It's Not Magic, a Sixth Street podcast

What’s it like leading a family business that invests in everything from baseball to robotics to soft drinks? We went to Minneapolis to talk with Jim Pohlad, chairman of the Minnesota Twins and co-head of the Pohlad Companies, about the balance between building for the long-term and the desire to “win now,” the process behind designing the Twins’ much-loved Target Field, and his family’s enduring...

Welcome back for Season Two of It’s Not Magic! We’re kicking it off with a woman who epitomizes what it means to be a tech leader: Stacy Brown-Philpot, former CEO of TaskRabbit and founding member of the SoftBank Opportunity Fund. Recorded live from the Concrete Rose Summit in Menlo Park, CA, Stacy walks us through her experience leading TaskRabbit and its community of "Taskers", the advice she re...

For our Season One finale, we sit down with Julie Jones, chair of Ropes & Gray, the venerable law firm founded in 1865 that today is a $2 billion enterprise with over 1500 hundred lawyers. Julie is the first woman to lead the firm, and we discuss her elevation to Chair in 2020 just as the world and business leaders faced unprecedented challenges. We talk about how she prepared and marketed her...

How do you build a business in a highly regulated industry? We asked the expert. Clip in to the via ferrata and join us with Igor Rozenblit, Managing Partner of Iron Road Partners and founder and former Co-Head of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Private Funds Unit. We learn about what it takes to build something new within a government agency, and we get Igor’s perspective as an entrepren...

What's it like being the first to develop a new way to detect COVID-19 using gene-editing technology? Janice Chen joins us (with special guest Sixth Street's Jeff Pootoolal) to talk about building a business around CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing technology. We discuss how she and her co-founders prioritize the myriad potential applications for CRISPR, creating the first CRISPR-based COVID-...

Sean Mendy joins us to talk about founding Westbound Equity Partners, an early stage investment firm with a dual purpose: to invest in and build great companies, while addressing the dramatic under allocation of investment in founders of color. We discuss Westbound's first unicorn portfolio company, what's changed and what hasn't since George Floyd's murder, and we learn about the teacher that mad...

Ambassador Michael McFaul joins us for a special episode from the Sixth Street Offsite in Austin, TX. He takes us back to his prescient warnings about the rise of Putin's autocracy in 2000. We hear about how Putin has changed since coming to power, what he's like in person, and the latest from leadership in Kyiv. We also discuss how to run an embassy, the value and limitations of historical analog...

Evan Smith brings us back to the beginnings of The Texas Tribune . We talk about how the business model he spearheaded is saving local news and maybe even keeping the art of civil conversation alive. He tells us how he honed his pitch on the way to raising over $100 million from across the ideological spectrum, and we find out why they play Lyle Lovett for him wherever he goes in Texas. Learn more...