Fortt Knox

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 t

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 o

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. 

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. 

Nothing is forever. Especially when it comes to running a multi-billion-dollar public company. This week, in a Fortt Knox podcast special, we're going to do a little retrospective … interviews with CEOs who, for now at least, are no longer CEOs.  I've been doing this podcast for more than a year and a half, so I've sat down with dozens and dozens of top executives, founders and entrepreneurs. Inevitably, change happens. Sometimes the company's board of directors wants a new strategic direction. Sometimes power struggles erupt. Sometimes personal failings come to light.   This time, the lessons from the highest achievers come with an asterisk. Just because you reach the top of an organization doesn't mean you'll stay there. I would add another: Just because these execs are no longer in their old jobs, don't assume they're done. When Steve Jobs was shoved out of Apple in the '80s, he went on to found NeXT, build Pixar, and return to Apple. Mark Hurd was ushered out of HP and landed what turned out to be a bette

Digital fraud is a big business. The same trends that are powering the cloud computing era – global brands, pay-per-use pricing, open-source collaboration – are making thieves rich, too.  Michael Reitblat is fighting that trend. As co-founder and CEO of Forter, he's trying to keep retailers from getting fooled by credit card scammers. It's a journey that began when he was a teenage hacker, through college and startup dreams, to working on his second startup.   At the Nasdaq Marketsite I talked to Reitblat about the state of organized crime online, and what innovators can do about it. 

Tobi Lütke is the founder and CEO of Shopify, a public company worth $17 billion. The shopping landscape is changing fast, with new tax laws, same-day delivery, in-store pickup and mobile payments adding new twists and capabilities all the time. Lutke, and Shopify, provide technology tools to simplify all that for merchants.  I talked with Lütke recently at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square, as talk of tariffs and taxes are swirling. We talked about what's allowed Shopify's stock to double in a year, and how he went from a teenage German apprentice to a Canadian entrepreneur … who's now a billionaire on paper, by the way.

Q-Tip. The Abstract. He’s not going to say it about himself outside of the the playful banter of a rhyme, so I’ll say it: He’s one of the most recognizable voices and influential minds in the history of hip-hop music.    Q-Tip is probably best known as part of A Tribe Called Quest, a group that emerged in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Hits like “Can I Kick It?” “Scenario” and “Bonita Applebum” cemented Tribe’s place as innovators, both in their lyrical cadence and the way they used sampling and a broad mix of musical genres to make something new.   A Tribe Called Quest released its final album in November 2016. Member Phife Dog, Malik Taylor, passed away from diabetes complications earlier that year. I talked to Tip about his new music, his other creative efforts, mourning Phife, and the state of the music business.

Few companies have gone through the kind of image transformation GoDaddy has over the past decade.  Back in 2005, GoDaddy launched its first commercial that used women in revealing outfits and sexually suggestive themes to sell web services. Wagner became GoDaddy's CEO at the beginning of this year, and those commercials are long gone.   Today's GoDaddy bears little resemblance to the one of a decade ago, which is probably a good thing given how cultural winds have shifted. I talked to Wagner about his journey to the CEO seat, and what he's working to do with the products and culture.    I got some time with Scott Wagner at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. We talked about leadership, culture, and what it will take for small businesses to thrive in this latest wave of the digital economy. We also streamed the conversation live on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the CNBC apps on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.

Today it's a $4-billion publicly-traded company. It's synonymous with streaming video, going head-to-head with Apple, Amazon, Google and lately Netflix, in the cord-cutting era. But Roku's been around for more than 15 years. That means it's older than YouTube.  Anthony Wood, the founder and CEO, hasn't followed a straight line to get Roku where it is. He's gone through a few different business models. He got some help from Netflix. Now he's defying the odds and talking about Roku's latest strategic moves. I met Anthony Wood at Roku's New York office in Midtown Manhattan. We talked about his journey as an entrepreneur – from selling used golf balls as a kid to his big move to Silicon Valley. He also gives his take on what's next in this golden age of TV.

A little more than 40 years ago, there was a live event that changed television forever. Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier. A boxing match: "The Thrilla in Manilla." But the men in the ring weren't the only ones with big career stakes on the line. A 30-year-old entrepreneur named Kay Koplovitz had waited about a decade for this moment. She was the driving force behind making the fight the first live satellite broadcast. It changed the cable industry forever, and laid the groundwork for her to become the first woman to head a television network – one she launched two years later – USA Network.  Kay Koplovitz today is a venture capital investor, a board member, and an advocate for women in business. I got some time with her on a busy day at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to talk about her journey, and lessons for the rest of us who – maybe in our jobs, maybe with some new venture – are trying to do what's never been done. 

Sometimes Plan A doesn’t work out. You’ve got to be ready to improvise.  That’s one of the themes in Bastian Lehman’s story. He had a different career path in mind, but ended up settling for entrepreneurship. So far it’s going pretty well. He’s the cofounder and CEO of Postmates, a delivery startup that’s part of this race to remake the way we shop. He's raised about a quarter billion dollars.   Postmates was originally supposed to be doing furniture delivery. That didn’t work out for some interesting reasons. When I sat down with Bastian Lehmann at the New York Stock Exchange, I got a fresh appreciation for why the ability to make smart adjustments is often better than being able to divine the future. 

I’ve never had a repeat guest on Fortt Knox in the year and a half I’ve been doing this. That’s not because there’s a rule against it, I just never had a compelling reason to.   That changes this week.   A few days ago I flew out to Seattle and then went up to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, and sat down with CEO Satya Nadella. Satya was my guest in October, when his book "Hit Refresh" came out. It was a big deal because Nadella has dramatically changed the perception and trajectory of one of the world's most iconic companies, and most people had no clue who he is. "Hit Refresh" was his big moment of public definition, both for his vision for Microsoft and for himself as a leader.  Satya wasn't new to me, though. We first met about seven years ago, before he was CEO, on one of his trips to Silicon Valley. I was CNBC's tech correspondent, he was in charge of Microsoft's Server and Tools division, which at the time most people outside of the tech industry thought was a boring backwater.

Vlad Shmunis just wasn't an enthusiastic employee. Didn't like following directions. And he had ideas – lots of ideas. Eventually, something had to give. So the entrepreneurial engineer took a leap, even though family members said he was nuts.  How'd that work out? Well today, Vlad Shmunis is the founder and CEO of RingCentral, a Silicon Valley company at the intersection of communication and cloud. The company went public just under five years ago. Today it's worth more than $5 billion.  If you're a long-time Fortt Knox listener, you're going to sense a pattern. Vlad is the third CEO I've had on who grew up in the former Soviet Union and eventually found his way to the U.S. There was Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov, Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn, and now Vlad. Their stories are all pretty different in key details, but similar in some important core ways, when it comes to education, values and … please listen for this one … the family's approach to risk.  If you or someone you know is thinking about taking a leap to s

Rafat Ali has done something remarkable in an era where it's really tough to make money telling people the truth. He built and sold PaidContent, a site that covered the digital media revolution with trenchant foresight. And now he's built Skift, an information company focused on the travel and dining industries.  I sat down with Rafat Ali at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to get an insider's look at how you revolutionize a crumbling industry. Rafat's a guy whose career I've sort of passively followed as a journalist for a long time. When I was writing for a newspaper in Silicon Valley 18 years ago, I saw him toughing it out on the opposite coast. As he's jumped into entrepreneurial ventures, I leaped from newspapers, to magazines, to broadcast, while crafting my own digital projects. Like Fortt Knox.  Anyway, part of the brilliance of Rafat Ali is his ability to draw lessons from one industry that are prophetic in another. So even if you're not into media or travel, there's something in here for you. 

GoFundMe is a generosity powerhouse – it's helped people raise a total of more than 5 billion dollars for all kinds of causes and pet projects. Rob Solomon is its CEO. Late last year, Solomon made a bold move – GoFundMe no longer takes an automatic cut of the money people raise. Now GoFundMe itself runs purely on donations.  Solomon didn't think he wanted to be the CEO of GoFundMe when he first got the offer – he saw people using it to raise money for cat toys – but he soon changed his tune. I talked to him about the future of using tech to do good, the primacy of trust in today's landscape, and his advice for Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who's facing his own trust crisis. 

Tim Ryan grew up in a working-class family in Boston, where his early jobs included a paper route and a job at a grocery. He’s now the U.S. chairman of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the global accounting firm known as one of the big 4 auditors. In 2016 it was ranked as the fifth largest private employer in America.   Whether it’s the changing political landscape, the headaches companies face over protecting data, or getting the right envelopes at the Oscars, PwC handles issues large and small – and a lot of it crosses Ryan’s desk.   I sat down with Tim Ryan at PwC’s office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan to talk about the challenges facing global business, and his own rise from blue-collar roots to the top level of a company that touches many of the world’s most powerful companies.

This week on the podcast? DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu. He just raised more than half a billion dollars to build out his business.  There’s this idea out there that today’s consumers are lazy, and that’s why we're getting stuff delivered all the time. The thing is, I don’t know about you – but the reason why I’m ordering so much delivery is because I’m so busy.   That’s where DoorDash comes in. The company was cooked up by four students at Stanford four and a half years ago. One of the four, Tony Xu, is the company's 33-year-old CEO.  Xu was in New York recently after raising a monster round of funding – $535 million. I sat down with him at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square to find out what he's really building, and why he thinks he can beat Grubhub, Amazon, Google, and a lot more rivals lining up to take him on. 

Everybody loves a David and Goliath story. The problem is, in business these days, the David is usually a family business, and the Goliath is some technology-juicing giant. Goliath is usually winning.  So here's a story that returns to classic form: Danny Govberg is the CEO of Govberg Jewelers in Philadelphia – and he's also the CEO of Watchbox, an app and website that's shaking up the world of luxury watches. By Govberg's count, he's selling at a rate of $200 million worth of watches this year between the two businesses, much of it in brands like Rolex, Patek Phillipe and Omega – brands that run in the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars per watch. And he says he's growing more than 30% a year.  All of this is happening while the popular narrative is stacked against him. Supposedly hardly anyone wears watches anymore, and for those that do, the Apple Watch and Samsung Watch are running roughshod over the market. Well? That's not the whole story.  I met Danny Govberg at the Breitling Boutique on Madiso

Abe Ankumah had never touched a computer before he arrived at Caltech in 1997, but quickly became captivated and decided to major in computer science. Now he’s the cofounder and CEO of Nyansa, a Silicon Valley startup that monitors the health of wireless networks. An immigrant from Ghana, raised by hopeful entrepreneurs, he has the kind of story that has fueled Silicon Valley for decades. I met Abe at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square and talked to him about his journey, and the experiences that paved the way for what he's working on now.