461 episodes
Masters of Scale Masters of Scale
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- Business
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4.7 • 25 Ratings
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On Masters of Scale, iconic business leaders share lessons and strategies that have helped them grow the world's most fascinating companies. Founders, CEOs, and dynamic innovators join candid conversations about their triumphs and challenges with a set of luminary hosts, including founding host Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner). From navigating early prototypes to expanding brands globally, Masters of Scale provides priceless insights to help anyone grow their dream enterprise.
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Local veggies, national scale: Sweetgreen co-founders
What started with three college friends looking for a healthy lunch in D.C. grew into Sweetgreen, a fast-growing restaurant business focused on salads and grain bowls. From a tiny 500-square-foot storefront to more than 220 locations nationwide, the Sweetgreen journey includes booking The Strokes for a "salad festival," adopting cutting-edge technology, and proving that fast food can include locally-sourced, farm-fresh ingredients. Listen to co-founders Jonathan Neman, Nathaniel Ru, and Nicolas Jammet share how they have scaled the business in alignment with its core values, to a public company valued at $2.5 billion.
Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com
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Meet your kid’s new AI tutor, w/Khan Academy founder and CEO Sal Khan
Khan Academy first rocked the education world with online video. Now Khan Academy CEO and founder Sal Khan has gone all-in on AI, convinced that it has immense potential to democratize and improve education. Khan tells Rapid Response host Bob Safian how an early outreach from OpenAI led Khan Academy to create an AI assistant called Khanmigo, which is already being used by thousands of students and teachers. Khan shares lessons from this real-world experiment, plus the inspiration behind his new book, Brave New Words, and why the most educated among us tend to avoid the risks worth taking.
Pre-order Sal Khan’s new book, Brave New Words: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/740806/brave-new-words-by-salman-khan/
Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com
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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. -
Fighting media's reality distortion, w/Axios CEO Jim VandeHei
Every day we’re inundated with news and opinion pieces about America’s hopeless division — but is this really true? Axios CEO Jim VandeHei joins Rapid Response host Bob Safian to bust what he sees as myth, plus share his seemingly counterintuitive AI play. VandeHei also makes a case for why the era of business leaders speaking out on political issues may be behind us, and he weighs-in on the state of Buzzfeed, NPR, and where the future of news media is inevitably headed.
Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com
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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. -
Preserve start-up spirit at scale: Techstars’ Maëlle Gavet
Maëlle Gavet is the CEO of Techstars, a pre-seed investor focused on early-stage entrepreneurs. It boasts a market cap of $111.6 billion, and supports founders in programs that span from Tokyo to Lagos to Alabama. Maëlle champions hard work, gratitude, and a questioning nature, qualities her grandfather imparted while she was growing up in France. She has carried her curiosity through a wide-ranging international career, in start-ups and scaled corporations. We hear lessons drawn from her vast experience, including the transformation of Ozon — the "Amazon of Russia" — in the early 2010s, to leadership roles in global travel and real estate. And we get a sample of the advice she often shares with Techstars’ founders, about how to balance their values and the needs of their company, always with an optimism about entrepreneurship as a force for good.
Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com
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How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman
The streaming wars have reached a new inflection, as Netflix and Disney+ jostle for position, and in the process disrupt post-strike Hollywood. Paramount+ invested heavily in blockbuster veteran Alex Kurtzman to turn Star Trek into a distinguishing franchise. Now Kurtzman talks with Rapid Response host Bob Safian about the future of streaming, the end of TV’s golden age, and how courting Trekkies offers lessons for all customer engagement. Plus, Kurtzman shares behind the scenes stories of Star Trek’s past, present and future.
Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com
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How AI adds to human potential: (LIVE) with Scale AI’s Alex Wang and Intel’s Lama Nachman
Generative AI is advancing at a breakneck pace, prompting questions on risk and opportunity, from content creation to personal data management. In a special live recording, we delve into the ways AI can augment human work and spur innovation, instead of simply using AI to cut costs or replace jobs. Host Jeff Berman joined a seasoned AI researcher, Intel's Lama Nachman, and a young start-up founder, Scale AI's Alexandr Wang, on stage at the Intel Vision event in April 2024. They explore topics like AI’s disruption of creative industries, mitigating its biggest risks (like deepfakes), and why human critical thinking will be even more vital as AI technology spreads.
Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com
Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Customer Reviews
Best podcast On entrepreneurship I have listened to
If you are interested in learning about success and failures of huge business successes, listen to this! Reid is an amazing and humble host of high caliber guests. He conducts these talks with mastery (no interruptions and great leading questions). As a proud European, I loved the episode on Shopify - more please 😁!
Water hooked me
I stumbled upon the episode with Charity Water after I read an article online about Masters of Scale. A wonderful introduction to your show. Love the format and tempo.
An amazing show with useful lessons!!!
As a leader of a software product development team, my role is to build an innovative, high performance team. Continuous learning about engineering practices and product development becomes a must, for me to be able to fulfil my role. I'm an active listener of masterofscale.com and se-radio.net, an active reader (and writer) of medium, quora and stackoverflow. Being a father of a now 11-month baby, I have to fit my learning to small period of free time during the day. Sometimes it is 30 minutes at night after my baby sleeps, sometimes during 15-minute train to work. Gradually I realise that listening to podcast is much more easier, as I can listen while cleaning the floor or washing the dishes. I came to know about masterofscale podcast only 1 month ago but since then it's been part of my daily learning.
The best thing about masterofscale, is I get to hear from the successful and famous leaders from startups and corporations around the world. It is really exciting to hear from top leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings, and of course Reid Hoffman talking about topics of my interests. After all, my goal is to build a successful, scalable product and a high performance team, and I've learnt a lot from the show lessons which help me to achieve that goal. The most recent lesson I learnt from the show is from the CEO of Y Combinator "love is better than like".
In general, the content is good, the structure is good, the narrator is good, the explanation is good. Especially, in assessing a statement of guest speakers, Reid often relates it to relevant real stories from other companies or leaders, or relates it to previous episode content of the show. This is a great way to dive deep into a statement and assess it. Some people say that the sounds and animations are a bit too much. At first I am unfamiliar with it and have almost the same feeling, but after few episodes I start to think it is one of the factor distinguishing this show with others. Most other professional podcasts I listen to have no musics in the middle - only the interviewer and the guests speaking. The minus point of the show with a person using English as 2nd language like myself, is that sometimes there are formal (and probably not commonly used) words - but it is not so much of trouble as I can re-listen or find the transcript in the webpage.
The ads played during episode is surprisingly not annoying at all. As a person who thrives to learn and know about new things, I actually find it fascinated to hear about how other innovative companies solving real life problems. It goes in sync with the content of the show and purpose of the show. If it plays some ads for the purpose of e.g. encourage sales of KFC or Cocacola or such things like that then it'll become annoying and funny. Please, keep the ads about innovative companies. Another comment about monetization, if I was asked would I pay for subscription, my answer is yes, provided that it comes together with some kind of real live interactions with guest speakers or masterofscale team.
After I finish one episode, I often follow up by Googling the name of the speakers, read wikipedia about them, find some more relevant Youtube video of them speaking, and adding or following them in Linkedin. So far, I followed almost all the speakers I listened, and surprisingly one famous speaker actually accepted my invitation to connect. I plan to follow their posts and articles on Linkedin and comment and discuss my ideas with them in their articles - although I still couldn't find time to do it and although they might not have any time to response to unknown guests. I do like discussion and sharing of knowledge. I posted on my Faccebook and Linkedin to introduce about this show to my friends. I promoted this show in Engineering Tech Talk Slack channel of my company, as the admin of the channel and one of organizers of our Tech talk. I wish one day I could bring a famous guest to our engineering talk.
I hope I've done my best to give my honest review about this show. I described my persona, good things, bad things, my position about common feedback, suggestions about ads and monetization, my behavior of listening and following up - pretty much all the helpful things I can think of to feedback to the team. Hope it helps on your decision to improve the show, and hope that I'll get the Blitz scaling book signed by Reid. Good luck for myself, and congratulation to Masterofscale team for your excellent work. Thank you.
More about persona if you'd like to know:
Vietnamese expat living in Malaysia
Junior manager level, aged 29.
Industry: Software, Fintech