John Chambers is an extraordinary leader. During his 25 years at Cisco, he took the business profitably from $1 billion, to over $49 billion in annual revenues. Not only is this one if the internet-era’s greatest success stories, but one which built much of the infrastructure of the modern internet. Today, John Chambers is the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. Chambers focuses on helping disruptive start-ups from around the world build and scale, while also promoting the broader development of start-up nations and a start-up world. He invests in companies across categories and geographies that are leading market transitions, such as ASAPP, Aspire Food Group, Balbix, Bloom Energy, Cloudleaf, Denim, Lilac, OpenGov, ParkourSC, Pensando, Pindrop, Privoro, Quantum Metric, Rubrik, SAFE Security, SparkCognition, Sprinklr, Uniphore, and Virsec. Prior to founding JC2 Ventures in 2018, Chambers spent 25+ years with Cisco, serving as CEO, Chairman and Executive Chairman. He currently holds the title of Chairman Emeritus with the organization. With countless lessons learned during his tenure at Cisco and working with startups, Chambers wrote Connecting the Dots: Lessons for Leadership in a Startup World in 2018, sharing his management, leadership, and business principles. Chambers is also the Chairman of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) and Global Ambassador of the French Tech, as appointed by President Emmanuel Macron of France. In this interview I speak to John Chambers, Former Chairman & CEO of Cisco & CEO of JC2 Ventures. John shares his learnings on leading one of the internet-era’s greatest growth journeys, how to spot market transitions and opportunities, his reflections on leading hundreds of acquisitions & investments, and what it takes to lead a scaling, global business.

Thought Economics

Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work – pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe offers not just a history but a general theory of disaster. As Ferguson shows, governments must learn to become less bureaucratic if we are to avoid the impending doom of irreversible decline. In this interview, I speak to Niall Ferguson about how we should think about disasters & catastrophe and how society can (and should) be better prepared.

Thought Economics

In 2014, Whitney Wolfe Herd launched Bumble as, “the only dating platform where women make the first move…” Today, Bumble has over 55 million users in 150 countries.  As Whitney notes herself, “Bumble has now grown far beyond a dating app into a networking platform, allowing people of all genders to make empowered connections in all areas of their lives, whether that means you’re seeking a romantic relationship, making new friendships or growing your professional network.” Like many of the world’s fastest growing entrepreneurial companies, Bumble is rooted around real pain points, faced by millions of people, which are solved elegantly, intuitively and engagingly.  I caught up with Whitney to learn more about her entrepreneurship journey, and what it takes to build a successful scale-up business.

Thought Economics

To learn more about the phenomenon of cyberhate and the reality of trolling I spoke to David Baddiel (comedian, author, screenwriter & presenter), Ginger Gorman (journalist and author of Troll Hunting: Inside the world of online hate and its human fallout) and Hussein Kesvani (journalist and author of Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims)

Thought Economics

Technology push also brings with it a range of unintended or unexpected consequences, particularly at a time (as we are now) where technology can grow from the germination of an idea to sweeping ubiquity at a frightening pace.  As a society, we seemingly cannot adapt ourselves, our culture, economy and political landscape fast enough to cope with the momentum of technological advance, but things needn’t be this way. Mitchell Baker co-founded the Mozilla Project to support the open, innovative web and ensure it continues offering opportunities for everyone. As Chairwoman of Mozilla, Mitchell   is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide, collective of employees and volunteers around the world who are building the internet as a global public resource, open and accessible to all.   I caught up with Mitchell to ask whether we need a more human internet.

Thought Economics

In these exclusive interviews we talk to Dr. Vint Cerf (Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet”), Professor Robert ‘Bob’ Metcalfe (Co-inventor of the Ethernet, founder 3COM), Dr. Jeff Jaffe (CEO, W3C – The World Wide Web Consortium), Kevin Kelly (Co-Founder of WIRED) and Professor Luciano Floridi (Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information,  University of Oxford). We discuss the essence of the internet, the most profound technological advance in the history of our species.

Thought Economics

In these exclusive interviews we speak to Col. Artur Suzik (Director of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, NATO CCD COE), Ambassador Gábor Iklódy (Director of Europe’s Crisis Management and Planning Directorate), Professor Sadie Creese (Professor of Cybersecurity at Oxford University and Director of the Global Centre for Cyber Security Capacity Building at the Oxford Martin School) and Professor Howard Schmidt (Partner at Ridge Schmidt Cyber and Former Cyber Advisor to Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush). We discuss the threats posed to nations, their economies and societies from the internet and networks that form cyberspace.

Thought Economics

Guest article written for AllAboutAlpha.com – the official publication of the  Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) Association originally posted at: http://allaboutalpha.com/blog/2011/10/20/alpha-hunter-using-twitter-to-predict-the-markets/ Our understanding of financial markets in the last few decades has shifted.  Professor Johan Bollen (Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing) states, “..I think behavioural economics has now…

Thought Economics

History has seen humanity exist in a near constant battle for social, economic, political and (since the enlightenment) individual freedoms. These battles have been set against a backdrop of great change and conflict, as states, commerce and other bodies struggle to reconcile their needs for utility, their risk aversion and…

Thought Economics

In this article, we speak to Professor Robin Dunbar, Head of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford about the psychology and anthropology of social networks, together with their impact on human behaviour and the structure of our society.

Thought Economics

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