122 - The Uber IPO Show; Plus, Amnon Shashua on Intel's Driverless Challenge

We’ve got a fascination with founders in our culture – people who start stuff. Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates.   I’ve had a new generation of founders here on Fortt Knox: Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake, and Guild Education founder Rachel Carlson to name a couple.  So this week we’re going to dig into what successful founders do right, and what we can learn from them. Because hey: The way I look at it, even if you’re not starting the next Apple, the chances are pretty good that a lot of us have started something, or will before too long. Maybe it’s a small business – a major project on your job.   My guests: CNBC Wealth Editor Robert Frank, who has chronicled the ways of successful entrepreneurs for many years now. And the irrepressible Scott Galloway, Professor at NYU’s Stern School of business, author of New York Times bestseller The Four, which examines the animating ideas behind Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. This week for the Fortt Knox one-on-one I’ve also got Maynard Webb. He’s former Board Chairman at Yahoo, former CEO of LiveOps, chief operating officer at eBay, and board member at Visa and Salesforce.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

22 Sep 201847min

Three new iPhone Xs and a watch that's a cleared medical device: That's what Apple announced at its biggest event of the year. But what does it mean for Apple? Which, if any, of this stuff is worth buying? Jon Fortt breaks it down with Christina Farr, CNBC.com health reporter who has been breaking stories left and right on Apple's health advancements; Jillian Manus, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and CNBC tech correspondent Josh Lipton. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

15 Sep 201831min

Big week for social media. Colin Kaepernick tweets his new Nike ad, Nike retweets, and it’s on. Did Nike just make a big mistake, or did it lock in the loyalty of a valuable customer base? Plus, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey go to Capitol Hill and … I know what you’re thinking, no, Dorsey didn’t go for a Civil War battle reenactment, though with that beard he’d make a dashing Rufus King – I’m just saying – with a bow tie? That’s fresh. No, they went for a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, to talk about what they’re doing to make sure foreign powers aren’t futzing around with our Midterm elections, which are coming up in just two months. This is Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I am Jon Fortt of CNBC. Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning contributor to the New York Times Magazine joins me; he has covered the legal upheaval coming to the social space. And Ellen Pao, CEO of Project Include, former CEO of Reddit, and canary in the “Me Too” coal mine joins us. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

8 Sep 201830min

The economy's supposed to be really good, if you look at the official numbers. According to the U.S. labor department the unemployment rate was under 4 percent in July, which is a level that a lot of people used to consider "full employment." Everybody who wants a job has one.   Except … not really.  The system isn't working the way it's supposed to for working people. Here's what I mean. Typically in the past, when so many people have jobs, pay goes up. I mean, how else are you going to get people to work for you if everybody has a job. You've got to pay them more.   But that's not happening – at least not anywhere near at the level it should be. The Labor Department reported last month that if you look at median weekly earnings, and you factor in inflation, the typical worker is just treading water.   And what about the future? Having a job and making a living are not the same thing. The cost of a four-year degree rose about 25 percent in the last decade according to the College Board, to $34,740 a year. Meanwhile student loan debt Is exploding.   So: wages flat. Traditional schooling expensive. We haven’t even talked about the cost of raising a family if that’s your thing. What are you going to do if you’re not already in the job you want to be doing for the rest of your life?  Today we’re going to find the smart way to navigate all this. Getting the skills for a better job or higher pay without crushing your bank account and going deep in debt.   Welcome to Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I am Jon Fortt at the Nasdaq Marketsite in New York’s Times Square.   Joining me on the show today to help you make your plan: Here with me at the Nasdaq, Laura Pappano is an education reporter who lives and breathes this stuff, writing in the New York Times, the Hechinger Report and more.   Joining us from Denver, Rachel Carlson cofounder and CEO of Guild Education, a company that helps employers offer education as a benefit to employees, kind of like healthcare – clients include WalMart, Lowe’s, Taco Bell and Chipotle.   And finally, joining us from Cambridge Massachusetts, Anant Agarwal is an MIT professor and CEO of EDX, a free-to-learn platform. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

25 Aug 201830min

The conversation with Harman CEO Dinesh Paliwal begins at 27:58.  Free speech is getting exhausting. It’s a game of online publishing whack-a-mole as wingnut Alex Jones, of Infowars fame, finally gets suspended from Twitter, only to direct his audience to Tumblr. How should those of us who still love America feel about the amount of crazy that’s going on in the media game these days?  MoviePass is testing its business model … on Solo. Borrowing a page from Darth Vader’s Cloud City book of negotiating tactics, movie theater subscription company MoviePass is altering the terms of your deal – pray they don’t alter it further.   And skinny bundles are the new skinny jeans. In further evidence of a trend I like to call “The Great Rebundling,” digital distributors and content companies are hooking up faster than you can say, “Ban Alex Jones.” The latest to swipe right on each other: Verizon doing a deal for free Apple Music and Samsung doing a deal to pre-load Spotify on all its devices.   Last but not least, for the Fortt Knox one-on-one this week I’ve got Dinesh Paliwal, CEO of Harman International, the high-end audio company Samsung bought for 8 billion dollars last year. He’s talking straight about the future of music formats and the right way to play business hardball with China.   Welcome to Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I am Jon Fortt at the Nasdaq Marketsite in New York’s Times Square.   Joining me on the show today to break down the headlines: I’ve got Ed Lee of the New York Times. Dan McComas, former senior vice president of product at Reddit. And joining me a bit later, Brent Lang, the senior film editor at Variety; and Cherie Hu, columnist at Billboard. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

18 Aug 20181h 2min

I've got something different for you this week: A big conversation about work. As in, where should you work? What kind of company: Big or small? Young or established?  The idea for this episode came from my CNBC colleague Sharon Epperson, who's just great. Sharon covers personal finance, and I'll often stop at her desk and strategize about work and life.    Sharon did a piece on how to land a job at a startup, and I wanted to expand the topic to, should you take a job at a startup, even if you can? So I huddled with CNBC producer Evan Falk, as I do every week to talk about Fortt Knox Live, and we decided to put a show together. Get Sharon, a couple of top-flight venture capital investors, and I wanted to get some students and recent graduates, too. I mean, they're the target audience for this stuff, right?  So that's what we did.   One more thing, and this is important: So we're about two years into Fortt Knox, and it's grown a lot – I want to thank you, the podcast listeners, and also the live show viewers on all our platforms including Facebook, Periscope, YouTube, and the CNBC apps on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. For the past two years, I've been basically working on two different shows: The Fortt Knox Podcast, here … and Fortt Knox Live, which streams on Wednesdays. The podcast is mostly one-on-one interviews, and the live show is mostly broader conversations tackling technology, society and culture.   My guests are two venture capitalists: Jeff Richards, managing partner at GGV Capital, and Graham Brown, partner at Lerer Hippeau. Three students: Ahmad Eshghyar, an MBA candidate at Yale; Roni Barak Ventura, a doctoral candidate at NYU; and Raymond Willey, an MBA candidate at Baruch College. And one CNBC colleague, Sharon Epperson. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

11 Aug 201835min

Pandora, the music streaming service, has a culture that's heavily musical. So as a new CEO of the company, it helps that Roger Lynch not only plays guitar, but he actually still plays live gigs with a band.  Lynch sat down with me above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, before the opening bell. He's been in the job for less than a year – and he's got his work cut out for him. Spotify just went public, and has grabbed a lot of attention. Meanwhile, many of the most powerful companies in tech are competing with him in the market, including a few little names like Apple, Amazon and Google. How does he plan to win?  Lynch started out a scientist, became and investment banker, and found his groove as an entrepreneur – he's the founding CEO of video streaming pioneer Sling TV.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

21 Juli 201821min

George Kurian is the CEO of NetApp, a storage technology company whose stock market value is more than $20 billion. Normally I like to start off talking about what makes my guests unique. But in this case, George has a lot in common with another Silicon Valley tech executive named Kurian – his twin brother Thomas is president at Oracle.  George and I could spend a lot of time talking about how unlikely it is that anyone climbs to the top level of a multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley tech company, much less that two brothers would do it. We did talk about that a bit. But we also talked about strategy, and the challenges he's faced leading in a period of rapid change.  I sat down with George Kurian at the New York Stock Exchange, three years into his tenure as NetApp CEO.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

14 Juli 201823min