Latest Interviews
Showing 3181–3195 of 3,244 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- Goldman Sachs13 min
Tory Burch, Founder and CEO of Tory Burch LLC: Talks at GS Session Highlights
Tory Burch has scaled her brand from a kitchen-table startup to a billion-dollar enterprise operating 136 global stores while driving a five-year expansion strategy targeting Paris, Milan, and Shanghai alongside region-specific product development. Complementing this commercial growth, the Tory Burch Foundation leverages the 10,000 Women Initiative to provide female entrepreneurs with capital, management education, and mentorship, a mission Burch advocates for on the President's Council on Entrepreneurship. This dual focus on aggressive international market penetration and social responsibility has strengthened employee retention and consumer engagement while establishing the brand as a leader in female empowerment.
- Goldman Sachs30 min
Admiral William McRaven: Talks at GS Session Highlights
William McRaven, Admiral William McRaven, Jack
In this strategic briefing, the speaker analyzes the evolution of ISIS from Al-Qaeda in Iraq, warning that unchecked regional instability could cascade to threaten U.S. allies like Jordan and necessitates a coalition strategy involving ground advisors rather than airstrikes alone. Drawing on personal command history of high-stakes missions including the raid on Osama bin Laden, the former three-star admiral emphasizes the importance of political consistency, detailed operational planning, and the human reality of special operations families supported by the SEAL Foundation. The presentation concludes with a call for long-term nation-building in Iraq and sustained global intervention to prevent spillover instability from Africa, underscoring the moral and strategic necessity of addressing conflicts in Mali, Somalia, and Nigeria.
- Goldman Sachs10 min
Lauren Bush Lauren, founder & CEO of FEED Projects: Talks at GS Session Highlights
Founded by a former college student inspired by global hunger statistics, the for-profit enterprise Feed utilizes a consumer goods model to fund meals for both international school feeding programs and domestic food banks. The organization’s flagship Feed Supper initiative and strategic partnerships with groups like the UN World Food Program aim to distribute 100 million meals by its tenth anniversary, with a focus on using nutrition to improve school attendance for girls in the world's poorest countries. Ultimately, the venture operates under the vision of achieving global food security so thoroughly that it can rebrand as "Fed" and dissolve its own operations.
- Goldman Sachs39 min
Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan and Lloyd Blankfein: Talks at GS Session Highlights
Timothy Dolan, Lloyd Blankfein, Cardinal Timothy Dolan
Archdiocese of New York Archbishop Cardinal Timothy Dolan leads a strategic restructuring that closes 55 parishes and 59 schools to redirect $392 million toward active social services while managing a linguistically diverse flock across three boroughs. Facing tensions between traditional doctrine on marriage and modern pastoral needs, Dolan balances doctrinal integrity with Pope Francis's inclusive approach to ensure the church remains spiritually vibrant despite demographic shifts. Concurrently, he champions religious freedom against government mandates and establishes new communication offices to engage younger generations, aiming to strengthen faith communities by prioritizing dynamic ministry over maintaining vacant facilities.
- Goldman Sachs22 min
Barrister and Philanthropist Cherie Blair with GS' Dina Habib Powell: Talks at GS Session Highlights
Cherie Blair, Dina Habib Powell, Dena Powell
Former barrister Cherie Blair discusses her transition from a thirty-six-year partnership with Prime Minister Tony Blair to leading her own international law firm while detailing her foundation's work in fostering female economic empowerment across developing nations. By leveraging mobile technology to support small-scale entrepreneurs in countries like India and Nigeria, the organization aims to bridge the global gender gap in economic participation, which she argues is essential for GDP growth and national stability. Blair contrasts historical legal barriers she faced, such as systemic discrimination during her pupillage, with modern evidence that women reinvest 90% of resources into their communities, positioning financial independence as a critical smart business imperative.
- Y Combinator31 min
Andrew Mason at Startup School SV 2014
Launched by Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon evolved from the struggling The Point platform into the world's fastest-growing company after achieving rapid product-market fit with its daily deal model. Despite facing intense global competition and receiving lucrative acquisition offers from Yahoo and Google, the board rejected these opportunities to prioritize independent growth, a strategic decision that Lefkofsky later viewed as superior to the short-term pressures of the company's subsequent IPO. Reflecting on these experiences, Lefkofsky now applies a disciplined, values-first operational framework to his new venture, Detour, emphasizing long-term conviction over immediate data-driven compromises.
- Y Combinator27 min
Kevin Systrom at Startup School SV 2014
Stanford student Kevin Systrom leveraged a bias towards action to pivot his failed location app, Burbn, into Instagram after identifying a core user need for photo filtering during a photography course in Florence. This strategic shift to a minimalist mobile photography platform, combined with a community-first hiring philosophy and a global time-zone launch strategy, enabled the service to reach massive scale within days despite early infrastructure limits. Systrom's journey highlights a successful transition from building a generic marketplace to cultivating a defensible creator ecosystem that prioritizes user experience over immediate monetization.
- Y Combinator29 min
Reid Hoffman at Startup School SV 2014
Reid Hoffman recounts the strategic origins of LinkedIn, detailing how the concept emerged from a 2000 offsite with PayPal co-founders to address capital constraints and how the platform achieved critical mass by leveraging address book integration to bypass early growth limitations. He contrasts common Silicon Valley myths with historical data, arguing that economic downturns foster superior company formation while warning against raising excessive capital that dilutes operational focus. Furthermore, Hoffman analyzes his investment philosophies through case studies of Facebook, Zynga, and Bitcoin, emphasizing the necessity of balancing conviction with rigorous self-audits to navigate markets where smart peers initially dismiss contrarian visions.
- Y Combinator34 min
Ron Conway at Startup School SV 2014
Venture capitalist Ron Conway outlines a portfolio strategy at SV Angel that prioritizes investing in entrepreneurs with innate drive and deep personal conviction over specific product ideas, noting that successful founders often exhibit a "vocation" mindset. The firm screens thousands of candidates for co-founder dynamics and product focus while rejecting those who prioritize networking or lack honesty about traction, accepting a high failure rate to capture major market wins. Through a team-based approach evolving over two decades, SV Angel leverages young deal-makers and senior advisors to guide founders who solve personal problems with relentless persistence.
- Goldman Sachs9 min
Inventor Dean Kamen & Goldman Sachs' Don Duet: Talks at GS Session Highlights
Dean Kamen, Don Duet, Calvin Lully
A self-taught entrepreneur who entered the healthcare sector to solve fundamental problems rather than make incremental improvements, the speaker cites the iBot wheelchair as a breakthrough that overcame both physical and social barriers for users like Calvin Lully. Challenging the notion that education lacks teachers or resources, the speaker argues that engagement requires packaging learning through entertainment and elevating tech innovators as cultural heroes. While employing 600 engineers to define new markets, the organization intentionally avoids direct manufacturing, instead partnering with global incumbents to scale rare, world-changing innovations despite a high rate of experimental failure.
- Goldman Sachs24 min
Congressman John Lewis & Lloyd Blankfein: Talks at GS Session Highlights
Former civil rights leader John Lewis traces his journey from a sharecropper's son in rural Alabama to a central figure in the 1960s nonviolent movement, detailing his collaboration with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and pivotal events such as the Freedom Rides, the 1963 March on Washington, and the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" confrontation in Selma. These struggles directly catalyzed landmark federal legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Lewis credits for enabling the presidencies of Carter, Clinton, and Obama while warning that the unfinished work of racial and LGBTQ+ justice demands continued vigilance against modern legal setbacks.
- Goldman Sachs32 min
John C. Whitehead & Tom Brokaw: Talks at GS Session Highlights
John C. Whitehead, Tom Brokaw, Peter van de Ven
Goldman Sachs senior partner John Whitehead shared his classified D-Day experience where, to save his crew, he disobeyed orders and maneuvered his landing craft through enemy fire, a sacrifice he concealed for decades to avoid court-martial. This hidden act of courage foreshadowed his post-war humanitarian airlifts to Hungary and his unique consensus-based leadership philosophy at Goldman Sachs, which prioritized moral responsibility and team cohesion over rapid decision-making. Tanya Cushman's book *The Greatest Generation* finally brought these suppressed stories to light, revealing how the extreme pressures of World War II forged the ethical frameworks that defined Whitehead's public and private life.
- Goldman Sachs17 min
Lord John Browne with GS CIO Marty Chavez: Talks at GS Session Highlights
Lord John Browne, Marty Chavez
The event synthesizes global energy transition challenges with corporate diversity strategies, highlighting how technological innovation and capital investment drive renewable cost reductions while policymakers navigate the trade-offs between energy security and decarbonization. Speaker Lord Brown illustrates the psychological and productivity costs of hiding personal identities in conservative business environments, using his own experience with tabloid exposure to underscore the need for authentic leadership. He concludes by outlining seven specific elements for fostering inclusive cultures, emphasizing that effective diversity initiatives require top-down direction, senior leadership integration, and comprehensive policies that address gender, sexuality, and race simultaneously.
- Y Combinator22 min
Urska Srsen
Bellabeat, a Slovenian startup co-founded by Urska Sršin and Sandra Sršin, pivoted from a complex B2B patient monitoring system to a consumer wearable that allows expectant mothers to track health metrics and connect emotionally. Founded in 2012 and accelerated by Y Combinator in late 2013, the company has sold over 8,000 devices and secured seed funding shortly after its Demo Day presentation. Operating across European, American, and Australian markets, the firm aims to digitize prenatal care by integrating medical data into everyday lifestyle habits through a hardware and mobile app ecosystem.
- Y Combinator31 min
Alfred Lin with Justin Kan
Lin and Tony Hsieh launched LinkExchange in 1997 to solve traffic acquisition for web hosts, eventually selling the network to Microsoft for $265 million before co-founding an angel fund that pivoted to Telme Networks and Zappos during the dot-com crash. While leading Telme, Lin executed a strategic shift from a failing consumer portal to an enterprise SaaS model that generated $150 million in recurring revenue and an $800 million exit, whereas Zappos survived a liquidity crisis by enforcing profitability on the first order and pioneering rapid overnight fulfillment. This dual success story culminated in Zappos maintaining operational independence before its acquisition by Amazon, illustrating Lin's philosophy of prioritizing long-term cultural partnerships over short-term investor returns.