Masters of Scale

A diverse network of collaborators is key when making scale leaps. Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel has cultivated a wide network of scientists, business leaders, and government officials across his career. When COVID-19 struck, Bancel called upon this nexus of experts to aid the warp-speed development of the mRNA-based vaccine in the race to save millions of lives. Read a transcript of this episode:&n...

It’s easy to have a grand idea; putting that plan into action is not. Victoria Yampolsky conceived of a global concert in support of Ukraine. Without any experience in entertainment or international aid, she shares how she didn’t accept “no” for an answer in her quest to book big-name guests like Pink Floyd and negotiate a streaming deal — to pursue a fundraising goal of $10 million. Read a transc...

If you're launching a moonshot, success depends on how you manage the trajectory of risk. When Stéphane Bancel became Moderna's first CEO, the biotech start-up was chasing a way-out idea many experts thought was impossible. Stéphane built a culture of calculated risk-taking to create a platform for extraordinary leaps — one that enabled life-saving mRNA vaccines when Covid-19 struck. Read a transc...

With the workplace in historic flux, consulting firm PwC is committing a whopping $2.4 billion to create an employee engagement platform offering a radically new level of choice. PwC’s U.S. chair, Tim Ryan, shares why the bold initiative is necessary in the face of the Great Resignation. It's just one of several evolving crises, Ryan says, that has made leading a business more complex and demandin...

Massive change isn’t something you can brute-force — you need to ignite buy-in, again and again, up and down your organization. Because even if your changes will make things more fun, more interesting, and more profitable, you’re going to face defiance and inertia until you clue everyone in. That’s what Bill Ford learned while working to remake Ford Motor Company as an environmental powerhouse — a...

Has Gopuff cracked the code of instant delivery — a field where even Amazon has struggled? Co-founder Yakir Gola talks about the challenge of owning the customer journey from app to warehouse to doorstep, and the reasons why being outside Silicon Valley is giving Gopuff a big advantage as it expands across the United States and around the world. Yakir talks with host Bob Safian about why moving fa...

We often hear the story about the great leader who joins a legacy company and guides it through massive transformation. But massive transformation can also start from the inside. Bill Ford, the executive chair of the Ford Motor Company, founded by his great-grandfather, is proof that great change can come from within. He has led not just one but multiple refreshes of Ford’s mission, culture, and,...

Charity Dean was one of the first public health officials to set the alarm on COVID. When she searched for a tool to forecast future bio threats, she realized that it didn’t exist yet. So she co-founded the Public Health Company, where she uses lessons from her government experiences, but without the same rules or limits. She speaks with Bob Safian about why all companies must be public health com...

In honor of our five year anniversary of Masters of Scale, we're revisiting our first episode ever, featuring Airbnb's Brian Chesky. If you want your company to truly scale, you first have to do things that don't scale. Handcraft the core experience. Get your hands dirty. Serve your customers one-by-one. And don't stop until you know exactly what they want. That's what Brian Chesky did. As CEO of...

Gayle Smith is the CEO of the ONE Campaign, the advocacy group founded by U2’s Bono — and last year, she was tapped by the U.S. State Department to coordinate America’s COVID response and vaccine distribution globally. Her experience both inside and outside government gives her a distinctive outlook on how business can and should help on humanitarian issues, from Ukraine dislocation to climate cha...

Amid pandemic disruption, Chief turned a small, NYC-based club for women executives into a national phenomenon with more than 12,000 members. Co-founder and CEO Carolyn Childers joins Rapid Response to share how she and co-founder Lindsay Kaplan managed the unlikely transformation, which recently yielded a $100 million Series B funding round. She reveals how the company leveraged existing tech and...

To succeed in the modern business environment, you need to strut your stuff: to cultivate a personal brand that supports career growth. No one represents this better than Tyra Banks. As a model, a producer, and an entrepreneur, Tyra has forged a personal brand that has enabled her to make multiple pivots, building fame, wealth, and meaningful impact on the issues that matter most to her. Startups...

Meet Alyona Mysko, the CEO of a B2B startup in Ukraine called Fuelfinance , as she walks us through the lessons she’s learned while leading her company in a war. Her experience — which sometimes requires her and her team to work from bomb shelters during the day — offers lessons for every leader about communication, collaboration, and creativity in crisis. All of Ukraine is running like a start-up...

Learn the 5 mindsets that will reshape the way you hire, train, and retain — to build the team of superheroes that will power your business to scale. Hear real-world advice and great stories from Reid, Bob, and legendary leaders like PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, GoFundMe’s Tim Cadogan, Burberry and Apple’s Angela Ahrendts, and Vanderbilt basketball coach Jerry Stackhouse.  Read a transcript of...

“Don't let the roadblocks get in the way when there are people who need you desperately.” Eric Friedrichsen, the CEO of Emburse, a B2B software provider, has navigated around risks and financial costs to meet the needs of tech contractors based in Ukraine. Part of that response includes the company’s offer to relocate people and families to Spain, where Emburse’s European headquarters is located....

Your local community can be the power behind an epic scale story — because smart community investment always maximizes returns. No one knows this like Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder and CEO of Chobani. He turned a small Upstate New York town into an epicenter of Greek yogurt by mobilizing a community to revive a mothballed dairy plant. In creating opportunities for new jobs, he created opportunities f...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the sanctions that followed, have radically impacted supply chains around the world. Jennifer Bisceglie, CEO of Interos, a risk-management firm focused on supply chains, has seen her company’s risk dashboards light up in new and far-reaching ways. Many businesses are more exposed than they realize, she says, with tech businesses surprisingly facing some of the hig...

Airbnb’s charitable arm, Airbnb.org, has committed to offer free, temporary housing for up to 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine. Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia joins Rapid Response to discuss how the company is deploying business tools for humanitarian benefit. He also shares how Airbnb’s platform has become a surprising tool to transfer money directly to individual Ukrainians, already generating $15...

Onboarding isn't just about employees. The often overlooked step-by-step process — to join a product or company — lays the foundation for everything that follows. No one knows this better than Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva. From the moment she started the Australia-based graphic design platform, she knew she had to engage newcomers with simplicity and speed. It took a series of step...

“It’s not about fixing women. It’s about fixing the system,” says Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code and Marshall Plan for Moms. As the author of the new book Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work , Reshma calls out corporate feminism and society’s assumption that women have to solve the problems of workplace achievement on their own. She argues that childcare is an economic issue that s...

Good partnerships transcend the transactional. In Part 2 of our two-part series featuring Daymond John, founder of FUBU and one of the original “sharks” on ABC’s Shark Tank, Daymond shows how aligning your mission with partners builds trust that can take your scale to a new level. Featuring stories about Shark Tank, the Kardashians, Coogi, Pharrell Williams, Trainual and more, Daymond delivers les...

Watching the news out of Ukraine, Tokunbo Koiki saw alarming reports of African and Caribbean students struggling because of racism to flee the country. The news both outraged and inspired her to take action — fast. Tokunbo, an entrepreneur and social worker, shares the real-time story of how she linked up with two strangers, Patricia Daley and Korrine Sky, to build a full-fledged aid organization...

“My big call to action would be to support existing organizations,” says Susy Schöneberg, the founder and head of Flexport.org, the nonprofit arm of the logistics firm Flexport. Schöneberg and her team are organizing complex shipments of relief goods to Ukrainian refugee sites across Eastern Europe; she breaks down how her organization has been safely managing the flow of goods toward displaced re...

How do you create authentic partnerships to build scale? In Part 1 of our two-part series featuring Daymond John, founder of FUBU and one of the original “sharks” on ABC’s Shark Tank, Daymond shares lessons from FUBU’s earliest days in Queens, where he partnered with bouncers, bodegas, his neighbor LL Cool J, and his earliest collaborator and investor (his mom) to turn a great idea into a billion-...

“We have to assume that cyberattacks will happen,” says Bipul Sinha, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Rubrik. He joins Rapid Response to discuss the dramatic escalation of cyberthreats in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Bipul explains how state-sponsored actors and cybercriminals are both heightened threats, and how traditional cybersecurity approaches are adjusting to counter them. He also...