View From The Top

“In companies, you don’t want just the product team thinking about the product; the finance team thinking about finance ... You want everyone all the time feeling like they’re an owner, and they can have a point of view on any part of the company.” In this View From The Top interview,  Sarah Friar , MBA ’00, CEO of Nextdoor, sits down with Zack Doherty, MBA ’24. During their conversation...

"I've seen unbelievable change happen in places that the world sees as not investible. Part of storytelling is doing the work of investing so that people can tell their own stories because of the changes they've made." In 1986 Jacqueline Novogratz quit her job on Wall Street and moved to Rwanda to help open the country's first microfinance institution. She then came to Stanford GSB in 1989, and, i...

"Now also in that meeting, I asked her, 'Could you introduce me to a few of your friends? I’d love to meet with them and talk about this idea.' Because every meeting has to get you to three other meetings. Never leave a meeting with someone without asking them for that introduction." In this View From The Top interview, Rent the Runway founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman shares stories from her first m...

“If you can create unreasonable expectations, people amaze you with their creativity.” In this  View From The Top  interview, Shantanu Narayen, Chairman and CEO of Adobe, spoke with Sankalp Banerjee, MBA ’23, about his personal evolution as a leader, including the last 16 years as CEO. Narayen discussed the importance of innovative thinking across multiple scales, seeking opportunit...

In April and March of 2020, as shelter-in-place mandates swept the globe and travel halted, bookings on Airbnb plummeted. With an 80% revenue loss, the company had to lay off nearly a quarter of its workforce.  "When you’re our size, and the business drops by 80 percent in eight weeks, it's is like being in an 18-wheeler going 80 miles-an-hour, and then you slam on the brakes," Airbnb co...

“You know what kind of culture you have by how your employees are feeling on Sunday night when they think about getting ready to go back to work on Monday morning.” When Cynt Marshall was hired as the CEO of the Dallas Mavericks in 2018, she presented her vision: that the organization would become a global standard for inclusion and diversity. “I truly believe if you have an inclusive culture...

"For me, the thing that stood out was my difference. I wasn’t chasing the thing that others were chasing. I was chasing the things that lived with my values." In this View From The Top interview, Tristan Walker MBA ’10, founder and CEO of Walker & Company, sits down with James Yan, MBA '23, to talk about his journey from Stanford GSB to entrepreneur. Walker shares a story from day he'll n...

"If you want to build the future, don't look to the future. Look to something that's in the corner in the present." In this episode of  View From The Top,  the podcast, Andy Dunn MBA ’07, founder and CEO of Bonobos, sits down with Cyerra Holmes, MBA '23, to talk about his journey building a clothing company while a student at Stanford GSB. He also shares stories from his recent...

"My number one priority is to make sure Zoom employees are happy. I believe if you have happy employees, you’re going to have happy customers." Eric Yuan, SEP '06, founded Zoom in 2011 to "deliver happiness and bring people together" in a frictionless video environment. In 2019, Eric led Zoom to one of the highest-performing tech IPOs of the year. But it was the next year that reall...

"Entrepreneurship is in my DNA. In my own life journey, I've come to appreciate the significance of entrepreneurship in transforming communities, in transforming countries, societies, and humanity." Tony Elumelu, a Nigerian businessman, billionaire, philanthropist, and champion of African entrepreneurs, is a steadfast believer that the private sector has a role to play in developing countries acro...

"Figure out what the big moments where you can bring your teams together are. It cures a lot of ills. It really helps with morale. It's incredible for team building." In this episode of View From The Top, the podcast, Gwynne Shotwell, the president and COO of SpaceX, sits down with Christopher Stromeyer, MBA '22, to discuss risk-taking, feedback, and her pre-launch ritual. Watch this int...

Alexandra Eitel, MBA ’22, sits down with Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe to discuss breaking down inequality through genetics and how leaders should build trust by being unabashedly honest. “The guiding principle for 23andMe is transparency and choice. It’s the choice whether you want to get your genetic information, the choice if you want to participate in research, the choice that y...

"You have to encourage innovation. Companies become more conservative in decision making as you grow...be okay with failure and reward effort, not outcomes." In this episode of  View From The Top , the podcast, CEO of Google and Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, speaks to Archana Sohmshetty, MBA '22, about the impact of access to technology, humanity's challenge to harness it, and how Google is sustai...

"If you talk about and comment on everything, your voice becomes background noise ... It's important [for brands] to be clear what matters most to us and why. What's our purpose? Why do we exist?" In this episode of  View From The Top, the podcast , Dara Treseder, MBA '14, Peloton's global head of marketing, communications, and membership discusses how she found her purpose as a leader and wh...

When David Vélez, MBA '12, moved to Brazil in 2008 to open a regional office for a private equity fund, he didn’t expect one of his biggest challenges to be getting a bank account. The process took five months. Five years later, he was in São Paulo after working as a partner for Sequoia Capital, a venture firm, and has just graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business. To him, Brazil’s...

“You have to be very humble if you want to be an entrepreneur…know what you know and know what you don’t know.” In this episode of  View From The Top, the podcast,  Jessica Alba, founder of The Honest Company, sits down with Alexandra Eitel, MBA '22 to discuss how entrepreneurs have to trust their gut.   View From the Top is drawn from the dean’s speaker series in which pr...

"People will give you credit, but 99% of it is not you,” said Hamdi Ulukaya, CEO of Chobani, in a  View From The Top  interview on campus. “It's the environment that you created.”  Interviewed by Alexandra Eitel, MBA ’22, Ulukaya also discussed how businesses can benefit from hiring and training refugees in their community. "Refugees can come into society and a community....

MercadoLibre e-commerce, the eBay of Latin America, is a $28 billion company. At its roots are three friends who met at Stanford GSB. In this  View From The Top  speaker series, MercadoLibre founders Marcos Galperín, MBA ’99; Hernan Kazah, MBA ’99; and Stelleo Tolda, MBA ’99 discuss the team dynamics of starting a company with classmates and the contrarian views that helped them succeed....

“My story is not an exceptional story. It could have been the story of any girl if their fathers and brothers had allowed them to speak out.” In this  View From The Top  interview, activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, shares her mission mission to ensure that all 130 million girls who are out of school can have access to education. “My goal is to meet these girls,...

"What I've found with our players, is that the guys who have the most balance in their lives, are the ones who know how to handle all this stuff the best," said Steve Kerr, head coach of the NBA's Golden State Warriors, in a  View From The Top  interview on campus. "Work-life balance is just crucial." Interviewed by Rustom Birdie, MBA '22, Kerr compared leading on the court to...

In this View From The Top interview, Thasunda Brown Duckett , president and CEO of TIAA, recalls her childhood experience moving from New York to Texas in a car packed with everything her parents and two siblings owned and why she knew from a young age that she had the power to make progress. In her conversation with Adriann Negreros, MBA ’21, Duckett talks about how to change social inequities by...

In this View From The Top interview,  Priscilla Chan , cofounder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, shares the story of her refugee family fleeing Vietnam and what it was like for her growing up as an Asian American in the Catholic suburbs of Boston. In a conversation with Rex Woodbury, MBA ’21, Chan discusses how the values she learned as a young girl have given her the...

As the CEO of Gap Inc., Sonia Syngal’s brand is to create with audacity. In this View From The Top conversation with Adriann Negreros, MBA ’21, Syngal discusses her career, from her start in the auto industry to her recent experience guiding a major retailer through the pandemic. “It's like that Apollo 13 moment when you just have to get it done and the situation requires us to step into the leade...

As the CEO of Land O'Lakes, Beth Ford connects her working-class Midwestern childhood with her success running a farmer-owned cooperative . In in this  View From The Top  episode, Ford talks to Adriann Negreros, MBA ‘21, about being the first openly gay female CEO of a Fortune 500 company and how she’s succeeded in a male-dominated industry. “You want to have humility, but you can’t be s...

Having lived in 4 countries by the age of 12 and growing up the only Ghanaian family in a predominantly white town in Colorado, Bozoma St. John had an expansive worldview at a young age. In this View From The Top interview conducted by Jessica Lawson, MBA ’21, the chief marketing officer of Netflix discusses the importance of not comparing yourself to others and how content can spark curiosity and...