View From The Top

When Tekedra Mawakana told her mother she was thinking about taking a job at Waymo, her mom had a question: “Who is going to get in those cars?” The company, which calls itself the “world’s first autonomous ride-hailing service,” currently operates self-driving, for-hire vehicles in about a dozen cities across the United States, including San Francisco, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Austin. “We want to be the world’s most trusted driver,” Mawakana tells Amira Weeks, MBA ’26, in a View From The Top conversation recorded live at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “Cars are getting safer, but humans are more distracted than ever.” She envisions massive safety gains — “We have to improve the status quo: 1.2 million people killed globally on the roadways is unacceptable” — and cities remade by a reimagined mobility infrastructure. “My hope is that we’ll see cities with more green spaces, more convening spots — which will hopefully make them feel more like cities and communities and less like concrete jungles.”  Mawakana held legal and public policy roles at eBay, Yahoo, and AOL before she became Waymo’s COO. “I hadn’t actually given myself the opportunity to be in a place that was genuinely a moonshot,” she reflects. “Trust that small voice that is telling you that everything you’ve done has prepared you for this.This conversation was recorded on May 21, 2026.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

David Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, was the first person in his family to go to college. Born to blue-collar parents in Baltimore, Maryland, he didn't set out to be an investor. “I was always interested in politics,” Rubenstein tells Sanil Rajput, MBA ’26, in a conversation recorded live at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Though he got his JD from the University of Chicago, “I wasn't really interested in the law, and the law wasn't interested in me,” he says.A roundabout series of events resulted in a job advising Jimmy Carter; that role, in turn — and the abrupt end of it when Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan in 1980 — would eventually lead him to private equity.“I struggled for a while to get a job,” Rubenstein recalls. “Because when you're out of power in Washington, you're a dead man.” After reading that a former Treasury secretary had turned $1 million into $80 million in 18 months on something called a leveraged buyout, Rubenstein co-founded Carlyle in 1987. “‘When you're getting kicked out of town, get out in front and pretend you're leading a parade,’” he says, quoting former Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen. “What does that mean? It means take advantage of the situation you find yourself in. If you're getting kicked out of town, say you're leading a parade. If you're in Washington, D.C., say you understand companies heavily affected by the federal government better than the guys in New York do.” Today, Carlyle manages several hundred billion dollars and has offices in more than 30 countries. Rubenstein has since become a prolific philanthropist, interviewer, and as of 2024, owner of the Baltimore Orioles.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Daniela Amodei and her brother Dario lead Anthropic, one of the world’s biggest and most influential AI companies. It wasn’t in her career plan. “I really think of myself as a generalist,” Amodei tells Gintare Zukauskaite, MBA ’26, in a conversation recorded live at Stanford Graduate School of Business earlier this year. “If you were to look through my background, you would be like, ‘What is this lady actually good at? She doesn’t have a law degree. She’s not a computer scientist.’” But, she continues, “The ability to be curious and learn across a lot of disciplines and to have a strong foundation of wanting to have impact, regardless of the area that you’re working on — I think that’s an underrated quality.”Almodei says that Anthropic is founded on "radical" responsibility and transparency. Asked about her decision to leave OpenAI and co-found Anthropic, she says, “We were running towards something versus running away from something. We had this vision in our heads of wanting to create an organization where the values that matter to us around safety and around responsibility were at the forefront of what we were doing.”The best piece of advice she’s ever received came from a friend and mentor she turned to during that turbulent time: “You already know what the right answer is.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When Demis Hassabis pitched DeepMind to a few venture capitalists back in 2010, the business plan was almost comically audacious. “Step one: Solve intelligence. Step two: Use it to solve everything else,” he recalls in a conversation at Stanford Graduate School of Business with Stanford University President Jonathan Levin. “And people were quite confused. But we really meant it.”Sixteen years later, the “broad arcs” of that plan have gone “unbelievably well,” says Hassabis, a chess prodigy turned video game developer turned neuroscientist turned Nobel Prize-winning AI pioneer. Today he’s on a mission to create “the ultimate tool for science,” building on his decision to give away AlphaFold, the groundbreaking AI system that predicts the structures of proteins. The future, Hassabis says, is just around the corner: “Ten years from now, I think we’ll realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now.”AI@GSB, the Dean's Applied AI initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), and Stanford Medical School hosted a conversation with Demis Hassabis, Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, on the frontier of artificial intelligence and what it means for how we live, work, and flourish.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Citi is one of the most important financial institutions in the world, moving $5 trillion a day across more than 100 countries. Jane Fraser has run it since 2021, when she became the first woman to lead one of America’s “Big Four” banks. In a conversation with Sanil Rajput, MBA ‘26, on View From The Top: The Podcast, Fraser opens up about prioritizing her personal life, pursuing skills and relationships over job titles, and what she learned from the former CEO who tore up her career development plan. “Go the unorthodox path,” she says. “Because — surprise, surprise — you will get the job if you have the skills to be successful in it.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Roblox founder and CEO David Baszucki was building a 3D, multiplayer, cloud-based world before almost anybody had thought about the metaverse. In a wide-ranging conversation with Jeremy Tepper, MBA ’26, on View From The Top: The Podcast, Baszucki describes how he created a company that’s become a household name. “My job is a constant re-architecture of myself,” he says. From outlasting competitors like Minecraft and Fortnite to prioritizing the safety of Roblox users, Baszucki says he sees challenges as opportunities. “We really are, arguably… the future of how you stay in touch with someone else.” This conversation was recorded on November 18, 2025. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Alibaba, known as the “Amazon of China,” is one of the world’s most valuable companies. In a wide-ranging conversation on View From The Top: The Podcast, co-founder and chairman Joe Tsai recalls how it became the company it is today — and looks ahead to the company it may become. Having access to AI, Tsai says, is like “having access to water and air.” He rejects the suggestion that the United States and China must compete to develop this resource. “AI is a race among companies, but AI shouldn’t be a race between countries,” he says. Asked for his advice on building a global company, Tsai suggests focusing on winning locally first. “You have to win the market where you started,” he says. “And then you can think about going overseas, going global, because with winning local battles, you’re training your team, you’re developing talent that enables you to be a global player. So you’ve got to start somewhere.” This conversation was recorded on January 29, 2026. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Being a reporter is the most fun an adult is allowed to have at work,” says A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher and chairman of The New York Times. In a wide-ranging conversation with Amira Weeks, MBA ’26, on View From The Top: The Podcast, Sulzberger reflects on what it means to lead a 175-year-old media institution in a moment of intense political pressure and technological disruption. He explains why journalists must “tune out the cheers and the jeers” and why democracy and markets depend on “the accountability and transparency that the press provides.”This conversation was recorded on January 13, 2026. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on View From The Top we’re sharing an episode of GSB at 100, a limited audio series created especially for Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Centennial. GSB at 100 presents a scrapbook of memories, ideas, and breakthroughs as Stanford GSB celebrates its first century and looks around the corner to what the next 100 years may hold. On this episode of GSB at 100, you’ll experience Centennial Day, hear Dean Sarah A. Soule honor the past, celebrate the present, and look to what the future may hold. GSB at 100 depicts a school defined not only by its innovation and impact, but by its people: curious students, devoted faculty, and accomplished staff — a community of thinkers, dreamers, and doers.Learn more about the Stanford GSB CentennialSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on View From The Top we’re sharing an episode of GSB at 100, a limited audio series created especially for Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Centennial. GSB at 100 presents a scrapbook of memories, ideas, and breakthroughs as Stanford GSB celebrates its first century and looks around the corner to what the next 100 years may hold.On this episode of GSB at 100, you’ll step inside the classrooms where teaching sparks transformation.Learn more about the Stanford GSB CentennialSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At 30, Orlando Bravo, JD/MBA '97, thought his private equity career might be over. “I did three deals and when the dot-com bubble burst two out of the three went to zero,” he tells Gintare Zukauskaite, MBA ’26. “It was an absolute disaster.” Mentor and firm principal Carl Thoma, MBA ’73, gave him one more chance. Bravo pitched software buyouts, and five years later — “one deal at a time” — he’d become a named partner at the firm, Thoma Bravo, which today manages about $180 billion.  “Find the [risks] that are meant for you to take,” Bravo advises. “Do the work, focus on your business, focus on you, and do your thing. That will pay huge, huge dividends, and will make everything very, very clear.”This conversation was recorded on October 21, 2025.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on [If/Then or View From The Top] we’re sharing an episode of GSB at 100, a limited audio series created especially for Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Centennial. GSB at 100 presents a scrapbook of memories, ideas, and breakthroughs as Stanford GSB celebrates its first century and looks around the corner to what the next 100 years may hold.On this episode of GSB at 100, you’ll hear from the dedicated and accomplished staff members who work behind the scenes to make Stanford GSB a community unlike anywhere else in the world.Learn more about the Stanford GSB CentennialSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.