Bill Gates, Brian Chesky, and more: Unheard moments from our first Summit

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LINDSEY COLLINS: When you have everything to lose, that’s when the risk gets super scary.

BRIAN CEHSKY: A near-death business experience. And it was like our company was a burning house. If I could go in the house and only take half the things, which things would I take with me?

AURORA JAMES: Guys, this was not a calling out. This was a calling in. This was an opportunity.

JEFF BERMAN Hey folks — Jeff Berman here. We’re doing something a little different with this week’s episode.

As our team gears up for the 2024 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, we thought it was a good time to share a few of our favorite moments from our first event.

That was back in 2022 with featured speakers like Bill Gates, Tyra Banks, Brian Chesky, and many others. It was a room charged with ideas and full of big energy. Consider this your sneak peek into the kind of insights we will surely see again at this year’s Summit.

That’s coming up October 23 and 24, by the way, with more fantastic sessions from people like Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates, entertainer and entrepreneur Tracee Ellis Ross, and many, many more.

You can learn how to attend or tune in at mastersofscale.com.

To kick off this curation of highlights from the first Summit, we have a conversation about scaling creativity with Pixar executive Lindsey Collins and the creator of the film Turning Red, Domee Shi. Here’s Lindsey:

Copy LinkScaling creativity at Pixar

COLLINS: When I started at Pixar, I started on A Bug’s Life, so it was very small. I think at that point, they had just decided that they were going to get funding to make a second movie.

So nobody knew what they were doing. It was a bit of a hot mess, as they say. But it was super fun. That’s why I think all of us were there — the draw of the hot mess. And kind of being like, great, let’s go, let’s be part of that. And since then, obviously, we’ve gone from kind of maybe we’ll make another film to then we evolved to one film a year, which took us a long time to get to.

And then eventually to three films every two years, which math-wise, you can just imagine to a bunch of animators being like, So, three films every two years, and they’re all like, I don’t, what? Every eight months, basically, we were trying to finish a film. And then now we kind of evolving now with streaming.

So it is kind of, I would venture to say over the course of my time there, almost kind of quadrupled the amount of output we do.

We talked a lot about this, which is, as a starting company, who you attract when you’re just starting out is so different than who you attract when you’re at the top of your game, right? And so, the growth of the company has been huge over the last few years, especially, and those are people that are coming to Pixar for different reasons than the people that were there at the very beginning.

And it’s not to say it’s better or worse. It’s, just, it’s a very different vibe. So I think one of our fears is always that either we lose something we find to be crucial, that we forget that it’s crucial and we lose it, or that we stick so closely to what we’ve done in the past that we forget how to innovate.

And I think the biggest challenge, certainly for me, and that I’ve talked a lot with you about and with you about is taking risk. When you’ve got nothing to lose, taking risks is all you like. You’re like, all right, so there’s nothing to lose. But when you have everything to lose, that’s when the risk gets super scary.

And I think that’s where we are constantly trying to push ourselves or at least ask ourselves if we are taking risks. I try to always, and Domee is great at this too, is trying to kind of always say, is it, is it too easy?

Are we playing it too safe? Are we depending too much on kind of a past, that was amazing, but is not who we are now? And if so, we need to change it up. I think we have to be okay. And when we say fail early, that was always on like a small scale, but we have to be prepared for some of our filmmakers to fail.

BERMAN: Here’s filmmaker Domee Shi:

DOMEE SHI: Yeah. I think filmmaking is just throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks. And that’s kind of how we craft our movies at Pixar. We have eight screening cycles.

So we have eight opportunities. Like every two, three months, we put up the entire film in a really rough form. And we just watch it from beginning to end. And we just get as many notes as we can from as many fresh eyes as we can. And we change, and we adjust, and we rewrite. And I just wanted to just throw as much spaghetti against the wall as possible so we could identify what are those key moments that we can put into the movie.

There’s no point in agonizing and trying to perfect each spaghetti strand because you’re going to throw it and it’s going to stick or it’s not. I like how you’re sticking with this analogy. It’s like, you ever make spaghetti? I think about the world in like food metaphors, as you can tell.

COLLINS: But I think, I mean, at one point early on, I remember you looked at me and you’re like, “Whose idea was this?” You’re like, “Who thought this was a good way to make a movie?” This was like screening two. And I was like, “Oh, well. Like, 23 other filmmakers kind of thought so, but it was good.” It was like she was challenging it because it’s frustrating, it’s hard, it’s horrible. You live for three and a half years with a broken movie.

SHI: It’s hard, it was especially hard for me because I’m kind of a type A perfectionist, and you have to fail, and you have to show rough, broken versions of your movie to your filmmaking heroes and watch them rip it apart, but you just got comfortable doing it.

BERMAN: Learning from failure and accepting blunt feedback is tough — it can be really tough — but it’s essential for every leader.

Our next scene from Summit comes from a person who has plenty of experience in this arena. Airbnb founder Brian Chesky talked about 2020, when everyone told him the pandemic would be the end of his company.

Copy LinkAirbnb surviving a “near-death business experience”

CHESKY: I thought the hardest thing I would ever do in my life was start Airbnb, and I was certain of that.

And I came back from the holidays. It was January 2020. And I think like most of you, I thought my life was going down a certain road, and I could predict it. And we were about to go public. We had mostly finished our S1 about a business that I was feeling pretty confident about, and we were kind of a success story at that point.

We were a 30-billion-dollar company waiting to go public. And if you told me 14 years earlier, when I was 25 unemployed, my parents are social workers, that would happen, I would’ve told you were crazy. I thought we’d made it. And then all of a sudden, within eight weeks, we lost 80 percent of our business. And when you’re like our size and you lose 80 percent of your business in 8 weeks, it’s like an 18-wheeler going 80 miles an hour and then having to slam on the brakes.

Nothing good happens. And it was a really, actually, terrifying time in some ways. I mean, there were major journalists saying, “Is this the end of Airbnb? Will Airbnb exist in the future?” This is eight weeks after the preparation for what was supposed to be a huge IPO.

I felt like we had a near-death business experience. And then suddenly everything became really kind of more clear to me. And not everything mattered. And I remember it was like our company was a burning house. If I could go in the house and only take half the things, which things would I take with me? You suddenly have to do that. And the other thing I’ve learned about a crisis, a lot of people now ask me, what’s the hardest thing to manage in a crisis?

You know what the hardest thing to manage in a crisis is? This surprised me. It’s your own psychology. The hardest thing to manage your crisis, is your own psychology, if you’re a leader, because the psychology of the leader I found becomes the psychology of the organization. And if you think you’re screwed, people see it in your face and they say, well, you have the most information, so we must be screwed.

But if you are optimistic — and not optimism that’s blind optimism, because then you’ll lose faith, but optimism rooted in some basis of facts that people still want us to exist. And we’re not going to be as big as we used to be, but this is why we’re going to exist. Then that becomes the optimistic mentality that permeates the organization.

And you need to be optimistic to have creativity. And you sure as hell need creativity in a crisis because often there seems like no good solutions. And then the next thing you need to do in a crisis, I found, is communicate about four times as frequently as a non-crisis. I talked to every executive every day, every board member every week.

I did all-hands meetings every single week. And I would totally be open in Q&As, and that was counterintuitive because in a crisis, you kind of don’t want to face every employee because they’re going to ask, “Are we going to do layoffs?” And you really don’t want to answer that question. But I would try to just go through that process.

And the final thing I think is that in a crisis, you have to be decisive and fast. But the problem with decisiveness is that a lot of people, especially a lot of data-oriented people, they get a little bit paralyzed. Because in a crisis, everything’s changing and how can you make a decision? We know the core data and that’s when you need courage, but courage needs to lean on something.

What do you lean on with courage? And so courage must lean on principles. In other words, in a crisis, I don’t think you make business decisions as much as you make principle decisions and principle decisions become things like, if I can’t predict the outcome, how do I want to be remembered? And if you always just imagine in a crisis:

This is my defining moment. This is how I want to be remembered. It sometimes helps you separate from the craziness and the chaos of that moment. And then suddenly you can point a way forward and you can become better than you ever were. So to end the story, before the crisis, we were a break-even company.

Actually 250 million dollars. People then thought we were going out of business. A thousand of us went in a foxhole, rebuilt the company from the ground up, and miraculously, eventually went public at a valuation five times our nadir and now like a design-led company did more than three billion dollars in free cash flow.

And the last 12 months by not even really trying to make money. And I think there’s a number of lessons here, but I think the most important lesson that I learned is the thing you learn most about a crisis is yourself and you’ve got to be true to who you are. Don’t apologize for how you want to run the company, because when you are in your darkest moments, then you know, the principles in who you are is what you have to lean on.

BERMAN: After the break, we’ll hear from Princess Reema, Saudi Ambassador to the United States, on the importance of not taking no for an answer, and how to use business to make radical change. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

We’re back with the highlights from the first Masters of Scale Summit. You can find all these full talks and more on our YouTube channel.

Up next, Princess Reema, the current Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, shares what can happen when the word “no” does not fit in your vocabulary.

Copy LinkPrincess Reema on empowering women in sports

PRINCESS REEMA: Before being a diplomat, I was an actual government employee at the Ministry of Sports.

And part of my role was to come in and say, how can we include women in a sector that women never were included in? And that really spoke to my soul because prior to working in government, I’d created a women’s social enterprise for female inclusion, financial literacy, and readiness for work skills. And my mantra is providing access for opportunity.

I was hired to push back on either the stereotype that we had for ourselves or the limiting beliefs that we had for ourselves. Or the boundaries that we were always told no, because I was told there is no no. The no is simply what you could imagine doesn’t exist. So, with that, what I was empowered to do was say, from a health and wellbeing point of view for our young women, what do we want?

It’s Greenfield, nothing exists. From an education point of view, what do we want? From the business development point of view, what do we want? From the consciousness of a woman, what do we want? So we were able to put PE in girls’ schools for the first time in the history of my country. We were able to allow for women to run, jog, ride a bicycle, and participate and compete internationally.

We took four women as wildcards to the Olympics, and frankly, one of the most amazing opportunities was they said, there’s these four girls. We need to get them ready, but we can’t talk about it, which means we can’t train anywhere publicly, which means also FYI at that time, no facilities for women in sports.

So I said, my God, what do you want me to do with this? So they actually, we ended up doing their bootcamp in my home. They trained in my home gym. They stayed in my parents’ guest house because we just needed to get it done. Get it done. The thing was just get it done before somebody says no, because once you break the ice and you take that first step, it is what it is. It’s precedent.

BERMAN: Get it done. Find a way. It’s something every business leader needs to tell themselves at the most pivotal times of growth.

Next up, we’ll hear from Aurora James. She’s a designer and founder of the Brother Vellies brand, worn regularly by Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Lady Gaga. Aurora shared how allyship, innovation, and profits can go hand in hand.

Copy LinkInside the 15% Pledge

JAMES: I’m sure that everyone in this room remembers where we were in May 2020, and I was at home alone in Brooklyn. And when news and video footage started circulating of Mr. Floyd’s senseless murder, in a lot of ways it felt like a grief that was almost too heavy to bear. And coupled with my own emotional reaction to the situation, I realized that from a business perspective, I was going to have to handle this as well.

Just like many of you. So I’m sure a lot of you in the audience here thought, wow, I would love to do something to help. In fact, some of you here, as well as a lot of other CEOs and founders actually called me that week, trying to figure out how your company should respond to the sudden racial reckoning.

And I knew this time things were going to have to be different. We would no longer be able to work with just DEI policies or one-time donations. We needed innovations. Not just donations. We needed actions, not just words. What we needed was true allyship. The idea for me was simple.

Black people are almost 15 percent of the population. Major retailers should commit 15 percent of their shelf space to Black-owned businesses.

And I thought, if major retailers started committing to the idea of the 15 percent pledge, Silicon Valley might actually be excited to take notice and start allocating more than just their traditional 1 percent of funds to Black entrepreneurs.

I thought about how much money would start being funneled back into the Black community. And I realized something. Not only was this the right thing to do, it was going to be damn good business. And so, I tagged a bunch of the retailers that I wanted to come to the table and have a conversation. Guys, this was not a calling out. This was a calling in. This was an opportunity.

But to be honest with you, I was nervous. The next morning was a Sunday, and I woke up to a flurry of inbound messages. The idea was catching on. I stayed up that night, overnight, with my web designer so that we could launch a petition on Monday at noon. By Tuesday, that same petition had almost 100,000 signatures.

By Wednesday, I registered to become a non-profit. By Thursday, CNN and The New York Times were calling. And by Day 10, Sephora became the first major corporation to commit to the 15 percent pledge.

Right then and there, they had become an ally. In the days and weeks that followed. My message was simple. We are all guilty, but ultimately it’s the system that we’ve created that is to blame. And this is our unique opportunity to start rebuilding parts of that system.

We’ve partnered with everyone from McKinsey to Google to Yelp, to American Vogue to help harness their unique skills as allies to actually propel Black businesses forward. So I’ve learned a lot over the past few years about what it means to be an ally. I’ve learned that allyship takes action. I’ve learned that it takes radical accountability, and I’ve learned that it takes partnership with Black women.

Closing the racial economic gap in this country is entirely possible, but we are going to have to do it together. Each and every one of you in this room right now holds a unique opportunity and ability to affect change exactly where you’re at. And all you need to do is start asking questions. Starting with, how can I be an ally?

BERMAN: Asking the right questions is an essential aspect of leadership. Sometimes even more important than having the answers. That problem-solving approach was also on display with Summit speaker Bill Gates. To close out our episode, let’s hear this iconic leader talk about the global challenge of scaling up renewable energy.

Copy LinkBill Gates on scaling climate solutions

BILL GATES: Electricity when the sun is shining is essentially a solved problem, but people who don’t want to freeze to death or factories that need to run 24 hours, it’s reliability is the hard part of electricity, and so you have to think of it as a reliability system that faces the problem that during the extreme cases, which are cold snaps and heat waves, your renewable sources tend to not be available.

So when the cold front hits the Midwest, there’s no sun, there’s no wind, and yet, you have this non-sheddable load, which is people don’t like to freeze to death, you can’t thaw them out later. And so it’s 24 hours a day and a mind-blowing amount of energy required in that case. So having either nuclear fission, which has huge economic problems and we need breakthroughs, or fusion, which has both science problems and economic problems. These are grossly under-invested areas. Now, versus, say, 10 years ago, the investment level’s gone up very dramatically. There’s 14 fusion companies, Breakthrough Energy’s in four out of the 14. I’m biased on fission because I directly fund once you put billions of dollars into something, you get biased that it might work.

I’m hoping I can take that money and spend it on malaria. Well, the involvement of the private sector companies is one of the fantastic things that happened. Over the last five years at the Glasgow Summit COP 26, last November, the private sector really came and not just the private sector that’s, inherently emits, which is like oil and gas or electricity.

The finance sector, the technology sector all were there saying, okay, they want to help be involved. And for many of these new green products, they can be pilot customers. When they build a new building, they can buy green cement. Yes, they’ll pay a little bit extra. But that is part of that learning curve.

Human innovation’s incredible. I didn’t know when I started down the breakthrough energy path, whether I’d see the same innovation I’d seen in the digital realm. I really didn’t.

And I’m here to tell you that, wow, bright people, particularly in the United States have come up with solutions to these problems. And it’s going to be fun to back those and get those scaled out literally on a global scale.

BERMAN: Bill reminds us all the promise that innovation can bring.

From navigating crises to embracing creativity, the moments in this episode were just part of the wisdom shared during our first Masters of Scale Summit. You can check out these full conversations and more on our YouTube channel.

Our stage program runs October 23rd and 24th. Find out more at mastersofscale.com/summit.

I’m Jeff Berman, thank you for listening.