Over the last year, I’ve had the chance to sit down with dozens of founders as host of the Masters of Scale podcast. Through these conversations I’ve honed my theories on what allows companies to scale spectacularly, and how these individuals realize their visions. For this week’s show, I had a very free-flowing conversation with Ev Williams, who founded…
I recently had the pleasure of attending an OpenAI event, where a number of academics, government types, and entrepreneurs convened to discuss artificial intelligence. The questions ranged from the changing nature of work, to how AI can play into international relations, to transformation of industries, to what the state-of-the-art is. Obviously, artificial intelligence is a complex…
Payal Kadakia thought of everything when she launched Classtivity, the precursor to the fitness subscription service ClassPass. She and her team spent 18 months developing an “OpenTable for classes,” building thousands of partner relationships and a beautiful website. Every time a customer booked a class, Classtivity would make money. But 90 days after launch, Classtivity…
Much of what I’ve been thinking and talking about in recent years focuses on scaling up quickly. But this week on Masters of Scale, I’m focused on a very different topic — how to reinvent a company so it remains relevant decades or even centuries after founding. Forget being a unicorn, and be a “Phoenix” instead…
One goal I have for 2018 and beyond is to increase my participation in ongoing efforts to make tech workplaces more diverse and inclusive. It’s an urgent and critical problem; one only has to read Emily Chang’s latest book, Brotopia, to get a deeper understanding what has unfortunately become the experience of so many women in tech.…
The startup world has its own unique vocabulary, filled with acronyms, slang, and colorful phrases. An uninitiated listener would be understandably confused by a founder enthusiastically exclaiming, “We’re crushing it! Our lower CAC proves that the dogs are eating the dog food!*” But the core prerequisite for scaling a new company is a common, simple,…