Fortt Knox

The conversation with Harman CEO Dinesh Paliwal begins at 27:58. 

Free speech is getting exhausting. It’s a game of online publishing whack-a-mole as wingnut Alex Jones, of Infowars fame, finally gets suspended from Twitter, only to direct his audience to Tumblr. How should those of us who still love America feel about the amount of crazy that’s going on in the media game these days? 

MoviePass is testing its business model … on Solo. Borrowing a page from Darth Vader’s Cloud City book of negotiating tactics, movie theater subscription company MoviePass is altering the terms of your deal – pray they don’t alter it further.  

And skinny bundles are the new skinny jeans. In further evidence of a trend I like to call “The Great Rebundling,” digital distributors and content companies are hooking up faster than you can say, “Ban Alex Jones.” The latest to swipe right on each other: Verizon doing a deal for free Apple Music and Samsung doing a deal to pre-load Spotify on all its devices.  

Last but not least, for the Fortt Knox one-on-one this week I’ve got Dinesh Paliwal, CEO of Harman International, the high-end audio company Samsung bought for 8 billion dollars last year. He’s talking straight about the future of music formats and the right way to play business hardball with China.  

Welcome to Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I am Jon Fortt at the Nasdaq Marketsite in New York’s Times Square.  

Joining me on the show today to break down the headlines: I’ve got Ed Lee of the New York Times. Dan McComas, former senior vice president of product at Reddit. And joining me a bit later, Brent Lang, the senior film editor at Variety; and Cherie Hu, columnist at Billboard.

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I've got something different for you this week: A big conversation about work. As in, where should you work? What kind of company: Big or small? Young or established? 

The idea for this episode came from my CNBC colleague Sharon Epperson, who's just great. Sharon covers personal finance, and I'll often stop at her desk and strategize about work and life.  

 Sharon did a piece on how to land a job at a startup, and I wanted to expand the topic to, should you take a job at a startup, even if you can? So I huddled with CNBC producer Evan Falk, as I do every week to talk about Fortt Knox Live, and we decided to put a show together. Get Sharon, a couple of top-flight venture capital investors, and I wanted to get some students and recent graduates, too. I mean, they're the target audience for this stuff, right? 

So that's what we did.  

One more thing, and this is important: So we're about two years into Fortt Knox, and it's grown a lot – I want to thank you, the podcast listeners, and also the live show viewers on all our platforms including Facebook, Periscope, YouTube, and the CNBC apps on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. For the past two years, I've been basically working on two different shows: The Fortt Knox Podcast, here … and Fortt Knox Live, which streams on Wednesdays. The podcast is mostly one-on-one interviews, and the live show is mostly broader conversations tackling technology, society and culture.  

My guests are two venture capitalists: Jeff Richards, managing partner at GGV Capital, and Graham Brown, partner at Lerer Hippeau. Three students: Ahmad Eshghyar, an MBA candidate at Yale; Roni Barak Ventura, a doctoral candidate at NYU; and Raymond Willey, an MBA candidate at Baruch College. And one CNBC colleague, Sharon Epperson.

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Pandora, the music streaming service, has a culture that's heavily musical. So as a new CEO of the company, it helps that Roger Lynch not only plays guitar, but he actually still plays live gigs with a band. 

Lynch sat down with me above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, before the opening bell. He's been in the job for less than a year – and he's got his work cut out for him. Spotify just went public, and has grabbed a lot of attention. Meanwhile, many of the most powerful companies in tech are competing with him in the market, including a few little names like Apple, Amazon and Google. How does he plan to win? 

Lynch started out a scientist, became and investment banker, and found his groove as an entrepreneur – he's the founding CEO of video streaming pioneer Sling TV. 

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George Kurian is the CEO of NetApp, a storage technology company whose stock market value is more than $20 billion. Normally I like to start off talking about what makes my guests unique. But in this case, George has a lot in common with another Silicon Valley tech executive named Kurian – his twin brother Thomas is president at Oracle. 

George and I could spend a lot of time talking about how unlikely it is that anyone climbs to the top level of a multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley tech company, much less that two brothers would do it. We did talk about that a bit. But we also talked about strategy, and the challenges he's faced leading in a period of rapid change. 

I sat down with George Kurian at the New York Stock Exchange, three years into his tenure as NetApp CEO. 

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Nothing is forever. Especially when it comes to running a multi-billion-dollar public company. This week, in a Fortt Knox podcast special, we're going to do a little retrospective … interviews with CEOs who, for now at least, are no longer CEOs. 

I've been doing this podcast for more than a year and a half, so I've sat down with dozens and dozens of top executives, founders and entrepreneurs. Inevitably, change happens. Sometimes the company's board of directors wants a new strategic direction. Sometimes power struggles erupt. Sometimes personal failings come to light.  

This time, the lessons from the highest achievers come with an asterisk. Just because you reach the top of an organization doesn't mean you'll stay there. I would add another: Just because these execs are no longer in their old jobs, don't assume they're done. When Steve Jobs was shoved out of Apple in the '80s, he went on to found NeXT, build Pixar, and return to Apple. Mark Hurd was ushered out of HP and landed what turned out to be a better gig at Oracle. 

We start with Brian Krzanich, who was CEO at Intel until three weeks ago. That's when Intel's board of directors learned he'd had a relationship with an Intel employee that violated company policy. I got to know Krzanich when he took over the CEO job from Paul Otellini. Brian likes to be called BK, and I quickly learned that he's most comfortable holding onto his identity as an engineer rather than thinking of himself as a corporate executive. The most memorable part of my conversation with him in January 2017: When he revealed a different kind of mistake earlier in his career that almost cost him his job at Intel.

Mark Fields is another executive who'd spent a long time at his company and climbed to the top before his exit. The bottom line on his departure: The stock wasn't doing well, and some within the company lost patience. Fields was in the CEO seat about three years, and my CNBC colleague Jim Cramer thinks he wasn't given enough time to really make his mark. When Mark and I talked in April of last year about his path to the top of Ford, he said he developed a reputation for volunteering to tackle big problems: 

Speaking of boardroom drama, Qualcomm right now has one of the most dizzying situations in techland. The company's locked in a legal battle with Apple over patent payments, it just fended off a hostile takeover attempt from rival Broadcom with an assist from the U.S. federal government, and former CEO and chairman Paul Jacobs – the son of founder Irwin Jacobs – left the board and is trying to raise money to take the company private. Paul Jacobs sat down with me in June of last year and talked about his commitment to Qualcomm. If you think he might give up his fight where the company's concerned, just listen to this: 

Sir Martin Sorrell built WPP by putting together various ad firms and PR businesses into an empire the likes of which the industry had never seen. He resigned from the company in April with allegations swirling about personal misconduct and misuse of company resources. He has denied those allegations, and is in the process of relaunching his career with a new venture called S4 Capital.

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Digital fraud is a big business. The same trends that are powering the cloud computing era – global brands, pay-per-use pricing, open-source collaboration – are making thieves rich, too. 

Michael Reitblat is fighting that trend. As co-founder and CEO of Forter, he's trying to keep retailers from getting fooled by credit card scammers. It's a journey that began when he was a teenage hacker, through college and startup dreams, to working on his second startup.  

At the Nasdaq Marketsite I talked to Reitblat about the state of organized crime online, and what innovators can do about it. 

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Tobi Lütke is the founder and CEO of Shopify, a public company worth $17 billion. The shopping landscape is changing fast, with new tax laws, same-day delivery, in-store pickup and mobile payments adding new twists and capabilities all the time. Lutke, and Shopify, provide technology tools to simplify all that for merchants. 

I talked with Lütke recently at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square, as talk of tariffs and taxes are swirling. We talked about what's allowed Shopify's stock to double in a year, and how he went from a teenage German apprentice to a Canadian entrepreneur … who's now a billionaire on paper, by the way.

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Q-Tip. The Abstract. He’s not going to say it about himself outside of the the playful banter of a rhyme, so I’ll say it: He’s one of the most recognizable voices and influential minds in the history of hip-hop music.   

Q-Tip is probably best known as part of A Tribe Called Quest, a group that emerged in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Hits like “Can I Kick It?” “Scenario” and “Bonita Applebum” cemented Tribe’s place as innovators, both in their lyrical cadence and the way they used sampling and a broad mix of musical genres to make something new.  

A Tribe Called Quest released its final album in November 2016. Member Phife Dog, Malik Taylor, passed away from diabetes complications earlier that year. I talked to Tip about his new music, his other creative efforts, mourning Phife, and the state of the music business.

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Few companies have gone through the kind of image transformation GoDaddy has over the past decade. 

Back in 2005, GoDaddy launched its first commercial that used women in revealing outfits and sexually suggestive themes to sell web services. Wagner became GoDaddy's CEO at the beginning of this year, and those commercials are long gone.  

Today's GoDaddy bears little resemblance to the one of a decade ago, which is probably a good thing given how cultural winds have shifted. I talked to Wagner about his journey to the CEO seat, and what he's working to do with the products and culture.   

I got some time with Scott Wagner at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. We talked about leadership, culture, and what it will take for small businesses to thrive in this latest wave of the digital economy. We also streamed the conversation live on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the CNBC apps on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.

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Today it's a $4-billion publicly-traded company. It's synonymous with streaming video, going head-to-head with Apple, Amazon, Google and lately Netflix, in the cord-cutting era. But Roku's been around for more than 15 years. That means it's older than YouTube. 

Anthony Wood, the founder and CEO, hasn't followed a straight line to get Roku where it is. He's gone through a few different business models. He got some help from Netflix. Now he's defying the odds and talking about Roku's latest strategic moves.

I met Anthony Wood at Roku's New York office in Midtown Manhattan. We talked about his journey as an entrepreneur – from selling used golf balls as a kid to his big move to Silicon Valley. He also gives his take on what's next in this golden age of TV.

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