Fortt Knox

Oren Jacob saw Star Wars as a kid, and fell in love with the idea of bringing together technology and storytelling to create something entirely new.  

Today, he’s the cofounder and CEO of PullString, a tech startup that teaches software how to have conversation. That could mean helping companies build an Alexa skill for Amazon’s Echo, or allowing Hello Barbie to talk.

I caught up with Oren at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, where he spoke to leaders in the tech world about laying the groundwork for the future of voice interaction with computers.  

He told me how his early fascination with Star Wars led him to an internship and first career at Pixar – before he decided to start his own thing.

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Boutique treats and toys for dogs, it turns out, are a big business. Bark was co-founded by Matt Meeker, who's now its CEO. It's the seller of the subscription BarkBox. And it expects to do a quarter billion dollars in sales in 2018. 

Americans spend about $70 billion a year on their pets; that’s part of the reason why General Mills just announced that it plans to pay $8 billion for pet food maker Blue Buffalo. And it’s part of the reason why I went to see Matt Meeker at Bark’s headquarters in New York City’s Chinatown, and learn how he saw this pet-pampering mega-trend coming six years ago.  

When you’re pursuing a big idea, it’s important to keep refining it, and questioning your assumptions. That’s one of the things I took away from Matt’s story.

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Frugality is baked into Rob Bernshteyn’s life experience. His family immigrated from Russia when he was a kid, and he used savings from a paper route to start a baseball card business … which helped pay for his college education. In his mid-30s, after an executive role at SuccessFactors, a tech company that went public, Rob’s entrepreneurial itch became overwhelming, and he used his modest IPO windfall to launch Coupa.

Coupa’s mission? What else — help businesses save money through smart software. 

Rob and I met at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to talk about how far Coupa’s come — it’s now a public company worth $2 billion — and how he got there.

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Who doesn't like to eat? Maybe my seven-year-old … he'd rather talk at the table … but the rest of us, when we're hungry, want something right now, and something that's not going to induce a lot of guilt. 

That, in a nutshell, is what has given birth to the fast casual movement over the past 20-plus years, and this week, I want you to join me for my conversation with the father of fast casual, Ron Shaich. Before there was Chipotle or Dig Inn, there was Panera Bread. Founded in Missouri in 1987, it now boasts more than two thousand locations. But Shaich, one of the founders, was selling cookies when he first got into the restaurant business. And he's got some insights to share about the journey.

I got some time with Ron Shaich to talk technology, and quality, and wages, and more. We had half of this conversation on Fortt Knox Live, which you can catch Wednesdays at 2 pm, and see by the way on YouTube, and the CNBC app on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. Also, Ron and I kept the conversation going exclusively for this podcast, so there are parts that are new here, even if you watched live.  

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Kaz Hirai has been the CEO of Sony for six years, and the company just announced that he'll be stepping aside and taking the title of Chairman in April. 

That means he's been the CEO at Sony for much of time that I've been at CNBC. And in that span I've sat down with him most every year at the Consumer Electronics Show, a sprawling event in Las Vegas where the world's gadget giants gather every year. 

Funny thing about Hirai – he stepped in to take the reins at Sony at a moment when the sky was falling in on the company. Apple's iPod and iTunes had snatched the digital music mantle away from the Japanese giant, and Samsung had seized Sony’s crown in TVs. Hirai leaves the CEO seat with the company pretty clearly better off than when he started. 

I sat down as usual with Hirai at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, but this time, for both CNBC live and for the Fortt Knox podcast. We discussed Sony's latest products in phones, TV, and the return of that robot dog, Aibo – but I also talked to him about the multicultural life experience that prepared him to be CEO in this turbulent era.  

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You don’t have to be playing the markets every day to know that stocks have been doing very well lately – and not just lately, for about nine years now.  

That means you might be hearing a bit more about stock exchanges. Which brings us to my next guest. Adena Friedman is the first woman to lead a global stock exchange. She’s the CEO of Nasdaq, a job she’s held for a year.  

To get there, she’s had to chart a path where there was none. For example, it meant choosing what was right for her family over what seemed like the more obvious career decision – and making it all work anyway.  

I sat down with Adena Friedman – where else? At the Nasdaq, in New York’s Times Square. We talked about the roads not taken, and the new landscape for female entrepreneurs.

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Imagine you've worked 23 years at a company, up to the top. You're being groomed to be the next CEO. And then the current CEO tells you – actually, he's not leaving anytime soon. 

That's the position Al Kelly was in nine years ago at American Express. What happened next is a textbook case in how to handle career curveballs. Today Kelly is the CEO of Visa, and has great things to say about Ken Chenault, who’s retiring as CEO of American Express. Kelly also has great insight into what's happening in the world of money, from Bitcoin to Apple Pay. 

I sat down with Kelly recently at the National Retail Federation conference in New York. Visa is a big company, worth more than a quarter trillion dollars, and its technology touches a staggering number of the payment transactions happening around the world. We talk about that – plus his career, which has taken him around some interesting corners. 

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Daymond John grew up in Queens, New York. He wasn’t the best student – he would later be diagnosed with dyslexia – but he did have an eye for fashion and a talent for connecting with people. 

Today, you’ll know him as one of the sharks on Shark Tank – a popular show on ABC and CNBC where entrepreneurs pitch their companies to a superstar panel of investors. That show is in its ninth season. Contestants want not just his money, but perhaps more important, Daymond John’s advice and unique connections. 

Daymond John is also out with a new book this month, Rise and Grind, analyzing the key habits of successful people. He sat down with me to tell how he rose from sewing clothes in his mother’s house, to becoming an investor and TV star, and what he’s learning now. 

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Whether it’s sports, college, or work at Goldman Sachs, Carter Reum and his brother Courtney have always had a tendency to do things together.  

But it’s still pretty surprising that the two Midwestern guys managed to start a company together selling specialty alcohol … make millions of dollars … and now coach and invest in other entrepreneurs.  

They’ve written a book about it – together, of course. Shortcut Your Startup is available January 16, and tries to turn conventional business advice on its head.  

The Reum brothers don’t have a rags-to-riches story – they grew up outside of Chicago with a dad who was CEO of a manufacturing company and a Mom who had an MBA from Columbia. It is a story of teamwork, invention, and the guts to abandon what’s comfortable – budding careers in finance at Goldman Sachs – to pursue something potentially great. And I think that makes it a perfect story for the start of a new year.  

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Success doesn’t usually come along a simple path, and that was definitely true for Shan Sinha. He was raised by a single mom in Texas, fell in love with technology, went to M.I.T., dropped out to do a startup, and … 

Failed. 

He went back to M.I.T. But of course that’s not the end of the story, or he wouldn’t be on this podcast. He got a job at Microsoft, left to start another company, and this time struck gold – by eventually selling that company to Google in 2010. Now he’s the founder and CEO of yet another business – Highfive, a video conferencing outfit that’s breaking new ground.   

I don’t like straight lines. My career hasn’t traveled in one, and chances are, yours hasn’t either. So I love when I get to explore the stories of people who started out at a disadvantage. Or struck out a few times before hitting that home run. That, I can learn from.  

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