Award-winning business advice from Silicon Valley and beyond. Iconic CEOs, from Nike to Netflix, Starbucks to Slack, share the strategies that helped them grow from startups into global brands — and to weather crisis when it strikes.
On each episode of our classic format, founding host Reid Hoffman — LinkedIn cofounder, Greylock partner and legendary Silicon Valley investor — and a stellar lineup of guest hosts prove unconventional theories about how businesses scale. Guests share their stories of entrepreneurship, leadership, strategy, management, fundraising. You’ll hear the human journey, too — failures, setbacks, learnings.
From our Rapid Response format, you can expect real-time wisdom from business leaders in fast-changing situations. Hosted by Bob Safian, past editor-in-chief of Fast Company, these episodes tackle crisis response, rebuilding, diversity & inclusion, leadership change and much more.
Someone is asking you to do something or why you're doing something. My grandfather used to say thank you is the most important word, so merci in French. And for him, this thank you was more than just saying thank you because someone holds the door for you. It was more like, thank you for the opportunity that I have to be alive. Thank you for the fact that I have amazing grandchildren. Thank you for the fact that there was fresh bread today. And so I feel like that gratitude, that way of looking at the world in a glass half full type of way is so important to me as an entrepreneur. I see a lot of the decision making that I follow use this set of values that my grandfather drilled into my brain. That's Mayel Gavai, CEO of the global startup accelerator, Techstars. The wisdom Maelle absorbed from her grandfather Pierre when she was a girl in the French countryside became the foundation for a remarkable career. She's a founder, an entrepreneur, and a longtime c suite executive. Ma'am was recently named to the list of Barron's 100 most influential women in US finance. She helped scale the Russian ecommerce giant Ozan, raising the largest ever venture round in Europe at the time, and she has held executive roles at massively scaled companies, including the real estate firm Compass and the Priceline Group. Ma'am became CEO of Techstars in 2021. Techstars is a pre seed investor and accelerator program for early stage entrepreneurs. Maiele embodies the spirit of entrepreneurship and is remarkably savvy when it comes to navigating large companies. It's that mix that makes her story so rich to explore on Masters of Scale. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fire
Being a mirror that reflects the moment in which it's making its content. So when you see something like the opening of Civil War this weekend, you realize that people are obviously in an election year really thinking about this that it is highly, highly, highly there. Look, we go to the movies or we watch television to have to experience catharsis. We go and we sit in the dark and weed our popcorn to experience a sense of catharsis that allows us a closer understanding of the very thing we're experiencing in the world, which is why movies have always been so much part of our popular culture. That's a Alex Kurtzman, the executive producer behind Paramount's ever expanding collection of Star Trek TV shows. He's also worked on franchises from transformers to Spider Man to Mission Impossible. As we approach the 1 year anniversary of the Hollywood strikes, I wanted to talk to Alex about the state of the streaming wars right now. He's someone Paramount plus TAP to help compete against Netflix and Disney plus and others. Even if you're not a trekkie, Alex shares insights for leaders everywhere about how to keep your brand feeling fresh and when to risk upsetting your biggest fans. Let's get into it. I'm Bob Safian, and I'm here with filmmaker and producer, Alex Kurtzman of Secret hideout. Who orchestrates the Star Trek TV franchise for CBS and Paramount Plus. Alex, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Bob. So your your entree into Star Trek came on the big screen working with JJ Abrams on Star Trek feature films. And so in preparing for this, Jeff, I started looking at some recent box office numbers for, like, civil war and god's
We have to date just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale. One of the most breathtaking advances in AI came just a few weeks ago when OpenAI announced a new tool called Sora. It generates AI video from a text prompt. You type in details of a scene, the characters, the setting, the actions they're taking, and Sora creates a video from just those words. It's expected to be released to the public later this year, but Masters of Scale was granted access to experiment with its beta release. Now it doesn't do dialogue yet, and of course, you can't see a video on this audio podcast. But I had to start the show with a Sora demo. And last night, some of you may have been harassed by me asking for some prompts for some ideas, and I met Kathy and Sarah. I don't know if Kathy and Sarah are in the room today, but they gave me a great prompt, which if we can roll the next video, we got last night and within an hour, we turned this around. Sarah and Cathy said, show me a French bulldog wearing a red fedora in Paris, eating a croissant. So what pops up on the screen is a realistic, adorable dog in this chic Parisian setting, chomping a delicious pastry. Who doesn't like French bulldogs wearing fedoras, eating croissants? So you can see how quickly the pace is going. That's just one ambient scene. But recently, Sora released an entire short film with multiple locations, voice over, character development, and real pathos. It looked a lot like an Oscar nominated short. All this is shaking up Hollywood, big time. Tyler Perry stopped work on an $800,000,000 studio expansion because he just doesn't know what AI is going to do to film and TV production. Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the legends of the industry.
Politics, big tech lawsuits. I wanted to take the temperature on the state of the economy with someone who represents millions of anxious business people. I was eager to ask Clark about her recent visit to China and also explore the impact of US government regulation on progress and innovation. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. We'll start the show in a moment after a word from our premier brand partner, Capital One Business. I woke up in the middle of the night because I had this nightmare that we were front page news, that we've done the stupidest mistake of our life by making this pivot. That's Saparna Saran, chief marketing officer for Capital One Business, and she's recalling a moment from her previous position at Capital One when she was heading up a team designing a new business card. We had just made the decision to go all in and sunset the prior version of the product, which was honestly the cash cow for our business. When we made that decision within a senior leadership meeting, as someone who had been on the journey to build this out for 5 plus years, it was really exciting. But by the time the weekend hit, I started to feel the responsibility and the pressure. We are taking this big bet on something that I've built. Perhaps you've been there. You've made a pivotal decision, and then panic sets in. How would Aparna calm her butterflies and steer her team through this pivot? We'll find out later in the show. It's all part of the refocus playbook, a special series where Capital One Business highlights stories of business owners and leaders using one of Reid's theories of entrepreneurship. Today's playbook insight?
What I was passionate about, and it turned out it's one of the ways to be successful in business. Make sure that you catch the wave. If you're trying to open a business and nobody wants what you have, you're gonna fail. But there was a generational change that was beginning to happen in the United States. While John did not see the enormity of the coming wave of the organic and healthy foods movement, he could sense the sea change. From his vantage point, it was a no brainer. His customers were not the fringe even if they were, at the time, a niche. And they were exactly the type of customer you want, loyal and willing to evangelize. John was confident that the market for natural foods would continue to grow and that Whole Foods was in prime position to take advantage of that opportunity, but not without some very tough challenges. One of the reasons we were successful in the early days so much was my dad. He had been a accounting professor at Rice University and he had a very successful business career. And I didn't have any business background. He didn't know what to make of me. It's like, what the hell are you gonna do with your life, son? And when I found passion about these natural foods, he wasn't interested in natural foods, but he was very happy that I was interested in business. And so we got very close, and my dad ended up being one of my closest friends. He was my best man at my wedding, And he mentored me for the first 16 years of the business from 1978 to 1994. Ultimately, when I turned 40 years old, we were fighting in these board meetings all the time. Whole Foods was now public. We went public in 1992, and we acquired Bread and Circus, which was the natural foods crown jewel of the East Coast, and Mrs. Gucci's, which was the crown jewel in Southern California. It was like those three companies together, we that was the DNA that we needed to become a national brand, but my dad opposed both deals. Why why did he oppose them, John? He just thought we were trying to grow too fast, trying to
