Daniel Schmid Crafts A Sustainability Playbook For SAP
Software giant SAP is a global leader in many social responsibility realms. Daniel Schmid, SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer, discussed how the company became a leader in international corporate sustainability efforts, why he’s optimistic and what’s next. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Karen Walker: Daniel, you were in a senior management role for […]
McGraw Hill’s Simon Allen: An Accidental CEO Leads Global EdTech
McGraw Hill, the 130 year-old educational publishing company, is now a leading global provider of digital products and services in education, medical, business and trade sectors. I recently met with president and CEO Simon Allen and discussed McGraw Hill’s decades old shift to digital from print. We also spoke about topics including M&A, the broader macro impact that […]
David Chubak: Leading With Humble Hustle At Citi
David Chubak, Citi’s CEO of Retail Services, which services 78 million co-brand and private label credit card accounts ($92 billion in purchase sales), partners with a diverse group of merchants to support their commercial growth. We spoke recently about how the bank is responding to changes in the industry and consumer behavior, and his career […]
Lessons From Formula E Racing For High-Performance Teams
Most Americans are familiar with Formula 1 racing, popularized by the Netflix show Drive to Survive. Much less well-known is a fascinating analog, Formula E racing, which was created in 2012 with a mission to show “just what sustainable mobility was capable of, driving electric vehicles to the fore in the race for a better, cleaner future.” […]
Tom And Darr Aley’s Aidentified: The Relationship Cloud Reimagining Sales Ops
Tom and Darr Aley are twin brothers with a stellar track record in founding and managing successful companies such as Generate, which was acquired by Dow Jones in 2009, and were early investors in companies such as Netprospex, which was acquired by D&B in 2016. Aidentified is their latest venture, founded to solve a problem they identified early in their careers: how to quickly […]
ReliaQuest CEO Brian Murphy Finds Success Through Hard Work And Tailwinds
Brian Murphy, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm ReliaQuest, listened to his clients and led the company through a shift to a SaaS based model. ReliaQuest recently announced a new round of funding led by global investment firm KKR, with a pre-money valuation of more than $1 billion. We spoke about what it took for the […]
Christina Kosmowski, LogicMonitor’s New Customer Centric CEO
Christina Kosmowski established her career creating customer success at hyper-growth companies Salesforce and Slack. We recently discussed her path and her appointment as CEO at LogicMonitor, the cloud-based infrastructure monitoring and observability platform provider. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Karen Walker: You previously held senior positions at Salesforce and Slack, and came to […]
Inflection’s CEO Mike Grossman: Good People, Good Values, Good Business
Mike Grossman has been a software entrepreneur and CEO for more than 20 years. He joined background screening company Inflection in 2018 and has steered their entry into the enterprise space. We spoke recently about the modernization of the screening business and how the values of his organization are the key component of their success. This interview […]
Offensive Security’s Ning Wang: Following Her Passion From Physics To Cybersecurity CEO
Ning Wang, CEO at Offensive Security (OffSec), joined the company with a mandate to transform the business model into a subscription-based learning platform. We recently spoke about her path to becoming a CEO and about OffSec’s “secret sauce” in the cybersecurity training world. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Karen Walker: Ning, you have a […]
Shelly Kapoor Collins: Creating Access To Capital, Networks And Markets For Women
Shelly Kapoor Collins is a partner at Sway Ventures and the founding partner at the Shatter Fund. She’s also held a variety of positions in the public sector, including a position on the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) in the second Obama administration. We spoke recently about the impetus behind Shatter, her decision to join […]
CEO Brian Doubles Leads $16 Billion Financial Services Company Synchrony With Agility
Brian Doubles became CEO at consumer financial services company Synchrony earlier this year. He’s since impacted areas from strategy to organization design and operations. We spoke recently about the shift, Synchrony’s new strategy and how working remotely has helped his team stay aligned. Karen Walker: Brian, you’ve only been in your role for a few months. What […]
Ed Walsh And ChaosSearch: Data Access At Scale
Ed Walsh recently left IBM to become CEO of ChaosSearch, a cloud-native data lake platform that indexes data at scale. ChaosSearch closed a $40 million Series B funding round co-led by Stripes and Moore Strategic Ventures in late 2020, after growing revenue by 766%, tripling their customer base, doubling their headcount, and are on pace to […]
John Werner Reimagines TEDx As Something Extraordinary
John Werner, successful serial entrepreneur, technology startup investor and mentor, has spent his career bringing ideas to life in order to solve big problems. Among his achievements, he is one of the founders of TEDxBoston and has reimagined what TEDx can be with a recent event in Boston. TED conferences began in 1984 focused on the intersection […]
Bringing AI To A/B: OfferFit’s Founders Solve A MarTech Problem
OfferFit, a marketing technology firm focused on personalizing multi-channel communications by replacing A/B testing with self-learning AI, has just received a $14M Series A. The round is being led by Canvas Ventures, with participation from Alumni Ventures Group, Carbide Ventures and angel investors Jeremy Stoppelman and David Edelman. I spoke with founders George Khachatryan (CEO) […]
CEO Mike Betzer’s Triple Play At Enterprise AI Firm Hypergiant
I recently spoke with Mike Betzer, the new CEO of Hypergiant, the Austin-based enterprise AI company. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Karen Walker: How did you land at Hypergiant? Mike Betzer: I spent 14 years growing MCI, and it was unbelievable. We were this tiny little company that was competing against AT&T, […]
Meaningful And Simple: Climate Neutral’s Approach To Impacting Consumer Behavior
Climate Neutral works to decrease global carbon emissions by getting brands to measure, offset, and reduce the carbon they emit. They are now working with over 350 brands across 13 business industries, representing a carbon footprint of over 1M tons of CO2. I spoke with Austin Whitman, founding CEO, about how consumers and brands must work […]
Verizon’s Wendy Taccetta: Major Findings Of Recent Small Business Recovery Survey
I spoke with Wendy Taccetta, Verizon Business’ senior vice president for nationwide small business and channel chief, about their recent Small Business Recovery Survey. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Karen Walker: I started reading the survey results and, much like a good book, I found myself highlighting something on every page. There’s […]
William Crowell’s Latest Foray: Cybersecurity Governance At [redacted]
[redacted] (the company’s actual name is [redacted], Inc.), a cyber defense company, has just appointed a former Deputy Director of the National Security Agency to the company’s board. William Crowell has been active in the field of public and private information security for decades. [redacted] closed a $35M Series B funding round earlier this year led by Ten […]
Playing The Long Game: Dorie Clark’s Strategies For Success
Top business thinker and Duke professor Dorie Clark’s latest book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, gives us strategies to break away from the relentless crush of short-term pressures. I recently spoke with her about strategies and concepts for playing the career long game. This interview has been condensed […]
Pivoting Toward Success: Owner.com’s Adam Guild
Adam Guild, the 21-year-old co-founder and CEO of Owner.com, has been a successful entrepreneur since the age of 12. His latest venture, Owner.com, provides an online infrastructure platform for restaurant operations. SaaStr Fund, Redpoint Ventures, Day One Ventures and multiple high-profile individuals have invested. We spoke recently about his business trajectory and why Owner.com has seen […]
Solving New Cybersecurity Challenges In IoT: Rene Bonvanie, Executive Chairman At Ordr
Rene Bonvanie, a longtime cybersecurity industry executive and an executive-in-residence at Battery Ventures, has just been appointed executive chairman of Ordr, the cybersecurity platform company. We recently spoke about his leadership career, his experience as an executive-in-residence, and the challenges in IoT that attracted him to Ordr. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity […]
Jonathan Harris, CEO Of Molekule, Is On A Mission
I spoke with Jonathan Harris, the new CEO of Molekule, a leader in reinventing air purification. Harris brings more than 30 years of hardware and software experience to Molekule, after leading sales at consumer companies like Jawbone, GoPro and Roku. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Karen Walk: Let’s start with your first 100 […]
Creating A Wider Spectrum For DEI: Leila McKenzie-Delis
Leila McKenzie-Delis is the founder and CEO of DIAL Global and founder of The McKenzie-Delis Foundation. The Foundation recently launched a new initiative – the 2021 McKenzie-Delis Review on Diversity and Inclusion – which will provide an expanded understanding of diversity and inclusion. I recently spoke with Leila about the Foundation, what drives her work, partnerships and the […]
Tellius’ CEO Ajay Khanna: Closing The Data Insights Gap
Tellius is an AI-driven decision intelligence software platform company, backed by Sands Capital Ventures, Grotech Ventures and Veraz Investments. I spoke with founder and CEO Ajay Khanna about the inception of their core idea – combining AI and machine learning driven automation with a natural language search interface for ad hoc exploration – and leading as […]
PSEG’s Ralph Izzo Addresses Climate Change
PSEG (NYSE: PSEG) is a diversified energy company headquartered in Newark, N.J., one of the ten largest energy companies in the U.S., and part of the Fortune 500. I spoke with Ralph Izzo, Chairman, President and CEO, an advocate for reducing the negative impact of climate change. This interview has been condensed and edited for […]