Fortt Knox

By CNBCBusiness Technology Careers

Fortt Knox episodes

August 12, 2017 40 - Julie Sweet, Accenture CEO of North America: The Beauty of Reinvention
This is a conversation about reinvention. Not just once, but over and over.
Julie Sweet leads the North American business at Accenture, a global consulting giant that employs more than 400,000 people and produced more than $32 billion in sales last year. Julie's territory made up almost exactly half of that total.
I'm not really sure how most people become consultants. Ideally they get good at something, then show other people how to do it better.
Julie's path was different. She was a lawyer – a partner at one of those swanky firms: Cravath, Swaine & Moore – and left that to be the top lawyer at Accenture, which you might also know by its old name, Arthur Andersen Consulting.
She parlayed that job … into a bigger job. And that's the key detail here. Julie has a history of doing that sort of thing, and I wanted to find out how.
I sat down with Julie Sweet just this week at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to talk about her path to the C-suite of one of the world's top consulting firms, and how her father, who painted cars for a living, set the no-excuses example that helped her get there.

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51 min
August 06, 2017 39 - Tristan Walker, Walker & Company Brands founder & CEO: A Black Entrepreneur in Silicon Valley
Tristan Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker and Company Brands. He's 33 years old. In this episode I somewhat jokingly say that growing up, he was an odd kid, because of the surface contradictions.
He's a business mind who made a name for himself when he joined a mobile technology startup, but his first company focuses on skin and hair care. He grew up in a working-class family in New York, and his father was killed when he was young – but he went to a boarding school.
His most prominent investors? Andreessen Horowitz, the marquee Silicon Valley venture capital firm – but he and I speak plainly about Silicon Valley's diversity challenges.
I recently visited Tristan Walker at the offices of Walker & Company Brands in Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. This episode was special for me, because, let's be frank: There aren't many African-American technology journalists in this business. I'm one. There aren't many African-American entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, and Tristan is arguably the best-known. I'm seven years older than Tristan, but we're of a similar generation. We've been a part of this era of sweeping change, and seen what's missing ... and who's missing.

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53 min
July 30, 2017 38 - Jason Calacanis, investor: The Brooklyn Kid Turned Angel
Brooklyn in the 70s and 80s.
Today, he says, his net worth is somewhere north of 100 million dollars. That's not because he's an entrepreneur, though he has started a handful of companies. Jason got rich as an entrepreneur. But he got really, really rich by investing in the crazy ideas … of other entrepreneurs.
He just wrote a book: Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups. He says he can tell you how he did it, and give you pointers so that – maybe you can do it, too.
In the tech world, we call these people "angel investors." They're usually the first money into a startup, giving six figures or less – just enough to keep an idea going while the founder figures out whether it's big enough to attract millions from venture capitalists.
The downside of being an angel investor: It's really risky. You're probably going to lose the money you put into 90% of startups. The upside: If you get a couple of winners, they can be huge wins.
And get this: because of the way regulations are changing, you can now become an angel investor, from the comfort of your computer. You can pool your money with other angels.

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31 min
July 24, 2017 37 - Brad Smith, Microsoft president: If You Change the World, You Change the Law
Brad Smith has been at Microsoft for nearly 25 years, and has been the top lawyer there for 15. He now holds the title of president, also running corporate affairs and working alongside CEO Satya Nadella.
Brad led Microsoft's legal defense against David Boies and the U.S. government a generation ago. You might have heard of that infamous antitrust case against Microsoft. Today he's fighting for Microsoft's right to shield certain customer data in the cloud.
Brad and I did a panel together at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado recently about the global threat from hackers. After that we sat down and pushed record, and had a conversation for Fortt Knox.
Three things you're going to hear from Brad Smith: How his upbringing shaped his view of the world, how as a young lawyer he used technology to advance his career, and how to learn from massive upheaval – like the government's antitrust case against Microsoft 20 years ago – which I think it's fair to say changed Microsoft, the tech industry, and Brad Smith's career, forever.
That's where the title of this episode comes from: If you change the world, you change the law. Two decades later, Brad has a take on the Microsoft case that I just find profound: And perhaps a near-prophetic warning to today's other world-changers, including Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google – and advice you and I can apply, too.

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39 min
July 17, 2017 36 - Anil Chakravarthy & Bruce Chizen, Informatica: Even CEOs Need Mentors
Think of this as getting to audit a little bit of a leadership master class.
Bruce Chizen has the kind of unique executive experience that would fill a book of business school case studies.
As the CEO of Adobe – the company that makes Photoshop, Premiere and more – Bruce mentored his replacement, Shantanu Narayen – and he often sat across the bargaining table from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
That's when I met him, as a young reporter in Silicon Valley, nearly 20 years ago now.
Today, Bruce sits on many boards of directors, most notably the board of Oracle – run by the one and only Larry Ellison.
At the same time, Bruce is executive chairman at Informatica. Informatica works with businesses to manage the trove of data they store in the cloud. There, he's working with new CEO Anil Chakravarthy on navigating a tricky job. Not only does Anil have to inspire the rank and file, he's got to develop his lieutenants and manage a board of directors stacked with impatient private equity investors.

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28 min
July 10, 2017 35 - Danielle Weisberg & Carly Zakin, The Skimm cofounders: Millennial Mavericks
This week on the podcast: Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, co-founders and co-CEOs of the Skimm.
Their core product? The Daily Skimm, a newsletter targeting millennial women that keeps you up to date on what's happening in the world.
They didn't invent the daily newsletter by a long shot, but Weisberg and Zakin are working the kind of magic with it that should make every media executive in the world sit up and take notice. Here's a little context: The New York Times announced recently that it has 13 million subscriptions to its 50 newsletters. Weisberg and Zakin have 5 million subscribers who open their one newsletter multiple times per week.
I caught up with Carly and Danielle at The Skimm's headquarters on 23rd Street in Manhattan, to talk about their journey as business partners and friends, the roots of their entrepreneurial drive, and today's unique challenges for women in the startup game.

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53 min
July 02, 2017 34 - Mike Tuchen, Talend CEO: A Teen Adrift Becomes A CEO
Mike Tuchen is the CEO of Talend, a company with a billion-dollar market value. It helps customers take advantage of their data and apply it effectively. But before kicking off a career that's included an executive stint at Microsoft and a turn as CEO of Rapid7, he was nearly kicked out of boarding school and had to figure out how to make a contribution as the runt of his Brown University rowing team.
Tuchen joined the Fortt Knox podcast to share a story that's not your typical wunderkind-makes-good tale. His story shows that when the pressure is on, believing in your unique talent can be the key to tilting the odds in your favor.

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28 min
June 25, 2017 33 - Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm chairman: Building a Powerhouse for the Smartphone Era
It's been about 10 years since the debut of the modern smartphone, when Apple's iPhone first went on sale. One of the companies that has most defined this decade? Qualcomm.
Leading the charge at Qualcomm for most of that time has been executive chairman Paul Jacobs. His father Irwin co-founded the company, and Paul helped build it into a power broker in mobile computing.
Qualcomm designs the chips that serve as the brains for most premium Android phones, and its patented technology is in pretty much every smartphone on the market. That has earned the company a stock market value that's now over $160 billion.
I sat down with Paul Jacobs at CNBC headquarters for a conversation about some of his defining moments, and what's next.

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44 min
June 18, 2017 32 - Uber's Wake-Up Call for Leaders: Deirdre Bosa, Mike Isaac, Vivek Wadhwa
It's a story of ambition, innovation, management gone wrong:
Uber.
It's been a ride-hailing game changer, but also a cautionary tale, so this week on Fortt Knox Live, I brought together an expert panel to discuss the latest news and what it means for Silicon Valley.
Mike Issac of the New York Times, Vivek Wadhwa of Carnegie Mellon, and my colleague Deirdre Bosa of CNBC joined me in San Francisco this week to break down the big changes coming for Uber's management, and what the rest of us can learn.
Here's our conversation:

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33 min
June 10, 2017 31 - Steve Ballmer, L.A. Clippers owner: Living Large After Microsoft
There's a story about former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer throwing a chair across his office and hitting a table with it. This story has become a piece of Silicon Valley lore. Now, Microsoft is not in Silicon Valley. It's in Washington State, near Seattle.
But the story is a piece of Silicon Valley lore because of the reason Steve Ballmer allegedly threw the infamous chair. He wasn't aiming at a person. He didn't hate his table. He was fired up, because one of his engineers was leaving to take a job at Google. Google! And Google IS in Silicon Valley.
The guy is passionate.
One project he's spending time on in retirement: USAFacts. It's a trove of information about where our federal tax dollars really go – you can find it at USAFacts.org, and play with the numbers yourself. Ballmer started digging after his wife asked him to get more involved in the family foundation's charitable work. Ballmer is passionate about making sure kids have the opportunity to do better than their parents did financially. I asked him if that passion is what motivated him to do a massive data project.

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21 min

About Fortt Knox

From the publisher's feed

Jon Fortt co-anchors TechCheck on CNBC, and has covered technology and innovation for more than 15 years. Fortt Knox brings you rich ideas and powerful people. Guests include Intel CEO Brian Krzanich,…