Compound Interest from Semafor Business

In this special episode of Compound Interest, Semafor’s Chief Commercial Officer Rachel Oppenheim sits down with Todd Heimes, Vice President and General Manager at our season sponsor, Amazon Business. Todd and Rachel sit down to discuss how Amazon Business is reshaping how organizations buy.

Heimes has been scaling Amazon since he started there in 1999, and has been growing Amazon Business since it started in 2016. His goal is to help organizations of all sizes save time and money by making business buying smarter, easier, and more strategic. Heimes discusses how the solution cuts the friction of age-old systems through immense selection, fast delivery, and a foundation built on customer obsession and earned trust.

This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. This episode is commercial content produced by Semafor Global Studio with Amazon Business.

Klarna, best known as a buy now, pay later giant, came of age during the e-commerce boom. But as AI takes over everything, including our shopping, Liz and Rohan ask Sebastian about what an agentic commerce future means for his business, if Klarna will eventually become a bank, the truth about his AI customer service experiment, whether people should really be financing their DoorDash orders, and much more.

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This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Bitcoin evangelist Anthony Pompliano has reinvented himself as the champion of a new kind of investor: digitally native, high-net-worth, and deeply skeptical of Wall Street expertise. He joins Liz and Rohan to talk about his AI-powered CFO product, why he thinks independent investors outperform the pros, what's left in crypto worth caring about, and the uncomfortable politics of the Trump family's meme coin.

Sign up to get the Semafor Business briefing in your inbox.

This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

If you ski or snowboard, you probably have an opinion of Rob Katz’s business. The Vail Resorts CEO joins Liz and Rohan on Compound Interest to talk about the criticisms of crowding, lift lines, and pricing of the season pass that changed winter sports forever.

Katz also explains why the company doesn’t hedge weather, how the industry’s high-end clientele complicates customer relations, why he isn’t hearing Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s bid to buy Park City, and the impacts of climate change on his business.

Sign up to get the Semafor Business briefing in your inbox.

This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast has been at the forefront of a new kind of business media for more than a decade. Co-host Joe Weisenthal joins Liz and Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith to talk about how the business of business media has evolved throughout his career and how he and Tracy Alloway approach making a podcast that gets into the weeds of supply chains for an audience that ranges from high schoolers to Wall Street executives.

They also talk about why the website formerly known as Twitter is still the place to be for finance and tech watchers — but why Substack’s drive to monetize expert amateurism has made it worse — and why he’s optimistic that the age of AI may actually be good for journalism … or at least podcasts.

This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Chris Bogart spent years at Cravath before building Burford Capital into the world's largest litigation finance firm — turning lawsuits into investible assets. Liz and Rohan dig into the financialization of corporate fights, Burford’s $16 billion beef with Argentina, and what it would take to finally let private equity buy a piece of Big Law.

This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Marc Lore built Diapers.com, sold it to Amazon. Built Jet.com, sold it to Walmart. Now he’s trying something different: taking Wonder — his vertically integrated food-delivery startup — all the way to a public offering.

Semafor Deputy Editor-in-Chief Shelly Banjo joins Liz to dig into how he’s betting that robots, influencers, and AI-directed meal plans can finally crack the code on profitable food delivery, what e-commerce taught him about attacking fat margins with automation, and why he’s also quietly searching for desert land to build a city from scratch.

This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Image: Reuters/Mike Blake

Mark Cuban is on a mission to rid the US health care system of the middlemen he blames for soaring costs. Liz and Rohan dive into his approach with Cost Plus Drugs, which aims to disrupt the little-known middlemen driving up prescription drug prices. He also discussed soaring valuations in sports, his own regrets around the Dallas Mavericks sale, and offers a surprising assessment of TrumpRX.

This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Photo Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

Colossal, the biotech startup working on de-extincting the woolly mammoth and the dodo, thinks it can make trillions of dollars — almost none of it from consumer-facing products. Liz and Rohan dive into it all with CEO Ben Lamm, who has already spun out four businesses as he’s built the bioscience business with a focus on serving governments and nations looking to build drought-resistant plants, plastic-munching microbes, and much more (some of it classified!)

This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

John Arnold — one of the greatest energy traders of his generation — turned his sights on philanthropy nearly two decades ago, applying the same ROI-driven focus that made him billions to charitable giving. He walks Liz and Rohan through his vision for fixing higher ed, the problem with sports betting and prediction markets, and the Trump-driven chaos in the energy markets.

This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.