Fortt Knox

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 worke

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 th

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ou

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 fat

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

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

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 c

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.

This week on the podcast: Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, co-founders and co-CEOs of the Skimm. Their core product? The Daily Skimm, a newsletter targeting millennial women that keeps you up to date on what's happening in the world. They didn't invent the daily newsletter by a long shot, but Weisberg and Zakin are working the kind of magic with it that should make every media executive in the world sit up and take notice. Here's a little context: The New York Times announced recently that it has 13 million subscriptions to its 50 newsletters. Weisberg and Zakin have 5 million subscribers who open their one newsletter multiple times per week. I caught up with Carly and Danielle at The Skimm's headquarters on 23rd Street in Manhattan, to talk about their journey as business partners and friends, the roots of their entrepreneurial drive, and today's unique challenges for women in the startup game.

Mike Tuchen is the CEO of Talend, a company with a billion-dollar market value. It helps customers take advantage of their data and apply it effectively. But before kicking off a career that's included an executive stint at Microsoft and a turn as CEO of Rapid7, he was nearly kicked out of boarding school and had to figure out how to make a contribution as the runt of his Brown University rowing team. Tuchen joined the Fortt Knox podcast to share a story that's not your typical wunderkind-makes-good tale. His story shows that when the pressure is on, believing in your unique talent can be the key to tilting the odds in your favor.

It's been about 10 years since the debut of the modern smartphone, when Apple's iPhone first went on sale. One of the companies that has most defined this decade? Qualcomm. Leading the charge at Qualcomm for most of that time has been executive chairman Paul Jacobs. His father Irwin co-founded the company, and Paul helped build it into a power broker in mobile computing. Qualcomm designs the chips that serve as the brains for most premium Android phones, and its patented technology is in pretty much every smartphone on the market. That has earned the company a stock market value that's now over $160 billion. I sat down with Paul Jacobs at CNBC headquarters for a conversation about some of his defining moments, and what's next.

It's a story of ambition, innovation, management gone wrong: Uber. It's been a ride-hailing game changer, but also a cautionary tale, so this week on Fortt Knox Live, I brought together an expert panel to discuss the latest news and what it means for Silicon Valley. Mike Issac of the New York Times, Vivek Wadhwa of Carnegie Mellon, and my colleague Deirdre Bosa of CNBC joined me in San Francisco this week to break down the big changes coming for Uber's management, and what the rest of us can learn. Here's our conversation:

There's a story about former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer throwing a chair across his office and hitting a table with it. This story has become a piece of Silicon Valley lore. Now, Microsoft is not in Silicon Valley. It's in Washington State, near Seattle. But the story is a piece of Silicon Valley lore because of the reason Steve Ballmer allegedly threw the infamous chair. He wasn't aiming at a person. He didn't hate his table. He was fired up, because one of his engineers was leaving to take a job at Google. Google! And Google IS in Silicon Valley. The guy is passionate. One project he's spending time on in retirement: USAFacts. It's a trove of information about where our federal tax dollars really go – you can find it at USAFacts.org, and play with the numbers yourself. Ballmer started digging after his wife asked him to get more involved in the family foundation's charitable work. Ballmer is passionate about making sure kids have the opportunity to do better than their parents did financially. I asked him

To say Tom Siebel has had an interesting life would be putting it mildly. He’s a billionaire, a tech visionary, and the survivor of an elephant goring eight years ago that, by the odds, should have killed him. Several doctors told Siebel he would never walk again, much less sail competitively. But he does. So what do you learn about life when you’ve stared down death in the form of a five-ton elephant, been crushed by that elephant, and lived to tell the tale? What do you learn when you’ve invented one of the first killer workplace apps of the PC era, then sold it for about $6 billion dollars? After you’ve made all that, survived all that, why, at 64 years old, are you still inventing? Tom Siebel, now the CEO of C3 IoT, sat down with me for the at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to share some insight into what’s made him tick – and what’s helped him succeed.

Today she sits at the helm of a promising cybersecurity company. But first Nicole Eagan had to survive the dotcom bust. Eagan is CEO of Darktrace, a startup that battles hackers using software that gets smarter over time. Invented by mathematicians and former British intelligence operatives, the technology, much like a human immune system, looks for signs of odd behavior in a client's network. Eagan and Darktrace are on the cutting edge not only in security, but also in a gender-balanced tech workforce. Eagan says half of her employees are women. She knows how unusual that is, having operated in Silicon Valley through booms and busts … as an enterprise tech worker, a venture capitalist, and now as an executive. Nicole Eagan sat down with Fortt Knox to share lessons from efforts that worked, and efforts that didn't.

You've probably heard of TaskRabbit – the online service lets you pay a contractor to run an errand, clean an apartment, put together an Ikea bookshelf – any number of odd jobs. Before there was Uber or Airbnb, TaskRabbit birthed the so-called "gig economy." You might not know that Kevin Busque co-founded TaskRabbit with his wife, Leah, who he is quick to admit was the brains behind the operation all along. In an unusual twist on the typical Silicon Valley story, Kevin and Leah were high school sweethearts, married right after college. They worked at the same company more than once, bootstrapped a business together, and eventually moved across the country to realize the Silicon Valley dream. Leah served as CEO of TaskRabbit for years, and is now executive chairman. Kevin recently launched a new venture, Guideline, a 401(k) platform.