Jack Hidary And The Art of Entrepreneurship

Jack D. Hidary is a successful serial tech entrepreneur. In 1995, established EarthWeb a company dedicated to the needs of tech professionals. Jack now serves as Senior Advisor to Google X Labs. Committed to community and philanthropic causes, he has received several industry and community awards as well as being recognized as a Global Leader of Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum, Davos. He is also a founding member of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). Jack studied philosophy and neuroscience at Columbia University and was awarded a Stanley Fellowship in Clinical Neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Dave Zaboski And The Creative Arts

Dave Zaboski picked up a crayon as a child and never put it down, dedicating his life to the creative arts. He is a classically trained painter and illustrator. As a Senior Animator with Disney, Sony and Warner Bros., he has contributed his talents to the contemporary classic films Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, the Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Tarzan, The Emperor’s New Groove, Fantasia 2000 and more. 

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Lauren Kunze and The Future of Chatbots

Lauren Kunze built her first chatbot at age fifteen, and is now Principal at Pandorabots: the world’s leading platform for building and deploying chatbots. She is a published author and graduate of Harvard College, where she studied Literature and Language, and Neuroscience.

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Josh Bersin and Corporate Learning

Josh Bersin founded Bersin & Associates in 2004 to provide research and advisory services focused on corporate learning, leadership, talent management, and HR technology. Today he is responsible for Bersin by Deloitte’s long-term strategy, research direction, and market eminence. He has a B.S. in engineering from Cornell University, an M.S. in engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Kevin Kelly And Technological Forces

Kevin Kelly is the co-founder of Wired Magazine, a best-selling author and a leading thinker on technology. After the release of his new book, The Inevitable, I had a chance to talk with him about how about his life, his journey and how technology will continue to change our lives.

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Hemalee Patel And How To Live A Healthy Lifestyle

Dr. Hemalee Patel is a practicing physician and Assistant Professor in Internal Medicine at Stanford University Hospital specializing in preventative medicine specifically in the field of nutrition, resilience and mindfulness. Dr. Patel's mission is to bring awareness of the effects stress, lack of exercise and poor nutrition has on the body and the role this plays in the development of chronic diseases. Through her practice, she utilizes evidence-based medicine and accessible methods to educate and empower individuals, enabling them to take control of their health and personal sense of well-being.

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Maxine Ryan And The Power Of Blockchain

Maxine Ryan is the co-founder of Bitspark, the world’s first cash in, cash out blockchain remittance platform for Money Transfer Operators and Individuals to send Asia wide. Her startup has won international awards for its innovation in payments and is redeemed as one of the pioneers of the bitcoin/blockchain remittance space. Maxine is an advocate for Blockchain technology having consulted and strategized with Fortune 500 companies, F.I’s, Telcos and Startups in the use case of this game changing technology. Maxine is an international speaker on the topic as well as a mentor to financial technology startups.

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Barbara Hou And The Future Of Education

Barbara Houis the former executive co-director for Harvard Innovations and Ventures in Education (HIVE), a campus organization that supports educational entrepreneurship at Harvard University. Previously, she founded the Asian Women’s Leadership University (AWLU) Project, a 501(c)(3) educational startup dedicated to establishing a global women’s leadership university based in Asia. She has also practiced as a corporate lawyer in the Hong Kong offices of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP and Allen & Overy LLP. She is a graduate of Smith College and the University of Michigan Law School.

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Salim Ismail and Exponential Organizations

Salim Ismail is a sought after speaker, strategist and entrepreneur – his last company, Angstro, was acquired by Google in August 2010. Salim spent two years as SU’s founding Executive Director and currently serves as its Global Ambassador focusing on its global presence. Prior to that, Salim was a Vice President at Yahoo and the Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo’s internal ‘ideas factory’ where game-changing ideas were brought in, built and launched. He is also the author of Exponential Organizations, which is required reading at the world’s top organizations. Salim consults on innovation & growth and believes, “if you aren’t disrupting your business or industry, someone else is”. In this episode, Salim shares his technological and philosophical insights on how we can move the world forward.

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Rob Nail And The Future Of Abundance

Rob is the CEO and Associate founder of Singularity University. He brings a unique entrepreneurial and globally-focused approach to growing a non-traditional university as a platform to create a future of abundance where exponential technologies empower us to solve the global grand challenges.

Prior to Singularity, he co-founded Velocity11 in 1999, building automation equipment and robotics for cancer research and drug discovery. After being acquired by Agilent Technologies in 2007, he traded the CEO role for a General Manager role attempting to be a catalyst for change at a big company. He gave up in 2009 to go surfing and eventually find his true calling and biggest challenge yet with Singularity University. He is a director at Harman (HAR) and Light&Motion. He is also a co-founder and director of Alite Designs, is an active angel investor and advisor, and holds degrees in Mechanical, Materials Science and Manufacturing Engineering from UC Davis and Stanford University.

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David Roberts And Disruptive Innovation

David Roberts is regarded as one of the world’s top experts on disruptive innovation and exponentially advancing technology. His passion is to help transform the lives of a billion suffering people in the world through disruptive innovation. David served as Vice President of Singularity University and two-time Director (and alum) of the Global Solutions Program. He is an award winning CEO and serial entrepreneur, and has started ventures backed with over $100 million of investment from Kleiner Perkins, Vinod Khosla, Cisco, Oracle, Accenture, In-Q-Tel, and others. He is the recipient of numerous awards and medals and has led the development of some of the most complex, state-of-the art systems ever built, to include satellites, drones, and fusion centers. He also worked as an Investment Banker in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at Goldman Sachs Headquarters. He received his B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering from M.I.T. was a Distinguished Graduate, and majored in Artificial Intelligence and Bio-Computer Engineering.

He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. David is Chairman at HaloDrop, a revolutionary global drone services company, Chairman at 1QBit the world’s first software company for quantum computers, and is a formal adviser to Made-In-Space, responsible for manufacturing the first object in Space with a 3D printer on the Space Station. Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley’s Business schools have all written and taught case studies on David’s leadership, management, and decision making. He has been featured on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, and in USA Today, Fortune Magazine, The New York Times, Business Week, CNN, and dozens of others. His startups have received many awards to include Internet World’s Net Rising Stars, Red Herring’s Catch, top 50 Private Companies in the World, Red Herring Top 100 Private Companies in the World, USA Today’s Tech Reviews Best Picks, Internet Outlook’s Investors Choice Award, Enterprise Outlook Investors Choice, Best of the Web from PC World, and Apple Computer’s Premier Systems Integrator Award. His fascination with technology began In fourth grade after building a hovering electric drone, to carry his younger sister to the bus stop, powered by what was formerly his mother’s vacuum cleaner, and fortunately limited by the length of an electric power cord.

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Will Weisman And The Intersection of People And Ideas

Will Weisman heads up the Exponential Conference Series at Singularity University. His background leading, investing in, and advising technology and consumer product companies has enabled him to acquire a unique blend of operational, investment and entrepreneurial experience. Will is passionate about people and ideas and has spent his life working to bring them together to help curate great opportunities and experiences.

Among his most unusual accomplishments is that Will created and popularized the wrap, yes, the burrito like thing at a 30 unit restaurant chain he founded called World Wrapps. Will received his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and has a BA from University of California at Santa Barbara. In this episode, we talk about Will’s entrepreneurial journey and the lessons he learned along the way.

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Marcus Shingles And Facilitating Exponential Change

Marcus Shingles is the Chief Executive Officer of The XPRIZE Foundation, a non-profit founded by its Executive Chairman, Dr. Peter Diamandis. XPRIZE is the leading expert in designing and implementing innovative models that utilize gamification, crowd-sourcing, incentive competitions, and exponential technologies to solve the world’s grandest social challenges.

Prior to XPRIZE, Marcus was a Partner at Deloitte Consulting LLP and leader of Deloitte Consulting’s Innovation Group where he worked with corporate executive teams to better understand and plan for the opportunities and threats associated with disruptive innovation driven by “exponentials” (e.g., 3d printing, block-chain, crowd-sourcing, AI) resulting from the accelerated pace of discovery, invention, and technology. At Deloitte, Marcus also championed the strategic global partnership with Singularity University, and helped establish and lead the Innovation Partnership Program with XPRIZE and SU.

Marcus has over 20 years of experience, and prior to his most recent roles at XPRIZE and Deloitte, he was a successful entrepreneur founding a management consulting business working with Fortune 500 leadership teams on innovation, technology, and analytics initiatives. Earlier in his career he was the leader of the Consumer Products CRM consulting practice at Ernst & Young, and he started his career in industry at the Kellogg Company in Sales & Marketing, Global IT, and the Customer Strategy departments.

Marcus has published numerous thought-leadership pieces and presents regularly on technology trends, disruptive innovation, and related business and social impact strategies. In his spare time, Marcus has pioneered a program in partnership with the public school system in both Los Angeles and Boston to bring “exponential entrepreneurial” training and contemporary thinking to high school students in currently underserved communities. The program has been implemented as part of a multi-year curriculum in the classroom, designed to teach self-sufficiency and prepare students for an optimistic and exponential future.

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Brad Templeton And The Evolution Of Computing Systems

Brad Templeton is a developer of and commentator on self-driving cars, software architect, board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, internet entrepreneur, futurist lecturer, writer and observer of cyberspace issues, hobby photographer, and an artist. Templeton has been a consultant on Google’s team designing a driverless car and lectures and blogs about the emerging technology of automated transportation. He is also noted as a speaker and writer covering copyright law and political and social issues related to computing and networks. He is a director of the futurist Foresight Nanotech Institute, a think tank and public interest organization focused on transformative future technologies. Templeton was founder, publisher and software architect at ClariNet Communications Corp., which in the 1990s became the first internet-based business, creating an electronic newspaper. He has been active in the computer network community since 1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET from its earliest days, and in 1987 founded and edited a special USENET conference devoted to comedy. Templeton has been involved in the development of important pieces of software including VisiCalc, the world’s first computer spreadsheet, and Stuffit for archiving and compressing computer files. In 1996, ClariNet joined the ACLU and others in opposing the Communications Decency Act, part of the Telecom bill passed during Clinton Administration. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the plaintiffs and ruled that the Act violated the First Amendment in seeking to impose anti-indecency standards on the internet.

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Jane Barratt And Financial Literacy

Jane Barratt is the founder & CEO of GoldBean. She is a long-term investor and champion of financial literacy. Jane spent more than 20 years driving growth for Fortune 500 companies, including many Financial Services institutions. Her frustration with the disconnect between personal consumption (which drives the economy) and personal finance (from which only the wealthy benefit) inspired her to become a registered investment advisor, to apply a more empowered, personal and data-driven approach to investing.

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Ric Edelman And Financial Planning

Ric Edelman is the chairman and CEO of Edelman Financial Services, the author of several personal finance books and the host of The Ric Edelman Show. Edelman has been ranked multiple times the #1 Independent Financial Advisor in the United States by Barron’s. In the late 1990s, his company was named by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing privately held financial planning firm in the country for three years in a row. In this episode, we talked about his journey of starting his business and the many lessons he learned along the way.

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Ben Milne And Real-Time Payments

Ben Milne is the founder and CEO of Dwolla, a payments startup building the ideal way to move money, as quickly and safely as possible. Under Ben, the Des Moines-based company has raised over $32 million from investors, like Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures, and has been recognized by Fast Company as one of the world’s “50 Most Innovative Companies of 2014”. Ben has been named as one of Forbes’ “Disrupters of the Year” and has appeared on Inc. Magazine’s in its annual 30 under 30 collection, Bloomberg TV, and The TODAY Show. In 2013, he was recognized for his work by MIT Technology Review’s in its annual “Innovators Under 35” list.

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Brian Forde And Digital Currencies

Brian Forde has spent more than a decade at the nexus of technology, entrepreneurship, and public policy. He is currently the Director of Digital Currency at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads efforts to mainstream digital currencies like Bitcoin through research, and incubation of high-impact applications of the emerging technology. Most recently he was the Senior Advisor for Mobile and Data Innovation at the White House where he spearheaded efforts to leverage emerging technologies to address the President’s most critical national priorities. Prior to his work at the White House, Forde founded one of the largest phone companies in Nicaragua after serving as a business and technology volunteer in the Peace Corps. In recognition of his work, Forde was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

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Vishal Sikka And The Promise Of Technology

At the Hilton Union Square in the heart of San Francisco, during Infosys’ annual flagship conference Confluence, the chief executive talks about his deeply held beliefs and lessons learned through his journey in the world of innovation and how technology can move us forward.

Dr. Vishal Sikka is a champion of technology, and clearly sees it as an amplifier of human potential. He wants to use software in purposeful ways to address some of the biggest challenges of our times. As CEO of Infosys, Dr. Sikka is renewing existing landscapes to fundamentally drive down costs, for clients, using automation and artificial intelligence, and at the same time bringing breakthrough innovation to help them transform user and consumer experiences, leverage data in entirely new ways, tap into new business opportunities and create new business models. For example, the Zero Distance initiative, which focuses on bringing innovation to every project for every client on an ongoing basis, has set a precedent in the industry for driving grassroots innovation.

Prior to joining Infosys, he was a member of the Executive Board of SAP. He is credited with creating SAP’s breakthrough in-memory data platform SAP HANA, the fastest growing product in SAP’s history. He received his BS in Computer Science from Syracuse and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford.

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Tom Ding And Autonomous Finance

Tom Ding is the CEO and co-founder of String, a venture backed FinTech startup developing a decentralized permissionless global financial environment for Ethereum smart contract developers that aims to help programmers become the world's bankers. In other words, he is passionate about creating products that would otherwise not have existed. Tom formerly worked at Alibaba and eBay. At String they improve all financial services from consumer banking to hedging and with partners are launching a decentralized, low cost, global and open platform that will unleash innovation by the crowd. They care especially about the world's un/underbanked and businesses in developing economies where it is often impractical to access advanced financial services.

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Camilo Buscaron And The Promise Of Robots

Camilo Buscaron is a rising champion in the world of robotics. He has won many awards for his work, and is currently based in San Jose, CA where he is inventing the future robot that won’t disappoint society. In this episode, we talk about his robotic journey and the benefits and challenges that a world filled with robots will bring.

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Max Brody And Creativity

Max Brody is a multi-disciplinary designer & developer. He designs things (from websites, logos, apps, to interfaces), and programs full-scale web and mobile applications for individuals and businesses. He believes that software is art, and that art should be perfect. He likes to say that art is perfect only if it is guided by a singular vision from start to finish. He loves translating that passion into clean, modern, simple and timeless designs. Max is also the founder and CEO of Cent, a platform and system where anyone could fairly make money by creating any piece of original content. The mission is two-fold: To give creators a seamless source of income from creating awesome work and To in(cent)ivize those who don’t think of themselves as creators to give creating a try.

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Louis Mikal And Biological Patterns In Life

Louis Mikal is a scientist entrepreneur and traveler. Louis co-founded Serendipia Nest coliving/ coworking house for solutionners in San Francisco. He is very interested in decreasing the boundaries between individuals and sharing ideas freely. Having studied biochemistry and then transitioned into technology management Louis has a broad overview of how synthetic systems correlate to the natural ones. Louis is very interested in the way biological patterns of the most primitive organisms are reflected in everyday life.

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Justin Lafazan and The Next Gen Summit

Featured in Forbes, USA Today, The Huffington Post, Inc. Magazine and more, Justin Lafazan is an acclaimed entrepreneur, speaker, best-selling author and consultant. The Founder of Next Gen Summit and best-selling author of What Wakes You Up?, he’s on a mission to inspire the world’s young people to design the lives they want to live, through entrepreneurship.

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Frederick Meyers And The Buddhist Way

Frederick Meyer is a lifelong practitioner of Shambhala Buddhism. He is co-founder of Medivate, a web app to help users maintain a regular meditation practice, and works as a web developer.

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Self-Reliance: An Introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson was an American essayist and poet who led the 19th century transcendentalist movement. In this adapted essay called "Self-Reliance", he champions self-reliance and individualism as a virtue, and contrasts it with other concepts such as dependence or conformity. He emphasizes to follow your own voice. Because the original can be difficult to read, I have created an adapted version that is hopefully easier to access.

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Brian Smith, Serial Entrepreneur Turned Executive Coach

Since he quit his investment banking job, Brian Smith has built and sold a multimillion dollar portfolio of businesses. He has built, bought, and sold businesses in the retail, service, and commercial real estate sectors. Now Brian coaches and studies entrepreneurs, helping them to make transformations at both the personal and organizational levels. Brian’s clients include founders and executives at all levels: from seed-round to post-exit.

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Bryan Johnson, Entrepreneur Extraordinaire

Bryan Johnson made a decision at age 21 and never looked back. He told his family and friends that he would start a company and retire by age 30. In 2013, he sold his company Braintree, an online and mobile payments provider, to eBay for $800 million in cash. One year later, he dedicated $100 million of his own capital to invest in entrepreneurs working toward quantum-leap discoveries that promise to rewrite the operating systems of life. That marked the beginning of the OS Fund. Since then, Johnson has been meeting with and investing in visionary scientists and entrepreneurs working on some of humanity’s greatest opportunities and challenges. Johnson is also an adventurer. He has climbed some of the highest peaks in the world, raced in the African desert, explored an active volcano and built a snow cave in the Arctic. He is a pilot, the father of three and a children’s book author. At a small café in Nolita in the heart of New York, the entrepreneur and investor talks about his entrepreneurial journey and his goal of rewriting the operating systems of life.


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Nick Hanauer and How To Think Independently

Nick Hanauer is co-founder and partner in Seattle-based venture capital firm, Second Avenue Partners. He has managed, founded and financed over thirty companies, creating aggregate market value of tens of billions of dollars. For example, he co-founded aQuantive, which sold to Microsoft for $6.4 billion, and was the first non-family investor in Amazon. He also serves as a Director for The Democracy Alliance and as a board advisor to the policy journal Democracy. He has a degree in philosophy from the University of Washington, is married with two children and lives in Seattle, Washington. At O’Reilly’s Next:Economy conference in San Francisco, the venture capitalist talks about the value of studying philosophy, his investment strategy and how to think independently.

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Peter Diamandis and Exponential Thinking

At the Exponential Finance conference hosted by Singularity University in New York, I had the opportunity to talk with Peter Diamandis, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Singularity University. Diamandis counsels the world’s top enterprises on how to utilize exponential technologies and incentivized innovation to dramatically accelerate their business objectives. Diamandis is also the Chairman and CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and launching large incentive prizes to drive radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. He attended MIT where he received his degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering, as well as Harvard Medical School where he received his M.D.


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Bob McDonald and Value-Based Leadership

Bob McDonald is eighth Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Prior to joining VA, he was Chairman, President, and CEO of The Procter&Gamble Company (P&G) He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in the top 2 percent of the Class of 1975. He is personally committed to values-based leadership and to improving the lives of others. When he visited Harvard Business School, I had a chance to talk to him. In this interview, he shared his lessons of West Point and CEO of Procter & Gamble and how his expertise from the private sector carries over to the public sector, to lead the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. We started with a simple question.

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Eric Ries and The Lean Startup

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and was named as one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech by BusinessWeek Ries serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. He was also an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. While an undergraduate at Yale, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career eventually leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. In this interview, the entrepreneur and startup mentor talks about his mission, how he deals with obstacles and why startups fail.

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Chris Camillo and Social Arbitrage Investing

A pioneer in applying social data analysis to investing and also the co-founder of Ticker Tags, which is a crowdsourced association taxonomy that connects trending social content to investable companies. I first heard about Camillo on CNBC where he talked about how he turned 20K into 2M. By now he has grown this figure to $8 million and besides investing in public markets, he also invests in startups as an angel investor. His latest venture was created to evolve financial news monitoring to include social-monitored tags that serve to parse the world’s data streams without bias.

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The Food Revolutionary, Josh Tetrick

Tetrick started Hampton Creek, a San Francisco food startup that is going to make it easier for millions of people to eat better. Bill Gates selected his company as one of three companies that will shape the future of food. He has led a United Nations business initiative in Kenya and worked for former President Bill Clinton. As a Fulbright Scholar he taught school children in Nigeria and South Africa. He is also a graduate of Cornell and the University of Michigan Law School. He is an entrepreneur that not only thinks big but also has the stamina and power to transform his vision into reality, and plus he is a cool guy.

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Doug Carmichael (Part 2) and How to Understand The World

The second part of the interview of Doug Carmichael, a strategy consultant at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. We talk about his advice to younger people, news media consumption, what he did to understand the world, his regular get togethers in Palo Alto, his experience as a psychoanalyst and his daily ritual.

Carmichael started physics at Caltech, got a PhD from Berkeley in human development, a post doc of Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies and lived in Mexico City while studying at Eric Fromm’s Institute for psychoanalysis. He consulted the White House and ran the network for Al Gore’s Reinventing government. For the last ten years has focused on the broad social science issues relevant to rethinking humanity’s relationship to nature. Started the Stanford Strategy Studio and is most interested in the relationship between the humanities and economics.

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Doug Carmichael and How to Understand The World

This pilot episode features Doug Carmichael, a strategy consultant at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. We talk about how to understand the world, where he grew up, how he developed his interests, his influences, what you should study to understand the world, the importance of history and physics, the origin of capitalism.

Carmichael started physics at Caltech, got a PhD from Berkeley in human development, a post doc of Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies and lived in Mexico City while studying at Eric Fromm’s Institute for psychoanalysis. He consulted the White House and ran the network for Al Gore’s Reinventing government. For the last ten years has focused on the broad social science issues relevant to rethinking humanity’s relationship to nature. Started the Stanford Strategy Studio and is most interested in the relationship between the humanities and economics.

I also wanted to give thanks to Matthias Gohlke, who was kind enough to produce our intro and outro jingles for the podcast.

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