. That's the only place that attraction exists right now and that I believe really checks all the boxes on visual stimulation, um experiential design, but more importantly, emotion. So I remember when we opened, uh there was a 12 year old boy that was a guest of a friend of mine. And after going on that attraction, he asked me quite seriously, uh what do we feed our dinosaurs, right? So, so that type of sense, the suspension of disbelief um can only be found in, in, in the major players in this and that was why that is my favorite. I'm going to have to find an excuse to go find a story to write about it and then get work to expense it. Um But thank you Bob for, for walking us through the toolkit on how you build immersive experiences at universal. We're going to take a short break right now. Please help yourself to coffee, which will be served right outside the ballroom. Don't forget to pick up a copy of Gensler's design forecast 2025 report available at the desk on a first come first serve basis. So grab your copy. Now we'll meet back here for our next conversation promptly at 1045. When we come back, we'll hear from two of Silicon Valley's leading industrial designers and a panel of accomplished design leaders on customer experience. We'll see you back here soon.

Fortune Global Forum 2024

Abby Joseph Cohen, Professor of Business, Columbia University Graduate School of Business
Gary Cohn, Vice Chairman, IBM; Former Director, U.S. National Economic Council
Lynn Martin, President, NYSE Group
In conversation with: Diane Brady, Executive Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media and Co-Chair Fortune Global Forum

Fortune Global Forum 2024: Business at the Speed Of Change

Photograph by Michael O’Shea for Fortune

Abby Joseph Cohen, Columbia University Graduate School of Business
Gary Cohn, U.S. National Economic Council
Lynn Martin, NYSE Group
Diane Brady, Fortune Live Media and Co-Chair Fortune Global Forum

Most Powerful Women Summit 2024

Get to know the attendees of the Most Powerful Women Summit 2024

Most Powerful Women Summit 2024: Welcome And The Big Get-To-Know-You

Impact Initiative 2024

Debbie Dyson, Chief Executive Officer, OneTen Zakiya Carr Johnson, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, US State Department Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM-SCP, President and CEO, SHRM Moderator: Phil Wahba, Senior Writer, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Impact Initiative

Impact Initiative 2024: DEIA's Next Act

Photography by Rebecca Greenfield/Fortune

Debbie Dyson, OneTen, Zakiya Carr Johnson, US State Department, Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM-SCP, SHRM, Phil Wahba, FORTUNE

Join the Fortune COO Summit: Driving Operational Excellence this October, where the world’s leading operations executives will unveil game-changing strategies. Gain insights on transforming supply chains, managing risks, preparing workforces, and enhancing financial performance.

COO Summit 2024

Leslie Motter, Chief Executive Officer, Make-A-Wish America
Jessica Orkin, Chief Executive Officer, SYPartners
Moderator: Lila MacLellan, Senior Writer, Fortune; Co-chair, Fortune COO Summit

COO Summit 2024: Closing The Say-Do Gap - Executing On Purpose

Um I have to say as a journalist, I have mixed feelings about this topic because this is our bread and butter finding the places where companies are not doing the thing that they say they're all about, right? They have a lofty purpose, but that's not what they're executing on. But I know this is a problem. We need to learn how to close it. So I just wonder if you can talk to me, Jessica a little bit about the, the say do gaps that you've seen out there in the wild when you with your clients and how they come about? Sure. Um So at the highest level, every single company in here, all of your leaders, all of you, you have a purpose, probably a purpose statement. Um You probably have cascaded that then into what is your strategy? What are your key priorities, etcetera. Um This is the work that Xy partners does uh with our clients all around the world. The heartbreak and the um disappearance of trust happens when that does not translate into the lived experience of all of your employees, of your customers. And so it's one thing to go out and say in big beautiful language. Um the change that you're seeking to create in the world, the impact that you're seeking to deliver. Um But if the day to day realities don't express that um you lose credibility and this is an economy that is run on trust and the weakening and erosion of trust is affecting all of our businesses for profit and not for profit. Uh And we work with both the how of connecting those two things is something that we can get into through this conversation. Great. Thank you. Um And Leslie, I know that you are in the nonprofit world right now, but you had for profit experience, especially at American Express. What in this room full of coo s what advice do you have from a company that's all about executing on purpose? What can they take away from the nonprofit world? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the purpose at where I am now make a wish is very clear. We are creating a life changing wishes for Children with critical illness that is very clear purpose and one that so many rally around whether it's our own employees, our partners, et cetera. And it is so critical. I think that the beauty is though we have the same capability, whether we're with a for profit or a nonprofit. As you mentioned, I spent 11 years with American Express previous to this role with make a wish and we absolutely had just as strong of a purpose about being the world's most respected service provider or service brand. And as part of that, we've tried to make sure that resonated with our employees. And that's really the key, whether it's for profit or nonprofit is having that employee engagement aspect of the brand. So I ran the largest service center at American Express at the time, we had about 3500 employees and it was making sure that every single employee felt that every day they came to work. It was about providing exceptional customer service, not just answering the phone. Great. Thank you. Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about like how the gap actually erupts if you've ever if you have a way of pinpointing that and if you have any examples from your own companies about gaps that you discovered and how you managed it sometimes strategy gets well ahead of the operational realities. So I think we've been talking about actually in some previous sessions about you're really working on two time scales, you're working in the far future in the transformation that you're trying to drive through your company. But then you're working the absolute day to day and the day to day is built on legacy systems. And so no matter how fast and how agile our companies can be, there is going to be a gap between those two. Um A lot of times, front line workers, baristas we've worked with Starbucks, um starting with Howard in 2008. Um, through to the present, you can have a disconnect between what the company both stands for its values, the strategy of where it's going. It's very bold vision and then actually being able to innovate and update the operational systems, the processes, the ways of working that cascade through the whole organization and touch both your front line employees and then your customers. Right? Ok. Yeah, it's interesting, you mentioned Starbucks because recently they hired a CEO who's going to commute by jet, not every day, but people are pretty upset about that because Starbucks is also talking about part of its purpose being green, right? Um In the audience, please, um be thinking about any questions you might have for our panelists. I'll come back to you in just a few minutes. Um Have you found any examples that make a witch where you had, you discovered a gap in your purpose and what, how you were executing and what have you done to really drive home purpose for your employees? I think, um we also have a very bold vision to reach every eligible child, which we're not doing currently. So in order to do that, I think one of the things that we've been really focused on the last few years is making sure we have engaged employees because it's so important to where we're going. And one of the I guess gaps, um I would say is that our internal culture did not match the power of our brand externally. I mean, you talk to anyone about make a wish and you get the, oh my gosh. And you get the, it's, it's about community and support and lifting each other up, etcetera. And so we've been very intentional the last couple of years about making sure our internal culture is raised to really match the power of our brand externally. And if we get there, we're gonna be unstoppable, having every employee feel that way about coming to work every day. And it's important, I mean, I hire technology folks, finance folks operations. So it's not necessarily, I mean, it's, it's a competitive skill set, whether they could go somewhere else and make more money. So making sure that they have that power of being connected to the ultimate mission of the organization. And then they feel that every day is so important. Do they have an opportunity to meet some of the, the people, the Children or the parents who are? That's a great question and that, and that's one of the things that we found. So, you know, as we have people working in it behind the scenes, they could feel very disconnected from the mission. And that is um one of the things I talk about about bringing the power of the brand externally internally is exactly that. So we now have things like mission moments where we start meetings with an actual make a wish that has occurred. So regardless of where you are in the organization, wherever you're sitting, because we're also remote as well. You feel connected to ultimately what your position is and how it's so impactful in the world. Great. Um Those, yeah, that sounds lovely. Actually, I wish we could have mission moments right here. Um Is there anybody in the audience who would like to ask a question? You can raise your hand and yes in the back, sir. Good morning. My name is Martin Vanneman. I'm joining you from New York City. Question to three of you and everybody. How are you on tiktok? Sorry, on Tik Tok. How are your thoughts on Tik Tok? Uh Interesting. Now, do you use Tik Tok as part of your strategy, either with your employees or with your customers? Not with our employees? And really for us, uh the Tik Tok is much more organic as Children are having wishes or waiting for wishes, etcetera where uh we really utilize both Insta and um and other channels much more from that perspective. But we're out there, we're pretty much everywhere with the reach that we have and especially with our demo demographic. We serve Children ages 2.5 to 18 and they are all over it. And then you think about the 20,000 volunteers we have across the US and all of the employees, et cetera. It's happening organically, but Insta is really where we're targeting more with our corporate partners like a Disney fanatics, et cetera. We don't, we're a very quiet brand, uh very quiet company. We work with many people and companies in this room, but you might not know it. Um because what we do is so kind of precious and needs to be quiet in terms of the transformation that we're doing. If what you're talking about is sometimes what's under that question is sometimes a disconnect um between what a company stands for and how it's showing up in the world. Um There also needs to be some communication with your employees about where and why there might be disconnect. So it's actually something to lean into versus to pretend it's not going on. Um Rena Moskowitz, who is the coo and CMO of Etsy and she speaks a lot about this. Um She was telling me that the combination of those two things, both being the chief operating officer, but then really being responsible for the communications. Um And the marketing of the organization is a shift she's seeing uh generally with the CEO role you're becoming in many ways, one of the primary ambassadors champions and communicators, um which is maybe a shift from the deep, deep technical expertise uh that was driving the coo role in the past. So, so interesting because I know there was a study out of Paris that found executives are, you know, have no problem sort of describing what a company's purpose is, but as you went lower and, you know, down into the ranks of the company, it was much harder, like 60% of employees can't explain what a company's purpose is, which is way too low. So, um I imagine also that during a time of crisis, it would be very easy for a coo to drop purpose or to not keep their eye on that aspect of a job of the job. How do you maintain it? Um when there's a lot of financial pressure. So I actually was the coo of make a wish prior to moving into the CEO position. And I held that role during quite a few um the pandemic being one of them, uh quite a few of, of um those crisis if you will. And I think it's actually more important than, than ever to make sure that you're making that link for all of your employees. Um We had to actually have some pretty major transformation during that time. Uh Previously, we had a couple of volunteers that went into the home of each child and helped discover their wish, et cetera. We really had to transform overnight because we were not able to do that anymore. And we still wanted to find creative ways to deliver these life changing wishes to Children when they it most. And so that really took the engagement of all of our stakeholders to think creatively about what we could do. So if we weren't really tying into the overall purpose, it would have been, it would have been a completely different, I think, experience. But we were able to transform both the way that we delivered wishes, virtually, wish discovery et cetera as well as the way. Um you know, many of our stars interacted with Children since they weren't having concerts, they could do video wishes, et cetera. So that transformation during that time and of crisis only beca came because we were tying back to the purpose and how do we still maintain what we're doing and what's so important to do during this time? That's great. One of those silver lining stories in the pandemic. Um And how do you track whether or not a gap is opening or whether or not you've maintained that closure between the say do gap. Um Jessica. Sure. So one of the things we do a lot of is um actually looking at the incentive systems of your organizations. Um So again, how do you tie the big picture purpose into strategy? Bold moves focus areas and then Kpis or metrics that ladder out from that. But there's a step deeper which is looking at how are your people actually incentivized? Are you valuing through actual performance reviews, career progression, mentorship compensation. Are you valuing in actuality, the things that you say you value up top? Um And again, legacy systems, sometimes you crash into legacy performance systems, operational models, et cetera? That were wired for a different time. And so you have to do the work of actually bringing those into alignment. And then to your point about communicating your purpose, understanding your purpose, identifying some of those really operational changes as an expression of purpose and then how it ties back up. So that might include compensation. Yeah, the company. Yeah. Yeah, we've done our own work on this at Syp. So um our purpose is to unlock collective potential to build more vital futures. The collective potential is really important. Um in your organizations, there's so much potential uh held by teams and larger groups, but it's stuck because of many, many issues, many reasons. We all know it and we crash into them. Um within SYP, we do all of our work by bringing different people together with different disciplines. So we have strategists and analysts and tech people, but we have designers, we have filmmakers, we have people from real anthropologists, right? And so what we were realizing was because the market values different skills and different roles differently. So somebody with an MB A, somebody who has a deep strategy background often gets paid more than, let's say a designer, we had that gap in our organization as well because we were looking out at what the market was telling us that did not align with our own values. And so we did a full compensation philosophy overhaul. We changed how we pay people and how we um communicate our values uh to everybody in the organization, how did people react just quickly? You know, it took a lot of communication because on the one hand, um some people really felt seen for the first time. Um and it was a very practical example um of putting your purpose into action. Um But for other people, because they're so used to how the market rewards you, right? It took a little bit of time to get their head around it. And so again, consistent communications, the drumbeat of why we do what we do is so critical. Thank you so much. This is some great practical tips. It's really lovely to have you both. Thank you and thank you for the question.

How do we mitigate some of the unintended consequences of AI, to security, productivity, and the overall job market? And, importantly, can the industry keep developing at speed and scale while also moving forward responsibly?

The program, presented in association with Accenture, will feature intimate one-on-one conversations, engaging panel discussions, and lively roundtable sessions.

Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024

Torrey SMITH, Co-founder and CEO, Endiatx Moderator: Ellie AUSTIN, FORTUNE

Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: Swallow This! The Transformative Power Of AI-Enabled Micro-Robotics In the Human Body

Brainstorm AI 2024: The Transformative Power Of AI-Enabled Micro-Robotics In the Human Body

So as I said, we're talking about micro robots here that are ingested into the body that in itself poses a lot of questions. It sounds a bit like a science fiction film, which is both a source of fascination. But also I think for many people probably in here a source of skepticism. So if we could start off by you explaining to me briefly why you think pill bot is more effective than the traditional endoscopy? Well, thank you. Our hope is that with little tiny robots that can swim around in the body, you can actually supplant or augment the existing tech that's out there. I'd, I'd like to think that pill bot could be a little scout to go out and find illness out in the world and then bring that illness into a hospital to treat properly. Ok. Ok. So it's, it's speeding up the process that it's making it more efficient. Um Looking at your website, the pil bot team, it's made up of a lot of engineers. Now, some people might expect there to be doctors, scientists on your core team. Can you explain to me why that isn't the case and where the medical expertise comes from in this process. Well, so besides a group of almost 20 deep tech engineers, we actually have leading gastroenterologists from all over the planet that have joined the company and many of them have even stepped up and invested and put their, put their names on the line. And are they part of the team or are they an advisory panel? What's the structure? Well, we're very proud to count Vivek Kumari, a leading gastroenterologist as one of our co founders and a very close friend. OK. OK. So some people here in the room are going, I would imagine the draw comparisons to something like Elizabeth Holmes and the an of scandal in that this is an outlandish idea that promises to transform the healthcare industry. Some might say it's too good to be true and we're going to see the technology demonstrated in a minute. I mentioned that you're in the process of seeking FDA approval. How else are you going to legitimized pillow within the scientific and the medical community to silence those skeptics? Well, the key here is just uh putting a robot where our mouth is, right? If we can create a technology that lets a doctor have a look around inside you to the point where it's maybe a little bit more inexpensive or a little bit more accessible. And if doctors start to say we'd like to use this in our actual patients, then we're starting to do our job. But until we get to the point where doctors are demanding to use pill bot, you know, it really is just a R and D project, but we're excited to show it off right here. So you can kind of start to judge for yourself. So it's word of mouth. Obviously, that's the FDA component is that also going to be peer reviewed research. How does that side of things work? Actually, that's been one of the things that's helping us most of all uh attract brilliant doctors is uh to be honest, uh everyone wants to publish on til bot. It's an exciting new platform that can open up all all sorts of new research avenues. And so people are actually realizing that uh you know, joining the team and, and getting a hold of the robots could actually help them in their, their academic career as well. And are people publishing? I know PBO? Yeah, it hasn't featured hugely in the mainstream press. But if we're looking at the scholarly academic side of things, kind of what level of publication has that been so far around Pil Bot, the biggest publication so far that's coming is that we have officially done our first patients uh in Auckland, New Zealand uh in our IRB uh clinical trials. And we're actually starting to see Pil bot do some clinical work, but of course, that's just uh under, under under active progress right now, trial gets complete, will basically bring all that data together and we can think about publishing. Ok. So nascent, but you're looking to have more data in the future. For sure. My final question before this part of the session is so pilot or your, your company has raised $7.5 million I believe in funding since it was founded in 2019. And it's worth noting that 1.5 million of that dollars, um 1.5 million of those dollars comes from the Singapore based Virge Tech Health Fund. Um 7.5 million. It's a good amount. It's not a huge amount. And I imagine that this is deeply expensive technology to develop. So where's the rest of the money going to come from? Well, we're obviously excited to continue that adventure. You can always do things with new amounts of funding. But the thing that we're really proud of is with the support of Verge Health tech funds here in Singapore and the support of some of the most passionate deep tech engineers in Silicon Valley. And, and actually beyond, we've been able to make some magic happen using pretty limited resources. But when we show you the robot today, you'll see that it's not perfect that you'll definitely see opportunities for it to improve. And that's kind of where the next rounds of funding might be able to help us. Ok. So you're going to continue pitching right on that note, I know you've got a couple of slides to show us to uh to explain in a bit more depth how the robot works. So take it away. Yeah. So let's just briefly look at a robot and we'll start to ask ourselves, you know, if we go back in time, you know, the way that you would get data uh from someone's health inside the human body, um was very difficult, you could cut into the body, you could slide a tube into the body. But in a hospital and we're asking ourselves, could we potentially have microscopic robots travel throughout your body? Not only finding out what's wrong, but maybe actually starting to fix it. So that's the adventure we'd like to go on today and we'll have to acknowledge that it's a difficult challenge. But where we're going to begin is the human stomach. Because in the human stomach, we have this unique opportunity for a robot that is maybe not microscopic. This is the size of your fingertip. But pill bot contains a live video, three dimensional motion with pump jets. If you're willing to drink some water, you can get some motion um and the ability to control it in XY and Z. And so the goal here is to basically show there's a part of the body that we can actually send a robot to right now. The stomach, we can probably do an amazing block of work there. Then where do we go next? And so you'll see right here is kind of where we are in the current process of miniaturization. I want these to be rice brain size. I want to do brain surgery with it. Um So looking inside till bot, you'll see a pretty elegant combination of pump jet motors, really high powered lithium batteries that we work really carefully to make safe live video, right? A lot of the stuff you would see in a drone. But the reason that we're doing these robots is that they give us the data, right? Data is how we understand what's wrong data is how we train up A I. And from here, there's a bright future for this. But you know, let's start to talk about what we can actually do with uh one of these. So OK, this, this is pill bot and I need to turn this thing on and if I'm gonna turn this thing on, I'm gonna need my chief engineer Quentin to come out here, Quentin. Let's bring this thing to life. OK. So, and Tori and Quentin, I need you to talk us through what you're doing here at. So Quinton is using an optical signal, a bright light to wake til bot up, it's been sleeping. And so now you'll see til bot um start to uh swim around. He just got some water into the thruster lumen. So we don't get vapor locked. And what we have here is basically a swimming little drone. And can I just highlight how Quentin is controlling it. He's using what looks like an Xbox controller. Yeah, we, we find that a lot of younger gastroenterologists really understand the value proposition. Um, but basically what we're doing here is we're saying, let's make a swimming robot. Let's call it a little eyeball. Let's drink some water. Let's swallow the robot. And let's take a procedure that would be done in a hospital after several physical hospital visits. Let's take that whole adventure and let's digitize it. Let's turn it into a telemedicine, call it home. Let's let a I do some of the boring work for us. So this is about accessibility. How much does a pill boat cost? So cost of goods uh can often hover around 35 to 50 bucks, right? It's a relatively inexpensive physical article. All of the value is in the hard work that miniaturized it and in the data that comes off of the robot. But if we can't make it inexpensive to build, then there's no way we're going to get it out into the world and actually go find problems. What do you expect it to cost when it comes to market? Um In the US market, it'll be a couple of $100 just like a normal pill camera. But if we're going to take it to Asia and beyond, um honestly, I envision a future where these would cost maybe 10 or $15 or maybe even less, but you'd have hundreds of millions of people accessing this kind of care. But the amazing thing is that while we're doing that, the health data that would come off a platform like that would be incredibly valuable. OK? Um So Tori, I believe you are not going to swallow pill bot. I, you know, honestly, we came all this way. I think we might as well might as well go ahead and swallow. It would be rude not to. Ok. So you're, you're gulping down a glass of water to prepare your stomach. I imagine I need a little fish tank in my tongue. You need a fish tank in your stomach. Ok? And for context, Tori told me earlier, this is the 45th pill box that he has swallowed in his lifetime to date. It's, it's a lot of fun. We really enjoy this process. Ok? Perfect. And for those who can't see, I was like, oh wow. More. Ok. I would say the pill bot looks like the size of a pretty large multivitamin. Um It's, it's not small, it's not a small robot. In fact, it's probably just about the biggest thing that someone could ever reasonably swallow. And even maybe half of people might not be able to do it. But the thing that bugs me is that we transact as much as $55 billion every year in the old way of how we do endoscopies. But that only reaches 1% of stomachs and So we're, we're really not reaching people where we need to reach them. And what do you think? Should we uh go ahead, we get you guys. OK. All right. So Quinton is gonna hand me this guy and uh let's uh let's do it. I'll get it nice and wet and uh hopefully let's get a live video up on the screen. Here we see. Oh, here we go. There we go. OK. So you can see. Oh, and I need the uh antenna a little bit closer to my tummy. There we go. So hopefully you can see me. You can all see yourselves. And now let's go ahead and swallow pills out. All right. So let's have a look at my stomach. I've been starving all day. Ok? I can whip it around a little bit and then the hope is that we'll sort of break into the bottom of the stomach and you'll kind of see what's going on. There we go. So, the idea here is we want to make sure that you can quickly and easily give a gastroenterologist a live view inside the stomach and the ability to move around. I want this to be like the tip of an endoscope, but just in virtual form. Ok. Um Here we go, we're traveling through your intestine. Um Tori if how are you feeling, first of all? So sometimes I'll feel it when I swallow it. But honestly, once, once I swallow it, that's OK. I think we're gonna cut the video now because that's enough intestines for one day. But Tory, I, I've just got a few questions like quick fire questions that I want to ask you as, as we come to a close. Um, is there anyone who can't take pillow? I'm thinking pregnant women, Children. Well, right now, the, the weird thing is if you're like a child or a cancer patient, you'll have a really delicate G I tract and inserting an endoscope is actually kind of traumatic. And so if we can make it maybe a little smaller, so it would be appropriate for a kid. You might actually be opening up treatment avenues for people that are actually kind of prohibited from them. Ok. And you said that you mentioned this, all that some people call it. The what happens that? Well, we have been swallowing camera pills that don't move but still contain many of the components. We just saw, uh for more than 25 years. And during that time, we've learned how to do it safely and we've also learned that maybe one in five, maybe one in 10 people are going to have trouble swallowing a camera pill. So for us, even if we make it the same exact size and shape, we're going to be missing out on maybe 10, maybe 20% of the population. The thing is though those camera pills because they don't move, they only address about 1% of the population, you can't use them on everyone. And so we're actually talking about going from addressing 1% of people to maybe 80 or 90% of people by making it a virtual experience. And worst case scenario, pill goes rogue within, you know, what, what are the potential health dangers as a result of that happening? Because as incredible as it sounds, we're putting a small drone into the human body and that must come with risks. Well, we had a, we had a pretty amazing uh chat with FDA back in December and they sat us down and the thing that was really thrilling was to hear enthusiasm coming from the biomedical engineers over at FDA, from the regulatory bodies, from the doctors working with them. And they said honestly, this is tech that everyone is kind of hoping for and we want to sit down with your team and figure out how do we do it safely? How do we do it? Right. And what were they concerned about the FDA when you spoke to them? We were concerned about the fact that we use lithium batteries and we were curious if the FDA would be willing to even entertain the conversation. And they actually said, absolutely, sit down. Let's go over your engineering plans. Let's see how you test these batteries. Let's see what happens when a battery fails. Can you contain it? And so far it looks like we're actually on track to being able to turn this into a safe platform. Ok. There's so many more questions I have Pretoria, I'm sure you have Pretoria as well. But thankfully, he will be sticking around for the next two days. So please do feel free to find some at a coffee break, flag him down and continue the conversation because this, as I said is quite an outlandish idea. Thank you for demonstrating it to us today and I look forward to seeing what happens next and thank you so much. Thank you.

Brainstorm Tech 2024

Aicha Evans, Chief Executive Officer, Zoox Interviewer: Emma Hinchliffe, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Making The Robotaxi A Practical Reality

Join Fortune editors and powerful leaders at the crossroads of business, technology, and health care for crucial conversations and connections.

Brainstorm Health 2024

Cathy Friedman, Executive Venture Partner, GV (Google Ventures)  Alyssa Jaffee, Partner, 7wireVentures  Anarghya Vardhana, General Partner, Maveron  Moderator: Andrew Nusca, Editorial Director, Fortune

Brainstorm Health 2024: Building Resilient Healthcare Companies

Cathy Friedman, Executive Venture Partner, GV (Google Ventures)  Alyssa Jaffee, Partner, 7wireVentures  Anarghya Vardhana, General Partner, Maveron, Andrew Nusca, Editorial Director, Fortune

Hey, everybody. How are we doing? All right, we've got a great, a great session in store here. Um I want to start off by reading something that I was reading in a report uh from last year, so much has changed since last year, but it was a report last year about kind of the market conditions. It was, it's hard not to have a glass half empty view of the health tech market. Uh The reasons were that the public market markets were underwhelming. Uh that venture capital funding uh had been down since about 2021. Um It is however way up from a decade ago, I want to just say that um now we have lots of macroeconomic anxiety, soft landing versus hard interest rate cuts. A few, many, nobody knows what's going on. So I want to ask, are you feeling optimistic or are you feeling cautious? I am feeling optimistic. Uh And the reason I'm feeling optimistic is that there are a ton of great technologies and companies out there that need to be financed because they're meeting unmet needs for patients. Um And at our fund, we have a really long term view and I think if you have a long term view, these needs need to be met. There's money to be made and patience to be served here. So I am optimistic. I'm so sad to hear that people are feeling that the glass is half empty because while the heyday of the pandemic is over, what came out of Pandora's box was the consumer empowerment that we've all been craving in health care. So we're all looking to become better stewards of our health, right? Patients are people that have things done to them and consumers are active stewards of their health. More companies are getting funded today. The bar to start a company is lower. And so we're seeing innovation come in health care that we've never seen before. So while the funding markets may tell one story, the actual um capabilities of these businesses, the commercial traction they're getting from health plans, from health systems, from Pharma orgs Employers is beyond. I think what any of us thought could happen five years ago and please, I'll, I'll start with the hard part which I think if you're an entrepreneur right now, it can feel like fundraising is really, really hard, it can feel like the bar is higher than ever, which it is, it can feel like there's a lot of pressure from your board to hit certain unit. Economics hit certain goals. So the glass can feel kind of hot half empty as an entrepreneur. But I think the positive side of it is that now is the time to build an incredible company, the resilience, the grittiness, the forced constraints are allowing for companies to discover new business models, innovative ways of reaching customers in non expensive previously, Facebook and Google and also creating environments where companies and payers and providers who are purchasing the products are also demanding really, really high quality. So I think the clinical outcomes that will come out of this batch of companies is going to be better than ever before. Let me stay with you for a second. So you can invest in lots of different kinds of companies. Health as a category has different considerations. Share your perspective. What is great about a health uh uh uh company from an investment standpoint. What is a difficulty, a challenge? Yeah. So for context, I'm a consumer investor. So I invest in companies who think of the end patient as the consumer. So a lot of the business models are B to B to C, some are B to C and in health care. Unlike many other companies, there's so many considerations including ethical clinical clinical ones. Are you doing? What's right for the patient at end of the day? Are you driving better results? I think in the heyday of a lot of funding, we saw companies that were trying to deliver growth at all costs. That wasn't always the best thing for the patient. And I think we could all name a number of companies that were driving for that growth without always having the necessary guard rails around the company to protect the patient at the end of the day. Yeah, we um so our thesis is called the informed Connected health consumer. So how to all of us here in this room today? How do we get access to information, connecting into the system? The system connects back to us to improve our own health outcomes. But the thing is health care companies are not consumer companies and there became a very blurred line early on about in the pandemic of what those companies were and how companies were marketed or where the bulk of the dollars lie in health care, the bulk of the dollar dollars still lie with the incumbents and a lot of companies believe that if you build it, they will come and in health care, they will not come. That's and so creating business for they might come and stay for five minutes or they'll do a pilot and and not pay nothing, ask you to actually pay for that pilot. So I think ultimately, um what wasn't working? What doesn't work is people that don't have that understanding, people that don't have founder market fit, right? We talk a lot about product market fit. But why are you your team the right people to build this to do this? There's way easier ways to make money than to do this in health care. You've got to be here for something else. And that's what's most important, you know, you said founder Market Fit, is that right? So, so I was, I was, that was gonna be my next question, which is in this moment. Yes, thank you. I appreciate it. Well, no, in this moment, it's clearly a kind of a moment of reckoning. So what's working and what's not, are founders sufficiently resilient is capital, sufficiently patient, you know, are are the cost structures sustainable. This market environment is really tough to fundraise the bar is higher. What investors are looking for is different than what investors used to look for in the past and it's causing friction and frustration. But I think it also creates resilience in companies. I have not heard so many conversations about profitability in all my years of being a venture capitalist than I have in the last 18 to 24 months that we are actually building the right kind of companies, the appropriate level companies. And I think an argue says as well of clinical outcomes, like we are in this business to actually drive value in health care, to improve outcomes and to reduce costs. And that's not a buzzword on a slide, although we see it often on those slides, that is really the mission and the goal of what we're trying to do and many people miss that. So if you're building a company that actually shows how you can do that often, those companies will become the most successful. Yeah. And you have to have a clinical out comes, but you also have to have financial outcomes. So the best companies create dashboards that they say they set up uh goals that they want to reach and they, if they reach them great, if they exceed them even better. But if they don't reach them, they rejigger themselves and figure out how they can reach them because not setting goals. And just assuming some great story is going to take place because you have some great patient, something to deliver doesn't work in this market at all. I think that we're seeing uh a batch of founder who are incredibly mission and purpose oriented and financially oriented and want to build a business versus perhaps in the previous set of companies, there was a lot of mission, a lot of purpose and there was a hesitancy to even say, hey, we're building a business that can actually sustain itself with revenue and it feels like the two are finally coming together, maybe, maybe also the naivete around. Um I, I built this thing in tech or I built this thing in consumer. But gosh, being a health consumer is so hard and so frustrating and creates so much friction. I gotta go do that thing now. And it's an amazing passion and mission. But welcome to this world that all of us know is extremely complex and convoluted. And so if you aren't able to understand how to unlock it, many companies have found themselves really stuck in that process. Yeah. And I think you need to decide if you're gonna play inside the current system, meaning the payers and the providers, the employers, how it is right now, or if you're gonna do something completely different and play outside and we've done some investing on outside as well, which is also interesting. So folks, I'm gonna come to the audience in a few minutes with questions. So think about it. All right, I, I wanted to ask you. So where are we seeing in? What subcategories are we seeing success versus not that BioPharma comes to mind. Uh uh V BC comes to mind where in your particular portfolios, where are we seeing good and not so good? We tend to be vertical investors. So we really focus on companies that solve problems. Um We're less of a horizontal investor. Technology is great. A I is incredibly transformative, but it is not a one stop shop. And so where we focus on is how can A I be an application or component for care delivery? Um But it's not the thing. And so what is the thing that drives value? All of us are actually on a board of an amazing women's health company called Caraway that focuses on Gen Z women. So how do we help young women gain independence and agency in their health care? Journey. We're seeing a lot of these types of solutions start to really materialize because of their focus on the communities that they serve. I have a slightly different angle um which is a lot of the companies I'm seeing now have a different focus on the actual clinician than I've seen previously. I think that pre pandemic, a lot of clinicians, which I think a lot of you here in the audience are clinical practicing folks. Um We're almost seen as just a part of the business you use them, you move on, you get new ones, whatever. And for the first time, I'm seeing a focus on hiring great clinicians, retaining them, keeping them happy, developing them. And actually thinking of your clinicians as your big best and biggest asset, which is a big shift. I think in the start up world where that can sometimes feel slower and more cumbersome than let's just grow users by any means. Yeah, I think also really focusing on access because there are a lot of um areas within medical care where there just isn't uh a big enough supply. And the examples I can think of in our portfolio in menopause. We have midi, we have ULA, we have a Lara where you just don't have doctors that cover those specialties. So by providing that on in a telehealth way with the ability to go somewhere else for four wall treatment, you can make access so much better. So you don't have as many care deserts around the US. You know, I was actually that, that, that leads into, uh another question I was gonna ask is, you know, COVID and the pandemic just exposed a lot of gaps in the system and then there was a big rush. So, in your opinions, do you feel that those gaps persist? You know, are we starting to solve for any of them? You know, I think the gaps still persist, but the one that's been the most heartening for me is the focus on behavioral health. I think the pandemic showed America and, and the larger world, how lonely people are, how much connection they need and how important mental health is equally, if not more important than our physical health. And that acceleration, you know, we see tons of companies and behavioral health where investors and things like two chairs and bend and really being able to see companies focused on folks with mental well being I think is heartening and just continuing. I would, I would add to her comment, which is the physical and the mental are very connected. And in our prior prior to COVID world, it was sort of you had a mental health problem and you had a physical problem. And I think through COVID, it's become much more of common knowledge that those are very related. So you can't just have a mental health solution, you can't just have a physical health solution. They have to be integrated. The thing is Andrew. We are um I think we, we're at this time today where we're going to spend our entire lifetime and multiple lifetimes over trying to solve these problems in health care. And that's scary, but also um enticing of how big this thing can be. And we talk about access to care and the Medicaid population and companies, the number of who are here today Summer House, who does uh Tebas pediatric care, a company called Ground Game that does uh works with CB OS and a number of kind of scoh opportunities to really close gaps in care. There's so we can name a million more companies that are starting on this journey and even just getting initial penetration, we heard from Sarah London and the CEO of Centene. There's just so much that we have to do. Um And I think that should hopefully be an encouraging message to those in the fans today who are actually working to do this on the front lines because we are making progress. It just, it does take time and a brief follow up before we go to the audience. Um So many lifetimes, you know, investing does require a return. Have you heard this longevity thing? We're gonna live for many lifetimes. Keep investing. I see. OK. OK. Got it. Got it. All right. Let's go to the audience. They will live on forever. All right, let's, let's right over here. We'll wait for the mic for and please uh introduce yourself. Just name and, and organization, please. Hi there. I'm uh Doctor Natalie Davis from prevent Scripts. Alyssa, I can remember on a start up health call. Probably this was pre pandemic. I think you talking about series A metrics. Um Could you give us an update on series A metrics for 2024 and how that goal post may have tweaked on the Yeah, on the record, I don't actually think my answer personally has changed much. My answer is again, um We invest mostly B to B to C 50% of our capital comes from strategic organizations, health plans, health systems, pharma, employers. And so what I look for is if you know, Cigna is an amazing partner to us, for example. And if Cigna says, wow, your business is so amazing. I wanna do this. I wanna roll you out to all my national accounts. Are you gonna thrive or are you gonna be crushed? That is how we look, get a series A it's uh we don't have a definitive metric around revenue. I'm sure that, you know, my, my amazing panelists can give some more guidance, but at the end of the day, the core of what we think about is is your business in a place where we can take you to these large incumbents and you are able to carry whatever comes of that. Hopefully very, very large and long lasting contracts. Yeah, I would just add on to that. We don't have any specific tailored revenue tax, whatever, but we're very focused on the number one thing, which is the team, the number two thing, which is the product market fit and the number three thing, which is the ability to scale and that usually involves having some tech that's very good and deep. Um, so those things have not changed in this market at all. Well said, all right, let's find one more another, another audience question. Forgive me. It's very bright. Yes, way back here. Hello everyone. My name is Elena, the co founder and CEO of generation lab and we actually work in longevity. So that word is becoming bigger and bigger in the space right now. What we are doing is starting out from 19 different organ health and build a personalized plan from lifestyle, nutrition, medicines and also workout. So I want to hear a perspective of health care because it's becoming a new world from sick care that we used to be. How do you guys think about the new healthcare world is changing? Especially longevity is becoming a real trend right now. So, um I believe that the most important thing in health care is early detection right now before I joined Google Ventures, I was the chair of Grail. And to me, we can detect things early and that was cancer. But there are many other things and some people earlier today were talking about Children and detecting things early. So you have to be able to detect them early and that requires diagnostics and other things there. And then once you detect them early, you have to have personal medicine to deal with them. I'm less concerned with living to be 100 and 50 than I am living to be some age where I can be active and healthy and whether that's 80 or 90 or 65 doesn't really matter. Um But I don't want to be into the business of longevity investing just for the sake of living longer. I I think that a lot of the longevity conversations, content products are really tailored to certain like niches of society. And as a consumer investor, I think a lot about how does this get mainstream, how do regular people in the world use this access this and that feels like a lot of the missing gap. Of course, stuff has to launch first and they are early adopters and such. But, you know, my vision is with the power of A I, there is a possibility where people can know what is exactly the personalized tailored thing for them because right now the question is like, what test do I use? What protocols do I follow? Should I listen to this podcast or that one? And the more that can be personalized and accessible, the better also payers have to pay for it. So, you know, I think you you even in V BC and the, the journey to value based care is much more complex and not as straightforward as we thought. And we longevity fits. I'd say there's probably still a, you know, a knock on the fee for service door of how you can think about the entry way to build that relationship with the health plan in order to get to a real bundle or a real risk based contract, given the value of longevity. All right. Well, um, 2025 then is it gonna be the year of Pretenders or the year of contenders contenders? Absolutely. I think a lot of companies that are building right now are gonna be of a strength and girth and revenues w um, that it's gonna be a great market and you, you know, they're 30 companies right now that could break out to be phenomenal companies in 2025. 1 2nd. I'm gonna say contenders because great companies get funded. All right. All right. Ok. And Contenders. Ok. But please, that, that, that's our time. Give them a round of applause. Thank you so much. Yeah, that's correct.

Future of Finance 2024

Robert Goldstein, Senior Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer; Member, Global Executive Committee; Co-chair, Global Operating Committee, BlackRock Moderator: Lee Clifford, Executive Editor, Enterprise, Fortune

Future of Finance 2024: BlackRock and the Future of Finance

Robert Goldstein, Senior Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer; Member, Global Executive Committee; Co-chair, Global Operating Committee, BlackRock Moderator: Lee Clifford, Fortune

Good morning, everyone. All right, Rob, you made it here in the nick of time. Brave some awful traffic. Let's dive right in. A little traffic is good. It shows the city is sort of back. I like it. Absolutely. The city might be too back. Um OK, so you guys founded an A I lab in 2018. You've been at this for a little while. Tell us where is it, what does it do? What have you learned? And I think that when people talk about A I, they forget that the A I lab at MIT was actually founded in the 19 fifties. So a lot of these ideas, these concepts, these methodologies are actually not brand new. What's brand new for the past few years has been this confluence of there's more data than anyone could have imagined even a few years ago. And the amount of compute capacity in the world and how you access. It has just fundamentally changed a couple of years ago, even less when Chachi Pt started what I would call a gen A I revolution, the world changed again. So we have started our A I lab in 2018 we've been using these methodologies really for a couple of decades and what the purpose of the A I lab, which is literally like right on the border of the campus of Stanford. And we have a lot of people who are affiliated with the math department, the electrical engineering department of Stanford, who are effectively running the lab. And the vision at the time was a very simple vision, which was, we have a lot of things we're solving for. We have a group of people who are solving for them using a variety of methods we've been trying for many, many years. And let's get a group of people who are more focused on natural language processing optimization, more focused on the math than the finance. And let's throw the same problems at them and see how they would ultimately solve those problems. And we've had great, great success with that. What changed a couple of years ago? And I think at the most basic level, you could think of it as everything we were doing really was centered on numbers. Now. What's happening with gen A I is that you're able to extend your problems and solutions to be more about words and language. And that unlocks what I believe will be the most significant technology innovation evolution, revolution of my 30 year career because the kinds of things you could do have just expanded greatly. And I'll, I'll give, can I give one quick example? OK. So, so the quick example that I would give is we had a presentation to Blackrocks Board several months ago. It was uh either October or November or last year. And the presentation was on Gen A I. And what our strategy associated with Gen A I is. And as part of that presentation, because we normally would write a memo as part of the board materials, we had the idea of let's actually use chat EPT to write the memo. So we took what our strategy document was and we fed it into chat EPT with a very simple prompt and that prompt was write an executive summary. I think it was 500 words, maybe 1000 words um for the board explaining our strategy, some of the risks and so on. So it gave us a memo and then we gave that memo to a bunch of people internally to read. And what was most amazing to me is and, and we have some tough graders within Blackrock. Let me be very clear as we gave the memo to those tough graders to read. Everyone had comments and the comments were typically things like I hate the tone. The comments were like, I think you're selling yourself short. The comments were like, what about this? No one realized it was actually written by a computer. A couple of people when we told them it was written by a computer, they said, I don't like the computer's tone I'm like, well, you should take that up with the computer. And then what became clear is that even something like the tone, the computer will be able to modify its tone a little nicer to or you feed it 10 other memos with the right tone and you say give me the tone of those memos. So it's just those are the kinds of problems you would have never thought of a computer solving three years ago, writing the memo describing your strategy. So the unlock here is a generational unlock and particularly through the lens of a coo it's a incredible force with regard to how you need to think about operating a company, the talent strategy and just the overall strategy of how you engage with and communicate with clients, how you process information to generate investment ideas. It's a whole new world one. Let's talk about strategy a little bit. One thing I'm hearing from a lot of companies is suddenly you need to re evaluate your strategy every three months, every six months, it's no longer something that you know gets evaluated every couple of years. As what are you finding? Well, I think is a starting point without question, everything is just happening faster. So if you take a step back, I think this is another we would think of technology innovation and consequence, maybe an unintended consequence, but everything is happening faster in this world. And a big part of it is because one of the fundamental ingredients for change is information flow and the information flow is just accelerating, accelerating accelerating. So I think we view strategy as an incredibly fluid assignment. But what's interesting from a black rock lens is that the strategy has been uh largely unchanged because from our perspective, we're really looking at what are the challenges that clients have with their whole portfolio, with the whole investment portfolio. And the core of our strategy is really fulfilling that whole portfolio requirement. And if anything many of the forces that are happening, including the forces that we're describing now are just accelerating the client requirement to work with people who could do more and more things for that whole portfolio. When you look back over your 30 year career at Blackrock, what are some of the things that you think are unique about your company and have made it so successful over the past 30 years? We only have six minutes. II, I think I could talk for a year about my 30 years. But importantly, I think that if you look at the history of Blackrock and if you look at what Blackrock is today and even as we were being introduced, we spoke about Blackrock, we spoke about the Aladdin platform, we spoke about the ETF platform, the is shares platform that we have. And what's interesting is that if you think about the asset management industry, particularly if you go back 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, you could argue even today, it really is organized much more around the service providers, the asset managers. And then there's this expectation that the clients have to put all these service providers together. So even if you look at Black Rock and our size and scale, it still is under 10% of the market, the industry is incredibly bifurcated, which leads to the client having to do a lot of work. And the strategy that we've been employing at the most basic level is that the clients are our compass for where we take the company. So the clients are building these whole portfolios. Those whole portfolios involve taking investment strategies that seek alpha investment strategies that are designed to provide exposures through replicating indices, public markets, private markets across a whole array of things. Then you need to understand the risks in those portfolios. You need to understand asset allocation, you need technology to do the processing. So our strategy has always been how do we be able to solve the client's whole problem or any building block piece or the technology infrastructure? Now, if you look back when we started to provide Aladdin, people said, why would an asset manager provide technology when we bought Barclays global investors? And we as part of that had the ishares leading ETF franchise. People basically said you need to be an active manager or you need to be an index manager, they would call it back then, a passive manager, there could be nothing further from the truth. You can't be both. It was religious. And we just said, why is it religious? If clients are taking all these pieces and putting them together, isn't the industry an industry designed to serve its clients? And I think if you look at the past three decades, the industry is just shifting more and more. And I like to think Blackrock is leading in that shift to how can you really service the whole portfolio and how could you be able to talk to clients where even if they buy one LEGO piece, one building block from you as an individual product, you recognize it's in the context of that whole portfolio and you can talk to them about that LEGO piece in the context of the whole portfolio. OK. Well, we're here at the Future of Finance conference. So now it's time for some bold predictions. We're sitting here 10 years from now. What is going to look different about the whole finance industry? I I think that the Black Rock was founded and from the earliest days, there was a thesis that at its core, the asset management industry is an information processing industry. And I think the past three decades have been, if you look at it as a line, it's been going like this towards that vision. I think the line is gonna go like this. I think that the asset management industry and the broad business of investments in aggregate is gonna just increasingly become an information processing and technology business. There's gonna be mass personalization that clients are gonna be able to experience. There's gonna be a mass ability to look at all the data that's being created. And, and, and remember if you look forward as a prediction, I'm not smart enough to know if it's five X 10 X 100 x 500 X. I just know it's lots of x more data in the world that asset managers will need to understand and process and these businesses are just gonna increasingly become technology businesses in every way possible. I think it's also quite clear that the lines between the public markets and the private markets, the lines between where you are within a, a capital structure and a capital stack, all of these lines are getting more blurry. So the portfolio of the future will clearly have public market exposures and private market exposures. It will clearly have fixed income and equity, but it will clearly be thought of more as a series of exposures than the convenience technology of being able to label things a certain way and assume as a simplifying assumption, assume that that label behaves a given way. Last question, you've said tech a lot I haven't counted but it's many times. Is it changing who you're hiring? What, what type of background are you looking for now? That's a great question. We within blackrock, roughly um a little over a quarter of the company would be people who are technologists. That is something that we've been doing for for quite some time. But it's interesting because I feel like is we have more and more conviction that we need more technologists. We also have more and more conviction. We're, we're, we're a firm that has a very large analyst class every year that we hire out of university. We also have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history in England in things that have nothing to do with finance or technology. And it's that diversity of thinking and diversity of people and diversity of looking at different ways to solve problems that really fuels innovation. As a history major, we have to stop there. But as a history major, I'd love to hear that. Thank you so much for joining us.

Brainstorm AI London 2024

Zoubin Ghahramani, Vice President, DeepMind, Google; Professor, Information Engineering, University of Cambridge Dr. Anne Phelan, Chief Scientific Officer, BenevolentAI Dr. Marc Warner, Co-Founder and CEO, Faculty Moderator: Jeremy Kahn, AI Editor, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm AI London 

Brainstorm AI London 2024: How The Latest Breakthroughs In Generative AI Will Transform Business And Society

Photography by Joe Maher Fortune Brainstorm AI

Brainstorm AI: How The Latest Breakthroughs In Generative Ai Will Transform Business And Society

Zoubin Ghahramani, DeepMind, Google; Information Engineering, University of Cambridge, Dr. Anne Phelan, BenevolentAI, Dr. Marc Warner,  Faculty, Jeremy Kahn, FORTUNE

Thank you all for being with me and thank you all for joining us. So general A I is creating a lot of buzz. A lot of excitement about what is coming in the future from these models. I want to start by talking a little bit with been who's Amelia to write about Gemini. This is a very powerful model that Google has, has developed and has just come out with a couple of new versions of what is so special about Gemini Zubin. And how is this potentially transformative? Let's start there. Yeah, thanks Jeremy. It's a pleasure to be here. So, um first of all, Gemini is, is a whole family of models going from on device models to our very largest models. And uh what's really exciting about Gemini is that they're built multi modally from the ground up so they can process uh images, audio, video, et cetera alongside text. And our latest version of Gemini um actually has uh what's called a, a 1 million token context window, which means that it can process and keep in memory a tremendous amount of information much larger than any of the other models out there. It's like a whole book's worth of material. It's many books, a whole podcast, a video, an entire code base. And you know, if you think of that, not just if you think of that in terms of like the short term memory that the model has, that you can query and interact with the capabilities of that. We've only really scratched the surface of that. Interesting. Now, I know when Gemini came out at least one version of the model, there was an issue around the image generation capability of the model that in an effort to try to make sure that the images were you represent a diverse set of people and overcame some of the historical biases in the data that people complained about with these models. You guys created a model that it was actually very hard to get it to generate images of white people even in historically appropriate context for that. And it was quite embarrassing for you. How do you, how do you overcome issues like that? Because I think, I think that's one of, I think that's one of the problems now is that people want a model that you can just say, OK, well, you know, be diverse when that's appropriate and when it's not appropriate, you know, be correct to the historical context, but you can't just tell the model that apparently. So yeah, how do you overcome the first of all? Thanks Jeremy for asking, you know, it's, it's actually you know, it really highlights the fact that these challenges are difficult, right? First of all, you know, we want the tools, the generative A I tools to be relevant to people all around the world. So if you ask a model to create images of, let's say a nurse in a hospital or a school teacher or you know, a board member of a company, it has to be relevant to people all around the world. Google is a global company. We have, you know, people using our tools on every continent. Um but the guard rails that we put in uh in that case, we were clearly wrong. We came out, we actually said that we then um pulled the image generation for Gemini off so that we can improve it and put it back out in a way that's more acceptable to more people. Um You know, this is really part I think of the iteration process where you create tools, these are cutting edge tools, you put them out there, people find them really useful, sometimes, sometimes they find them offensive, right? And you know, I think this is a a healthy thing that the whole A I community is really grappling with right now. Mark I want to get you in here. You faculty help a lot of different businesses, try to figure out how to implement A I technology, help the government do this to some extent. I think, you know, this all comes down to reliability. You have these very powerful systems were very excited about the sort of headline capabilities, but then they start playing around with it and they're like, oh, but it's not reliable. How do I? And I think a lot of business leaders are struggling with the idea of how do I implement something that's not reliable? What advice are you giving people around that? Yeah. So we think that people need to think about these in a human centric way. So they are tools to be used in combination with people. And so if you're careful and you're thoughtful about how you design that in from the start, you give yourself this ability to sort of tune the workload between the person and the machine and that ultimately, well, one puts you in a much better place right now because the models aren't perfect and will have small failure modes that can mess up a particular workflow. But two, it does also future proof you to an extent because over time, you can tune that balance between the person and the machine so that as these developing capability and the truth is, nobody knows how fast they're going to develop and how far they're going to get. But as they do develop in capability, you will be able to tune that workflow as you go. And so you'll have this nice possibility of being relatively future proofed and benevolent. You're using these to help with drug discovery a lot of people are very excited about the potential transformational effect on science. Maybe you can talk a little bit about where you see this going and how big an impact you think these models will have on science. Yes, actually your comments resonated really clearly for me because we do think of it as human in the loop we have now the capacity to surface huge amounts of data by medical data. The field is expanding at a colossal rate, all mixed data, patient level data and to be able to carefully curate and amalgamate all that to be able to pose biological questions to our data foundations is something that we've given an awful lot of thought and some elements are moving really quickly in terms of automation and some are very heavily reliant on the human in the loop kind of process. But fundamentally drug discovery is very, very difficult, it's expensive, it's time consuming something like 95% of drugs don't make it through clinical development to launch and it costs something in the region of $2.5 billion per drug. So anything that we can do even incrementally to increase our probability of success in each incremental process step of the process and inevitably bring down costs is going to have a massive societal impact with the use of A I is carefully applied to drug discovery. And when you talk about carefully applying, I mean, can you talk a little bit about what's involved there and, and how do you prevent some of the potential failure modes? As Mark was saying of these models? Yeah. So I mean, I think incrementally, the first step of drug discovery is identifying the target that you want to modulate. So we spent a lot of time thinking about trying to integrate all biomedical data so that we can understand the signaling pathways and mechanisms of health and disease. So we can choose the right target because fundamentally, if you have the wrong target, doesn't matter how good you are, the rest of it, the whole thing's doomed really. So starting really carefully with the with the right target is a is a big first step. And actually, as we use some of these more generative models, really thinking carefully about the prompt and asking very careful questions of the technology so that you don't get these kind of hallucinatory answers that you can very carefully. It's not just one question, one answer. It's a series of very carefully crafted questions that get you a more and more refined answer back that then we can use, you know, actual data that we can use for the next step of the process. Interesting speaking of questions, we're going to go to questions from the audience in a minute. So please think of your questions. Um When you talk about using these tools for science, I know deep mind has done a lot of work around this alpha fold, you know, a huge success. Um recently, though there was a paper you guys had on material science that had been published in nature came up with, you know, thousands of new materials with unknown properties of science. It sounded very exciting. There's recently been some criticism though that a lot of those materials are not really synthes, sizeable, not easy to manufacture. Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. I mean, as someone who's been in this area for a long time, looking at the research potential of these models, how are you thinking about it? Are we, are we over hyping? What these can do for science? So I don't think we're over hyping because I think actually one of the most exciting things that A I can do for humanity is uh advancing our ability to create new technologies, new other technologies. So let's talk about material science. This is a very exciting area. Um uh So the paper in question um actually uh had uh 2.2 million new stable crystals that were automatically generated from the A I model. And if you think about what new materials can help you do, they can help you um design uh better batteries, they can help you um design better uh photovoltaic solar panels and all sorts of things that will help us address, you know, medical devices, all sorts of things that helps us address um you know, societal challenges. Now, um the uh the process that we stand by the results of the paper, it was peer reviewed in nature, which is really the top journal academically. Um, and, you know, it's part of a healthy scientific uh uh process where you put out some results and people come out and question them, you go back and forth and, you know, hopefully that the truth comes out. But the paper is really exciting along along with a lot of the other work that has been done in A I for the sciences in, you know, many areas like biology with Alpha fold or, you know, fusion energy and mark, do you think the hype sort of getting ahead of ourselves here in terms of what, what these models can accomplish? Uh Well, I mean, I, I like, I think that A I for science that deep mind does is unbelievable and totally brilliant. But I do think in other contexts it's easy to over claim for these models. So, like, you know, you look at when we were promised or fully autonomous cars and it's taken a bit longer than we expected. And I think if people are thinking in the context of like, these are just going to automate away jobs, one for one that will be like much further away than most people anticipate, hopefully much further away as well. I think it's both true and good that it would be further away. But none of that is to say anything other than like the science these guys are doing is totally amazing, right? Uh I wanna go to questions from the audience. So please, if you have, if you have a question, please raise your hand and please wait till mic gets to you and I will call you. There's a question here if we can get a mic to this uh lady here. Uh And if you could please state your name and, and your affiliation. Um, when you stand up. Hi, I'm Natalia Yashu. I lead product in a net tech called Learn Light. Um, and actually I just wanted to respond to the last comment you made around. Well, it takes us longer than we sometimes expect to progressive technologies partly is due to our acceptance or no acceptance of risk. Maybe we could have progressed far faster with autonomous cars if we're ready for more accidents, right? So it feels to me like it's the same with um A I, so I wonder how do you think we can actually find that balance between accepting some risk? Is there less a risk that we're ready to accept because it's technology and not a human error or actually do we need to? That's, that's a great question mark. I want you to answer that first. Like when you're advising people on that question, like how much risk should I accept? How do they, how do you reach that balance was obviously context dependent. So if somebody is saying we want an algorithm that will put a red jumper or a blue jumper top of our website. Then, you know, it's basically use whatever you want. It doesn't, it doesn't matter too much. Then in something like a medical context where the ultimate decision can in principle come down to life or death care much, much, much, much more greatly about um about that risk tolerance. Um At the moment, you know, I don't think there is anything better or more thorough than working with the organization themselves because it is important to remember that even though A I is a new technology, the thing you're using it for is still the thing you are always doing in almost all cases. So if you're a doctor, you are always making life and death decisions and now A I is coming into that. So whether that was like a bureaucratic decision or a technological decision or some simpler algorithm, in any case, you are used to wrestling with exactly the ethical dimensions of that problem. And so in the context of any given problem, there's almost always like a large amount of pre existing thought that you can tap into carefully and, and when you're dealing with a process that, you know, costs 2.5 billion and takes 10 years, how do you view that sort of risk assessment? And, and can you, you know, is it, oh, if we can save any time and money off? Of that. It's worth it or, you know, not always. Yeah, I think, I mean, there is a risk associated with it, but I think the risk can be quite a positive force for disruption. So when you think about drug discovery, as in designing the actual drug, we have very experienced and very seasoned medicinal chemists who can design, they're augmented now with all sorts of different predictive tools to enable them to make different molecules. And sometimes the tools will suggest something the chemist would never ever have thought of. And they inherently think well, it could be, that's not right, you know, that's too dangerous. But I should then, you know, you kind of think, well, actually maybe components of that could be useful. So I think it's the risk management if you, you've got to be open to the notion of risk and what it can do in terms of disruption, but there has to be like guard rails and controls around how you view that, that kind of prediction. So I think, yeah, the scope for this as long as it's carefully monitored, right? Other questions from folks in the room, please raise your hand. There's a question right here, please stand up and say, yeah, he l Southern Methodist University and the board of Directors of Hitachi. Um at lunch, we spoke about the importance of the triangle between on one hand, it backbone. On the other hand, data analytics, data science and domain knowledge you talked about the human in the loop to make sure we get the right quality. But often the person with the domain knowledge, it's the hardest to get into the loop. Can you, can you give some practical advice? How do we make sure that we actually get this human in the loop in the right way? That's a good question mark. Do you want to take that? Yeah. Well, we think of it as human in the loop and human over the loop. So initially, when you start building a system, you probably do want a human actually in the loop as in nothing goes out without human seeing it. But over time, as you build confidence, you can have a human in over the loop putting policies to guide it. Now, the problem is that you do actually have to build your systems in a slightly different way. Like if you want to make them properly human centric, it requires a different set of slightly different set of technologies, a slightly different set of design principles. So we've thought quite a lot about how you do that and have not not published it in an easily accessible form. So I, I promise I will write a blog and I will send it around. Uh but they're like in essence, the way you do it is you start by designing for human and machine to work together and then you structure the algorithms in a more modular fashion so that you basically inherently build in more explainability and more causality into the system. Fascinating other questions here. There's a gentleman here hand up uh marksman from the Times and how, how do you address the issue of concentration of power in A I given the resources needed to build models, etcetera and compute. How do we, how do you answer that one from Google Jeremy? Um So, yeah. No. Uh I, I think it's a, it's a very good question. Um When we look at the, uh what's happened in A I over the last few years, um it's actually really exciting to see uh how many start ups have come out with state of the art models. It seems like, you know, uh every week we have a new entrant into the field, the barriers to entry have been continuing to decrease with open models. We've also contributed to that. We, you know, we've published a lot of our work, but we also have produced open models and then if you look at the um cloud providers, um the whole model is to make these uh tools available very widely. Um So I think it's actually a pretty healthy ecosystem of competition right now. Um It's, you know, although it's expensive to train the very largest models, once you train it, once you can make it available and then people can build on it and use it. And we've seen an incredible thriving of the ecosystem So, um, you know, we'll have to see what happens over the next few years. But, um, I'm, I'm, you know, not concerned about that myself, but, you know, and that brings up an interesting question though, which we were talking about earlier about sort of, do you, do you build these models yourself? Do you buy them? Do you use open source models? How is benevolent sort of looking at that? And then also in the industry of pharmaceuticals, like there's this issue about power, all the big pharmaceutical companies have traditionally had a lot of data. How have you guys as a start up sort of thought, compete with that? Yes, in terms of the models, we have a hybrid model. Actually, we have some proprietary capabilities, we have open access capabilities, we have open access capabilities that we sort of customized and made them more bespoke to our needs. So, you know, in case of access to data, we've systematically brought in a whole range of different data types from the literature or makes compound structures, all this kind of totality of biomedical data so that we can reason over it. But we will always be have smaller data foundations and the really big pharma who have got decades of drug discovery data in house and that's for them to build their models and reason over. But for us, you know, there's a surprising amount of literature publicly available, well, literature and other data modalities that if you systematically build, you can get really decent picture of human biology and mark when you're talking about customers and clients, how do you advise them on this issue of bill versus buy? And do they use an open source model or do you use the proprietary model that seems to do better on a benchmark? What we, I mean, we think about A I is just better software, right? So it's the perennial build vs by question and the only two answers we know are wrong is all build or all buy. Anything in the middle is almost, is at least justifiable. And then our view is that it depends on how it compares to your capabilities and your competitive advantage. So if you have like if it's close to your competitive advantage, you want to be leaning to more towards, more towards build. If it's further from your competitive advantage, you want to be leaning more towards buy. Fantastic. That's all the time we have for today with this group of panelists. But thank you very much for being here and thank you all for listening and we'll get on to the next panel. Thank you very much.

Innovation Forum 2024

The Honourable Paul Chan Mo-po, GBM, GBS, MH, JP, Financial Secretary, Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region In conversation with Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief, FORTUNE 

Innovation Forum 2024: The Innovation Imperative

Good morning everyone. Mr Chan, you fill a room. There's so many people here. It's great to see you all. It is very encouraging. Welcome. Good morning to you all. Good morning. Um So we have some questions about the economy and and your view of it. So I'd love to just start with your snapshot of it. You've recently said the economy is registering positive growth but the growth is not even. So I'm curious from your vantage point, the brightest spots and the most challenging spots. Well, you know, the more challenging part would be merchandise exports, which is affected by the higher for longer interest rate environment as well as geopolitics, both causing dampen the external demand, the brightest spot I would say come to Hong Kong, not just as a tourist or business visitor, but invest here over the past 12 months. We have seen tremendous interest in Hong Kong in terms of strategic business coming to Hong Kong in terms of talent coming to Hong Kong. So to spare some time to explore this city and we have tremendous opportunities to offer. So I want to explore a lot of those opportunities, some of the challenges how we can innovate our way to prosperity, um even further. But first, um the pandemic is something that's been difficult for everybody to uh get over. And it has changed habits in a lot of ways, whether it's been spending or tourism. Um What have been some of the biggest surprises and learnings as you've watched the recovery of Hong Kong. Well, you know, during the pandemic period, we have been very bold in terms of utilizing our financial resources to roll our counter cyclical measures to support the economic growth. Now, in terms of the post COVID level, in terms of public finance, we are entering into a what we call a fiscal consolidation process on the one hand, controlling the expenditure growth to make it below our economic growth. And at the same time, increase of our income by growing the economy and increasing in a very moderate and careful way additional revenue to the government so that in 23 years time, we will be able to return to balance. And at the same time, we would have enough resources to put to the areas that we want to develop like the technology and innovation area and build capacity for Hong Kong, for example, investing in the infrastructure in the northern metropolis. So that is one strategy going forward. And secondly, we see it as a very important move that is to leverage on the technology and innovation sector to diversify our economy, Hong Kong is well known as an international financial center. This is important, we will continue to further develop it to make it even more competitive. But at the same time, we want to grow the technology and innovation sector. So as to offer even more job choices for people as well as bringing our economy to the next level. If it sounds like diversifying the economy, beyond the financial hub that you've really established is a top priority. True. Yeah, wonderful. Um So I wanna remind the audience that at the end, we will have time for two questions. So be thinking hard. I will call on you at the end, but we'll leave a little bit of time for that. Um So Mr Chan Hong Kong's economy has always had its skeptics. Um and also it's always proved to be very resilient uh and decides with skeptics given that the recovery from COVID has maybe not been as swift in all areas as desired. Uh The skeptics are getting louder and there was recently uh op ed that caught a lot of attention in the financial times from a long time, Hong Konger who said um it pains me to say but Hong Kong is over, it's over. I'm sure you have opinions on that. And what do you say to those naysayers? Well, not at all. When you look at the tourist arrival last year, tourist arrival, about 34 million this year, we expect to have at least 46 million people and with the resumption in international fight continuing, I think this will be on the increase. And at the same time, let's share some facts. Look at our asset and wealth management, industry, asset under management, about $3 trillion. Look at our private equity, our venture capital sector, very vibrant altogether. They are managing about $220 billion, $220 billion and hedge fund. In terms of we are Asia number one, in terms of private equity, we are next just to the mainland in Asia. So all these sectors and growing when you look at our banking sector, total banking assets at the moment is about $2 trillion. And our banking sector has a lot of buffer, very resilient. Uh The liquidity ratio at the moment is over 100 and 60%. Whereas the international requirement is only 100% the capital adequacy ratio is over 20% while the international standard minimum is only 8%. So when you look at these figures, you will notice our financial market is still very strong and bonus is here. Our chief executive for the stock exchange, uh the total capitalization of the Hong Kong stock market three trillion uh let's see, $4 trillion and it is growing and we are diversifying our sources of new companies coming for this new capital, coming to use our platform. So I'm optimistic. Um you know, one of the challenges are there are some headwinds that could be long lasting and are just not entirely in your control. Um One of which are geopolitical tensions. Um Hong Kong's superpower has always been being a global super connector where you have this great relationship with China and you're also available to the rest of the world to engage with. Um how do geopolitical tensions uh change that I've had all? Well, you know, the geo geopolitical challenge will continue to be there for quite some time. We have to find a way to navigate all these and find new opportunities. I think that given the current situation, the unique status of Hong Kong under the one country two system becomes even more important and more apparent by coming here, you have convenient and even priority access to the mainland market. And at the same time, Hong Kong's unique character as an international city has been there. And we continue to be here like the rule of law, the common law legal system, the FIFA of capital goods, talent data and the separate currency, the Hong Kong dollar pack to the US dollar and it is freely convertible. So all these make Hong Kong very unique. So I think for us on the one hand, we need to communicate with the international community, coming to Hong Kong. You are in China, but we are different from the rest of China in terms of our way of doing things in business, our standards, which is best international standards. This is a natural platform for you to get access to the mainland market and as a springboard for the Asian market. And at the same time, I think we have a lot of attractions for talent and this going forward will be one of our key competitive advantages because whatever business you are in talent is the basis of competition. And I think we have very strong attraction for those of you coming to Hong Kong for this conference to find some time to explore this city. Uh Well, say for example, if you like wine and dine, we don't have any tax on wine. We have over 200 Michelin recommended restaurants. And you can also go to some of the mom and pop shop, which is also very interesting. So a lot to offer uh also in terms of lifestyle. So I'm very confident that if we continue to do the right thing, we will remain relevant and very attractive. Um Just one more point before we move on. Uh you know, one of the questions also in the article was um Hong Kong's ability to have autonomy to distinguish itself from some of these greater headwinds has always been a key part um with the passing of recent legislature, some of that has been called into question. Do you think it needs to be? I think you mean the reason and end of article 23. It is a constitutional responsibility, it is to compete uh one of the remaining work for Hong Kong as part of China to safeguard national security. And in fact, this piece of legislation, when you scrutinize it, it is no different than those in leading jurisdictions like the United Kingdom. So what we have in mind is that, well, we went through the difficulties, social unrest in 2019. Subsequently, we had the national security law enacted. We want to at the one hand ensure political stability and safety in this city and at the same time, so that we can concentrate our efforts to develop our economy. That is the idea and we appeal to you to work with us and to engage with different sectors in our community. And I am sure Hong Kong will remain one of the safest cities in the world and for the business sector, political stability is important. Thank you. Um So I want to talk about innovation, that's why we're here, right? Uh the innovation imperative. Um I'm curious for what do you think are some of the biggest bets? Um Hong Kong should make right now in innovation to set itself up for a path of prosperity. Well, innovation can be in a number of forms not necessary technology innovation. So for example, innovation in business models and the way we see it is that number one, the digital economy would be one of the driving force for innovation because it changed business models, transform businesses. But that assign we also need to focus on technology and innovation. Number one, as a sector to grow. Number two, as a means to transform and modernize the different sectors in our economy. And specifically when it comes to an sector of its own, we choose four areas to concentrate our energy. One is artificial intelligence and big data analytics. The second one is health science and health tech. The third one is fin tech and the final one is new materials, advanced manufacturing. We see these four areas offer tremendous opportunities. Say for example, for A I, we are building the infrastructure, increasing our computing capabilities. And more importantly, we are in a very aggressive mode of attracting companies in the A I space to come to Hong Kong to set up their business. I think A I I mean you you can't have any conversation with anyone in the world that lasts more than 10 minutes without us going into A I. It is so important. Um It has been called even though the Lisa Chat JP T was referred to as the Sputnik moment. Um the whole world is clamoring to create this amazing future. How do you um view Hong Kong's position now that we're on the precipice of this? Great A I change. How can you position this to be a big winner? I think the fundamental advantages began over as a hub for A I sector is the one country two system. Uh It is because here you can have convenient access to mainland data and international data and data is very important for this sector. Number one, number two is talent attracting different talents. Number three is our determination to grow this sector by increasing the computing capabilities. Say for example, in the budget, we talk about building a supercomputing center, here we are also inviting companies to come to grow a sector. And in this area, it may be interesting to note that if we marry A I with some other sector, say for example, the health science, the drug pharmaceutical sector that offers tremendous opportunities for pharmaceutical companies in the US or in Europe. If they want to tap the mainland market, where can they get the bio data of the Chinese? Where can they conduct clinical trial in order to enable their products to be registered and then be able to put on sale on the main market which offers 1.4 billion people. So in this area, I think we have uh we have a unique value proposition to offer. That is why in the budget we mentioned about hey along the border with sen uh not much of loop, let's develop that sector in the into a technology and innovation sector, bringing in those A I companies bring in those health science companies there. So that in in that particular song, we we try to work with the mainland authorities to get the approval to have more convenient or even free, full of data talents and capital. So that with these key factors of key elements, we can grow this sector more vibrant and build an ecosystem. And as you mentioned too, attracting global talent is a top priority for the chief executive for you for the whole team. Um How are you bringing the talents in? Why should entrepreneurs come here to build the start ups of the future, the biotechs of the future A I as a future? Well, you know, we have a dedicated office for this purpose. If I can, I may share with you some figures since December 2020 this office has was set up up till now. We have received over 220,000 applications. We we have approved about 100 and 60,000 of them and about 100 and 10,000 people have already arrived in Hong Kong. And among these people, there is one category we call them top talents, meaning that people earning about more than 2.5 million Hong Kong a year or those who graduate from the global top 100 universities without asking any questions, they can come. They do not need to find a job beforehand. And so far the response has been overwhelming and then we zoom in those who have arrived in Hong Kong. The top talents usually relatively young in the age group of 35 to 50 young family and these people have an average income double than a median income in Hong Kong. So we are very optimistic. I think Hong Kong's attraction is here. On the one hand, you are part of China, but on the other hand, the international character, the lifestyle and when I talk to those people coming, particularly with young families, they said the education here is excellent. Five of our universities are among global 100. And imagine how many international schools we have here? Over 50 offering curriculum in the US UK, German Swiss, Italy, Singapore, Japan, Korea. So this is indeed a an excellent hub for people who is interested to pursue a career. But at the same time, maintain the international character and have pop style lifestyle. Thank you. I want to give the chance to the audience to ask a question. If anyone has one, you can raise your hand. If not, I will continue to happily ask. Don't be shy. We have one right here in the corner, right. Go ahead. Yep. He's, he's coming with the mic right now. Thank you very much. Hi. Uh Lovely to see you here. I'm Brian. I'm an assistant professor at HKU. My question essentially concerns Hong Kong's relationship with the Middle East with ASEAN and also other parts of the world. I mean, historically Hong Kong had benefited off this vibrant Sino Western Sino American engagement and relationship which obviously due to geopolitical headwinds is no longer necessarily the case. But the reason why I'm not necessarily pessimistic is because I do think that as you, we self affirmed previously, we're actively engaging partners in Middle East in Southeast Asia, where Indonesia is now the fourth largest country in the world by population and also Central Asia, West Asia, Latin America and beyond. So, could you perhaps share with us here in the room? You know, what are the plans and initiatives you've got in mind for engaging the world beyond the West and also beyond the conventional partners on Gong had? Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you, Brian. I think for us in Hong Kong, uh us Europe, very important market, very important sources of investment so that we need to reinforce. But at the same time, we need to open up new opportunities. I went to the Middle East in October 2022. And in that particular visit, I made an effort to visit all the key ministries involving in innovation, technology, finance and investment. And I realized they also saw the need of diversification and they are interested in this part of the world. But traditionally the focus of investment uh in the US and Europe. So this part of the world is less familiar to them. That is why we reach out and we invite them to come and we even consider using the Hong Kong investment company to see some of the investments together with them. The idea is to open up new capital sources and new sources of quality issuers coming to Hong Kong for listing the same applies to ASEAN in particular quality issues, quality companies coming to Hong Kong. And we talked about geopolitics. Earlier on we observe because of geopolitics, the industry chain has been changing and manufacturers on the mainland, quite a number of them try to diversify and have certain parts of their operations, moved to Asia. Then Hong Kong can play a very unique role as a supply chain management center and Trade Finance Center. That is why in the budget, we said we are going to develop ourselves as a multinational supply chain center here. And ASEAN for us is good market and sources of quality companies. We also want to attract those talents to come to Hong Kong to work. When I went to the University of Malaya and University of Singapore, talk about the the opportunities here. I can feel the energy and we welcome them by open up. So as you look ahead, what do you think is the most important thing for Hong Kong to get? Right as we head into this new technological era um to come out on top and what is the last advice you would leave to executives in the room or who may be watching this, who are thinking about is now the right time to invest in Hong Kong. Well, for us, the one country two system is very important. We have to preserve that the legal system, the law of law, very important, the free movement of goods, capital, data and talents and the international character and dimension of Hong Kong is something that will continue to communicate with the international business community. We know that there has been some misunderstand misunderstanding about the situation here, even sometimes some uh narrative which is not very fair about us. Uh that is understandable. So we we would reach out but at the same time, invite people to come. And most importantly, if people can come and to make an investment and can make money and for people to come to work here, they have carried development and enjoy the lifestyle, then we will be able to succeed. So we will continue to work hard on that and on different funds. Be it IFC be it International Trading Center, uh be it the innovation and technology. We keep asking ourselves how to in a way how to work better, how to collaborate with different uh different people, different investors and different funds. Yeah, Mr Chen. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Conferences

Leadership Next

Ethan Brown, founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, isn’t just trying to disrupt the meat industry—he’s challenging the cultural, political, and economic systems that uphold it. In this episode of Leadership Next, Brown speaks with Fortune’s Diane Brady and Kristin Stoller about the uphill battle of building a plant-based food company in a world dominated by Big Meat. 

He shares why he believes alternative proteins are key to addressing the climate crisis, what the latest research says about the health benefits of going plant-based, and how legacy food giants—and even the pharmaceutical industry—are pushing back. From regulatory hurdles in Europe to cultural resistance in the U.S., Brown offers a candid look at what it takes to lead a mission-driven food innovation company in an increasingly polarized marketplace. 

Redefining Meat With Ethan Brown: The Battle Beyond the Burger 

Photo Courtesy of Beyond Meat; Graphic by Fortune

The Beyond Meat CEO opens up about challenging billion-dollar industries, the science behind plant protein, and the climate impact of what’s on our plate 

Citizens Financial Group CEO Bruce Van Saun joins Leadership Next to discuss the bank’s evolution in an era of digital disruption and economic uncertainty. Van Saun shares insights on Citizens' fintech partnerships, its focus on affluent and rate-sensitive customers, and the expansion into private banking. He reflects on leading through financial crises, including the aftermath of 9/11, and the importance of balancing regulatory oversight with innovation. From AI integration to community investment, Van Saun reveals how Citizens is positioning itself as more than just a bank—but a trusted advisor for customers navigating life’s biggest financial moments. 

Navigating Banking’s Next Chapter: Citizens CEO on Growth and Leading Through Uncertainty

Photo Courtesy of Citizens Financial Group; Graphic by Fortune

Bruce Van Saun on the future of regional banking, fintech partnerships, AI integration, and more.   

Wendy’s CEO Kirk Tanner is betting big on Wendy’s future—expanding internationally, doubling down on breakfast, and leveraging data to drive smarter decisions. In this episode of Leadership Next, cohosts Diane Brady and Kristin Stoller sit down with Kirk to discuss the fast-food giant’s evolving strategy. Tanner shares insights on the brand’s commitment to fresh ingredients, digital innovation, and international expansion, while reflecting on key leadership lessons from his time at PepsiCo. He also explains why failing forward is essential, how customer behavior—not just feedback—shapes decisions, and sets the record straight on Wendy’s so-called “surge pricing” controversy. Plus, he shares Wendy’s approach to transparency and career advice for rising professionals. 

Failing Forward: Wendy’s CEO Kirk Tanner on Leadership, Innovation, and Customer-Centric Growth

Photo Courtesy of Kirk Tanner; Graphic by Fortune

Kirk Tanner explains why customer actions—not words—drive business, the leadership lessons behind Wendy’s growth, and how the company is evolving for a new era. 

Chipotle is more than just burritos and bowls—it’s a $4 billion digital business with ambitious plans for international expansion. In this episode of Leadership Next, cohosts Diane Brady and Kristin Stoller sit down with Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright to discuss the brand’s strategy for sustainable growth, the role of AI in streamlining operations, and how external factors like immigration and economic uncertainty shape the fast-casual industry. Boatwright shares his journey from flipping burgers at McDonald’s to leading one of the most recognized food brands, opens up about his friendship with former CEO Brian Niccol, and explains why Chipotle is holding off on breakfast—at least for now. 

Guest-Obsessed and Future-Ready: How Chipotle Innovates to Grow 

Photo by Scott Boatwright/ Graphic by Fortune

CEO Scott Boatwright on AI-driven efficiency, brand expansion, and the challenges of leading a 130,000-strong workforce as economic pressures mount.

Roblox started as a simple gaming platform, but today it’s an expansive digital ecosystem powered by AI and user-generated content. In this episode of Leadership Next, cohosts Diane Brady and Kristin Stoller sit down with Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki to discuss the company’s evolution, the future of interactive entertainment, and how AI is reshaping digital experiences. Baszucki also shares insights on Roblox’s commitment to online safety, its growing role in digital commerce, and even his personal approach to health and wellness—revealing how a ketogenic diet and continuous glucose monitoring influence his leadership. Plus, he offers advice for aspiring entrepreneurs on how to shape their own realities. 

Beyond Gaming: How Roblox is Redefining Digital Worlds With AI and Wellness

Photo by David Baszucki/ Graphic by Fortune

Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki on AI-driven innovation, online safety, and why he sees Roblox as more than just a gaming platform. 

Beyond Gaming: How Roblox is Redefining Digital Worlds With AI and Wellness 

From spontaneous backpacking trips to AI-powered, hyper-personalized itineraries, travel has undergone a radical transformation. In this episode of Leadership Next, hosts Diane Brady and Kristin Stoller sit down with Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel to explore the future of travel. Glenn reflects on his early experiences navigating the world before smartphones, how AI is revolutionizing trip planning, and why personalization is key to the industry's evolution. He also discusses Booking Holdings’ rapid growth, its response to global crises like the Ukrainian refugee situation, and the industry’s potential next frontier—hypersonic travel. Plus, he shares insights on leading through uncertainty, the resilience of the travel industry, and why, despite a lifetime of global adventures, his favorite place to travel is home.

The Connected Trip: Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel on the Future of Travel

Photo Courtesy of Booking Holdings; Graphic by Fortune

Oura is more than just a sleep tracker—it’s a cultural phenomenon. In this episode of Leadership Next, Oura CEO Tom Hale joins Diane and Kristin to discuss how the smart ring has become a symbol of well-being, embraced by everyone from high-profile figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian to everyday users looking to optimize their health. Hale explores Oura’s expansion into activity readiness and women’s health, the importance of accuracy in wearables, and the growing consumer demand for data privacy—especially in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned. He also shares compelling stories of how Oura has helped athletes, cancer patients, and even non-drinkers make informed lifestyle choices and develop healthier habits. Plus, hear his take on whether too much health data can be a bad thing—and what Oura is doing to remain a trusted companion in personal health.

Giving Your Body a Voice: Oura’s CEO on the Power of Wearables

In this episode of Leadership Next, Oura CEO Tom Hale joins Diane and Kristin to discuss how the smart ring has become a symbol of well-being.

Oura is more than just a sleep tracker—it’s a cultural phenomenon. In this episode of Leadership Next, Oura CEO Tom Hale joins Diane and Kristin to discuss how the smart ring has become a symbol of well-being.

Reinventing Bayer: CEO Bill Anderson’s Push for Agility and Innovation


Photo courtesy: Bayer AG. Graphic by Fortune. 

Viome CEO Naveen Jain And His Son, Bilt Rewards CEO Ankur Jain Weigh In On The Differences And Similarities In Their Approaches To Startups.

Serial Entrepreneurs Naveen And Ankur Jain On Business Lessons And What Makes Them Tick As Leaders

Photo Courtesy: Jain Family. Graphic By Fortune. 

CEO Tarang Amin Says The Company’s Early Moves To Digital Platforms Paid Big Dividends.


How e.l.f. Beauty Uses Pricing And Technology To Stand Out In The Noisy Cosmetics Industry

Photo courtesy e.l.f. Beauty. Graphic made by Fortune. 

 Edelman CEO Richard Edelman Explains Why His Company's Trust Barometer, Now In Its 25th Year, Is More Relevant Than Ever.

A Deep Dive On The Relationship Between Business And Trust

Image provided by Edelman. Graphic done by Fortune. 

The Salesforce Founder And CEO Explains What Features The Company’s new Agentforce Agentic AI Tool Will Unlock for Customers

Marc Benioff Weighs In On The AI-Powered Future

Photo Illustration By Fortune. Photo Provided By Salesforce. 

In The Ground Up we sit down with entrepreneurs to get the story on how they were able to build a successful business.

The Ground Up

In October 2018, Aaliyah Arnold founded her online beauty and skin care brand BossUp Cosmetics when she was only 14 years old. Now at 18 years old, the Houston native expanded her line-up, offering a wide selection of products from eyeshadow pallets and lipsticks to blushes to brushes, along with her signature lip glosses. With over 1.5 million followers on TikTok, she shares a behind the scenes peek into her business where she received shoutouts from pop artist Meghan Trainor  and makeup artist James Charles.

How I Started A $700K Beauty Company At 14 Years Old

In October 2018, Aaliyah Arnold founded her online beauty and skin care brand BossUp Cosmetics when she was only 14 years old.

In October 2018, Aaliyah Arnold founded her online beauty and skin care brand BossUp Cosmetics when she was only 14 years old. Now at 18 years old, the Houston native expanded her line-up.

Honestly, it feels like a fever dream. I feel like I'm gonna wake up and all this is gonna be like, you know, not real. Hi, everyone. But it's surreal seeing something that I spent months creating from the ground up, you know, being a little kid creating these little lip glosses um to wear this today and to see people actually use it and enjoy it and say that it's good quality. It helps me know that what I'm doing isn't for nothing but it's sold out twice. My name is Leo Arnold. I am 18 years old and I am the CEO and founder of Boss of Cosmetics. I founded it in 2018 here in Cono Texas and it is now valued at $700,000. Mhm. No, for me. Hi, everyone. Welcome o my family helps me a lot with formulations and everything, especially my cousins. I remember making my first batch and I was like, hey, try this out, let me know how it is and she's like, girl, this is not good and I was like, OK, so I have to go back to square one. So after that, I did some more research, researching ingredients, formulations, lots of tron air. But in the end, we finally, we finally got it. I changed my formula. I want to say like 20 times before I got to the final one that I have right now in second grade, I started selling like little rainbow loom bracelets that I used to make. Myself. I used to have a business called Sticky Business where I would sell duct tape wallets and phone cases. And I feel like there, I kind of was introduced to the world of, oh, you make something here, you can sell it and make a profit out of it. I remember she came home once and told me that they used to call her the dollar tree because she would buy snacks and resell them to the kids at school. Honestly, I would get upset at her. Like, how can you do this, you know, like buy stuff and resell it, but it was whatever, whatever made her happy and whatever made her feel more comfortable at school because she would always get bullied. I went through bullying since I can't even remember she got bullied since she first went to school because she has really bad eczema. And they used to make fun of her. The last thing that happened with her in school was a kid pulled a knife on her when she was in line to go to the bus. That was the last thing for me. I figured the teachers are not doing anything. I'm not gonna take the risk because even though they are kids, there's kids that know what they're doing. When I was 11, I had a sign business. I sold it over on Etsy. And that's when I really started to receive, I want to say like real orders and like the Real World, it really brought like happiness with me and I knew that I wanted to continue doing that. She would leave a mess and I would get so upset. But then when I started seeing that, ok, well, this is going somewhere because she keeps getting orders and I keep taking stuff to the post office. So I kind of started being more understand this of the mess the day before my first day of homeschool ever hurricane Harvey hit. So it was a whole thing of trying to figure out how to do homeschool because it was my very first year doing it and then also losing my home of 10 years and everything in it. I couldn't take none of my slime supplies, none of it. Everything was lost. So I did have to rebuy a lot of my supplies and I kind of paused the shop while we could get into a hotel and my viewers of my shop on Etsy knew about that. I closed it because I was just wasn't interested anymore. I'm a firm believer. If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it. So I went a year without having anything and it was honestly probably the bored this year of my life and that's how boss up came to be was out of boredom. And because I had nothing to do and as a kid, I wasn't allowed to wear very much makeup, but I was allowed to wear lip gloss. So I decided, hey, why not make it and sell it? And I knew that I needed to create something that I was going to like that I was going to use and that I wasn't going to get bored of. I didn't get my first official order till two, almost three months later. And that was just one order at the time. I wasn't doing it for that. I was doing it more just because it made me happy to make something. And I was just posting on my Instagram on Instagram and especially for small businesses. There's these things called promo pages and basically you pay them and they promote your product at the time, the promo page that I used was not charging, it was completely free. So I was like, you know, why not? I think I received like 10 orders that same day. And I remember thinking that it was just so many orders. I was just so happy and I remember calling my mom like mom, we did it, we sold lip gloss. It was so crazy. And so I remember taking a picture of the orders and saying, ok, everybody, your order is going out really, really soon. And I feel like people see that people were buying that kind of built trust in me as well. People like, oh, ok, people are actually buying this stuff. Let me try it out. The first glass that I sold was for $3 and I was barely making any sense for my profit. A lot of my customers are like, hey, I have every single one of your glasses. I need something else come out with more things so I can buy more. And I was like, oh dang, that's crazy. You know, I was evolving to skin care and I just feel like Boss Boss Cosmetics didn't really resonate with me anymore. And my cousin showed me a song and it said bless up. She's like, oh you should do boss up. And I was like, that sounds good. So I changed it to Boss Up Cosmetics. That's when I decided to change all my product names to all names that have to do with women, empowerment, uplifting and positivity and just, you know, bossing up. I hope you guys are having a good day. We are packaging orders. Your name is Aah too. Me too. No problem, Billy Pop tips. The how to start a business, stay patient and be consistent. I feel like all social media, my brand wouldn't be where it is today. It was actually my first video that I posted on Tik Tok of me making my gloss. I had never posted a video like that using my own voice and it went absolutely viral. I looked at it last time I had 22 million views and I just remember orders were coming in and that's when my mom started to come help me even more. When she started getting lots and lots of orders. She was at the office by herself. I seen that she was getting stressed out and even my mom was like, there is no going down no more. Everything from here on now it's gonna go up. And so when my mom said that I'm like, you are right. I got to take the risk and just be with her. This is the most we spent together since she moved with my mom. So every day I look forward to spending time with her being at the office. Sometimes we bump heads like, you know, every mom and daughter, but we always work through it and I just love it and she loves it too. So she tells me, Megan Trainor just bought for my small business. What the I'm in so much shock, but let's package her order. She is the first celebrity to actually notice me and buy my product. I went live on Tik Tok and she joined Megan trains on the live and she had received her products and she was saying how she loved it. It was honestly a highlight moment of my life up until they were mutual. You know, she likes my, my posts and everything likes my stories. It's crazy. So in 2019 we made a little bit less than 10,000. But in 2020 we went with 16,000, 2021 we went a little bit up, got around 89,000 and in 2022 which is our biggest year yet. We hit 500,000. Today, I shipped two to Japan and then I shipped one to Qatar. We have a lot of overseas like this one to Canada. I hope they, they feel happiness. You know, that's why I do what I do and they feel beautiful in the products that I create. You know, I feel like the importance right now is to give those orders out. You know, people pay for their product, they want their product as soon as possible. So if it takes for us to work 10 hours, 12 hours, 14 hours, that's what we're going to have to do. We have to bring someone else in. So hopefully that will help. I'm a big dreamer. I like to manifest things like to speak things into existence. I have huge dreams. But ultimately, the goal right now is to get into retail stores. Sephora Ulta target source, my products out to them. That's the ultimate goal. I never take what I do for granted. I'm very grateful and very blessed to be where I am today and to have the supporters that I do and to have the family that supports me in doing it as well. My mom has finished a lot of blink cups and it's time to start shipping them cute and inside the cup it has instructions, a little care kit and everything.

On store shelves, customers might only see a bright yellow smile waiting to add some shine to the kitchen. But, behind the iconic ridges and gleaming eye holes are years of sweat and machine grime for Aaron Krause, 54, Scrub Daddy’s Founder and CEO. Today, Scrub Daddy has made over $220 million in sales for 2023. But, Aaron said his sponge empire is just getting started. 

How I made over $220M in sales as the daddy of the Scrub Daddy

On store shelves, customers might only see a bright yellow smile waiting to add some shine to the kitchen. But, behind the iconic ridges and gleaming eye holes are years of sweat and machine grime for Aaron Krause, 54, Scrub Daddy’s Founder and CEO.

On store shelves, customers may see a yellow smile waiting to add shine to the kitchen. Behind the ridges and gleaming eye holes are years of sweat for Aaron Krause, 54, Scrub Daddy’s Founder and CEO.

Jenny Nguyen was sick of watching women’s games on mute at sports bars, so she opened her own. The Sports Bra bar in Portland, Ore. shows only women’s sports. In just 9 days, she raised $50,000 to open the bar.

How I raised $50K in 9 days to open a bar showing only women’s sports

The Sports Bra bar in Portland, Ore. shows only women’s sports.

How I raised $50K in 9 days to open a women's sports bar

How I Raised $50K In 9 Days To Open A Bar Showing Only Women’s Sports

My name is jenny Win. I'm the founder and owner of the sports bra here in Portland Oregon. It's a women's sports bar. When you walk into a sports bar, traditional sports bar, you expect 24 7 coverage because there is 24 7 coverage of men's sports. Statistically 95% of all sports that are on tv or men's sports. And so our goal here is to take the 5% that is on tv and just put it on blast. I just knew I wanted to feel familiar. I wanted people to walk in and just feel like it was a regular sports bar. It's just a lot of decor stuff, memorabilia and that kind of that warmth of being in a familiar sports bar kind of dark, a little bit cozy. But then you change what's represented, you change what's on the tv. These are women's team flags. All the athletes are female athletes. That kind of stuff. When people say women's sports aren't popular. It's because people aren't seeing it. It's a bit of a catch 22. It's like, well nobody's watching women's sports. Well, no women's sports remain shown. It's really difficult. It's really difficult. It's like you have to be in an Internet detectives in order to find where to watch women. I was trying to stream the national team game the other day at work with some friends and we couldn't find it. I love the idea that if this place was packed, people driving by walking by talking about it would see that there are women's sports fans and they would see it. They'd hear about it and they'd be like, oh, people are into it. It shouldn't be a novelty, but it is a novelty. There's been women's athletics that have been agreeable on media for years. You know, women's tennis has always been an agreeable sport, you know, that people watched. And I think what, what I saw happen is that I saw women's basketball. Uh and ESPN really developed a strong relationship and we began to see more and more women's basketball. Um you also have that sec, you have the PAC 12, you have so many of those networks now that need more content. And so there's much more women's content available for about 14.5 years. I played pickup basketball with this hodgepodge group of women, we shared a love of sports and so we would go out before or after, um pick up and try to watch games and it was always a chore, you know, always trying to find Bar that was big enough to take a group of 12 and then also who would change the channel for us. And then not only that, but some of the people in our group are vegan, those dietary restrictions are really hard to find at sports bars. And then a large portion of our basketball group are queer folks or non binary folks. And so looking the way we do kind of feels unsafe in a lot of the traditional sports bars, There was one particular moment that stands out in my mind when it kind of clicked and it was in 2018 when our basketball group went to go watch the N. C. Double A women's championship. And I think there was like three seconds left, the game was tied and eric takes one dribble and launches a three pointer right at the buzzer and it goes in. So here we were like a dozen of us just going crazy on our own. I threw my hat across the bar and while I was standing, I realized that no one else in the entire bar was watching our game. So everybody's staring at us like we're absolutely bonkers. Anyway, we're leaving the bar and we're kind of like milling around the parking lot still kind of just high off of the game. And I was just like, oh my God, that was the best game I've ever seen. And one of my friends was just like, yeah, it would have been so awesome if the sound had been on, I hadn't realized that we'd watched the whole game with no sound. Right. Then I said, the only way we're ever going to watch a women's game in its full glory is if we had our own place. And I remember driving home and I was like, oh, we had our own place, what we call it, you know? And the very first name that popped into my head was the sports bras. It just made so much sense. All you're doing is you're taking a sports bar and you're changing the channel on the tv. So it's like a tiny switch and then it just became an inside joke. Whenever we went out to sports bars and we were frustrated with something, we'd be like, oh at the sports bra, this game would be on, oh, it's a sports bra. You know, they have gluten free buns for my burger with the sports bra. We'd never run out of toilet paper in the women's restroom or like all the things that, you know, sports bars kind of fall short on all the time. We got to talking about how when we were kids, if our parents had taken us to a place like a sports bra, how much of a difference that would have made in our lives to have a place that we walked into and felt represented or felt seen once I launched the Kickstarter, it was the first time that I put it out into the world. And by day three I was getting emails from all across the country right away. I had people coming up and being like, thank you for doing this, thank you for being an asian woman who opened a business and then people coming up and being like, oh a lesbian owned bar. I didn't think about it. I was just so focused on the sports bra and getting this off the ground. I created a space that I want to be in. So it is me in the end, but when I was conceptualizing it, I didn't think about it like that. I just wanted it to be a place that I felt good. I thought being a chef would help and I think it has, I mean, I think it's helped me like 0.5% 99 point whatever, 95% I don't know anything about. That was hard reaching out to people asking for help learning as much as possible. I mean, the learning curve for me was like a straight up and down wall for like the last year, I would say doing things with intentionality was really huge for me. And so I thought about how women's sports is underrepresented. And then I thought about what else is underrepresented. And if you want to create a space that's for everybody, you gotta try to represent everybody if we can do that through our menu. If we can do that through our physical space, let's do it. At the very beginning, I reached out to like network streaming services, All these things to get permission to play a bunch of different things that on top of trying to open a business was a lot of work. I felt like it was somebody else's full time job to try to find content. So just women's sports is a national sports media company and they have like hundreds and hundreds of hours of digital media on Youtube. So I reached out to them and I just told them about the sports bra, this concept and they're like, we love what you're doing, what do you need from us. And I was like, I'd love to have your digital content and they were like, okay, what else? Like literally that's how it went and like my heart like burst out of my chest. And then I reached out to ESPN and the same thing happened. I was on a call with seven like female executives from ESPN W and they were just over the moon with the concept. But once the word got out, the roles got reversed, then it was networks streaming services, all of these other things reaching out to us asking us to play their stuff at the very beginning, we definitely had some issues with haters. There was some like right wing blog that came out and I probably got like 45 1 star reviews saying things like oh they wouldn't let me in because I had a beard or oh they spent my burger when they found out I was a man or you know, like just all kinds of ridiculous stuff. One of them said that I held them down and made them watch the W. N. B. A. Playoffs. I would read the comment, I'd be like, oh what do I say back to this guy. And as I was thinking it like 16 other people responded with like way better things than I could have said. And I was just like, Oh the community has got this and that's how it's always been. We were able to be there on their opening night and I think that that was the moment that you could see that Portland was here to lift jenny and her organization up. I get tingles when I think about that night because the line went around the corner, there's definitely a community that just kind of I think was already here and now has a place to gather at the bronze, which is really nice. It feels like a place that I feel really comfortable in a place where I can be myself and watch things that actually are interesting to me and have that not be something that is viewed as an inconvenience to other people, but it's celebrated. People ask me jenny, why hasn't anyone done this before? Seeing how difficult it was for me to get open and get the content and all the, all the stuff that we need to make it a success so far. I don't think it would have been possible five years ago with the content that was on tv or with the investment or the interest in women's support. And I think timing was just right now for it to happen. I honestly think in the next 10 years women's sports could overshadow men's sports as far as popularity goes. I think a company like the sports bra is proving too many other companies within Portland's or outside of Portland that you can have a successful business focusing on women's sports. You know, like the, the NWSL championship game was played on broadcast on CBS and like a ton, almost a million people tuned in and that's a really big deal. So like, it's nice to finally see that. I think the kind of powers that be in sports economics are paying attention to women's sports and starting to recognize the value and we don't need to question whether it's a good idea or not and just commit to supporting women in athletics for real cultural change to happen. And I think women's sports is about cultural change, real cultural change takes, you know, according to Gloria steinem takes about 100 years. And so I think we're about halfway through that as women's sports are shown over time, we get a chance to fall in love with the athletes the same way that we do for men's sports. You know, so we can show women's sports and we can be able to prove that women will watch, men will watch families will watch women playing sports. I've had, I don't know, maybe 70 people reach out asking to open a sports bra in their town or city, um, multiple investors, just hordes of interest. Um, but besides that I've had people reach out who want to open their own thing. That is a women's sports bar. I've had sports bar owners reach out and ask how they can incorporate more women's sports into their sports bar. And so all of these things to me is part of the mission jenny. And the people around this saw a need and they're like, well, we're not gonna wait for anyone to do it, we're just gonna make it happen. So much of what we experience is, what is in existence, right? It's hard to know what the possibilities are if you can't see it. And so I think that having created this space when people come in here, I feel like it opens up a whole new set of possibilities to introduce a women's sports bar where the culture is built around celebrating and empowering and supporting women's sports. It's about time take one

Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole dives into her story of how she came up with a provocative way to sell vegan food and turn it into a $100 million brand from the ground up. The Ground Up showcases founders and entrepreneurs who worked their way up with a business ideas and turned it into a success story.

How I started a $100 million fast casual restaurant called Slutty Vegan

Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole dives into her story of how she came up with a provocative way to sell vegan food and turn it into a $100 million brand from the ground up.

Because of my confidence, I got me at least paying $1,200 in a 650 square foot space. And at my grand opening, I had about 1200 people, I couldn't believe that so many people would stand out in line to support me and that's when I knew I had something really big. I was on the front page of the New York Times in the food section. Like we built a multimillion dollar business and that was game changing for me. Yeah, Hey, what's up? It's pinky cole. I'm 35 years old and I'm the founder and ceo of the world famous $100 million brand, slutty vegan A. T. L. Born and bred in Atlanta Georgia, having a television background. I said, you know what, I know what people watch when they watch tv, they want stuff that's in your face, racy raunchy, that's going to make them pay attention. But when you think about veganism, veganism has always been known to be pure flavorless, clean, very clean, very green. And I said the two most pleasurable experiences in life is sex and food. If I can make people think about sex and think about food at the same time, I know that I can peel the layer back and educate you about veganism in a way that you've never seen it before. I'm originally from Baltimore Maryland. I grew up in a single parent household. My father did 23 years in prison while my mother worked multiple jobs to make sure that she took care of the family. I can remember my mom working so many jobs and learning how to cook with my grandmother because my mother was always gone working or pursuing her own entrepreneurial endeavors as a musician. My father was and is an entrepreneur even behind bars, he would call me and tell me books to read, he would teach me about stocks, he would teach me how financial independence was the most important thing in this world and I became a hustler at a very young age, I used to throw parties, I used to sell candy, I would sell food when I graduated from college, I didn't have any job lined up except for teach for America and I'm like, I don't want to be a teacher, no shade to the teachers, but I knew that it was in the middle of a recession and I had to figure it out. So I packed up my bags and moved to Houston texas to work at teach for America. I was out there for five days and I realized that I do not want to do this and my friend gave me $40 and I went to the airport and I can remember sitting in the airport with my yorkie Rudy and a guy walked up to me and I was bawling crying and was like, what's wrong with you? And I'm just like, I'm not happy, I don't want to be a teacher inside of the classroom, I'm gonna in other ways and he said I'll be right back. Do you know this man walked away from me and he came back and he gave me $240 just enough money to get me and my dog Rudy home and I never looked back after that. I moved to los Angeles California to be an actress and then I started doing background work and I thought that I was good at it. But then one of my sorority sisters said, listen, you were broke, you need some money, I'm gonna give you a job working in television while I was working at the Maury show. I had this bright idea to open up a jamaican restaurant and don't ask me why I just like a Jamaican restaurant, let's do it. I actually took over somebody's lease and I was paying $2400 a month, which is crazy now because you can barely $2400 a month, that's a light bill. Now. I went to Google and Youtube and I started learning everything I could learn about the restaurant industry, I barely knew what I was doing. I still don't know what I'm doing, but I barely knew what I was doing. I had the restaurant for about two years and then I had a grease fire and literally lost everything in the grease fire. My car got refold, I got kicked out of my apartment, I went flat broke, I got an opportunity to work in tv again, I was working as a casting director and I was done with restaurants, I was working on a Tv show, they had a hiatus and I started delivering for doordash and while I was delivering for doordash, I'm like okay, cool ghost kitchens, I've never heard of ghost kitchens, but I see it happening in L. A. I realized I was just preparing for what I was about to create just a couple of months later and when they asked me to go to Atlanta temporarily to work on the show, it hit me like a light bulb and I came up with this crazy as concept called slutty vegan. I didn't have anything written down, I didn't have a blueprint, I didn't have a business plan, it was just an idea that sounded good. I started slutty vegan as a ghost kitchen, It was like a $5,000 startup cost to start slutty vegan. So I had to get my permits, I had to get the facility which was like $1,200. I had to order my food. I had to get my first employees, I had to set up all of my online digital delivery platforms. A lot of entrepreneurs don't realize that if you really want to grow a company, you have to reinvest everything. When I tell you every single time I was reinvesting, I was not taking any money for myself. At first I was just making sure that my employees were paid and that I had food in my business. The reason why I started a food truck is because the facility told me that I had too many people coming to the building so I had to go, so they put me in a parking lot and I had to find a food truck on the fly, didn't know anything about a food truck. The food truck was $45,000, so I had to put $10,000 down and every single week I was paying like $3400 every single week to make sure that I could pay it off and I paid that off in like like two months, two or three months. I got a DM from somebody on Instagram and he told me that there was a restaurant that they were leaving the restaurant and it was available if I wanted to rent it because of my confidence, I got me at least paying $1,200 and 650 square foot space. And at my grand opening I had about 1200 people. I couldn't believe that so many people would stand out in line to support me and that's when I knew I had something really big. It's the people who are the meat eaters that come to slutty vegan most because one, they want to learn what the hype is about to, they have an idea that they can try this vegan thing and if it's good, maybe I can continue on this path and three slutty vegan is a vibe. Uh I'll be honest, I wasn't the most savvy business person when I started study vegan, but when it came to like price and I'm just like, okay, $16 sounds like it would make sense, that's the price. Like I didn't do any like extra calculations, but I grew as a business owner, I actually met the ceo of shake shack first randy Geraghty and I reached out to him, I'm like, hey, randy, you don't know me, but I got a really popular restaurant in Atlanta and I would love to be able to sit down with you because one thing about pinky cole is, I'm gonna shoot my shot, He responded, we went to lunch and and we built a friendship and ever since then he has been such a great mentor to me. And then a few months later I get a call saying that Danny meyer came to slutty vegan on a late night with a few of his friends and he loved the experience and they wanted to talk. It took a long time to get the investment. It took about nine months slutty vegan will be a billion dollar company from my mouth to everybody's ears is listening to this. Four years ago, slutty vegan was just a ghost kitchen concept and four years later the company is now valued at $100 million when you come to slutty vegan, it's a party, The atmosphere is just amazing, the music is booming through the speakers, the employees are dancing, everybody wants to be a part of that. The fact that I have $100 million business, I still pinch myself every day. Like I'm not talking about a million, I ain't talking about five million, I'm talking about a black woman who owns $100 million business. Forget the fact that I'm just a black woman, a woman, a minority owned business, A woman whose family is from Jamaica who comes from humble beginnings who literally has never had a silver spoon in her mouth. Like you are looking at the new american dream, I don't care if you're black, white, blue, yellow, green, funny vegan, it's for everybody.

Award-winning songwriter Barry Dean and brother Jered Dean cofounded LUCI, a company that's changing an industry by turning “dumb wheelchairs into smart wheelchairs.”

How we started a company helping 500,000 people In wheelchairs

Photograph by Ted Willis and Corey Shepherd for Fortune

LUCI is changing an industry by turning “dumb wheelchairs into smart wheelchairs.”

How LUCI is helping 500,000 people In wheelchairs

Rhiannon is active, she races in the winter special olympics every year she likes to play indoor soccer, she wants that full life. And so for her to have that full book of memories, she's got to be able to get out and do things and lucy makes it easier and easier and the easier something is, the more we can pack into a day. Lucy is truly an innovative product by the most innovative product I've seen in about 10 years that can really impact clients functionally help them to either drive a power chair where perhaps they couldn't do that at all before or certainly drive it with much better confidence, competence and safety. So it's very exciting. Were the first company in this industry to ever make a smart connected device. Our ability to push out over the air update and have lucy keep getting smarter and smarter over time is a completely new idea in this industry. So lucy is an add on accessory for a power wheelchair that turns a dumb wheelchair into a smart wheelchair. We add sensors in the brain and connectivity to the power wheelchair so that the user has increased independence. That helps not run into things. Not drive off things, connects the user to their team and to the modern world. Obviously its mission. All we're you know, we're dealing with my daughter, his niece going, we need to solve a problem and all her friends, you know that are in the same boat. She has cerebral palsy. She gets a power chair when she's maybe five or about to be five and she touched the trigger. And it the speed had not been a justice. And it took off you know six miles an hour straight into a wall and she was fine. But I then promptly parked in the garage because I was like this is too scary. I wish I could say we sat down and said we're going to start a company. It was absolutely not that it was weird solve a technical problem, build the I. P. And the prototypes and then surely there will be companies that you know that that will do this. My basement became the headquarters of lucy for a while about a year later. I think we got our first three employees and then got an actual space. But yeah Catherine's been the north star from the beginning and then we've added two and met so many amazing people. Rhiannon was born with a rare birth defect called skit successfully. So it's a development delay in the brain and it affects her motor and verbal. Um So she's highly intelligent but you know she's not able to walk. My name is I am 16. I am my high school junior with her skits and hopefully she also has spasticity. So when she's trying to make her body do something sometimes the body will go the opposite direction or her tone will kick in and she'll go full forward and you can see the scars around the house where the chair would get up against and nothing slows it down. There's a lot of injuries in the wheelchair space more than there are people having motorcycle injuries and ending up in the er, 175,000 year. People ending up in the er, because of wheelchair injuries using a power chair is actually tougher than I think a lot of people think it takes learning in order to operate this very heavy device within an environment. These wheelchairs cost as much as a car. They weigh 3 to £500 without the person in them, but there's no modern technology on them. I mean, it's really kind of a boat, battery, some wheels and a joystick. Uh and good luck. The only safety stuff on a wheelchair would be a seatbelt. I mean, we we did crash testing with one of the top independent facilities in the country and they're saying that just running into a wall in one of these chairs at full speed violates the laws set up for cars and forward crashes and there's no bumper, the knees, the feet, your toes, That's the bumper in a wheelchair. I have had some clients I've worked with who have tipped over a chair and maybe broken an arm or injured their head. So, these are very, very serious concerns, Lucy is always looking looking for the clear path and if there's no clear path, it just brings you to a stop. We're seeing now with the users, we have, we're preventing over 10,000 collisions or drop offs, tip overs every week. This is the alpha prototype, the very first prototype, March 2017. It's off the shelf sensors, just whatever I could get from spark fund and find in the garage. It proved the theory that we could do it. So we really quickly went to a beta prototype about a month later. Katherine used this data prototype for a year and a half and during that time we tracked all the data from it learned where it worked and what didn't work well. And so we took all the stuff we learned here and developed what lucy product is without today. So lucy product looks like this. We call this the smart frame and this mounts onto a power wheelchair. And so you take this smart frame mounted down there, it plugs in between the joystick or the drive method and the motors and adds multiple kinds of sensors. So we have cameras um, one on each side of the user and one in the back. And then we have our own type of ultrasonic sensor that we develop and then hidden in here and down on the foot plate of the wheelchair. We have our own proprietary millimeter wave radar. And so take all that put it on the chair and that means your chair doesn't run into things. Doesn't drive off things is connected to the modern world. You can interact with lucy through Alexa through your phone. So turns it into a modern device. So when I first heard about lucy, I have to admit the first time I heard about it all I thought this can't possibly be true. And then when I learned more about it, started seeing some videos and had a chance to finally see lucy, I was really quite amazed that it worked as well as it did. It's an extremely sophisticated system. I was also excited because I work with very complex clients and anything that I can bring to them that helps them to be more functional than they are. I'm all in. We were hoping that it would be safer but it it is so much more with all of the independence and the confidence and watching Ryan and smile as she heads out the back door by herself and just her and ninja her dog and they're just off and they're gonna go for a walk and you're just not worried. It's fantastic Lucy has given me so much confidence. I am able to be more independent and do the things I want to do. She's 16 years old, she doesn't want mom and dad looming over all the time. Now she can go act like a teenager, we have a saying internally which is, life is a team sport. We have different clinicians, we have activity, people, we have specialists involved and doctors, so we set up the, my lucy app so that people can actually set up a team and choose what information to share the right or the driver of the chair can decide. This information needs to go to my doctor. This information needs to go to my caregiver. They can share uh battery status so that an alert goes out and let people know, hey, um, you know, Katherine's at this location, her battery's low, She may get stranded soon. You might want to check in right. One of the next things that we're working on. It sounds really simple, but it's just a pressure monitor for air cushions. That's not a hard tech list. That is just a knowing that there's a problem and getting the tech into the hands of the people that need it. Now that you actually have a computer and connectivity and a smart wheelchair. It becomes a freeing device not just for mobility but also for health. One of the things I'm really excited about that we just announced is the pediatric solution. Now you can get a wheelchair for a very young child with lucy on it once kids start crawling their vision and visual perceptual skills really explode all sorts of the area areas of the brain. Just like if kids don't have this ability to have independent mobility before the age of five, it changes the whole waterfall of development of possibilities for them for their whole life. You can't get that back. I think this is going to really change a lot of people's lives. So lucy is right now getting funded by insurance and Medicaid and the V. A. But usually there's some pushback because it's new technology. So if I recommend a power chair for a client, it's being paid for by an insurance company or by a state Medicaid program or perhaps a federal Medicare program. Well, the problem is something new comes along and there's not room in our current construct for how do we deal with a truly new product once these funders see it that first time in real life, what it can do for that user, we found that people tend to flip pretty quickly to, oh this actually makes a lot of sense. I think they're starting to come around especially on the lucy device because they're starting to see what long term It actually will save them money. Rhiannon is priceless but her equipment around her is $30,000 every time she rolls out the door and goes somewhere. So you obviously you don't want it bouncing off of things. It's been an interesting learning curve for us to learn how to combine the fact that there's that passion, there's that personal need That has built a real company that's really doing things in a real market now. We're at that place of raising our first funding and doing all that and that's going very well. But it's a very different path I think than most companies go on because it's already for sale. It's already in 40 states, you know, I mean hundreds of users, a lot of people see this and it is a mission all company. We have a cause, you know, we talk about moving at the speed of the need, you know, the internally those kinds of things. But the fact of the matter is although suddenly realized this is a real incredible business opportunity as well. There's an assumption that wheelchairs are a real niche that there's not very many people using wheelchairs in the world. And that assumption is wrong. Uh, there's, you know, a million more people in wheelchairs in the US than there are electric vehicles in the US. We have a lot of these conversations about equity. But what is sometimes left off of that scale are people with disabilities. It's a broad range of people. Some of those people will require a power wheelchair to be as independent as possible. It's easy to look down upon people who are less functional than ourselves. And I think we need to remember that one of the beauties of assistive technology. One of the reasons that I enjoy assistive technology so much is it levels the playing field. So now someone who didn't have mobility before can be mobile. You look five years down the road and I think this will be um, inevitable that this technology is on every power wheelchair sold and you'll start seeing a lot of interesting new health and wellness options for wheelchair users, manual and power. There we go, Oh, now you're giving love.

Day In The Life

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky gave Fortune an exclusive look at his daily routine.

Airbnb’s 43-year-old CEO built a Fortune 500 giant— here is his daily routine

Airbnb's 43-year-old CO build a Fortune 500 giant— Inside his daily routine

Inside the daily routine of Airbnb’s CEO 

So I keep like a daily journal. They're not complete sentences. The pros are more like bullet points, and it's anything that comes to my mind, idea, anything. At the end of every week I'll go through all my old notes and I'll highlight or bold the notes I like. Those notes get consolidated into a notebook of ideas. Then I have to take action on them if I think they're really good. Then I create a giant to do list and then I assign that work to people, say I'll call them and knock down a list like, Hey, we should do this, we should do this, we should do this. And then every year. I basically write all the major things I accomplished, so I'll write ahead of time all the things I think I want to accomplish. At the end of the year I look and I compare list year over year. So I'm pretty systematic. I take a lot of notes and I organize those notes. Hi, my name is Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, and this is my daily routine. My daily routine starts pretty late because I go to bed pretty late. I go to bed at like 1, 1:30, maybe even sometimes later, so I'll wake up maybe around 8, 8:30, something like that. Most mornings I wake up. The first thing I try to do is do a little bit of cardio. I'll either go on a stairmaster at the gym, or maybe I'll walk my dog. I'll shower. I'll eat a light breakfast, and I drink 1 to 2 cups, typically of just black coffee without any milk or sugar. I usually go in the office Tuesday through Friday. Mondays. My executive team is distributed. Most of them aren't in San Francisco, so that meetings Zoom. Sometimes they'll go in on Monday. Usually I'll just do the meetings from home on Zoom in my home office. When I'm in San Francisco, and I'm probably in San Francisco at least 3 weeks a month. During the week I'll be in the office. I typically will have meetings from around 10 to 6, but I try to keep my day a little bit unstructured, so I generally don't like to have back to back meetings. I like to have some free time to roam around and to be able to do some head down work. I'll do emails kind of throughout the day. A way I'll take a break is I might just like the office is like a pretty large physical space, so I'll walk to the office, go downstairs to get a drink. I usually eat at like 9, 12, 369. 30 because I'm working out, so it's 5 meals a day, so there'll be noon or 12:30. The only caveat is like I do a little bit of like intermittent fasting too where like I found that's kind of helpful. It just kind of lowers your blood sugar in your body. So I'll work in the office till about 6, maybe about 7, then I'll head to the gym. Gym is around 7:30, 8 o'clock. I'll do weights 4 times a week. I have a personal trainer. They keep me undisciplined. I'll train and do like a half hour of cardio after, then I'll come home. And then half the nights I probably like to do personal stuff. I might have a dinner with somebody. I might hang out, I might read, draw, watch something on TV, do phone calls with friends. The other half time I might be working. If I'm working at night, I'm probably sometimes calling people. Sometimes I'll call employees that are available at night to check in, or I'll do a really heads downward, you know, I might, I could be writing from like 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. Now I'm not doing it every night, but if I really want to do some deep work, I'll do that. And then I go to bed and I repeat.

Sharon Price John credits her daily routine for her enduring enthusiasm for the toy retailer, and gave Fortune an exclusive look at her day, which kicks off before sunrise. 

Inside the daily routine of Build-A-Bear’s CEO who led a multi-million dollar turnaround

Sharon Price John joined the company in 2013.

Build-A-Bear's CEO gave Fortune an exclusive look at her day, which kicks off before sunrise. 

Inside the daily routine of Build-A-Bear’s CEO 

The best thing about Build A Bear, in my opinion, is that every day is completely different. When you step into a CEO role, you're automatically over all the functional areas, many of which you may not have ever worked in before. There's always a learning curve there, and I think it's really important to be intellectually curious and surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. Hi, I'm Sharon Price John, the president and CEO of Build. Workshop. I'm 60 years old and this is a day in the life series. I wake up around 6 a.m. and even though my phone is right beside me, I try not to look at it up on that first moment. I try to get in a good mood and think about what's great about the day, not be overwhelmed with what's next on the calendar or what emails came in overnight. Just take. 5 minutes or 10 minutes and be appreciative of everything about that day already. I'm a coffee addict. I drink 2 or 3 cups a day, but that's the first thing that I do before I do anything. And then while I'm having that first couple of cups of coffee, I do check all my emails. I don't always eat breakfast. I, I eat when I'm hungry, but if I do eat, it's usually going to be granola and. Fruit, maybe a bagel and cream cheese. Usually I walk about 1 mile in the mornings. Often I'm listening to a podcast or maybe I'm meditating depending on what's going on, but then I come back, get ready, go into the office. I live in Saint Louis, which is where Bild A Bear was founded back in 1997. We have moved the headquarters since it was originally created, um, from the. The outer edges of the city to downtown St. Louis. We have a 4 story building there where we also have a build a bear in the main floor that people come to, and that's always a lot of fun just to be able to go downstairs and remember why you do what you do every day. But it's a very short commute for me. It's probably less than 15 minutes on most days and I drive in from my home in an area called the Central West End, which is a really Old and special area of St. Louis, we're adjacent to a beautiful park called Forest Park. It's the largest municipal park in the United States actually. In just a matter of moments. You are in downtown St. Louis. I see the arch, usually the sun's coming up over the arch most mornings when I'm driving in, and then once you get back out just a few miles, I have that park very close to my home and. Can get away from it all really quickly. If I am in town, I am walking every week in Forest Park, often multiple times per week. I will go in when the first meeting starts, so that could be anywhere from 8 to 9 o'clock generally. Our meetings last usually an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, and there are definitely days that are completely back to back. No lunch. You have to squeeze in a bathroom break. It's nonstop. They might be from in person to combination of in person and on our our team's meetings sometimes they're just completely a teams meeting. They can be anywhere in the world and then once a week we have something. Called our bear Quarters meeting, which is in person and everyone comes in and I'm often speaking on the stage during that just giving people updates really it's informal but it's an important part of what we do. I will often bring my own lunch because I like to eat healthy food and we have a great canteen, but as my husband would say, I'm I'm kind of a picky eater. I eat when I have a break and I eat when I'm hungry. I'm notorious for forgetting to eat, which I know sounds crazy to some people and might not even sound healthy, but trust me, I'm healthy. You're asking me how I structure my afternoons. I don't. I have. admin extraordinaire who understands most of the time what I need, what are the important meetings, what are not, what are the what are some of the external needs that we have, what can get pushed off. It's absolutely critical in my opinion for someone in my role or a sea level role where there are so many people and things tugging on your time and your Attention to have that intelligent thoughtful filter so we look over my schedule usually Monday mornings and Friday nights or Friday evenings and sometimes Thursday evenings to walk through the next few weeks of what's going on, particularly as it relates to travel. I try to pack my travel full so I like to know when I'm going where so I can make sure I'm making them. Best possible use of that travel time. I try to leave Fridays a little bit open so I can collect my thoughts for the day or or the week rather. What time do you normally stop working in the office? In the traditional sense, probably around 6, 6:30, but a CEO in a town like Saint Louis, and I'm probably anywhere, um, you have a lot of responsibility. Perhaps we have people in from out of town. Um, whether it's a board meeting or there is someone from one of our partners, it's occasionally important for me to come in and shake hands with those individuals and sometimes have dinner depending on what's going on, so I have a job to do in those circumstances. Now I'm also a mom of three kids, and they're now older. They're 25, 22, and 19. so it's a much different environment now than it was when they were much younger. There's always things going on, but then we work hard to have that down time and, and I think that it's, uh, it's important to put your family first, but you know, the, the build a bear is also a part of my family. So this is turning out to be a sad thematic. I don't cook dinner. Because I'm not that good at cooking, but my husband is. In fact, uh, he's a very good cook. We actually own restaurants and a hard cider company and he generally has some food ready for us. When the weather's good, we eat outside, we have a kind of a, a really nice back patio and it's just great to be outside and. And enjoy sometimes so even with a glass of wine in the evening and, and whatever he's put together for us. Sometimes there might be some things that I'll need to circle back on that I didn't get to um after dinner. I do, you know, some personal work or I'll think about what I want to wear in the morning and try to like map out and make sure I know I really. I'm understanding what my next day is going to look like. Sometimes I have to, um, you know, think about the whole day, like if I have an event that next day, like what I'm going to wear, what I'm going to take, so I can transition and I go to bed a little bit early, you know, 9, 10-ish. I'm, I'm probably down by 10 o'clock.

WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert doesn’t rely on caffeine to get her through an often action-packed day–like the WNBA playoffs happening right now.

 From Deloitte CEO to WNBA commissioner: Inside Cathy Engelbert’s daily routine

WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert's daily routine never slows down— even during WNBA playoffs.

 From Deloitte CEO to WNBA Commissioner: Day in the Life with Cathy Engelbert 

I got a call from a former colleague at Deloitte who's now the head of the NBA basketball League operations. And he said I have the perfect job for you, commissioner of the W NBA. And you know what I said to him? No, I know nothing about running a sports league. And this is what we as women in the workforce cannot do is like automatically assume we can't do something. So as I thought about it, he kept on me for like three months and he's like, Cathy, you don't understand this is the job for you. So he said just come over and talk with people at the league office for one hour and I walked over, got off the elevator basketball everywhere. My father was actually drafted into the NBA in 1957 played against Wilt Chamberlain. There were pictures of Wilt Chamberlain and of course, I grew up with Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. And there were pictures and basketballs and logos of both W NBA teams and NBA teams everywhere. And I was mesmerized. So that's how I ended up as the commissioner of the W NBA. Hi, I'm Kathy Engelbert, commissioner of the W NBA 59 years old. And this is my daily routine. I typically wake up around seven ami. I think the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning, a lot of people say, look at their phone, I try to have that not be the first thing I do in the morning. Honestly, probably brush my teeth and then jump in the shower and then I come out and look at my phone. So it kind of gives me this little respite in the morning when I wake up and then it's like, ok, now let me look at everything that happened overnight. No, one day is the same. I have two kids. So spend some time with the kids sometimes have breakfast. Sometimes not. I used to be a big breakfast person, oatmeal, cherries, raisins, things like that, brown sugar. And now I kind of just have a protein bar in the morning on a banana and then have a big lunch. And obviously I have a lot of lunches and dinners in this roll. So I focus more on a big lunch than a big breakfast these days. One thing people don't know about me never had a cup of coffee. So I do not drink caffeine in the morning. I am a huge water consumer. A lot of water keeps me going. We're based in New York City. I live in northern New Jersey, so I have quite the commute in the morning. Sometimes I keep commute into New York City with my son who just joined the workforce in September in the morning, the commute into New York City from northern New Jersey can take about an hour and a half some days to way home. 45 minutes, 50 minutes. So much easier to get home than to get in the time of day. I usually get to. The office is usually somewhere between 839. That was one thing that coming from the corporate world. The first day of work you got in really early when you were in the corporate world, you were trying to beat the traffic. The commute had meetings, sports because there's so many games and so many things at nights and weekends. First day that I started, I think I got in at 730 no one got in until about nine o'clock. So, so now I get in, usually I aim to get in 839 if I don't otherwise have a meeting, scheduled early morning. And then it's really just meetings all day, meeting with potential corporate partners, meeting with my team. We're embarking on a huge transformation of the W NBA. So we have a lot going on globalization expansion. Getting ready for our All Star Game is a very busy time as well as we prepare to celebrate the best athletes in the world in women's basketball at our All Star game. But actually preparing already for next year's All Star game. So we're having meetings on a variety of things like that, meeting with our owners, our board of governors. So that's all jam packed in the day. So I'm kind of just, you know, always focused on lunch, whether it's with one of my team members, whether it's with a potential corporate partner, whether it's with just a, it gives me the opportunity to network. I usually take a couple block walk from our office and go to lunch. I actually put on my calendar s more smor small moments of recovery. Usually over the lunch hour, I need to get out. And whether I'm, if I'm working from home, I go for a walk and then have lunch when I get back. The afternoons are usually filled with meetings with my team on emerging issues. Again, planning for 10 pole events like our All Star game or Commissioner cup championship. Um Also, you know, every once in a while I have calls with media partners, corporate partners, you know, a lot of zoom definitely post pandemic, a lot of zoom calls, but also a lot of meetings in the office. Our office is very cool. It's got a lot of background with basketballs and players and current players and our retired players murals on the wall. So it's cool. People love to come in our office and, and see all the basketball related themes. Usually I try to leave sixish um because I know I'm going to be watching games. And the interesting thing about sports to me after 30 plus years in the business corporate world, you work nights and weekends because all your games are nights and weekends. I try to get home at a reasonable hour. So I leave at six, get home, +77 30 have dinner with the kids. My thoughts on work life balance. I used to call it work life integration because when you have the career I had before I got to the W NBA as the CEO of Deloitte and I had two kids and raising two kids. It was integrating them into part of my work because especially with technology today, following us everywhere and our devices, it was important to me to call it work life integration. I included my kids in a lot of things. One of my kids is coming to the W NBA All Star Game and um we'll have a ton of fun, you know, interacting there. But it is important and it's important to be a role model for young women and men in the workforce today to make sure they're seeing some of that balance and that integration and how you can turn some work things into fun things with the family as well. My wind down routine right before I'm about to go to bed is disconnect from devices because we're always looking at our devices, whether I'm big, you know, whether it's my ipad, whether it's my, my iphone, I'm usually watching some business. So, you know, when I first get home, then sports and then at the very end of the night I turn on friends. And so every night I set the sleep timer on my TV, whether I'm on the road in a hotel or whether I'm at home, I, I actually like, like the ambient noise of a TV in the background to get me to fall asleep.

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DAY IN THE LIFE