Masters of Scale

If you try to avoid risk, you actually risk total failure. Or worse: mediocrity. Take it from Shellye Archambeau. She led the most stunning Silicon Valley turnaround you’ve never heard of. She took the role of CEO for a failing tech company, months from bankruptcy. Through a series of calculated risks, she led it through a complex merger, a head-spinning pivot, and grew it into MetricStream, which...

If your company's dominated by one type of person, you run the risk of tunnel vision. You might move fast — but you'll often drive straight into traps. Truly scalable companies need a diverse portfolio of viewpoints to see the opportunities others miss. Sallie Krawcheck knows this well. She rose through the ranks of Wall Street and saw firsthand the challenges a lack of diversity brings. After ser...

We’re back with Part 2 of our special turn-the-tables episode with Reid Hoffman. In this episode, we follow Reid through PayPal, LinkedIn, the Microsoft acquisition, his angel investments, Greylock, and his hosting of Masters of Scale — all the while proving our theory that you can chart an epic journey to scale if you make everyone you enlist a hero — in their OWN story and not just yours. Guest...

In this special episode, we turn the tables on host Reid Hoffman. He’s the guest and we tell his story, while proving a theory that’s perfect for Reid: You can chart an epic journey to scale, if you make everyone a hero along the way. Our guest host is June Cohen, executive producer of Masters of Scale, CEO of WaitWhat, and former executive producer of TED Talks. Cameo: Matthew Mercer, host of the...

That constant roar of customer feedback? Be thankful for it. It holds all the secrets to your success, if you learn how to read the signs. Listen to what users say, sure. But also watch what they do and interpret what they need. Eventbrite's Julia Hartz embodies this principle. She believes passionately in learning from her customers, and has made rapid response to user feedback the driving force...

You need a great story to build a great company. And great stories are unwaveringly true. No one embodies this principle more fully than Scott Harrison, founder of Charity: Water. A master storyteller, Scott built his nonprofit on 3 radical principles: (1) 100% of donations would go to water projects (not overhead). (2) Progress reports would be utterly transparent, sharing victories, defeats and...

You can marshal the power of millennials to grow your company, but you have to redefine your concept of loyalty. To keep millennials as users (and employees), you’ll need to keep evolving — and help them evolve. Brit + Co founder Brit Morin understand this: As a maker and media creator, Brit is constantly co-evolving with her (mostly millennial) audience and team. It’s a secret to scale with the g...

Your first hires are your cultural cofounders. And it’s worth your time to get every one right. That's why Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri personally interviewed his first 500 employees. Today, with 8,000+ employees and $2b in annual revenue, Workday is consistently rated one of the best places to work. Learn the interview questions that can help you find the right employees to build your culture. With c...

To revolutionize an industry, you have to cast off received wisdom. Shake Shack’s Danny Meyer knows this well. When he opened his first high-end restaurant in New York, Union Square Cafe, received wisdom told him food was the star attraction. But Danny knew to focus on how customers FEEL. And it’s this feeling – Danny calls it “enlightened hospitality” — that can scale. From his first innovative r...

To survive your entrepreneurial journey, you have to learn to recharge. Knowing when to turn the lights out may be the only way to keep the lights on. Few know this better than Arianna Huffington, who dramatically scaled the Huffington Post — and then experienced profound physical burnout. Her new venture, Thrive Global, scales the idea of balance across an organization. With cameo appearances fro...

Normally, trust = consistency + time. But when you're scaling fast, you have to find shortcuts to trust, with your partners and your users. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek knows a thing or two about this. When he founded Spotify, he did what few disruptors ever do: He worked with the industry he was trying to reinvent. How did Ek build a relationship with a music industry wary of piracy? He found shortcuts...

You can scale big with a simple idea (and a tiny team!) — but only if you catch the prevailing winds. That's what Kevin Systrom did when he co-founded Instagram: The simple photo app tapped the right trends, built on larger social networks, and dodged the complexities that would have slowed them down. The result? 30M users in 18 months. And a $1B sale of a 13-person company. With a cameo by Rohan...

Can't find the star employees you need? Then make them. That's what Marissa Mayer did when she founded the Associate Product Manager program in the early days of Google — one of the company's crown jewels. She mentored a team of young, hungry, talented employees in the ways of Google, and they helped drive its success. She followed that same mindset when she became CEO of Yahoo!, and in all of her...

To succeed, you have to be relentless about pursuing a big opportunity — and ruthless about killing your own bad ideas along the way. Zynga founder Mark Pincus upended the gaming industry with social games like Farmville and Words With Friends. And he did it by gathering data; killing ideas that didn't move the needle, and going all-in on the ones that did. With cameos by Andrea Jones-Rooy , data...

You may think that to scale you need to cut humans out of the equation. The opposite is true. You can harness the power of the "human cloud" to solve almost any problem — as long as you keep the word “human” in the equation. That's what TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot championed for this community of people who work with each other, teach each other, and continually learn from each other. With...

How to find your big idea? Look for it. And look for it. And be ready to act. Spanx founder Sara Blakely was actively seeking a business idea when she thought of Spanx (she shares a never-fail technique). Then she moved fast, found help in the right places, and went all-in. The result: A billion-dollar company and women's wardrobes transformed.. With cameos by National Geographic Explorer Andrés R...

You can make your social impact and your bottom line work hand-in-hand. But you'll have to be as creative and innovative about your company's values as you are about the business itself. Howard Schultz, chair and former CEO of Starbucks, not only changed how America wakes up, but set new standards for employee benefits. From offering college tuition to American employees to providing health care f...

Guest host Tim Ferriss shares advice you’ll want to etch into stone: the Ten Commandments of Startup Success. We teamed up with Tim’s own podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show , to bring you this special remix of actionable lessons from Masters of Scale Season One, including previously unaired insights from Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Endeavor’s Linda Rottenberg. Tim is the autho...

Never put a limit on your first idea. It could span your entire career. Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter and Medium (and before that: Blogger), shares what he learned in every iteration of his grand vision to connect the world’s brains. A reminder that passion and perseverance can be paths to scale. Cameos: "grit" expert Angela Duckworth and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Read Grit: The Power of...

The price that bleeds your business could also save it. When you invent something innovative, you can’t know how to price it on day one. First, get people in the door — get a LOT of people in the door — even if you have to price your product fatally low at first. In this episode, ClassPass founder and chair Payal Kadakia shares their winding path to pricing and how it revealed what was invaluable...

Forget being a unicorn. Learn to be a phoenix. Your company can last 100+ years — but you'll need the resilience to rise and fall, and rise again. Fiat’s chair John Elkann shares the principles that helped the "horseless carriage" company founded by his great-grandfather survive the ups and downs of a century of business — including competitor attacks, leader shakeups, financial crises and more. O...

Whatever you are when you're small gets amplified when you grow. So if you're starting any kind of online community (social media, ecommerce, crowdfunding), be careful what you cultivate. Caterina Fake has founded or invested in companies with interesting and influential communities — Flickr, Etsy, Kickstarter, Stack Overflow, even Blue Bottle Coffee. Her wise words for every founder: Yo...

To move from one success to another, you have to learn to unlearn. Take everything that helped you win the first time, then discard it and learn a new way. That's how Barry Diller, a titan of "old media" (at ABC, Paramount and Fox), mastered the new dot-com world — with everything from Expedia to Match.com. This is Part 2 of our epic interview with Barry Diller, and it features cameos from Uber's...

Tinder. Top Gun. Roots. The Simpsons. What do they have in common? Media icon Barry Diller. Barry is what we call an "infinite learner." He’s only interested in things he's never done before. And if they’ve never been done by anyone? Better yet. He succeeds by embracing that he is, in fact, a master of nothing. Entrepreneurs, take note: You just might be an infinite learner yourself, and Barry sha...

In your company’s darkest moment, remember: You CAN pivot from failure to success. But only if you slash and burn everything that isn’t working. Slack’s co-founder and CEO, Stewart Butterfield, has twice navigated this kind of Big Pivot. He launched two different game companies, which both (surprise!) turned into game-changing communications platforms: Flickr and Slack. Hear the thinking behind ma...