Mitch Lowe has been a leader in some of the most influential and disruptive companies in the entertainment business. Mitch never graduated from high school. After a youth spent smuggling goods and money in Europe, he invested in and eventually ran video stores in the 1980s and 1990s. He was a cofounding executive of Netflix. After leaving Netflix, he became an executive at McDonald’s, eventually creating the DVD kiosk business that would become Redbox. Under his leadership as president and COO, Redbox became the third largest video rental company in America, growing to 35,000 locations and $1.5 billion in revenues. Mitch invested in and became CEO of MoviePass, a movie theatre subscription service that acquired three million subscribers in eight months. While MoviePass never succeeded, it significantly influenced the trajectory of the business of movie theatrical exhibition. In his new book Watch and Learn, Mitch gives an inside perspective on the dramatic evolution of the entertainment business, from the days of early cable television, Beta, and VHS to a world where consumers have infinite choice and control of the movies they see. In this interview, I speak to Mitch Lowe, Co-Founding Executive of Netflix, Former CEO of MoviePass and Former President of Redbox. We look at the lessons he learned from one of the fastest growing, competitive, and creative industries on the planet, and how those insights extend far beyond entertainment into all industries. We talk about disruption, success, innovation, and the importance of listening to your gut.  

Thought Economics

Marc Randolph is a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, advisor, and investor. As co-founder and founding CEO of Netflix, he laid much of the groundwork for a service that’s grown to 210 million subscribers, a market capitalisation of over $240 billion and which fundamentally altered how the world experiences media. He also served on the Netflix board of directors until retiring from the company in 2003. In this interview, I speak to Marc Randolph about success, funding & building multi-billion-dollar businesses with brilliant culture and what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

Thought Economics

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.’

Thought Economics

Sridhar Ramaswamy is CEO and Co-founder of Neeva and a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners. Neeva is search re-imagined. It is subscription based and does not sell ads or track user behaviour as a part of its business model. Neeva is focused on finding exactly what matters most for its customers, whether it’s on the web, or buried in personal files like emails or other documents. In this exclusive interview, I speak to Sridhar Ramaswamy (CEO & Co-Founder of Neeva) about his learnings from running Google’s $115 billion advertising arm, why our model of search is broken and how he’s fixing it.

Thought Economics

Professor Gary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. He has been on the faculty of the London Business School for more than 30 years and is the director of the Management Lab. Hamel has written 17 articles for the Harvard Business Review and is the most reprinted author in the Review’s history. His landmark books have been translated into more than 25 languages. Fortune magazine describes Hamel as “the world’s leading expert on business strategy,” and the Financial Times calls him a “management innovator without peer.” Hamel has been ranked by The Wall Street Journal as the world’s most influential business thinker and is a fellow of the Strategic Management Society and of the World Economic Forum. For over a decade, Gary has been researching how bureaucracy can be replaced by something better. In his forthcoming book Humanocracy, he lays out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings within them… organizations that are anchored around motivation, models, mindsets, mobilization and migration. In this exclusive interview, I speak to Gary Hamel about how we can dismantle the bureaucracy of the industrial age and replace it humanocracy – a management system fit for the future and fit for human beings.

Thought Economics

Since 2009, entrepreneurs have raised investment capital of over $70 million after entering the shark tank. Kevin O’Leary is a Canadian-Irish serial-entrepreneur and investor who has been a shark since series 1 first aired.  I caught up with him to learn about what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

Thought Economics

My interview with John Sculley, CEO of Apple Inc from 1983-1993 who grew the company from $800 million to over $8 billion in revenues

Thought Economics

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