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I should have posted this way earlier, but I've been getting questions. Here's the skinny: Fortt Knox is not dead. It's just been reborn. Instead of living in your favorite podcast app, Fortt Knox now lives on LinkedIn and YouTube.

Now you can see video of my interviews, and engage with a broader community of Fortt Knox viewers. I stream my interviews live, and the recordings are there for on-demand viewing. I also serve up curated insights from the interviews -- there's something new from Fortt Knox in my Jon Fortt LinkedIn feed just about every weekday, and pretty often on the Fortt Knox channel on YouTube, too.

Beyond that, Fortt Knox is taking on new life -- it's a weekly newsletter distributed through my profile on LinkedIn's platform. So if you don't have time to check in with me every day, you can get a weekly roundup of the latest goings on in tech, leadership and innovation, and find out what's coming next. So get on LinkedIn and subscribe, and that will be delivered right to your inbox.

Still, I know a lot of listeners will be bummed that the podcast part has gone away. You might be wondering why. It comes down to this: I want to hear from you. Interact with you. Podcasts are great as a passive medium, but they're a little too passive for where I want to take this. The new format is rich with video, and gives lots of opportunity for you to share the experience with others and interact with me.

So that's it! Look, LinkedIn isn't just for job hunting, and it's not just for self promoters and techies. It's a great platform for everyone who wants to get insight into how to do work better. And no, that's not a paid endorsement. Nobody paid me to move this to LinkedIn. It just happens to be the best platform for what I want to do with Fortt Knox. So: Thanks for being on the ride thus far, and I hope to see you on LinkedIn and YouTube.

In the late 1990s, Andy Jassy pitched a wild idea to his boss and mentor, Jeff Bezos: What if Amazon developed another business, delivering computing power and storage . 

Two decades later, it stands as Amazon’s most profitable division – one that Jassy continues to lead as CEO of Amazon Web Services. I sat down with Jassy in a broadcast exclusive at the company’s annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to talk about Amazon’s lead in the cloud today, the controversy surrounding the Pentagon’s awarding of the highly sought-after JEDI contract to Microsoft (and Amazon’s lawsuit in response), the lessons learned from the company’s failed HQ2 attempt in New York City and more.

Days ago California lawmakers passed a bill, AB5, that would force more companies to treat more workers as employees, not contractors. What’s the big deal? 

The gig economy. Whether it’s Uber and Lyft, or Postmates and Doordash, or TaskRabbit and Instacart, a slew of companies have grown up in the smartphone era with a radical idea. When just about everyone has a smartphone and a credit card, you can assemble a workforce on a moment’s notice, pay workers electronically, and let them be independent contractors. They can work as much or as little as they want! 

But just because employers can do this doesn’t mean they should. And that’s what we’re going to debate today.  

With me this week: Two professionals who have driven for Uber and Lyft and have different opinions about what should happen here.  

Karim Bayumi is out of LA. He says drivers like him – he’s driven 5 to 6 days a week for the platforms – deserve the protections of employee status, and the companies can’t be trusted to provide that without a law.  

Harry Campbell is a former part-time Uber and Lyft driver who’s known as the Rideshare Guy. He’s got a blog that focuses on the driver community, a YouTube channel, a podcast – and he says forcing companies to treat drivers as employees is the wrong way to go.

Tim O'Reilly had never come in contact with a computer until after college, when a friend asked him to help write a technical manual.  

It's quite a turn, then, that he has become a promethean figure in Silicon Valley. Like the mythical titan who stole fire from the gods and brought it to mankind, O'Reilly's publishing empire, his conferences and learning platforms have demystified computer languages and tectonic shifts.  

He literally wrote the book on the Internet, the Internet User's Guide & Catalog, the first popular tome about the subject. He and his events birthed terms like "open source" and "web 2.0," which have become enduring parts of the tech lexicon. His MAKE magazine arguably launched the broader maker movement of hands-on crafters and tinkerers. 

So naturally I wanted to sit down with Tim to talk about his new book, WTF: What's the Future, and Why It's Up to Us. In it, he has strong words for the Internet-driven tech industry he helped to shape, and some insight for workers like us trying to navigate the new digital landscape. 

Satya Nadella is the third CEO of Microsoft. He's also a husband and a father of special-needs kids. He's an immigrant.

And he's pretty close to doing something that, until he took the job just over three and a half years ago, most people in tech – heck, most people at Microsoft – thought was impossible.

That near-impossible task is a cultural revival of a once-dominant tech giant that was losing its grip on its soul. Under Nadella's leadership morale is up, and so is product quality and the stock price. The question is whether all of that can stick.

Satya sat down with me at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square in New York, where he stopped through to promote his new book, Hit Refresh, about the revival he's attempting at Microsoft. The conversation for my Fortt Knox podcast offers a fresh look at one of the most influential technology leaders in the world today, who's engineering a cultural rebirth that few thought possible – while also being a dad who faces some unique challenges helping his kids reach their full potential.

Louis Hernandez Jr. is the CEO of Avid Technology, a company that makes tools for editing video and audio, and writing music. 

Avid is facing hard times as rival Adobe grows stronger with Premiere and other creative suite tools, and as more software moves to the cloud. 

Hernandez is unique for a lot of reasons. One of them is that he's the Latino CEO of a publicly traded technology company. He recently wrote a book, The Storyteller's Dilemma, about the way technology is changing the media market.  

Louis talked to me about his path to the C -suite, his vision for the future of storytelling, and the factors that made his story so different from many of his cousins in the LA area where he grew up.

Rachel Drori comes from from a long line of entrepreneurs – her immigrant grandparents started a business when they got to the United States. Even more unique: Her mother started a business too, so she grew up around women founders. Today she's the founder and CEO of Daily Harvest, a young startup that sits at the intersection of nutrition and convenience. You think starting a business is hard? Well, it is. But Rachel started Daily Harvest when she was seven months pregnant, then raised investment funds for the business when she was pregnant. Her story is instructive for anyone who has wondered whether now is the right time to take a big career leap.

Njavwa Mutambo is the CEO of Musanga Logistics, a delivery company in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia. Technology has the potential to transform economies in Africa, empower small businesses, lower costs – but before any of that can happen, there are some basic challenges. One of those is the cost of delivery. That's where Njavwa, and Musanga Logistics come in. He's using bicycle couriers and people who own trucks and need side-work, Uber-style – to connect people in Zambia like it's never been done before. I invited Njavwa to CNBC's bureau at One Market Street in San Francisco. He described his vision for bringing more sophisticated e-commerce to the African continent, his path from impoverished orphan to tech entrepreneur, and what he learned from seeing Silicon Valley – and America – up close for the first time.

Seventeen years ago, life gave Ben Chestnut the push to start the company that became MailChimp. He was in web design. He got laid off. His employer offered him another job, but he knew: this was his chance to build his own thing. Today if you run a small business or you're into marketing, you've probably heard of MailChimp. For everyone else, it's the way a lot of people reach their customers' email inboxes. Newsletters, offers for special sales, you name it – MailChimp is in the tricky game of helping companies reach the people who actually want to be reached. Today, Ben Chestnut's team has more than 14 million users, and had more than $400 million in sales last year. Ben himself? An introvert. A soft-spoken guy who has perfected the art of capitalizing on the wrong answer and getting to the right one.

There is no one in Silicon Valley who's more connected than Reid Hoffman. That might be because he plays all of the connector roles, sometimes at once. He's a venture capitalist, at Greylock. He's an entrepreneur who co-founded LinkedIn, and sold it for 26 billion dollars last year. Reid's net worth is estimated to be north of 3 billion dollars. Now he has a seat on the board of directors at Microsoft. After teaching a class at Stanford, Reid started a podcast, Masters of Scale, that's about the art and craft of building monster businesses. Reid is deeply qualified on that subject. He was a founding board member at PayPal, and early on became its chief operating officer. That also makes him part of an eclectic group of characters known as the "PayPal Mafia" former PayPal employees who went on to dizzying success. Members include Elon Musk, YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, investor Peter Theil, and entrepreneur Max Levchin, to name a few. I spent some time with Reid Hoffman last week when I flew out to San Francisco to moderate a debate. It wasn't politics: Reid was debating his friend Tim O'Reilly on the merits of spending gobs of investor money to build startups into dominant forces. You can watch the debate on Twitter. Look up my @jonfortt. Or head over to YouTube and watch at the Fortt Knox channel. After the debate, Reid sat down with me on the 17th floor of LinkedIn headquarters to talk about how he scaled from a pre-teen who was ambivalent about school into one of tech's most prolific builders.

This is a conversation about reinvention. Not just once, but over and over. Julie Sweet leads the North American business at Accenture, a global consulting giant that employs more than 400,000 people and produced more than $32 billion in sales last year. Julie's territory made up almost exactly half of that total. I'm not really sure how most people become consultants. Ideally they get good at something, then show other people how to do it better. Julie's path was different. She was a lawyer – a partner at one of those swanky firms: Cravath, Swaine & Moore – and left that to be the top lawyer at Accenture, which you might also know by its old name, Arthur Andersen Consulting. She parlayed that job … into a bigger job. And that's the key detail here. Julie has a history of doing that sort of thing, and I wanted to find out how. I sat down with Julie Sweet just this week at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to talk about her path to the C-suite of one of the world's top consulting firms, and how her father, who painted cars for a living, set the no-excuses example that helped her get there.

Tristan Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker and Company Brands. He's 33 years old. In this episode I somewhat jokingly say that growing up, he was an odd kid, because of the surface contradictions. He's a business mind who made a name for himself when he joined a mobile technology startup, but his first company focuses on skin and hair care. He grew up in a working-class family in New York, and his father was killed when he was young – but he went to a boarding school. His most prominent investors? Andreessen Horowitz, the marquee Silicon Valley venture capital firm – but he and I speak plainly about Silicon Valley's diversity challenges. I recently visited Tristan Walker at the offices of Walker & Company Brands in Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. This episode was special for me, because, let's be frank: There aren't many African-American technology journalists in this business. I'm one. There aren't many African-American entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, and Tristan is arguably the best-known. I'm seven years older than Tristan, but we're of a similar generation. We've been a part of this era of sweeping change, and seen what's missing ... and who's missing.

Brooklyn in the 70s and 80s. Today, he says, his net worth is somewhere north of 100 million dollars. That's not because he's an entrepreneur, though he has started a handful of companies. Jason got rich as an entrepreneur. But he got really, really rich by investing in the crazy ideas … of other entrepreneurs. He just wrote a book: Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups. He says he can tell you how he did it, and give you pointers so that – maybe you can do it, too. In the tech world, we call these people "angel investors." They're usually the first money into a startup, giving six figures or less – just enough to keep an idea going while the founder figures out whether it's big enough to attract millions from venture capitalists. The downside of being an angel investor: It's really risky. You're probably going to lose the money you put into 90% of startups. The upside: If you get a couple of winners, they can be huge wins. And get this: because of the way regulations are changing, you can now become an angel investor, from the comfort of your computer. You can pool your money with other angels.

Apple's iPhone extravaganza is still the biggest product event of the year for a simple reason: The iPhone remains the single most successful hardware product of the PC era. We can talk about whether sales are growing or not, whether Apple is innovating or not. But Apple still sells more premium phones every year than anyone else.   So what happened this week? Three new iPhones announced, the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and Pro Max. A new Apple Watch with a screen that doesn't turn off. A new entry-level iPad. And two services at $4.99 a month, Apple Arcade and Apple TV Plus.  What does all of this mean? Should you pay $300 more for three cameras on the back instead of two? Does the watch update matter? And can Apple out-HBO HBO?  With me this week: A great lineup of people who know their stuff. Walt Mossberg, the godfather of tech reviews, is going to talk big picture from DC. Tech analyst extraordinaire Pat Moorhead and tech strategist Shelly Palmer are going to sift through and tell us which they think are the most significant. And then CNBC's own Julia Boorstin is going to join us from LA to give the view from Hollywood Apple's subscription moves. 

Brad Smith has been at Microsoft for nearly 25 years, and has been the top lawyer there for 15. He now holds the title of president, also running corporate affairs and working alongside CEO Satya Nadella. Brad led Microsoft's legal defense against David Boies and the U.S. government a generation ago. You might have heard of that infamous antitrust case against Microsoft. Today he's fighting for Microsoft's right to shield certain customer data in the cloud. Brad and I did a panel together at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado recently about the global threat from hackers. After that we sat down and pushed record, and had a conversation for Fortt Knox. Three things you're going to hear from Brad Smith: How his upbringing shaped his view of the world, how as a young lawyer he used technology to advance his career, and how to learn from massive upheaval – like the government's antitrust case against Microsoft 20 years ago – which I think it's fair to say changed Microsoft, the tech industry, and Brad Smith's career, forever. That's where the title of this episode comes from: If you change the world, you change the law. Two decades later, Brad has a take on the Microsoft case that I just find profound: And perhaps a near-prophetic warning to today's other world-changers, including Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google – and advice you and I can apply, too.

Think of this as getting to audit a little bit of a leadership master class. Bruce Chizen has the kind of unique executive experience that would fill a book of business school case studies. As the CEO of Adobe – the company that makes Photoshop, Premiere and more – Bruce mentored his replacement, Shantanu Narayen – and he often sat across the bargaining table from Apple CEO Steve Jobs. That's when I met him, as a young reporter in Silicon Valley, nearly 20 years ago now. Today, Bruce sits on many boards of directors, most notably the board of Oracle – run by the one and only Larry Ellison. At the same time, Bruce is executive chairman at Informatica. Informatica works with businesses to manage the trove of data they store in the cloud. There, he's working with new CEO Anil Chakravarthy on navigating a tricky job. Not only does Anil have to inspire the rank and file, he's got to develop his lieutenants and manage a board of directors stacked with impatient private equity investors.

This week on the podcast: Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, co-founders and co-CEOs of the Skimm. Their core product? The Daily Skimm, a newsletter targeting millennial women that keeps you up to date on what's happening in the world. They didn't invent the daily newsletter by a long shot, but Weisberg and Zakin are working the kind of magic with it that should make every media executive in the world sit up and take notice. Here's a little context: The New York Times announced recently that it has 13 million subscriptions to its 50 newsletters. Weisberg and Zakin have 5 million subscribers who open their one newsletter multiple times per week. I caught up with Carly and Danielle at The Skimm's headquarters on 23rd Street in Manhattan, to talk about their journey as business partners and friends, the roots of their entrepreneurial drive, and today's unique challenges for women in the startup game.

Mike Tuchen is the CEO of Talend, a company with a billion-dollar market value. It helps customers take advantage of their data and apply it effectively. But before kicking off a career that's included an executive stint at Microsoft and a turn as CEO of Rapid7, he was nearly kicked out of boarding school and had to figure out how to make a contribution as the runt of his Brown University rowing team. Tuchen joined the Fortt Knox podcast to share a story that's not your typical wunderkind-makes-good tale. His story shows that when the pressure is on, believing in your unique talent can be the key to tilting the odds in your favor.

It's been about 10 years since the debut of the modern smartphone, when Apple's iPhone first went on sale. One of the companies that has most defined this decade? Qualcomm. Leading the charge at Qualcomm for most of that time has been executive chairman Paul Jacobs. His father Irwin co-founded the company, and Paul helped build it into a power broker in mobile computing. Qualcomm designs the chips that serve as the brains for most premium Android phones, and its patented technology is in pretty much every smartphone on the market. That has earned the company a stock market value that's now over $160 billion. I sat down with Paul Jacobs at CNBC headquarters for a conversation about some of his defining moments, and what's next.

It's a story of ambition, innovation, management gone wrong: Uber. It's been a ride-hailing game changer, but also a cautionary tale, so this week on Fortt Knox Live, I brought together an expert panel to discuss the latest news and what it means for Silicon Valley. Mike Issac of the New York Times, Vivek Wadhwa of Carnegie Mellon, and my colleague Deirdre Bosa of CNBC joined me in San Francisco this week to break down the big changes coming for Uber's management, and what the rest of us can learn. Here's our conversation:

There's a story about former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer throwing a chair across his office and hitting a table with it. This story has become a piece of Silicon Valley lore. Now, Microsoft is not in Silicon Valley. It's in Washington State, near Seattle. But the story is a piece of Silicon Valley lore because of the reason Steve Ballmer allegedly threw the infamous chair. He wasn't aiming at a person. He didn't hate his table. He was fired up, because one of his engineers was leaving to take a job at Google. Google! And Google IS in Silicon Valley. The guy is passionate. One project he's spending time on in retirement: USAFacts. It's a trove of information about where our federal tax dollars really go – you can find it at USAFacts.org, and play with the numbers yourself. Ballmer started digging after his wife asked him to get more involved in the family foundation's charitable work. Ballmer is passionate about making sure kids have the opportunity to do better than their parents did financially. I asked him if that passion is what motivated him to do a massive data project.

To say Tom Siebel has had an interesting life would be putting it mildly. He’s a billionaire, a tech visionary, and the survivor of an elephant goring eight years ago that, by the odds, should have killed him. Several doctors told Siebel he would never walk again, much less sail competitively. But he does. So what do you learn about life when you’ve stared down death in the form of a five-ton elephant, been crushed by that elephant, and lived to tell the tale? What do you learn when you’ve invented one of the first killer workplace apps of the PC era, then sold it for about $6 billion dollars? After you’ve made all that, survived all that, why, at 64 years old, are you still inventing? Tom Siebel, now the CEO of C3 IoT, sat down with me for the at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to share some insight into what’s made him tick – and what’s helped him succeed.

Today she sits at the helm of a promising cybersecurity company. But first Nicole Eagan had to survive the dotcom bust. Eagan is CEO of Darktrace, a startup that battles hackers using software that gets smarter over time. Invented by mathematicians and former British intelligence operatives, the technology, much like a human immune system, looks for signs of odd behavior in a client's network. Eagan and Darktrace are on the cutting edge not only in security, but also in a gender-balanced tech workforce. Eagan says half of her employees are women. She knows how unusual that is, having operated in Silicon Valley through booms and busts … as an enterprise tech worker, a venture capitalist, and now as an executive. Nicole Eagan sat down with Fortt Knox to share lessons from efforts that worked, and efforts that didn't.

You've probably heard of TaskRabbit – the online service lets you pay a contractor to run an errand, clean an apartment, put together an Ikea bookshelf – any number of odd jobs. Before there was Uber or Airbnb, TaskRabbit birthed the so-called "gig economy." You might not know that Kevin Busque co-founded TaskRabbit with his wife, Leah, who he is quick to admit was the brains behind the operation all along. In an unusual twist on the typical Silicon Valley story, Kevin and Leah were high school sweethearts, married right after college. They worked at the same company more than once, bootstrapped a business together, and eventually moved across the country to realize the Silicon Valley dream. Leah served as CEO of TaskRabbit for years, and is now executive chairman. Kevin recently launched a new venture, Guideline, a 401(k) platform.

The National Football League was on the brink last year. Not of death – let’s not talk crazy, now – but of the type of loss of relevance that has humbled baseball and boxing over the past generation or so.   

But now as the NFL's 100th season kicks off this week, there's a sense of fresh energy. And I would argue that if football's going to make a full comeback, technology is going to have to play a big role. 

First, a word about where we've been. Football was the undisputed champ of the major sports leagues, popularity-wise. But between critical tweets from President Trump, fans angry about players kneeling during the anthem, fans angry that Colin Kaepernick doesn't have a job after kneeling, concerns about player concussions and safety, the spotlight was withering.  

Now things appear to be turning. The NFL struck a deal with Jay-Z's Roc Nation to promote music and merchandise that will benefit social justice causes, possibly addressing the move for player activism. The owners and players are already at the table for collective bargaining, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told CNBC this week, in hopes of presenting a strong case to both broadcast and streaming partners. ESports is gaining in popularity, potentially boosting the brand of the real game. And legal sports betting, enabled by smartphones, has some fans paying closer attention than ever. 

With me this week: CNBC's sports guy, Eric Chemi.

Also on this week's podcast:

How to say this: Rapper Jim Jones is known to his fans as an avid smoker of marijuana. It's so much a part of his brand that he's hoping to leverage that reputation into a business. His business associate Alex Todd, a jeweler with celebrity clientele, has launched a cannabis brand called Saucey Farms and Extracts. And Jones has a line within Saucey called CAPO.

I talked to both of them about how a hobby is turning into a business.

Kirill Tatarinov grew up in the former Soviet Union, the son of a government computer architect. The family didn't swallow state propaganda: His grandfather once spent ten years in a soviet gulag.   

To achieve his dreams, young Kirill would have to get out and move to the other side of the world.   

Tatarinov is now the CEO of Citrix Systems, a tech company with tools that make it easier to share information and get work done from anywhere. His journey to this point – to leading a company with a $13-billion-dollar stock market valuation – includes stops in Israel and Australia, working for startups and for Microsoft.   

It also included a wake-up call about what it really takes to drive a company toward success.

Michael Dell founded his company 33 years ago, in his freshman dorm room at the University of Texas, Austin. He had $1,000 to buy PC parts, and took orders over the phone. After that, it ballooned like crazy – and made Dell Computer one of the fastest-growing companies ever. The stock price went on a dizzying tear throughout the 1990s, roughly doubling most years throughout the decade. It also made Michael Dell a multi-billionaire. Since then, the path hasn't been easy. The era of gonzo growth in personal computers and corporate servers – Dell's bread and butter – is over. Now attention has turned to smartphones and cloud computing. Sensing weakness, legendary investor Carl Icahn tried to buy out the company four years ago, which probably would have resulted in it breaking into pieces. Michael Dell fought him and won, taking his namesake company private, and then making it bigger than ever.

Alexandra Lebenthal is a third-generation Wall Street power broker. Her grandparents started Lebenthal & Co. 92 years ago, helping to redefine the municipal bond business. Her company has seen better days – she's in the process of selling much of it to South Street Securities Holdings, though she'll maintain control of the corporate bond operation. Through the years, Lebenthal has shown a steadfast determination to maintain the family business, and to blaze a path in the boys-club world of finance. I sat down with her to talk about growing up in New York's financial world, her view of gender imbalances in the corporate world, and how she feels now that her college-age daughter has surprised her by deciding to follow in her footsteps.

For Ford CEO Mark Fields, the love of cars started early; he still remembers the set of Matchbox cars his dad bought him for his 6th birthday.  

Of course, love of cars alone wasn't going to get him to the helm of the second-largest U.S. automaker, and a brand that's been around for more than a century. That would take a mix of competitive spirit, adaptability, and a knack for getting teams to focus quickly. 

Mark Fields leads a company that last year sold more than 6.6 million cars, bringing in more than $141 billion from vehicle sales. In the era of Uber and Tesla that's getting harder by the day. 

I sat down with Fields to talk about some of Ford's latest efforts, and his own journey to the top. 

Ajit Pai doesn't come across as the sort of guy who'd be crossing swords with Silicon Valley. Question him about controversial topics and his answers come quickly, but always tempered by a Midwestern sincerity. Among the current crop of communication industry regulators, he was the first on Twitter. But yes, Pai is a controversial figure in the tech world. President Trump appointed him chairman of the regulatory body, and one of his first moves was to roll back regulations that would have prevented broadband providers from using your Internet browsing history to sell you advertising. I asked him about that – and more – for Fortt Knox.

Among the many business lessons Jeff Lawson has learned, there's this: Don't expect to get things done if you wait until you're perfectly prepared. Lawson is co-founder and CEO of Twilio, a company that makes it easy for apps to contact you. (Ever wonder how you can send a text to your Uber driver in the app, or get one in OpenTable when your seat is ready? Twilio does that.) Twilio went public last summer at the New York Stock Exchange, and is now worth about $2.5 billion. As it pushes to make apps communicate better, the scrappy San Francisco company has developed a culture that favors boldness and taking initiative, and frowns on perfectionism. I caught up with Twilio's CEO at a tech conference in Barcelona, Spain to talk about his journey from curious kid in the Detroit suburbs to CEO of a public tech company. Among the things I love about Lawson's story? It's about the setbacks as much as the successes, and learning along the way.

Not many executives can say they've studied the finer points of everything from deodorant and washing machines, to Bluetooth speakers and gaming keyboards. Bracken Darrell can. Darrell is CEO of Logitech, a company that once specialized in mainstream PC mice and keyboards. One of the remarkable things about him is his appetite for learning. His curiosity has led him from a modest upbringing in Western Kentucky, to leading one of the smartphone era's most remarkable turnaround stories. I sat down with Darrell for the Fortt Knox podcast to find out how his upbringing shaped him, and how his curiosity helped him find his way to the C-suite. Logitech's stock has quadrupled since he took over four years ago; the company's now worth $5.5 billion.

Katie Jacobs Stanton knows how to create her own options. Stanton, a veteran of Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and a presidential administration, now serves as chief marketing officer of genetic testing startup Color Genomics. Her professional journey from East Coast to West, and back and forth again, has given her rare insight into the workplace cultures that shape us today. I sat down with her for the Fortt Knox podcast to talk about the environment for women in tech, and her journey to the executive ranks in Silicon Valley.

Sir Martin Sorrell is arguably the most important advertising executive in the world. As CEO of WPP Group, he oversees a global marketing machine that he's assembled over more than 30 years. His group companies include J Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, and more than 100 others. Clients include two of every three Fortune Global 500 companies. When I sat down with him for the Fortt Knox podcast, I wanted to talk about his childhood, his career, and the pivotal choices he made. He didn't disappoint.

Tom Steyer became a billionaire by solving puzzles. That wasn't his technical job description – he actually founded Farallon Capital, a hedge fund in San Francisco, 30 years ago. As an investor, two signature moves stand out: One, he got his alma mater, Yale, to invest a portion of its endowment with him; the success of that arrangement sparked a trend. Two, he often made his own luck by investing deeply in countries and industries. As Steyer scouted unusual investments in unexpected places, he followed some basic rules. Now that Steyer has set his sights on politics and policy – he's rumored to be considering a run for California governor – I sat down with him for Fortt Knox. He gave me some of his best insights on how to succeed, and why he's fighting the new administration in Washington, D.C.

Summer’s coming to a close, and that means the streaming wars are about to get a lot more real. Apple released a trailer for The Morning Show, one of the big series slated to hit its Apple TV Plus service this fall. Disney just gave us more details behind its slate of shows for the Disney Plus service that launches in November; and Disney and Sony get a movie divorce … and Sony gets custody of Spider-Man.  

And later on the 1-on-1: Peter Reinhardt is the CEO of Segment, a startup that helps companies make sense of customer data. The company has raised more than $280 million and is worth more than $1 billion, but the path hasn't always been smooth.

We love to have these debates about who's the greatest of all time in any given sport; maybe it's because you don't even have to be an expert to get in on them. All you need to know is the yardstick for success. Serena Williams or Steffi Graf? Tom Brady or Joe Montana? That's what makes Michael Phelps special. There's no debate. He's the greatest swimmer and most decorated Olympian of all time. He won 28 medals over four different Olympic Games, 23 of them gold. The question is, how? Well, Michael Phelps is not a fish. Doctors have shot down the notion that his abnormal wingspan and flexible joints give him an outsized advantage. It turns out, Phelps worked hard on his craft. He also does a few mental exercises that the rest of us would do well to emulate. I sat down with him for the Fortt Knox podcast to get some of his best insights.

More than a decade ago, Steve Jobs asked Sue Decker to be the chief financial officer at Pixar. Decker said no. She did, however, join Pixar's board of directors. At the time, Decker ran finance at Yahoo. The decline of Yahoo has become the stuff of Silicon Valley legend; today the company is in the process of getting absorbed into Verizon, at a fraction of its former value. Sue Decker, on the other hand, has done just fine in the eight years since she left the Internet company. This is Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I'm Jon Fortt. This is a weekly podcast bringing you the highest achievers from business, entertainment, philanthropy, and sport. We're going to learn how the very best climbed to the top, and pull out lessons along the way. If that sounds good to you, make this a habit: subscribe on Apple's Podcast app or Google Play. And once you've done that, tell a friend — these talks are definitely conversation starters. Sue Decker is one of the few people that some of the top U.S. companies seek for guidance. Aside from Pixar, she has also served on the boards of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, chip giant Intel, retail powerhouse Costco, and others. On her path to those board rooms, Decker has gained a rare perspective on what works – and what doesn't – when you're trying to work your way up. I sat down with her on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to talk about her new startup, and her path to success.

Bayard Winthrop got his inspiration from Silicon Valley. If we could put a touch-screen computer in the palm of everyone's hand, why couldn't we actually make the next great American clothing brand … in America? So five years ago, Winthrop shipped his first American Giant sweatshirt, made in the U.S.A. from domestic cotton. Now he's producing thousands of shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, and sweatpants for men and women every month. And it's not all lounge gear: he's just introduced the brand's first cotton dress. This is Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I'm Jon Fortt. This is a weekly podcast bringing you the highest achievers from business, entertainment, philanthropy, and sport. I'm going to learn how the very best climbed to the top, and take notes to help you up the mountain. If that sounds good to you, make this a habit: subscribe on Apple's Podcast app or Google Play. And once you've done that, tell a friend — these talks are definitely conversation starters. There's lots of talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America these days. American Giant is actually doing it, and doing it the hard way. The company owns its factories in North Carolina where Winthrop says he employs hundreds of workers sewing clothes.

Gene Simmons is the most outrageous member of one of the most outrageous bands of all time: KISS. There's a lot more to KISS than shock. It's the number-one gold-record-earning group ever, at 30, when you include the four solo albums that band members released on the same day in 1978. Fourteen albums went platinum. This is a band that's known for its hits: "I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day" seems like it's a phrase as old as rock itself. The band is known just as much for its look. There's the black and white face paint, the pyrotechnics, and a few details that are signature Gene Simmons. There's the blood-spitting, the axe guitar, and of course the tongue so long it's almost a fifth band member. And guess what: They're still touring. This is Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I'm Jon Fortt. I sat down with Gene Simmons at the Studio Hotel in New York, to talk business and marketing. Simmons is a guy who not only managed to launch an iconic brand in his early 20s, he and cofounder Paul Stanley remade it several times along the way with different band members, different looks, and a voracious appetite for merchandising. A disclaimer here: This episode has some explicit lyrics sprinkled in. By Gene, not me. So maybe don't listen with the kids in the car. Up to you.

The key to understanding this moment in American history, in black history, is empathy. That's what Darren Walker is saying. And one could argue that if anybody's positioned to understand this dizzying landscape, he is. Walker grew up poor in rural Texas, became one of the first kids in the Head Start program, and made it big on Wall Street in the 1980s. But his true calling was even bigger: He's now president at the Ford Foundation, an $11-billion philanthropy giant that's aiming to address social justice and inequality around the globe.

When you see Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz's name, you might assume the daughter of Charles Schwab grew up quite privileged. After all, the Schwab name has become synonymous with wealth management. Didn't she end up working in the industry by default? Actually, no. Schwab-Pomerantz's parents divorced when she was a child, and her father's firm didn't become a financial force until she was well into her 20s. She was already there working with clients when Bank of America bought the company in 1983, and continued after the company split off again four years later. Today, Schwab-Pomerantz is Chairman of the Charles Schwab Foundation, and a senior vice president at the $56-billion company. She's a certified financial planner, and focuses on reaching out to groups like women, minorities and young people, who tend to have less experience managing their personal finances. I talked to Schwab-Pomerantz for the Fortt Knox podcast to get a sense of her personal journey – successes and mistakes – and also to dig out a lot of practical money tips for professionals who are trying to save for the future while planning big purchases and even raising a family. It's January, after all. There's still time to make good on those money resolutions.

How's this for authenticity: T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere has no qualms about dropping an f-bomb right in the middle of a press conference. He was taunting his rivals on Twitter long before that became the new standard in diplomacy. More important than all of that, Legere is growing the rolls at the third-largest U.S. wireless carrier at a dizzying clip – T-Mobile added 2.3 million subscribers in the first nine months of last year. AT&T and Verizon might be bigger, but T-Mobile is bold, scrappy, and changing the rules of the game. That's why for the latest episode of the Fortt Knox podcast I sat down with Legere to talk about how he decided to be a different kind of CEO, and why. More: http://forttknox.com

There's something hulking and sinister about him on screen that makes the bad-guy thing just work. As Butch Gilzean (and Solomon Grundy) in Fox's hit series Gotham, Drew Powell represents the old-time brutal criminal who paved the way for the super villains of Batman's prime to take over. Gotham, the Batman backstory, tees up the second half of its third season this week (1/16, FOX, 8 p.m.). In light of the occasion, I asked Powell to sit down with me for Fortt Knox to share his own backstory. It's worth paying attention. For kids with visions of stardom, Hollywood dreams rank up there near hoop dreams in the unlikely category. There are only so many hit shows on TV, and so many recurring roles. So how did Powell make it? There's not a formula, exactly, but there are a few lessons for anyone pursuing a passion that has long odds.

Twenty-five years ago, the man who is now CEO of the world's largest maker of computer chips was an engineer at the company. And he made an error that almost got him fired. "I wiped out the output of an entire factory for a week," Intel CEO Brian Krzanich tells me in the latest episode of the Fortt Knox podcast. "I'm lucky to be employed at Intel, sometimes I say." But instead of dooming him, his handling of the problem influenced the company culture, helping to birth a system called "Copy Exactly" that's become a part of its identity. Krzanich went on to make a name for himself as the executive responsible for all of Intel's factories, a job that prepared him to be CEO.

A new year's a time for goals and dreams. A time to make things happen. A time to roll with life's setbacks and turn things around. Broadway veteran Rory O'Malley (The Book of Mormon) did that in spades in 2016. The year started with him landing a lead role as Bill Gates in a musical, Nerds, that was supposed to make its Broadway debut in the spring. But just as the cast had finished learning the production, an investor pulled the plug. How's this for a turnaround? With his schedule suddenly cleared, O'Malley ended up landing the role of King George III in the smash hit Hamilton, which had just become a cultural force. In the latest episode of the Fortt Knox Podcast, as O'Malley shares his story, he also offers some tips that will help you get the most out of the year ahead.

15 years ago this week, Google had its IPO. Initial Public Offering. That means shares of its stock were available to buy for the first time. I was working as a tech reporter in Silicon Valley at the time and remember it was a big deal for a couple of reasons. One, Google’s IPO was a glimmer of hope after the dotcom bust. Two, Google was trying to reinvent the IPO by making it more transparent. They used a process called a Dutch Auction.   Today the IPO hasn’t changed for the most part. But maybe it’s about to. Prominent venture capitalist Michael Mortiz of Sequoia Capital wrote an op-Ed this week arguing that Slack and Spotify are leading the way to a better day where Wall Street fat cats won’t control and mystify the process of going public. But what would that mean for mom-and-pop investors? What would it mean for startup employees looking to make good?  This week to talk the future of the IPO I’ve got Mr. IPO, Jay Ritter, University of Florida Cordell Professor of Finance. Also joining me later on here at the Nasdaq I’ve got Kevin Delaney, Quartz Editor in Chief; and from San Francisco, Connie Loizos, TechCrunch Silicon Valley Editor and my former colleague at a certain newspaper in Silicon Valley.  

A car accident convinced a teenaged Diana Aviv that she had to leave home and fight for the poor and forgotten. One she caused. "As I pulled out, I hit him, and he went into the air and did somersaults and crashed to the ground," she remembers. She, a white Jewish teen, had hit a black bicyclist in apartheid South Africa in the early 1970s. "When we went to the police station, I went to the white entrance and he had to wait and go in the black entrance. And the police officer said to me, 'You tell me whatever you like, and that's what will be what happened.' And I decided I couldn't live in a society where I couldn't take the consequences of my actions, which was to get in trouble because of what I'd done. ... This was as contaminating to me as it was for him. Just, the consequences were easier for me – but they weren't, because how could I live with myself? And I decided then that I had to leave." Today, Aviv is CEO of Feeding America, the third largest charity in America by donation value, at more than $2 billion annually. As I learned when I sat down with her for the Fortt Knox podcast, her journey to that position is a study in how leading with your emotions as well as your head can bring world-changing results.

Sanjay Poonen grew up lower-middle class in India and pushed past rejection to become one of the most respected executives in Silicon Valley; he's now chief operating officer at VMware. Jay Simons' detour before law school took him playing piano across Asia – and inspired him to ditch law for tech, where today he's president at Atlassian, one of the industry's hot young companies. For most of us, the path to success isn't going to be a straight line. But those who make it learn a lot of lessons you can't capture on a résumé. So what qualities separate the best from the average? I sat down with Poonen and Simons for the latest episode of the Fortt Knox Podcast, and the two executives shared some wisdom from their journeys that should help others along the way.

Sebastian Bach is a big dude. You know how celebrities are always supposed to be smaller than you think? Jon Bon Jovi's about my height, and I'm 5'8". I met him in a restaurant in San Jose, Ca. a decade ago. Sebastian, the ex-Skid Row frontman, is huge. 6'3". We're at 30 Rock, the NBC Universal mothership in New York, where he's just popped out of shooting a segment with Access Hollywood. He's kindly agreed to meet me after, in what feels like a giant closet, because it's quiet, and you know, I'm recording a podcast. Here's a guy who joined a band in the mid-'80s, debut album went multi platinum, second album debuted at number one. He was the prettiest of the metal pretty boys, and he earned a bad-boy reputation, too. But the most remarkable thing? He changed. Skid Row broke up after Sebastian booked them as an opening act for KISS, which the other band members thought was beneath them. And of course, after Sebastian himself attracted a lot of the wrong kind of controversy with his temper and his mouth. That didn't help. But that was just the beginning of his story. Bach went on as a solo act, did some reality TV, and did four major turns on Broadway. He scored a recurring role on Gilmore Girls. Along the way, he picked up a few lessons he shared with me on Fortt Knox.