Fortt Knox

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rachel Drori comes from from a long line of entrepreneurs – her immigrant grandparents started a business when they got to the United States.

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Njavwa Mutambo is the CEO of Musanga Logistics, a delivery company in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia.

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Seventeen years ago, life gave Ben Chestnut the push to start the company that became MailChimp.

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There is no one in Silicon Valley who's more connected than Reid Hoffman. That might be because he plays all of the connector roles, sometimes at once.

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