The CEO Series

In this episode of The CEO Series, Will sits down with Spin Master co-founder and chairman Ronnen Harary. Ronnen walks through the early days of the company, including Earth Buddy, Devil Sticks, and Air Hogs. He also gets into the boom and bust of Bakugan, when sales went from $450 million to a billion and back again. He points to hubris as the real cause and explains how that period led directly...

In this episode of The CEO Series, Will sits down with Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest. Erik walks through the early days of Chess.com and the two chess businesses he ran before it. He talks about the company's slow, steady growth for over a decade, the surge that came with COVID and Queen's Gambit, and the playbook they built afterward for getting chess into the cultural conversation. He also covers...

In this episode of The CEO Series, Will travels to Vermont to sit down with Alex Roberts, CEO of WhistlePig Whiskey, at the WhistlePig farm. Alex explains how he went from working as a 24-year-old investment banking analyst on a potential sale of WhistlePig to being offered the CFO job himself. He talks about entering the company with no operating experience, dealing with imposter syndrome and the...

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Jake Karls, co-founder and Chief Rainmaker of Mid-Day Squares. Jake walks through the early version of the business which was three people making 50 to 100 bars a day in a condo kitchen and hand delivering samples with a Polaroid and a handwritten note. He explains how they raised money and built their own manufacturer. Jake talks abo...

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Danny Winer, co-founder and CEO of HexClad. Danny traces his path from studying theater and film at NYU and moving to Los Angeles with $2,000 and three suitcases, to a car accident at 28 that broke his back, shattered his right leg, and left him six figures in debt with no ability to work. He rebuilt by selling cookware at trade shows...

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz, Co-Founders of Eventbrite. Kevin traces his path from the early days of Silicon Valley to co-founding Xoom, a money remittance company that became one of the first developers on the PayPal API and was ultimately acquired by PayPal in 2015 for $1.1 billion. Julia shares how she left a career in television d...

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Nigel Morris, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of QED Investors and Co-Founder of Capital One. Nigel traces the origins of Capital One, from a working class childhood in England with a military father who moved the family 11 times, to building one of the most disruptive financial services companies in history. He recounts how he and Ri...

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Nigel Morris, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of QED Investors and Co-Founder of Capital One. Nigel traces the origins of Capital One, from a working class childhood in England with a military father who moved the family 11 times, to building one of the most disruptive financial services companies in history. He recounts how he and Ri...

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Jim Hagedorn, CEO of ScottsMiracle-Gro. Hagedorn opens up about the most turbulent chapter of his career: a $2 billion gamble on the cannabis industry that nearly ran the company into the ground. He discusses the intense pressure of "burning money," the isolation of leadership during a crisis, and the difficult reality of cutting hund...

In this episode of The CEO Series, host William Salvi sits down with Hitesh Sheth, CEO of Vectra AI, to discuss the evolving landscape of AI-driven cybersecurity. Sheth explains how Vectra AI protects enterprises across five of the six major attack surfaces and why the network remains the most critical source of truth for security teams. He breaks down why attackers currently have the advantage, h...

In this episode of The CEO Series, host William Salvi sits down with Alan Trefler, founder and CEO of Pegasystems, to discuss what it takes to build and lead a company for over four decades. Trefler explains how a frustrating experience consulting for New York banks sparked the vision behind Pega, and why bootstrapping the company from scratch gave him a perspective on business that still shapes h...

As digital integrity faces an existential threat from AI-driven social engineering, traditional cybersecurity has reached a critical turning point. Attackers are no longer just sending simple phishing emails; they are deploying autonomous AI agents to conduct "vibe phishing". They do this by using deepfakes and fake personas to build rapport and manipulate victims in real-time across multiple chan...

As cyberattacks evolve into autonomous, AI-driven threats, the industry has reached its "human limit". Traditional defense strategies—fragmented tools and manual workflows—can no longer keep pace with attackers who can now launch "all attack vectors, all at once". The only way to survive the next generation of threats is to move toward a "machine versus machine" defense. In this episode of the CEO...

In this episode of The CEO Series, host William Salvi sits down with Bhagwat Swaroop, President and CEO of Sonatype, to explore how the company is helping organizations build software securely in an era where 90% of code is assembled from open-source libraries rather than written from scratch. Swaroop explains why that shift makes rigorous vulnerability checks essential and how Sonatype's tools gi...

In this episode of The CEO Series, host William Salvi sits down with Shane Buckley, CEO of Gigamon, to discuss one of the most impactful yet under-the-radar companies in cybersecurity. Buckley explains how Gigamon's technology sits inside the core of massive networks to detect suspicious patterns and decrypt encrypted traffic, where over 95% of modern threats now hide. He breaks down why lateral m...

In this episode of the CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Andre Durand, the CEO of Ping Identity, to discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of digital identity. With over 20 years of experience, Ping Identity protects eight billion accounts for more than half of the Fortune 100, focusing on the core principle that organizations cannot secure what they cannot identify. Durand explains how ide...

Kyle Matthews grew up in the most decorated football family in NFL history. Four first-round picks. A Hall of Famer. Decades of combined pro careers. He went a different direction. With a team of 25 and a gap in the market he couldn't ignore, Kyle walked away from a top-producing career and built Matthews from the ground up — now the largest privately held commercial real estate brokerage in the c...

Everyone wants to know when the market will crash. ‪Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor has spent decades analyzing markets, and his answer might surprise you. In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Kunal to discuss why timing the market rarely works, how Morningstar has evolved into a global financial data powerhouse, and what leaders often underestimate when scaling a company....

"There were a lot of moments that felt like failure," says Mike Kirban, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Vita Coco. From early supply chain challenges to competing with giants like Coke, building the coconut water category was far from smooth. In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Mike to talk about taking a simple idea from Brazil and turning it into Vita Coco, navig...

What part of you has to die to become the leader you're meant to be? In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Ryan Serhant t‬ , CEO and Founder of SERHANT and star of Netflix's Owning Manhattan, inside a $45M New York City mansion to talk about the real cost of leadership, not the Instagram version.  This conversation isn't about flexing deals or views. It's about: • The par...

🎙️ If you enjoyed this episode of The CEO Series with Marc Malnati, don't miss the full video, can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4LMXsHxb1g&t=1s   Follow: Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/ceoseries/   Follow me: Instagram:   https://www.instagram.com/wsalvi/ Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-salvi/     Published On: Aug 11, 2022

🎙️ If you enjoyed this episode of The CEO Series with Katlin Smith, don't miss the full video, can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3JGwKxPG0&t=147s   Follow: Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/ceoseries/   Follow me: Instagram:   https://www.instagram.com/wsalvi/ Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-salvi/     Published On:  Jun 30, 2022

🎙️ If you enjoyed this episode of The CEO Series with Jerry Reinsdorf, don't miss the full video, can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teKemaOwweQ&t=79s   Follow: Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/ceoseries/   Follow me: Instagram:   https://www.instagram.com/wsalvi/ Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-salvi/     Published On:  Jun 30, 2022

🎙️ If you enjoyed this episode of The CEO Series with Jenica Myszkowski, don't miss the full video, can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9bTBaPHbNo&t=8s   Follow: Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/ceoseries/   Follow me: Instagram:   https://www.instagram.com/wsalvi/ Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-salvi/     Published On: Aug 3, 2022

🎙️ If you enjoyed this episode of The CEO Series with Ed Wehmer, don't miss the full video, can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD2sqjo78Ps&t=2s   Follow: Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/ceoseries/   Follow me: Instagram:   https://www.instagram.com/wsalvi/ Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-salvi/     Published On:  Jun 30, 2022