"You can learn how something can be done and then go back to first principles and ask yourself, 'Given the conditions today, given my motivation, given the instruments, the tools, given how things have changed, how would I redo this? How would

Aicha Evans: "You Must Have The Irrational Belief That It Will Work Out"

Dec 15th, 2023 56m 7s

"My first piece of advice is only take the role if you are really interested in it. Startups are hard," says Aicha Evans, CEO of Zoox. "And when it's tough, you find a way, you make a way, you back up the boat, you reassess, you pivot. And so i

Neal Mohan, MBA ’05, From CEOs to Content Creators: Be True To Yourself

Dec 13th, 2023 54m 34s

"The secret sauce of being a successful creator on the platform is just being true to yourself. And that sounds sort of very cliché, but I wish somebody had given me that advice early in my career because nothing rings more true."Neal Mohan, MB

Sarah Friar, MBA ’00, On How To Make Strategic Career Risks

Dec 11th, 2023 54m 47s

“In companies, you don’t want just the product team thinking about the product; the finance team thinking about finance ... You want everyone all the time feeling like they’re an owner, and they can have a point of view on any part of the compa

Jacqueline Novogratz, MBA ’91, on The Role of Storytelling in Investing

Jun 29th, 2023 54m 41s

"I've seen unbelievable change happen in places that the world sees as not investible. Part of storytelling is doing the work of investing so that people can tell their own stories because of the changes they've made."In 1986 Jacqueline Novogra

Jennifer Hyman On The Power of Relentless Optimism

May 23rd, 2023 55m 41s

"Now also in that meeting, I asked her, 'Could you introduce me to a few of your friends? I’d love to meet with them and talk about this idea.' Because every meeting has to get you to three other meetings. Never leave a meeting with someone wit

Shantanu Narayen: Generative AI Won't Replace Human Ingenuity

May 1st, 2023 53m 28s

“If you can create unreasonable expectations, people amaze you with their creativity.”In this View From The Top interview, Shantanu Narayen, Chairman and CEO of Adobe, spoke with Sankalp Banerjee, MBA ’23, about his personal evolution as a lead

Brian Chesky on Crisis Management

Mar 17th, 2023 56m 45s

In April and March of 2020, as shelter-in-place mandates swept the globe and travel halted, bookings on Airbnb plummeted. With an 80% revenue loss, the company had to lay off nearly a quarter of its workforce. "When you’re our size, and the bus

Cynt Marshall on Workplace Culture As The Measure of Success

Feb 23rd, 2023 54m 50s

“You know what kind of culture you have by how your employees are feeling on Sunday night when they think about getting ready to go back to work on Monday morning.”When Cynt Marshall was hired as the CEO of the Dallas Mavericks in 2018, she pre

Tristan Walker, MBA '10, "Every Action Must Be Based in Your Values"

Feb 9th, 2023 52m 41s

"For me, the thing that stood out was my difference. I wasn’t chasing the thing that others were chasing. I was chasing the things that lived with my values." In this View From The Top interview, Tristan Walker MBA ’10, founder and CEO of Walke

Andy Dunn on Entrepreneurship, Bipolar Disorder, and Cofounder Divorce

Dec 2nd, 2022 54m 42s

"If you want to build the future, don't look to the future. Look to something that's in the corner in the present." In this episode of View From The Top, the podcast, Andy Dunn MBA ’07, founder and CEO of Bonobos, sits down with Cyerra Holmes,

Eric Yuan on Keeping Customers, and Employees, Happy

Nov 29th, 2022 45m 55s

"My number one priority is to make sure Zoom employees are happy. I believe if you have happy employees, you’re going to have happy customers." Eric Yuan, SEP '06, founded Zoom in 2011 to "deliver happiness and bring people together" in a frict

Tony Elumelu on "Democratizing Luck"

Aug 8th, 2022 48m 7s

"Entrepreneurship is in my DNA. In my own life journey, I've come to appreciate the significance of entrepreneurship in transforming communities, in transforming countries, societies, and humanity." Tony Elumelu, a Nigerian businessman, billion

Gwynne Shotwell: Finding and Defining Your Team's "Big Moments"

Jul 15th, 2022 57m 16s

"Figure out what the big moments where you can bring your teams together are. It cures a lot of ills. It really helps with morale. It's incredible for team building."In this episode of View From The Top, the podcast, Gwynne Shotwell, the presid

Anne Wojcicki: There’s No Such Thing as the Perfect Dataset

Jun 30th, 2022 57m 56s

Alexandra Eitel, MBA ’22, sits down with Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe to discuss breaking down inequality through genetics and how leaders should build trust by being unabashedly honest. “The guiding principle for 23andMe is tra

Sundar Pichai: "Reward Effort, Not Outcomes"

Jun 16th, 2022 47m 12s

"You have to encourage innovation. Companies become more conservative in decision making as you grow...be okay with failure and reward effort, not outcomes."In this episode of View From The Top, the podcast, CEO of Google and Alphabet, Sundar P

Dara Treseder, MBA '14: "If You Stand For Everything, You Stand For Nothing."

Jun 6th, 2022 1h 1m

"If you talk about and comment on everything, your voice becomes background noise ... It's important [for brands] to be clear what matters most to us and why. What's our purpose? Why do we exist?"In this episode of View From The Top, the podcas

David Vélez, MBA '12: "Position Yourself in the Scarcity, Not in The Oversupply."

May 24th, 2022 54m 32s

When David Vélez, MBA '12, moved to Brazil in 2008 to open a regional office for a private equity fund, he didn’t expect one of his biggest challenges to be getting a bank account. The process took five months.Five years later, he was in São Pa

Jessica Alba on the role of humility in entrepreneurship

May 12th, 2022 41m 45s

“You have to be very humble if you want to be an entrepreneur…know what you know and know what you don’t know.” In this episode of View From The Top, the podcast, Jessica Alba, founder of The Honest Company, sits down with Alexandra Eitel, MBA

Hamdi Ulukaya: Creating the Right Environment

Mar 25th, 2022 59m 4s

"People will give you credit, but 99% of it is not you,” said Hamdi Ulukaya, CEO of Chobani, in a View From The Top interview on campus. “It's the environment that you created.” Interviewed by Alexandra Eitel, MBA ’22, Ulukaya also discussed ho

Marcos Galperín and MercadoLibre: Pursue the Contrarian View

Jan 25th, 2022 39m 26s

MercadoLibre e-commerce, the eBay of Latin America, is a $28 billion company. At its roots are three friends who met at Stanford GSB.In this View From The Top speaker series, MercadoLibre founders Marcos Galperín, MBA ’99; Hernan Kazah, MBA ’99

Malala Yousafzai on How We All Can Inspire Change

Dec 8th, 2021 57m 55s

“My story is not an exceptional story. It could have been the story of any girl if their fathers and brothers had allowed them to speak out.”In this View From The Top interview, activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, shares her

Steve Kerr on the Importance of Work-Life Balance

Nov 19th, 2021 1h 1m

"What I've found with our players, is that the guys who have the most balance in their lives, are the ones who know how to handle all this stuff the best," said Steve Kerr, head coach of the NBA's Golden State Warriors, in a View From The Top i

Thasunda Brown Duckett on Making Change Through the “Art of Possibility”

Jul 28th, 2021 42m 36s

In this View From The Top interview, Thasunda Brown Duckett, president and CEO of TIAA, recalls her childhood experience moving from New York to Texas in a car packed with everything her parents and two siblings owned and why she knew from a yo

Priscilla Chan: How We Can Do Better By Having Hope

Jul 21st, 2021 38m 25s

In this View From The Top interview, Priscilla Chan, cofounder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, shares the story of her refugee family fleeing Vietnam and what it was like for her growing up as an Asian American in the Catholic sub