4 - Bradley Whitford, actor & agitator: Life Imitates Art

It’s a familiar story in tech history: college friends stumble onto a big idea, drop out to pursue it, build a company, make mistakes, and eventually take that company public and make millions of dollars. That’s Apple, that’s Microsoft, that’s Facebook – and that’s Box.   Aaron Levie is the cofounder and CEO of Box, a company founded at the dawning of the cloud era. The basic idea: Wouldn’t it be great if we could store all kinds of digital files on the internet and teams could work on them at the same time, instead of emailing them around?  The answer is yes. That would be great. And Levie and his friends built a company now worth nearly $3 billion proving it.   The cloud thing seems obvious now, but when Levie was 20 years old and co-founded Box 12 years ago, it was far from it. I started covering him and the company in the early years of that journey, and I sat down with him days ago at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to catch up. At the wizened old age of 32, Aaron’s got a fresh take on advice he should have heeded, and where Silicon Valley needs to go next. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

5 Nov 201746min

When he was 14 years old growing up in West Philadelphia, Troy Carter started promoting parties at a neighbor's house and charging for entry. He did the DJing himself to save money.  Today he's one of the most respected visionaries at the intersection of two industries: Music and tech.   Carter wears a lot of hats. He's been a manager, working with the likes of John Legend, Lady Gaga and Meghan Trainor. He's an investor, a general partner at venture capital firm Cross Culture Ventures. And he's a connector. As global head of creator services at Spotify, he's ushering artists into the streaming age.  I met up with Troy Carter recently outside of San Francisco at the Black Enterprise Tech ConneXt Summit. We talked about his path from rags, to riches, to rags, and back again – and how a high school dropout learned to reinvent himself, and an industry.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

28 Okt 201728min

In case you haven't noticed, there are some big challenges facing the American worker. Unless you're in the top 20 percent salary-wise, if you've kept the same job, chances are you haven't gotten a big raise in the last decade or two.  The answer? There are arguments about whether a higher minimum wage would be a good fix, or a dramatic shift in tax policy. Rachel Carlson has a different idea.  Carlson is the co-founder and CEO of Guild Education, a startup that helps companies like Taco Bell to offer college tuition assistance as a benefit to their employees. Carlson has a unique blend of experiences – working in government, starting companies in Silicon Valley, and going to school on the other side of the tracks as a kid – that give her an intriguing perspective.   I sat down with Rachel Carlson to learn what's so hard about getting America's working class salaries rising again – and why the answers might be different than you think.   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

21 Okt 201739min

Chamath Palihapitiya is one of the most sought-after investors in Silicon Valley. It's because he has a knack for figuring out how things work. At Facebook, he led the team that studied our online behavior and figured out how to grow that service from 50 million users when he joined in 2007, to 700 million users when he left four years later.    Now as the CEO of venture investing firm Social Capital, he's working on something different: cracking the code to understand how tech is changing our world – and maybe make a few billion dollars in the process. It's quite a journey for Palihapitiya. He grew up poor, an immigrant from Sri Lanka, with a knack for numbers, a talent for gambling, and the proverbial deck stacked against him.   I visited Chamath at Social Capital's offices in Palo Alto, California to get an up-close look at how he thinks. One of his deepest insights? Getting the right answer is overrated. Real growth happens from examining our wrong answers.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

14 Okt 201745min

Tim O'Reilly had never come in contact with a computer until after college, when a friend asked him to help write a technical manual.   It's quite a turn, then, that he has become a promethean figure in Silicon Valley. Like the mythical titan who stole fire from the gods and brought it to mankind, O'Reilly's publishing empire, his conferences and learning platforms have demystified computer languages and tectonic shifts.   He literally wrote the book on the Internet, the Internet User's Guide & Catalog, the first popular tome about the subject. He and his events birthed terms like "open source" and "web 2.0," which have become enduring parts of the tech lexicon. His MAKE magazine arguably launched the broader maker movement of hands-on crafters and tinkerers.  So naturally I wanted to sit down with Tim to talk about his new book, WTF: What's the Future, and Why It's Up to Us. In it, he has strong words for the Internet-driven tech industry he helped to shape, and some insight for workers like us trying to navigate the new digital landscape.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

7 Okt 201727min

Satya Nadella is the third CEO of Microsoft. He's also a husband and a father of special-needs kids. He's an immigrant. And he's pretty close to doing something that, until he took the job just over three and a half years ago, most people in tech – heck, most people at Microsoft – thought was impossible. That near-impossible task is a cultural revival of a once-dominant tech giant that was losing its grip on its soul. Under Nadella's leadership morale is up, and so is product quality and the stock price. The question is whether all of that can stick. Satya sat down with me at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square in New York, where he stopped through to promote his new book, Hit Refresh, about the revival he's attempting at Microsoft. The conversation for my Fortt Knox podcast offers a fresh look at one of the most influential technology leaders in the world today, who's engineering a cultural rebirth that few thought possible – while also being a dad who faces some unique challenges helping his kids reach their full potential. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

30 Sep 201737min

Louis Hernandez Jr. is the CEO of Avid Technology, a company that makes tools for editing video and audio, and writing music.  Avid is facing hard times as rival Adobe grows stronger with Premiere and other creative suite tools, and as more software moves to the cloud.  Hernandez is unique for a lot of reasons. One of them is that he's the Latino CEO of a publicly traded technology company. He recently wrote a book, The Storyteller's Dilemma, about the way technology is changing the media market.   Louis talked to me about his path to the C -suite, his vision for the future of storytelling, and the factors that made his story so different from many of his cousins in the LA area where he grew up. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

23 Sep 201733min

Rachel Drori comes from from a long line of entrepreneurs – her immigrant grandparents started a business when they got to the United States. Even more unique: Her mother started a business too, so she grew up around women founders. Today she's the founder and CEO of Daily Harvest, a young startup that sits at the intersection of nutrition and convenience. You think starting a business is hard? Well, it is. But Rachel started Daily Harvest when she was seven months pregnant, then raised investment funds for the business when she was pregnant. Her story is instructive for anyone who has wondered whether now is the right time to take a big career leap. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

16 Sep 201730min