Instigators of Change

Shellye Archambeau has encountered a lot of obstacles in life, but her ability to navigate around them has proved almost superhuman. Archambeau talks about deciding - as a teenager - that she wanted to be a CEO, and how she navigated the business world to make that happen. How do you deal with a company that’s not paying you enough? That won’t promote you? That becomes complacent? And what happens when your break comes along in the middle of a tech meltdown? Archambeau tells her own story, and offers lots of advice along the way.

When Dheeraj Pandey co-founded the cloud computing company Nutanix in 2009, the economy was shaky. Housing was turbulent. And interest rates had moved dramatically. Sound familiar? Nutanix would grow into a multibillion dollar company, and now, Pandey is back at the start-up game. He’s trying to change CRM, though it’s a tough time to be challenging entrenched ways of doing things. How will he weather the storm? And what does he consider his secret weapons in business?

After tennis great Serena Williams announced her retirement from tennis, she tweeted out an article from Joseph Coughlin, head of the MIT AgeLab. Williams said she wasn’t retiring - she was “forever evolving.” And Coughlin believes that Williams’ sentiment is a sign of the times. Average Americans are getting older. They’re living longer. They want to evolve. And, by the way, they hold the vast majority of the nation’s wealth. But many entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate leaders still believe they should market to young people. And that’s despite the fact that Americans have been having fewer kids for decades, meaning that young people are in short supply. Coughlin joins us for a reality check - and a look at an enormous (and growing) opportunity.

When Jeff Wilke left Amazon in 2021, where - since 2016 - he had served as CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, his next chapter could have focused on rest and relaxation. After all, Wilke had been at Amazon for more than 20 years, and had seen it grow from a modest-sized bookseller to a worldwide behemoth. But Wilke believes the American economy - and national security - is dependent on luring manufacturing back to our shores. He explains why manufacturing is his new passion and why his new company has acquired so many small firms recently. Plus, how is he advising start-up founders now? And how does he see the consumer changing?

You might call Ethan Mollick a man obsessed. And he probably wouldn’t mind. Because Mollick - a high-profile professor at The Wharton School - is obsessed with data, which dispels a lot of the myths around startups. Like: Do twenty somethings have the most successful startups? Nope, it’s forty-somethings. Are teams more successful than solo founders? Don’t bet on it. Is brainstorming a great way to start a meeting? Not a chance. Join us for a discussion about what works in business, and what doesn’t (and be prepared to be surprised).

More than 50 years ago, President Nixon announced a moonshot to cure cancer. But the cure never came. More than half a million Americans still die from cancer every single year. Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and cancer physician Siddhartha Mukherjee says that, in some ways, the scientific community has failed - and it must embrace new approaches. One of the most promising of those approaches, he believes, is to starve cancer of the nutrients it needs. We speak with Mukherjee, a co-founder of Faeth Therapeutics, along with its CEO, Anand Parikh, about how to turn food into medicine, the results they’ve seen so far, and how quickly the FDA may act.

When Sarah Friar quit as the CFO of Square, CEO Jack Dorsey wasn't thrilled. But she felt compelled to take the leap. Friar explains why she left, and how her childhood in a conflict-plagued part of Northern Ireland factored into the decision. Plus, if you're building a company now, how should you navigate this tricky economic environment? How should you think about funding, layoffs, and communication? Friar offers her honest advice, and explains how weathering a downturn can help you create an even stronger company.

In 2005, a small company began offering up a way to post amateur videos on the web. YouTube operated on a shoestring, with its founders maxing out credit cards, and debating what the company was really about. The next year, Google - sensing that YouTube would be a powerful force in search - acquired them. This week, author Mark Bergen tells the story of YouTube’s strange birth and breakneck path to success. Plus, the company’s epic battles against traditional media, and the culture clash that followed its acquisition by Google.

In the early 2000s, a baby clothes salesman was about to strike it big. His name was Adam Neumann, and his rise - and fall - has a lot to teach both founders and funders about why a company can go off the rails. Neumann's new real estate venture, Flow, recently got a $350 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz. We thought it'd be a good time to revisit our conversation with bestselling authors Maureen Farrell and Eliot Brown to talk about how Neumann helped build WeWork, how he attracted tremendous amounts of funding, and ultimately, why the company experienced a fiery fall to earth.

Financial markets have been up and down enough to make anyone seasick. And if you're starting a company - or investing in one - it's an uncertain time. In one of our most popular episodes of the last few months, Samir Kaul - a founding partner of Khosla Ventures - talks about how this volatility compares to the downturns of 2001 and 2008, why he's not panicking, and how companies should navigate this new reality. Then, Kaul details what he's investing in now, and explains why incubating companies is so central to the work he does. Plus, a look at how Craig Venter - who helped sequence the human genome - shaped Kaul's career.