View From The Top

Daniela Amodei and her brother Dario lead Anthropic, one of the world’s biggest and most influential AI companies. It wasn’t in her career plan. “I really think of myself as a generalist,” Amodei tells Gintare Zukauskaite, MBA ’26, in a conversation recorded live at Stanford Graduate School of Business earlier this year. “If you were to look through my background, you would be like, ‘What is this...

When Demis Hassabis pitched DeepMind to a few venture capitalists back in 2010, the business plan was almost comically audacious. “Step one: Solve intelligence. Step two: Use it to solve everything else,” he recalls in a conversation at Stanford Graduate School of Business with Stanford University President Jonathan Levin. “And people were quite confused. But we really meant it.” Sixteen years lat...

Citi is one of the most important financial institutions in the world, moving $5 trillion a day across more than 100 countries. Jane Fraser has run it since 2021, when she became the first woman to lead one of America’s “Big Four” banks.  In a conversation with Sanil Rajput, MBA ‘26, on View From The Top: The Podcast , Fraser opens up about prioritizing her personal life, pursuing skills and...

Roblox founder and CEO David Baszucki was building a 3D, multiplayer, cloud-based world before almost anybody had thought about the metaverse. In a wide-ranging conversation with Jeremy Tepper, MBA ’26, on View From The Top: The Podcast , Baszucki describes how he created a company that’s become a household name. “My job is a constant re-architecture of myself,” he says.  From outlasting comp...

Alibaba, known as the “Amazon of China,” is one of the world’s most valuable companies. In a wide-ranging conversation on View From The Top: The Podcast , co-founder and chairman Joe Tsai recalls how it became the company it is today — and looks ahead to the company it may become.  Having access to AI, Tsai says, is like “having access to water and air.” He rejects the suggestion that the Uni...

“Being a reporter is the most fun an adult is allowed to have at work,” says A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher and chairman of The New York Times.  In a wide-ranging conversation with Amira Weeks, MBA ’26, on View From The Top: The Podcast , Sulzberger reflects on what it means to lead a 175-year-old media institution in a moment of intense political pressure and technological disruption. He exp...

This week on View From The Top we’re sharing an episode of GSB at 100 , a limited audio series created especially for Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Centennial. GSB at 100 presents a scrapbook of memories, ideas, and breakthroughs as Stanford GSB celebrates its first century and looks around the corner to what the next 100 years may hold.   On this episode of GSB at 100 , you’ll exper...

This week on View From The Top we’re sharing an episode of GSB at 100 , a limited audio series created especially for Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Centennial. GSB at 100 presents a scrapbook of memories, ideas, and breakthroughs as Stanford GSB celebrates its first century and looks around the corner to what the next 100 years may hold. On this episode of GSB at 100, you’ll step inside t...

At 30, Orlando Bravo, JD/MBA '97, thought his private equity career might be over. “I did three deals and when the dot-com bubble burst two out of the three went to zero,” he tells Gintare Zukauskaite, MBA ’26. “It was an absolute disaster.”  Mentor and firm principal Carl Thoma, MBA ’73, gave him one more chance. Bravo pitched software buyouts, and five years later — “one deal at a time” — h...

This week on [If/Then or View From The Top] we’re sharing an episode of GSB at 100 , a limited audio series created especially for Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Centennial. GSB at 100 presents a scrapbook of memories, ideas, and breakthroughs as Stanford GSB celebrates its first century and looks around the corner to what the next 100 years may hold. On this episode of GSB at 100 , you’ll...

This week on View From the Top we’re sharing an episode of GSB at 100 , a limited audio series created especially for Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Centennial. GSB at 100 presents a scrapbook of memories, ideas, and breakthroughs, as the GSB celebrates its first century and looks around the corner to what the next hundred years may hold. The first episode of the series begins where the GS...

Luis von Ahn was a tenured professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who had sold a company to Google. “You were pretty set, a lot of us would say, so why were you so hungry to build something new with Duolingo?” asks Ayesha Karnik, MBA ’25.  “For the first time ever, with phones, we can reach billions of people,” reflects the Duolingo co-founder and CEO. “I want it to be th...

Ken Griffin heads the most profitable hedge fund in history. But Citadel’s founder and CEO is focused on the future — not the scoreboard.    “I like to think I haven’t accomplished yet what I will be remembered for,” Griffin tells Michael Liu, MBA ’25. “That this is not a view from the top, but a journey to a destination yet to be determined.” From entrepreneurship — “If you want to...

Aravind Srinivas leads Perplexity — whose AI-powered search engine provides direct, sourced answers to any question you might ask it.  On this episode of View From The Top: The Podcast , Srinivas joins Aislin Rorth, MBA ’25, for a conversation that provides unique insight into how a young leader steers a late-stage startup with big aspirations — from finding a lane in consumer AI to rounding...

Lisa Su, the chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), leads one of the world’s most influential technology companies, a pioneer in high-performance computing and designer of chips that power everything from cellphones to supercomputers. On this episode of View From The Top: The Podcast , Su joins Michael Liu, MBA ’25, to talk about what it takes to stay on the cutting edge of technology, the...

Doug McMillon began his career unloading trucks. Forty years later, he’s Walmart’s president and CEO, a role he’s held for more than a decade.  On this episode of View From The Top: The Podcast , McMillon joins Aislin Roth, MBA ’25, to talk about what it takes to lead one of the world’s largest companies, from navigating billion-dollar decisions to modeling the retailer’s core values every da...

For more than a decade, Darren Walker has led the Ford Foundation — and has been singularly focused on inequality. Why?  “Because I want little boys and girls, wherever they are, if they're living in housing projects in the Bronx and they're Black or brown or they're living in rural towns that have been ravaged by opioids, I want them to be able to dream, and to feel as I did, that America wa...

Leena Nair doesn’t just talk about leadership — she redefines it. In a wide-ranging conversation with Ayesha Karnik, MBA ’25, Nair reflects on her journey from a factory floor in India to the corporate office in London, and ultimately, to Chanel’s C-suite.   With humor and heart, Nair describes how she approaches leading a global luxury brand, shares insights about risk and resilience, a...

In a candid conversation with Kailash Sundaram, MBA ’25, Roelof Botha, MBA ’00 — leader of one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world — reflects on his journey from South Africa to Sequoia Capital.  From meeting his wife and partner Huifen Chan, MBA '00, at Stanford Graduate School of Business, to lessons about ambition and failure, Botha reflects on his life and career so...

"If there are two things that have been foundational to my journey, it's been learning, and it's been the importance of taking risk." Hemant Taneja, managing partner and CEO of General Catalyst, shares his insights on leadership, innovation, and the evolving role of venture capital in this episode of  View From The Top, the podcast .  In his conversation with Shantam Jain, MBA '24, on th...

1,216. That’s the total number of NCAA games won by Tara VanDerveer , making her the all-time winning coach in college basketball history. In addition to coaching for 38 years at Stanford, she led the U.S. Women’s team to Olympic gold in 1996 – finishing with a flawless 16-0 record. “Coaching is teaching. It’s really trying to help people go to places they can’t go themselves,” says VanDerveer. “T...

“It wasn’t luck. I worked every single second of the day – I was obsessed with it. I wanted independence for myself, for my family, and I didn’t want to go back to Jacksonville.” In 2022, Daniella Pierson was named the youngest, wealthiest, self-made BIPOC woman in the world by Forbes . The 28-year-old grew her first company, The Newsette , to a $200 million dollar valuation without taking on...

"You can learn how something can be done and then go back to first principles and ask yourself, 'Given the conditions today, given my motivation, given the instruments, the tools, given how things have changed, how would I redo this? How would I reinvent this whole thing?" Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, started his career washing dishes at Denny's. He then worked his way to busboy and, e...

"My first piece of advice is only take the role if you are really interested in it. Startups are hard," says Aicha Evans, CEO of Zoox. "And when it's tough, you find a way, you make a way, you back up the boat, you reassess, you pivot. And so if you don't have that irrational belief and pull, don't do it." Aicha Evans took the role of CEO at autonomous vehicle company Zoox in 2019. And in 2020, sh...

"The secret sauce of being a successful creator on the platform is just being true to yourself. And that sounds sort of very cliché, but I wish somebody had given me that advice early in my career because nothing rings more true." Neal Mohan , MBA ’05 and the CEO of YouTube, visited the Stanford campus as part of View From The Top. Mohan sat down with Shannon Beckham, MBA ’24, to discuss his backg...