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15th September 2023 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

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.

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15-09-2023 21:35:02
Thought Economics

1st August 2023 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Bjørn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus and Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His new book Best Things First brings together 12 new, peer-reviewed studies which highlight how to make the world a better place, in the best [and most cost-effective] way. These studies show that by spending $35 billion a year (the same as the increase in annual global cosmetics spend in the last 2 years), on 12 specific policies, we could save 4.2 million lives a year, and generate over $1.1 trillion in new wealth. For every dollar spent, these policies generate $52 in global benefits. In this interview, I speak to Bjørn Lomborg, President of the Copenhagen Consensus. We discuss the 12 most impactful solutions to some of our world’s most pressing challenges – saving millions of lives, generating trillions in economic gains, and huge returns in the process.

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01-08-2023 10:37:21
Thought Economics

30th March 2023 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Mitchell Kapor is a pioneer of the personal computing revolution. He is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. In 1982, Mitch took lotus public, and in 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (The EFF is a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information online)   Mr. Kapor was first chair of the Mozilla Foundation, maker of the open source web browser Firefox, and continues to serve on its board. He is the founding investor and first chair of Linden Research, the creator of the virtual world Second Life. Currently. He is a trustee of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, a private foundation works to ensure fairness and equity, particularly for low-income communities of colour. Mitch and his wife Freada Kapor Klein launched Kapor Capital to prove that investing in gap-closing start-ups—companies whose services or products close opportunity gaps for both communities of colour and low-income communities—is good business – they detail the stories of some of these remarkable businesses in their new book, Closing the Equity Gap. In this interview, I speak to Mitch Kapor about the inequality created by venture capital and how Kapor Capital has proven that economic and social impact can occur together – benefiting the investor, and society.

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30-03-2023 15:40:13
Thought Economics

26th August 2022 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Dame Stephanie Shirley CH, also known as Steve, is a workplace revolutionary and successful IT entrepreneur turned ardent venture philanthropist. At 88 years old, her story has many strands which, woven together, have produced a lifetime of exceptional achievements. Dame Stephanie’s story begins with her 1939 arrival in Britain as an unaccompanied five-year-old Kindertransport refugee. This defining experience equipped her with fortitude at a very young age and made her determined to live a life worth saving. In 1962, she started a software house, Freelance Programmers, and pioneered radical new flexible work practices that changed the landscape for women working in technology. She went on to create a global business and a personal fortune which she shared with her colleagues, making millionaires of 70 of her staff at no cost to anyone but herself. Since retiring in 1993, Dame Stephanie’s life has been dedicated to venture philanthropy in the fields of IT and autism. She initially founded Autism at Kingwood in 1994 to support her late son Giles, then there was the ground breaking Prior’s Court School for pupils with autism and her charitable Shirley Foundation went on to make grants of £70 million. It spent out in 2018 in favour of Autistica, the UK’s national autism research charity founded by Dame Stephanie. In 2009/10 she served as the UK’s first ever national Ambassador for Philanthropy. In 2017, Dame Stephanie received a Companion of Honour (CH), a membership limited to only 65 individuals globally, for her services to entrepreneurship and philanthropy. In this interview, I speak to Dame Stephanie Shirley CH. We discuss her remarkable life story from arriving in Britain as five-year-old war refugee, to building one of the UK’s most successful information technology companies, changing the landscape completely for women in technology, and her work as one of the UK’s most prominent, and impactful philanthropists.

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26-08-2022 12:28:14
Thought Economics

18th August 2021 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

In 2001, Adam Neumann arrived in New York after five years as a conscript in the Israeli navy. Just over fifteen years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic CEO of a company worth $47 billion. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the six-foot-five Neumann looked the part of a messianic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The vision he offered was mesmerizing: a radical reimagining of workspace for a new generation. He called it WeWork.
As billions of funding dollars poured in, Neumann’s ambitions grew limitless. WeWork wasn’t just an office space provider; it would build schools, create cities, even colonize Mars. In pursuit of its founder’s vision, the company spent money faster than it could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, the CEO scoured the globe for more capital but in late 2019, just weeks before WeWork’s highly publicized IPO, everything fell apart. Neumann was ousted from his company, but still was poised to walk away a billionaire.
In this interview, I speak to Wall Street Journal reporter Eliot Brown on The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion. We discuss WeWork’s extraordinary rise and staggering implosion, why some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital bought the hype and what the future holds for Silicon Valley ‘unicorns.’

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03-12-2021 8:16:30
Thought Economics

20th June 2021 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Abigail E. Disney advocates for real changes to the way capitalism operates in today’s world. She has worked for thirty years with programs for low-income families, women’s rights, and global poverty. She is an Emmy- Winning Documentary Filmmaker and co-founder of Fork Films, a nonfiction media production company, which produces the weekly podcast “All Ears,” where host Abigail Disney interviews bold, solutions-oriented thinkers from the front lines of America’s urgent inequality and race crises. She is also the Chair and Co-Founder of Level Forward, a new breed storytelling company focused on systemic change through creative excellence, balancing financial and social returns. She also created the non-profit Peace is Loud, which uses storytelling to advance social movements and the Daphne Foundation, which supports organizations working for a more equitable, fair and peaceful New York City. I this exclusive interview I speak to Abigail E. Disney on her incredible career in the arts alongside her relationship with wealth, philanthropy, legacy, and success.

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03-12-2021 8:20:03
Thought Economics

23rd March 2021 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Steve Jurvetson is the Co-Founder of Future Ventures. He is an early-stage venture capitalist with a focus on founder-led, mission-driven companies at the cutting edge of disruptive technology and new industry formation. Steve was the early VC investor in SpaceX, Tesla, Planet, Memphis Meats, Hotmail, D-Wave, The Boring Company, Zoox and the deep learning companies Mythic and Nervana. He also led founding investments in five companies that went public in successful IPOs and several others that became billion-dollar acquisitions. In this exclusive interview, I speak to Steve Jurvetson– one of the world’s most successful venture capitalists – about disruptive entrepreneurship, the technologies and concepts changing our world, and how to invest in the most innovative entrepreneurs in the world.

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03-12-2021 8:26:34
Thought Economics

1st March 2021 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

In 2008, during the turbulence of a global financial crisis, a person (or group) called Satoshi Nakamoto released a white-paper called Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. The principle was simple but revolutionary- a technique to record digital transactions in a way that was public, permanent and verifiable without requiring a third party for trust. It is this principle that became more commonly known as Blockchain (or distributed ledger). Today, just 13 years later, the cryptocurrency market is valued at a staggering $1.6 trillion (around 2% of the entire global economy) and blockchain based companies are raising some of the largest rounds of funding in technology. To understand more about Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies I spoke to Nobel Prize Winning Economist, Professor Eric Maskin and a global expert on blockchain and cryptocurrency, Michel Rauchs.

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03-12-2021 8:28:44
Thought Economics

1st March 2021 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

In this exclusive interview, I speak to Max Parker (Founder of Matchstick Group) and Danny Jones (Investor & one-quarter of the multiplatinum British pop rock group McFly) about managing talent in the digital era, and the mental health impact of public profile and fame.

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03-12-2021 8:32:23
Thought Economics

10th April 2020 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Formula One (F1) racing is an incredible sport.  Some of the brightest minds in the world of engineering and human performance, equipped with multi-billion-dollar budgets, create staggeringly high-performance cars, run by similarly high-performance teams and drivers.  Nico Rosberg raced in Formula One for eleven years, claiming the title of World Champion in 2016 with Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 team.  Since then, Rosberg has embarked on a career as an entrepreneur and investor in green technologies and mobility.  He is an early investor in numerous successful start-ups including Lilum, What3Words, Tier, Lyft and Formula E.  He is also co-owner of mobility engineering company TRE, and Co-Founder of the GREENTECH FESTIVAL; a global platform for cutting-edge green technologies.  In 2020, he became an official judge of the TV show Die Höhle der Löwen (the German edition of the BBCs Dragon’s Den) with the aim of investing-in and supporting sustainable startups. In this exclusive interview, I caught up with Nico Rosberg to learn about his life in F1, entrepreneurship and investment.

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24-08-2020 17:45:53
Thought Economics

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