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.
Our two formats help tell the complete story of how a business grows, survives and thrives, and the mindsets of growth that keep leaders in the game.
On each episode of our classic format, host Reid Hoffman — LinkedIn cofounder, Greylock partner and legendary Silicon Valley investor — proves an unconventional theory about how businesses scale, asking his guests to 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.
If you want to capitalize on an opportunity that you think could change the world, you need to drive full speed toward it. Back in 1994, when Ajaz Ahmed dropped out of college to start one of the first digital ad agencies, AKQA, he knew he was at the cusp of the next revolution in tech. And if he wanted to be part of it, he’d have to move fast. Ahmed shares stories about how a band of 21-year-old dropouts built the agency from ground up, winning over early clients by building prototypes ahead of the competition. He dives into how his inner voice demanding him to “get big or die trying” led him to transform AKQA into a global agency with thousands of employees and the biggest clients in the world, like Nike, Virgin, and Usher. Read a transcript of this episode:https://mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter:http://eepurl.com/dlirtX See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
What’s the difference between an activist brand and an active brand? Impossible Foods CEO Peter McGuinness says that acting on your values defines a business — from climate change to Roe v. Wade. To unleash the next wave of growth for plant-based meat purveyor Impossible, McGuiness is rethinking how the whole category presents itself, taking aim at what he calls “safe and lame” approaches, partnering with the likes of Billie Eilish, and targeting the $1.4 trillion global meat industry. Read a transcript of this episode:www.mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter:mastersofscale.com/newsletter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Every company has its own internal factions: engineers vs. designers, East Coast vs. West, IT vs. everybody. The trick is turning factionalism into healthy competition that propels you toward your shared mission. At Motorola, Cisco, and now her start-up Fable, Padma Warrior has tapped into the power of internal divisions. It's not about separating people into warring camps; it's about building bridges from our differences, rather than divisions. Read a transcript of this episode:https://mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter:http://eepurl.com/dlirtX See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Volunteering and service are muscles that can close America’s divides and push social change. Speaking live at the 2022 Social Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C., AmeriCorps’ new CEO, Michael Smith, shares a vision for healing sociopolitical divides through partnerships and on-the-ground experiences. When it comes to tackling natural and social crises, he’s prioritizing impact over volume. Read a transcript of this episode:www.mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter:mastersofscale.com/newsletter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
The true seed of scale is customer love, which you can’t buy, hack, or game. Sam Altman, former president of Y Combinator, scaled countless start-ups by focusing on this one idea: Finding 100 users who love you is better than 1 million who kinda like you. As CEO of OpenAI, Sam leads the creation of genuinely useful AI products. He shares timeless insights in his interview from 2018 on how to build on the love of passionate customers to create world-shifting tools. Read a transcript of this episode:https://mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter:http://eepurl.com/dlirtX See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
When a tech nonprofit competes against a $2 billion incumbent dominating the market, its odds are slim. But Zo Orchingwa took that bet, founding Ameelio, believing that access to communication and education for the incarcerated is needed for their future success. Ameelio is on a quest to partner with every prison district in the country until one day, it scales enough to be redundant. Read a transcript of this episode:www.mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter:mastersofscale.com/newsletter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
The first stage of building up a business is to break things down. Michael Dell started a computer company in his dorm room by cracking open some early IBM PCs and figuring out what he could do better, faster, and cheaper. Then he did the same thing to the entire model of computer sales. Learn from Dell how to revolutionize an industry — using deconstruction to gain insight your competitors lack, and then building something bigger and better. Read a transcript of this episode:https://mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter:http://eepurl.com/dlirtX See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
While gasoline prices soar, solar company Sunrun is poised to usher in a customer-led revolution of distributed energy technologies. Sunrun’s CEO Mary Powell combats a “no and slow” culture to transform more homes into virtual energy plants by preaching optimism and scorning bureaucracy. She’s moving with urgency to create a cleaner and more cost-effective future as fast as possible. Read a transcript of this episode:www.mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter:mastersofscale.com/newsletter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Delivering human dignity to your customers is more than just good practice. It can be a powerful engine of scale. This insight has inspired Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins her whole career, as a labor leader, a music manager, and now as a fin-tech entrepreneur with Promise. Her secret? Take a contrarian lens to existing systems. Find a space where human dignity is lacking, create a product that gives your customers flexibility, options, access they didn’t have before —and unlock new value. Watch the signed version of Amber Galloway's story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F24FZz1DczA Read a transcript of this episode:https://mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter:http://eepurl.com/dlirtX See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
For Reid Hoffman, the way to live a meaningful and productive life is to focus on one key area: friendships. Speaking at Vanderbilt University’s 2022 commencement, he shares four lessons on why friendships are crucial for helping us achieve our potential and enact meaningful change. Read a transcript of this episode:www.mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter:mastersofscale.com/newsletter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.