98 - BlackBerry CEO John Chen; Plus, How to Beat Amazon

Njavwa Mutambo is the CEO of Musanga Logistics, a delivery company in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia. Technology has the potential to transform economies in Africa, empower small businesses, lower costs – but before any of that can happen, there are some basic challenges. One of those is the cost of delivery. That's where Njavwa, and Musanga Logistics come in. He's using bicycle couriers and people who own trucks and need side-work, Uber-style – to connect people in Zambia like it's never been done before. I invited Njavwa to CNBC's bureau at One Market Street in San Francisco. He described his vision for bringing more sophisticated e-commerce to the African continent, his path from impoverished orphan to tech entrepreneur, and what he learned from seeing Silicon Valley – and America – up close for the first time. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

10 Sep 201740min

Seventeen years ago, life gave Ben Chestnut the push to start the company that became MailChimp. He was in web design. He got laid off. His employer offered him another job, but he knew: this was his chance to build his own thing. Today if you run a small business or you're into marketing, you've probably heard of MailChimp. For everyone else, it's the way a lot of people reach their customers' email inboxes. Newsletters, offers for special sales, you name it – MailChimp is in the tricky game of helping companies reach the people who actually want to be reached. Today, Ben Chestnut's team has more than 14 million users, and had more than $400 million in sales last year. Ben himself? An introvert. A soft-spoken guy who has perfected the art of capitalizing on the wrong answer and getting to the right one. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

2 Sep 201723min

There is no one in Silicon Valley who's more connected than Reid Hoffman. That might be because he plays all of the connector roles, sometimes at once. He's a venture capitalist, at Greylock. He's an entrepreneur who co-founded LinkedIn, and sold it for 26 billion dollars last year. Reid's net worth is estimated to be north of 3 billion dollars. Now he has a seat on the board of directors at Microsoft. After teaching a class at Stanford, Reid started a podcast, Masters of Scale, that's about the art and craft of building monster businesses. Reid is deeply qualified on that subject. He was a founding board member at PayPal, and early on became its chief operating officer. That also makes him part of an eclectic group of characters known as the "PayPal Mafia" former PayPal employees who went on to dizzying success. Members include Elon Musk, YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, investor Peter Theil, and entrepreneur Max Levchin, to name a few. I spent some time with Reid Hoffman last week when I flew out to San Francisco to moderate a debate. It wasn't politics: Reid was debating his friend Tim O'Reilly on the merits of spending gobs of investor money to build startups into dominant forces. You can watch the debate on Twitter. Look up my @jonfortt. Or head over to YouTube and watch at the Fortt Knox channel. After the debate, Reid sat down with me on the 17th floor of LinkedIn headquarters to talk about how he scaled from a pre-teen who was ambivalent about school into one of tech's most prolific builders. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

26 Aug 201725min

This is a conversation about reinvention. Not just once, but over and over. Julie Sweet leads the North American business at Accenture, a global consulting giant that employs more than 400,000 people and produced more than $32 billion in sales last year. Julie's territory made up almost exactly half of that total. I'm not really sure how most people become consultants. Ideally they get good at something, then show other people how to do it better. Julie's path was different. She was a lawyer – a partner at one of those swanky firms: Cravath, Swaine & Moore – and left that to be the top lawyer at Accenture, which you might also know by its old name, Arthur Andersen Consulting. She parlayed that job … into a bigger job. And that's the key detail here. Julie has a history of doing that sort of thing, and I wanted to find out how. I sat down with Julie Sweet just this week at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to talk about her path to the C-suite of one of the world's top consulting firms, and how her father, who painted cars for a living, set the no-excuses example that helped her get there. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

12 Aug 201750min

Tristan Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker and Company Brands. He's 33 years old. In this episode I somewhat jokingly say that growing up, he was an odd kid, because of the surface contradictions. He's a business mind who made a name for himself when he joined a mobile technology startup, but his first company focuses on skin and hair care. He grew up in a working-class family in New York, and his father was killed when he was young – but he went to a boarding school. His most prominent investors? Andreessen Horowitz, the marquee Silicon Valley venture capital firm – but he and I speak plainly about Silicon Valley's diversity challenges. I recently visited Tristan Walker at the offices of Walker & Company Brands in Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. This episode was special for me, because, let's be frank: There aren't many African-American technology journalists in this business. I'm one. There aren't many African-American entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, and Tristan is arguably the best-known. I'm seven years older than Tristan, but we're of a similar generation. We've been a part of this era of sweeping change, and seen what's missing ... and who's missing. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

6 Aug 201752min

Brooklyn in the 70s and 80s. Today, he says, his net worth is somewhere north of 100 million dollars. That's not because he's an entrepreneur, though he has started a handful of companies. Jason got rich as an entrepreneur. But he got really, really rich by investing in the crazy ideas … of other entrepreneurs. He just wrote a book: Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups. He says he can tell you how he did it, and give you pointers so that – maybe you can do it, too. In the tech world, we call these people "angel investors." They're usually the first money into a startup, giving six figures or less – just enough to keep an idea going while the founder figures out whether it's big enough to attract millions from venture capitalists. The downside of being an angel investor: It's really risky. You're probably going to lose the money you put into 90% of startups. The upside: If you get a couple of winners, they can be huge wins. And get this: because of the way regulations are changing, you can now become an angel investor, from the comfort of your computer. You can pool your money with other angels. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

30 Juli 201730min

Brad Smith has been at Microsoft for nearly 25 years, and has been the top lawyer there for 15. He now holds the title of president, also running corporate affairs and working alongside CEO Satya Nadella. Brad led Microsoft's legal defense against David Boies and the U.S. government a generation ago. You might have heard of that infamous antitrust case against Microsoft. Today he's fighting for Microsoft's right to shield certain customer data in the cloud. Brad and I did a panel together at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado recently about the global threat from hackers. After that we sat down and pushed record, and had a conversation for Fortt Knox. Three things you're going to hear from Brad Smith: How his upbringing shaped his view of the world, how as a young lawyer he used technology to advance his career, and how to learn from massive upheaval – like the government's antitrust case against Microsoft 20 years ago – which I think it's fair to say changed Microsoft, the tech industry, and Brad Smith's career, forever. That's where the title of this episode comes from: If you change the world, you change the law. Two decades later, Brad has a take on the Microsoft case that I just find profound: And perhaps a near-prophetic warning to today's other world-changers, including Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google – and advice you and I can apply, too. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

24 Juli 201738min

Think of this as getting to audit a little bit of a leadership master class. Bruce Chizen has the kind of unique executive experience that would fill a book of business school case studies. As the CEO of Adobe – the company that makes Photoshop, Premiere and more – Bruce mentored his replacement, Shantanu Narayen – and he often sat across the bargaining table from Apple CEO Steve Jobs. That's when I met him, as a young reporter in Silicon Valley, nearly 20 years ago now. Today, Bruce sits on many boards of directors, most notably the board of Oracle – run by the one and only Larry Ellison. At the same time, Bruce is executive chairman at Informatica. Informatica works with businesses to manage the trove of data they store in the cloud. There, he's working with new CEO Anil Chakravarthy on navigating a tricky job. Not only does Anil have to inspire the rank and file, he's got to develop his lieutenants and manage a board of directors stacked with impatient private equity investors. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

17 Juli 201727min