Fortt Knox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bandwidth is different.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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