In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Danny Winer, co-founder and CEO of HexClad. Danny traces his path from studying theater and film at NYU and moving to Los Angeles with $2,000 and three suitcases, to a car accident at 28 that broke his back, shattered his right leg, and left him six figures in debt with no ability to work. He rebuilt by selling cookware at trade shows, then lost his first company, Juicepresso, in September 2016 at age 50.

What became HexClad started in the basement hallway of a trade show in Guangzhou, where Danny spotted hexagons lasered onto a Korean barbecue plate and found the rare thing nobody finds at those shows: the actual inventor, holding a book of 13 patents. They talk about the handshake deal that gave an unknown American company US exclusivity, why every investor turned him down for refusing to sell into retail, the emptied retirement accounts and rolling stack of credit cards, and the single Costco test store that saved the company when it was months from going out of business.

They also get into celebrity partnerships. Gordon Ramsay found HexClad by following them on Instagram, and Danny explains what his business manager meant by "you're going to get more than you bargained for," why Gordon is on weekly calls looking at numbers rather than just filming ads, and what happens when he does not like a product. Plus becoming the official cookware of the New York Yankees, the F1 work, and how a conversation with Jimmy Iovine turned a martini shaker into a collaboration with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz, Co-Founders of Eventbrite. Kevin traces his path from the early days of Silicon Valley to co-founding Xoom, a money remittance company that became one of the first developers on the PayPal API and was ultimately acquired by PayPal in 2015 for $1.1 billion.

Julia shares how she left a career in television development at MTV and FX to co-found Eventbrite with Kevin. Together they built Eventbrite into one of the world's leading live events platforms, took it public in 2018, and sold it in April 2026 for $500 million.

In this conversation they talk about what it actually takes to build a company with the person you are married to, how they handled investors who told them flat out they would not back a husband and wife team, and what happened when COVID turned Eventbrite from a $5 billion GMV company to negative revenue in 14 days.

They also get into the real overhead cost of running a publicly traded company, why Kevin believes selling Xoom when he did was a $10 to $20 billion mistake in hindsight, what Julia honestly does not know about what comes next, and their unfiltered takes on AI, the current investment cycle, and whether we are heading into a bubble.

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Nigel Morris, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of QED Investors and Co-Founder of Capital One. Nigel traces the origins of Capital One, from a working class childhood in England with a military father who moved the family 11 times, to building one of the most disruptive financial services companies in history. He recounts how he and Rich Fairbank identified that the biggest banks in America were making billion dollar decisions by gut instinct rather than data, and how being rejected by 25 banks only strengthened their conviction to prove them wrong. He discusses the regulatory crisis of 2002 that caused Capital One's stock to drop 40% overnight, what it felt like to carry his net worth statement in his briefcase for a year before leaving the company he built, and why the only sustainable advantage in any business is culture. Nigel also shares his philosophy on venture capital at QED, why fintech is a force for social good, and why he believes artificial intelligence will kill jobs while simultaneously creating opportunities we cannot yet conceive of.

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Nigel Morris, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of QED Investors and Co-Founder of Capital One.

Nigel traces the origins of Capital One, from a working class childhood in England with a military father who moved the family 11 times, to building one of the most disruptive financial services companies in history. He recounts how he and Rich Fairbank identified that the biggest banks in America were making billion dollar decisions by gut instinct rather than data, and how being rejected by 25 banks only strengthened their conviction to prove them wrong.

He discusses the regulatory crisis of 2002 that caused Capital One's stock to drop 40% overnight, what it felt like to carry his net worth statement in his briefcase for a year before leaving the company he built, and why the only sustainable advantage in any business is culture.

Nigel also shares his philosophy on venture capital at QED, why fintech is a force for social good, and why he believes artificial intelligence will kill jobs while simultaneously creating opportunities we cannot yet conceive of.

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Jim Hagedorn, CEO of ScottsMiracle-Gro.

Hagedorn opens up about the most turbulent chapter of his career: a $2 billion gamble on the cannabis industry that nearly ran the company into the ground. He discusses the intense pressure of "burning money," the isolation of leadership during a crisis, and the difficult reality of cutting hundreds of millions in operating expenses to keep the business afloat.

Hagedorn also shares insights into his unconventional path to CEO, from running away from home at 15 to join a commune to flying F-16s in the Air Force. He reflects on the "ruthless" but influential relationship with his father, Horace Hagedorn, and how he eventually spearheaded the massive deal between Scotts and Miracle-Gro.

In this episode of The CEO Series, host William Salvi sits down with Hitesh Sheth, CEO of Vectra AI, to discuss the evolving landscape of AI-driven cybersecurity. Sheth explains how Vectra AI protects enterprises across five of the six major attack surfaces and why the network remains the most critical source of truth for security teams. He breaks down why attackers currently have the advantage, how agentic AI is creating new attack vectors that most security tools can't yet see, and what business leaders should be doing at the board level to keep up.

In this episode of The CEO Series, host William Salvi sits down with Alan Trefler, founder and CEO of Pegasystems, to discuss what it takes to build and lead a company for over four decades. Trefler explains how a frustrating experience consulting for New York banks sparked the vision behind Pega, and why bootstrapping the company from scratch gave him a perspective on business that still shapes how he leads today. He breaks down how chess thinking, specifically the concept of candidate moves, applies directly to business strategy, why he thinks the current conversation around AI is mostly gibberish, and what it really means to build software that lasts. He also opens up about public market pressures, the billionaire label, and why significance matters more than success.

As digital integrity faces an existential threat from AI-driven social engineering, traditional cybersecurity has reached a critical turning point. Attackers are no longer just sending simple phishing emails; they are deploying autonomous AI agents to conduct "vibe phishing". They do this by using deepfakes and fake personas to build rapport and manipulate victims in real-time across multiple channels. To survive this "dystopia" where seeing is no longer believing, organizations must move beyond manual workflows toward a modernized, machine-led defense that can match the volume, velocity, and variety of today's threats.

In this episode of the CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Kevin Tian, the CEO and co-founder of Doppel. A former software engineer at Uber and Lyft who worked on flying cars and dispatch systems, Kevin has pivoted his expertise in large-scale machine learning to protect the world's most recognized brands. Doppel recently secured major funding from top-tier investors like Andreessen Horowitz to scale their social engineering defense platform, which now protects against sophisticated impersonation attacks for organizations managing billions of people.

This interview is presented by Orchestra. Orchestra is a strategic, integrated communications and marketing company helping brands connect, engage and grow in today's fragmented media landscape. Learn more about them here: https://www.orchestraco.com

As cyberattacks evolve into autonomous, AI-driven threats, the industry has reached its "human limit". Traditional defense strategies—fragmented tools and manual workflows—can no longer keep pace with attackers who can now launch "all attack vectors, all at once". The only way to survive the next generation of threats is to move toward a "machine versus machine" defense.

In this episode of the CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Galina Antova, the Co-Founder and CEO of Kai. After building Claroty into a $3 billion company, Galina has returned to "founder mode" to rebuild cybersecurity from first principles. Kai recently emerged from stealth with $125 million in funding to deploy autonomous AI agents that reduce risk in minutes rather than months.

This interview is presented by Orchestra. Orchestra is a strategic, integrated communications and marketing company helping brands connect, engage and grow in today's fragmented media landscape. Learn more about them here: https://www.orchestraco.com

In this episode of The CEO Series, host William Salvi sits down with Bhagwat Swaroop, President and CEO of Sonatype, to explore how the company is helping organizations build software securely in an era where 90% of code is assembled from open-source libraries rather than written from scratch.

Swaroop explains why that shift makes rigorous vulnerability checks essential and how Sonatype's tools give developers the guardrails they need to move fast without introducing risk. The conversation covers the AI trust paradox gripping the industry, where roughly 90% of DevOps engineers have adopted AI but only about 24% actually trust it, and why nation-states weaponizing AI makes proactive security measures more critical than ever. From leading a 500-person company serving 2,500 enterprise customers across 75 countries to his roots in Delhi, India, Swaroop brings curiosity, clarity, and conviction to everything he does.

This interview is presented by Orchestra. Orchestra is a strategic, integrated communications and marketing company helping brands connect, engage and grow in today's fragmented media landscape.

Learn more about them here: https://www.orchestraco.com