FourWeekMBA Gennaro Cuofano

Gerry Campbell, CEO, Entrepreneur, and Author. Former Senior Vice President and Group General Manager at AOL, between 2001-2006. And today CEO at Kryptonomic.io (https://www.kryptonomic.io/), helps you understand your customers and deliver the Web3 projects they love.With Gerry, we go through the early years of the commercial Internet. The first tech giants, as walled gardens. The rise of search engines, and from there the take over of Google. A startup in the mid-90s become a tech behemoth by the early 2000s. We revisit the history of the key events that led to the rise of Google and many interesting events in between. Gerry’s incredible experience at CompuServe, Compaq, AltaVista, and AOL is an incredible opportunity to make sense of these events.Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:Gerry, thank you for joining this conversation on the Four-Week MBA podcast, and it's a pleasure for me because you have an incredible experience, especially in a period of time that was an important transition, it actually represented an important transition for the internet, for what today we call Web 1 or Web 1.0. But really, you have been actually senior vice president and group general manager for AOL during the period of 2001-2006, you also have been at AltaVista CompuServe. So, when I looked at your past experience, to me, it was such a pleasure to invite you for this conversation, so thanks for joining.Gerry Campbell:Oh, I'm excited to be here. There's so much really cool history that I was fortunate enough to observe, participate in a little bit of, and I love to share the stories because it's a time when nobody was really looking, there was really cool stuff going on, and it turned out to be important. And I think we had the idea at the time, but I love going through this stuff. It's fun to share, and there are some really great business principles as well.Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:Yeah. And that's the whole aim of the podcast. So, we try to look and dig into very interesting business stories and history and try to reconstruct it based on the people that really lived through it.So, to start a little bit from your perspective, How did you end up working for several of the first big tech players on the internet in the first internet era? How did you end up there? How did it feel to work for those companies at the time?Gerry Campbell:Yeah, sure. So, I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, which is an unexpected place maybe by some to be involved in such early things, but I grew up just miles from CompuServe, which was one of the very first online services actually dating all the way back to the late 1960s, so there was a big history there. It was an established company. My personal interest was I'd always been a tinkerer, I got in trouble for tearing my bikes apart, and I got in trouble for taking computers apart as I got older, and so as a tinkerer, obviously, and I think I was an entrepreneur as well. Science showed very early because I started a bike shop in fourth grade or something like that. So, the internet and the technologies to me were fascinating.So, I got a copy of WIRED Magazine number issue two, and it talked about this online world and it was happening in IRC chat. And I think I was probably in my early twenties at the time and my attention was just captured. I thought this was the coolest thing ever. I'd been up to my elbows inside my Mac at that time and taken it all apart and was just fascinated with things it could connect to, and I was goofing around places and pulling files and telnetting and all that crazy stuff. So, I worked in between undergraduate school and then went back to Ohio State. I Actually went to Ohio State twice, which is in Columbus,

In this episode, Jimmy Soni (Author & speechwriter) and former managing editor of The Huffington Post tells us the story of one of the most interesting startups of the early Internet era. A company that wrote the rules of startup growth, and the business playbook that many startups would later on follow.Jimmy Soni is also known for A Mind at Play, his award-winning biography of Claude Shannon known as "the father of information theory."In this episode, we're covering the story behind PayPal, based on: The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. Gennaro:Thanks for joining this conversation, Jimmy, it's a pleasure to me because you wrote an incredible book called The Founders where you actually tell the story of the PayPal founders, and also the people behind PayPal. Thanks a lot for joining this conversation.Jimmy:Well, thank you for having me and for the kind words, and also for taking the time to read the book. It's funny, the book is longer than I thought it would be. And I think some of my readers have said it's taken them a little while, so I appreciate you taking a look at an early copy and spending some time reading it.Gennaro:Yeah. Actually thank you. Because it was a pleasure, I'm really honored to have had the chance to look at the initial manuscript before the launch, it's incredible research. You've done an incredible job. The story, it's so incredible, and I want to start from here because of course I know because I already read the manuscript why you were drawn to tell the PayPal story, but let me ask you what drove you to actually cover a story of a company that yes, defined the internet business playbook but was a company that was launched more than 20 years ago. What prompted you to research the PayPal story? Jimmy:Yeah. I came at this in a little bit of an accidental way. As my projects tend to go. I had finished up a book on a mathematician and electrical engineer named Claude Shannon and Claude Shannon had worked at Bell Laboratories in the 20th century. And Bell Labs was just the most extraordinary collection of talented people. And they had invented the transistor, they had won multiple Nobel Prizes. They invented the laser, they invented touch-tone dialing.And I started to think about, and honestly just go down Wikipedia rabbit holes of, what are other places like this, not individual talents, but clusters, groups of talented people? And I looked at Fairchild Semiconductor, which is a famous example. I looked at Zeropark, another example, general magic stood out in history. And someone had done either great books or great documentaries on those three subjects. And so, I fast-forwarded in the history and the late 1990s in Silicon Valley, the place is on fire. There's so much happening, there's so much money, so much ambition.And in that particular environment, you find this company created called PayPal and PayPal turns out to be the finishing school for this whole generation of entrepreneurs. Some are obviously household names, people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman. But there's a whole cast of characters there that maybe don't make the front pages of the headlines, but learned a lot from their time there. And I went into it just not really knowing what I was doing in the sense that I just figured, "Okay. There's probably a book on this."And then when I discovered that there should have needed to be more work done, I just started contacting people. And before long, I discovered that there really was something that happened at PayPal in the late 1990s and early 2000s and that the story deserved to be told, but that's how I came to it.Gennaro:Wow.

In this episode, we interview Matthew Leising, formerly reporter of Bloomberg news between 2004-2021.Now the co-founder of DeCential Media (https://decential.io/), and author of a great book:Out of the Ether: The Amazing Story of Ethereum and the $55 Million Heist that Almost Destroyed It All(https://i0.wp.com/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51mSHCTPuIL._SX336_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg?w=1154&ssl=1)Matt made his book available as a special edition, as an NFT collection at outoftheether.net. (https://outoftheether.net/)We cover the story (https://fourweekmba.com/business-storytelling/) of Ethereum of the early years, up to the DAO hack which would define the Ethereum governance for years to come, and it would be one of the most important events that defined the Ethereum ecosystem.Gennaro:Thanks Matt for joining this conversation, it’s a pleasure to have you here.Thank you for putting together such a book that is Out of The Ether. Which is the story (https://fourweekmba.com/business-storytelling/) of the DAO, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization hack, but it’s way more than that. It’s the story of Ethereum in the early days, in the early years, it’s an incredible story. So the effort that went into the book for the people that will be reading it, it’s incredible. So thanks for taking the time. But so, let’s start from there. What prompted you to cover Ethereum? Matt Leising:Yeah, of course. So I’ve been a reporter my whole life, a lot of that was spent at Bloomberg News and I was covering Wall Street and finance went through the financial (https://fourweekmba.com/financial-accounting/) crisis and all of that as a reporter. And my beat was market structure, which is like, how do markets work? What’s the kind of regulation that people are facing? Legislation is there, does this market need to be updated? So I was covering that for the derivatives market and the bond market for Bloomberg for many years.So once I finally understood what blockchain technology was, I realized it could really change the things that I was writing about. And this was around the same time that Wall Street was starting to wake up to that Bitcoin wasn’t just a cryptocurrency, it had this blockchain technology that for the first time allowed you to engage in trustless transactions with anyone around the world, which was transformative.So that was in 2015, I started covering blockchain as part of my beat, like I said, Wall Street was getting involved, so it was a really good time to write about it because there was a lot of interest, and to be honest not a lot of people knew much about it. So it was fun to just learn and write as I went along. So, it started just with blockchain in general, and then Ethereum had just been released in 2015, I didn’t start paying attention to it until early 2016 because there was this project that everyone was getting excited about called the DAO, it’s the Decentralized Autonomous Organization.And I’ve written it, that’s a terrible name come up by coders that is meant to scare children in the night. But basically what this was, was, in traditional finance you have venture capital firms that have money and they want to find startups to invest in, to help them grow their business (https://fourweekmba.com/business-strategy/) and get off the ground, and then also have an investment stake in these companies that they can then sell for lots of 

In this session, I interview Eliot Brown, a reporter at Wall Street journal since 2010, and author of:The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion(https://i0.wp.com/fourweekmba.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/cult-of-we.png?resize=676%2C1024&is-pending-load=1#038;ssl=1)We recount one of the most incredible startup stories of the last decade. The story of WeWork (https://fourweekmba.com/wework-business-model/), and how it went from being the most valuable startup on earth in a few years to almost risking going bankrupt, in a series of dramas, conflict of interests, and turns of events!This story is also turning into an Apple TV+ series.What was your background when you actually started to cover WeWork? What actually prompt you to cover the WeWork story?Eliot Brown:Yeah, so it was many years ago that I first came upon them. I was at the Wall Street Journal in 2013 covering commercial real estate and the office market. I was just interested in new trends in the office market and how people were working. A lot of people were talking about co-working spaces. So I went down to lower Manhattan and met this one company that was leasing a lot of space. I heard the CEO was kind of fun and talkative, so that’s when I first came upon them when I met with Adam Neumann.Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:Oh. I guess at the time, WeWork was one of the hottest companies in New York. It was very easy to end up hearing about that. But can you tell us a little bit more about the background of Neumann, who was the founder of WeWork. How was Adam Neumann’s life before getting in New York and the experiences that brought Neumann to actually create WeWork in the first place? Eliot Brown:Yeah. He had a pretty interesting life. He grew up in Israel largely. He did a brief stint in the U.S., but his parents were doctors, they were divorced. His mom was kind of unstable and always moving them around, always spending all the money she had. So they were running out of money, even though she had a decent-paying career. He spent some time on a Kibbutz, which communal socialist experiment type thing in Israel. Someone we talked to remembers that even then when he was just a teenager, he was always brash and had this real desire to make money, which is kind of a funny thing to come out of a socialist-communist little village.Fast forward, he did some time in the Navy in Israel, as is compulsory. Then he just wanted to get to New York and become rich. So he moved there. His sister was a supermodel, lived with her. She mostly supplied the money and he tried to start a baby clothes company, or he did start a baby clothes company that tried to make clothing that had knee pads for babies when they’re crawling. It was called Krawlers. The idea was that babies, their knees must hurt so here’s a way to make it so they don’t, and didn’t go very well.Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:Yeah. Also, because I mean, at the time he was a guy in his 20s, and he was selling like a product for babies. He didn’t have babies, actually, probably didn’t even understand what being a parent was at the time. But also there is another interesting paradox of this whole story, which is quite curious. As you said, when he was a kid he had the chance to actually hang out in a Kibbutz, which is a sort of closed, gated community where there is this sort of communism where you share everything. How important was this experience to Adam Neumann, on the negative side and also on the positive side?Eliot Brown:Yeah. I mean, well, I’ll tell you what he said. Though,

In this episode of the FourWeekMBA podcast, I interview Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica since 2015, Founder And Editor of Space City Weather, and author of:Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX(https://i0.wp.com/fourweekmba.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Screenshot-2022-02-15-at-17.48.05.png?resize=673%2C1024&is-pending-load=1#038;ssl=1)Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:Eric, thanks for joining this conversation. It’s a pleasure to have you in this session.Eric Berger:Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you.How did you actually get to cover SpaceX? What was the background that made you actually write the book in the first place?Eric Berger:Yeah, I mean, I’ve been covering space for a long time. I’m based in Houston, Texas, where Johnson Space Center is located. And so space is a big part of the fabric of community here. It became clear to me about a decade ago that the real future of space flight, at least in the United States, was in the private sector. It was at that point that SpaceX was just starting to take off. And then they’ve had really tremendous success over about the last five years with all the rockets they’ve launched, putting humans into orbit, and demonstrating reuse.And so it was back in about 2018 that I realized that SpaceX basics was not just sort of a really interesting company. They were really transforming the industry and continue to do so. And I wanted to understand why they had been successful. And so I was wondering, is this because of Elon Musk or did he just get lucky? Is he really as involved as he says he is? And so it was sort of with the goal of answering those questions that I embarked upon the project of really understanding the beginnings of SpaceX.Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:Yeah. Interesting. And for a little bit of context to the audience, because in this series, I also had an interview with the author of The Founders, which is a book about PayPal. And it’s a very interesting connection because actually when Elon Musk used the funding for SpaceX, it was actually the money that Elon Musk managed to get from an exit from PayPal. It was like around 2002 when PayPal was acquired by eBay, and that was what gave him actually the money to get started with SpaceX.And the interesting notice also that just one or a couple years before Musk had been ousted from the company, because he had been like the CEO of the company, and then there was a sort of interesting story behind it because Max Levchin and David Sachs organized, let’s say, ousting of Musk from PayPal. And there is a whole story behind it, which is very interesting and we cover in the other episode. Why did Musk get started with SpaceX? I mean, he is a software guy, one of the most incredible people that, of course, you have in business. But why did he get to space?Eric Berger:Yeah, I mean, it’s really interesting that he went from software into space flight, and then not too long after that, into electric vehicles. And I think the answer really begins with his unique personality. He is very much an engineer, and so he looks at the world, sees problems, and wants to solve them. And so I think after he’d sort of made it with PayPal in the sense that he was now sort of well off and could do the things that he wanted to do, he started to look around.

For this episode, I interviewed Patty Civalleri, an author at 1-TAKE Publishing LLC. She authored many incredible travel guides. And she made sure the memoir of Joe Coulombe could come to life!Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/laf_YjRssJh6dzPq7EA55oB4a7blehaKAcHPUYFjyFyc-Ohzy9zJlJVmT6orbdRtV9CJ-Pb1-8hZtb4Q7cHHV6_rvcxLGAtudopBlzp40kUCMdtAsD1hFDNQCPSMwn4x-8txFkBd)  (https://www.linkedin.com/company/8199840/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base%3BgaKrazW2TXSEeQvMB7B%2B%2FQ%3D%3D)Can we get a little bit into the story and the context of how you got into this book and the initial years of Trader Joe's as a company?Patty Civalleri:Yes. I got involved in the stories socially and Joe had written a journal about the founding of Trader Joe's and he held onto it and made changes over the years, and one day he found it in a box and didn't know what to do with it, so he gave it to his first employee Mr. Leroy Watson, who is a very close friend of my husband. And because we've been friends with Mr. Watson for many, many years, I have met Joe socially, gosh, many times over the last couple decades. So when Joe asked Leroy to do something with this book, Leroy came to me and he said, "Patty, you have published many books, can you help us do something with this book?" And I had written many books about Italy for travelers being a historian and Italy has the coolest history in the world.I took a look at the manuscript and I fell in love with Joe's story, what a great story. So I looked at it it was very raw, it needed a lot of work, so I spent many months bringing the manuscript, cleaning it up and making it work and rearranging everything. And I sat down with my agent and said, "Paul, can we sell this manuscript?" And we got several bids for the manuscript, but the winning bid was from HarperCollins, one of the largest American publishers in the world and that's how we got the story published.And as soon as we signed the contract with HarperCollins, the following week Joe passed away, which was a very sad event, and left me wondering how on earth I was going to promote this book without Joe, because he is clearly the center pin of all of this. But I realized that since Joe's passing it's much more important now to get his story out and get his history out, so that his story is not lost to history and doesn't get lost. So the book was published late last summer and it's gone global, we're so extremely happy with it and it looks like a book that's going to be around for a long time, so we're quite happy.Gennaro:Yeah. As I was telling you I'm very glad that the book came to life because it's an evergreen, the story it's very compelling, it's contemporary, the way it is written it's very practical.