BOB SAFIAN: Hi all, Bob Safian here. Today, we have a special episode highlighting some of our favorite moments from Rapid Response in 2024. While Rapid Response focuses on in-the-moment challenges, there are important, lasting lessons embedded in each conversation. We’ve identified six key lessons from the year, spanning tech, leadership, and creative solutions, illuminated by six memorable moments from guests like Will.i.am, Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff. Together, these moments offer a foundation for dealing with our turbulent world in 2025. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Lessons of Rapid Response.

Lesson number one: AI disruption is only getting started

Our first lesson comes courtesy of musician, entrepreneur, and personality, Will.i.am. I sat down with Will in early September to talk about the launch of his AI radio product, Radio-dot-FYI. But he also explored the still-evolving ways that AI is redefining music, media, and business overall. And true to Will’s nature — yes, we got some rhymes. Let’s listen.

You were the first one to tell me about UDIO, which is this amazing AI-based music generator that you’re invested in. I mean, you prompt it, it creates an original song for you. It’s amazing. Now the record labels are suing it for infringement. Like, squaring this sort of awesome tech for creative work and the kind of creative work that underlies it, that trains it? How do you think about those things fitting?

WILL.I.AM: Say, for example, Spotify had no users. The record companies wouldn’t have sued them.

So the reason why they sued them is because there’s growth. The reason why they sued UDIO is because UDIO has growth. So it’s a good thing because that means they’re going to come to some type of agreement faster, and artists and how they train their stuff on will be resolved. But we’re in tricky grounds now. For example, let’s say, for instance, Prince was alive and you went to Prince and said, “Hey, Prince, who’s your inspiration?”

Prince is going to obviously tell you James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix. If you would ask Michael Jackson, “Hey Mike, who’s your inspiration?” Michael Jackson would say James Brown, Fred Astaire, Sammy Davis Jr., and Gene Kelly. They both, what they both have in common is James Brown. And it’s clear that James Brown is their big inspiration.

You could see it. So in this case, from human to human, we call it inspiration. Machines call it dataset. And training, what you trained on. If you would ask an artist, “Yo, who’s your inspiration?” It’s the same thing because we have a neural network, and that neural network was based off of our neural network.

So now we’re on touchy ground here because last time I checked, Prince did not give James Brown royalties. Because he was inspired by him, his pathways were part of his dataset. So that’s where it gets blurry where we are now.

SAFIAN: Do you use UDIO? I mean, is there something you use it for in your songwriting, in your process?

WILL.I.AM: No, because UDIO doesn’t do Black Eyed Peas right.

SAFIAN: Well, you should be able to help them with that.

WILL.I.AM: Yeah, but I don’t want to help them with that. The way I write music, the AI doesn’t write music like that. It doesn’t do fusion right. It can do like, “Yo, give me trap.” It does that awesome.

It can do jazz. Great. But if the moment I’m like, “Yo, give me Samba with a little bit of blues and a little bit of rock and a little bit of calypso,” it’s not going to do that right. It’s better with—

SAFIAN: Pure flavors, right? More subtle flavors or creating new flavors. It just doesn’t do that as well.

WILL.I.AM: Yet.

SAFIAN: Is that what people most misunderstand about AI? The “yet,” like right now it can’t do Black Eyed Peas, but maybe it will be able to. Yeah.

WILL.I.AM: This is the worst it’s ever going to be because it just gets better from here. And that’s being optimistic in every sense of the way—ethically, morally, business practice, legally, compensation-wise. This is the worst it’s ever going to be being optimistic.

Let’s be optimistic that the powers that be don’t lead with greed. This is the worst it’s ever going to be. That sentence is it. Let’s be optimistic that the powers that be don’t lead with greed. This is the worst it’s ever going to be.

Lesson number two: The intention economy is rising

SAFIAN: The next lesson comes from Dara Treseder, Chief Marketing Officer of Autodesk, who talked to me from the glitz and glamour of the Cannes Lions advertising festival — where the industry hands out top awards. I previously talked with Dara about Super Bowl ads, and from Cannes, she doubled down on the value of focus: that the story we tell our customers, our employees, and our investors requires intentionality and intensity, especially in today’s marketplace. Let’s cue the tape.

DARA TRESEDER: When we talked about the Super Bowl, you and I discussed the CeraVe ad with Michael Cera. Remember that one where we talked about it? That spot that was at the Super Bowl won, it won the social and influenza Grand Prix.

Ogilvy, the agency that works with CeraVe, the brand on this, they got more than 450 content creators to fuel speculation around Michael Cera’s potential involvement with the brand. So if you think about it, they, from day one, were focused on the results because it’s a world where you can get lost in the noise, right?

Michael Cera is just one of how many celebrities that show, I mean, every celebrity from Beyoncé, right? So everybody was in a Super Bowl ad this past year. How do you make sure you get the ROI on that? They had a genius way for the brand to have seemingly organic conversations on the internet around this campaign to really deliver results.

The originality is so important. Things need to be original. So the other thing I’m seeing here is you can’t just do what everybody’s doing, right? One of the panels that I was on, someone said, we’re moving from the attention economy to the intention economy because intentionality matters so much. And what we’re seeing also get awarded are things that have never been done before. I like to call them MBDB, show me the MBDB never been done before.

SAFIAN: We’re kind of coming back full circle because there was a point where everything was about creativity and no one really followed what was happening with the outcome. And then it was sort of like, well, if you tweak all of the levers, the technological levers, and you use the right data and whatever, you get the result, and it almost seemed like the creativity didn’t matter. And what I’m hearing you say is we’re finally realizing you got to pull these two things together to really get the bang out of it.

TRESEDER: Absolutely. The art and the science have to come together. The magic happens at the intersection of both.

At the end of the day, one of the things I think is most beautiful about life is the story. And so as marketers, going back to our roots of telling compelling stories, that’s how we become the trusted partner to our customers.

We’re inspiring them with real stories where we’re forming true connections, as opposed to just trying to interrupt them with a variety of ads. We’re getting back to basics. And technology is helping us propel and do that in more innovative ways than we’ve done before.

Lesson number three: New talent is underestimated

SAFIAN: Hollywood offers a fascinating lens for understanding marketplace shifts. The Ankler’s founder and CEO, Janice Min, came onto Rapid Response a couple of times to guide us through the ups and downs of the entertainment business — from award shows and box office records to studio layoffs and industry infighting. We also talked about a platform she finds to be the most influential — and the most underrated — for a new generation. Here’s Janice.

JANICE MIN: Some of the smartest people in town have said to me that what we’re going to see in the next few years, this is going to be the rise of the independents. That the studio system, it’s like turning around an ocean liner with a broken engine. And the nimble upstarts will be able to move much more quickly.

I mean, the way someone who had visibility to Paramount’s books had described it to me, even though you’re seeing thousands of layoffs at Paramount, we’ve seen thousands of people laid off at Disney and Warner Brothers, there’s still so much more to cut because it’s an infrastructure built for another era. And the fast-moving independents don’t have that burden.

SAFIAN: I have to ask you about YouTube. YouTube fascinates me. It remains the most popular streaming platform for younger viewers, despite efforts by Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery. None seem to have an answer for YouTube’s dominance. It feels strange to say it, but do we still underestimate YouTube?

MIN: We totally underestimate YouTube. When you look at the amount of time spent on YouTube versus any other streaming platform, I mean, hands down, it blows everything away. So they’ve captured the attention economy. As people say, it’s hard for Hollywood to think about YouTube as anything more than promotion.

You put your trailers on there, you do an announcement saying how many million views a trailer got, but boy, if you think about the levers that a YouTube can switch to turn that into a more premium experience—and I know they tried that and it didn’t go very well — but they have so much data at their fingertips now.

And also, you’re seeing this fundamental shift in the creator economy where creators used to think that Hollywood was the be-all and end-all, that if you became a really huge creator, you might get a show on Hulu or you might get a show.

SAFIAN: That was the goal, right? That was the pinnacle. Yeah.

MIN: And now it’s not increasingly for people. You have Mr. Beast doing his 100-million deal with Amazon, and we’ll see how that goes. But you also have one of the watershed moments for the creator-YouTube-Hollywood relationship. There are these huge YouTube stars named Rhett and Link, and they ended up with a deal with Bollywood.

Warner Brothers Discovery to do a reality show. It came out, did not do well. They ended up doing basically a 20-minute video rebuttal to Hollywood where they fired Hollywood. And they said, “This is what you don’t understand. You don’t understand how to talk to our audience. You gave us really terrible notes.

Your process is awful. And we want to have nothing else to do with you. And we are going to just talk directly to our audience now instead of through you.” And I think that’s the opportunity when you were talking about the independence, is that whole, the direct-to-consumer fantasy of you don’t need the middleman, and who are these old guys, gatekeepers, who are trying to tell me how to do my thing?

And you’re seeing the most successful creators make ungodly amounts of money in a way that Hollywood probably would not have made possible for them.

SAFIAN: We have three more lessons of Rapid Response, including how and why Airbnb backed into its most high-profile strategic investment of the year. That’s after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Welcome back to Lessons of Rapid Response, spotlighting six of our favorite insights from the show in 2024. Before the break, we heard from Will.i.am about AI disruption, Dara Treseder about the need for intentionality, and Janice Min about the impact of new talent. Now we dig into three more lessons, starting with Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff. Let’s jump back in.

Lesson number four: Be bolder than you’ve ever been

I spoke to Salesforce’s Marc Benioff to learn more about the company’s big investment in Agentforce—an AI tool to help fulfill tasks on a user’s behalf. But the key learning was less about technology than bold leadership. Marc admits his own shortcomings, crediting Nvidia’s CEO with inspiring him to go all-in on AI, years later than he should have. Let’s listen.

You’ve had to make several rapid responses over the last two years. Your co-CEO stepped away, you managed some layoffs, you structured to enable the creation of Agentforce. How have you approached this phase?

MARC BENIOFF: Of your leadership? So I’ve been the CEO of Salesforce for 25 years.

And as we’ve grown from zero to now 38 billion in revenue this year, we’re obviously the number one CRM, but also now the second-largest enterprise software company in the world behind Microsoft, I would say. And we use this term for startups a lot, but it’s true for big companies. And I think big company CEOs like me now don’t think enough about this.

And it’s not exactly founder mode, which is this kind of funny buzzword term that’s going around.

SAFIAN: Yes.

BENIOFF: It’s pivot. You have to be ready to shift, to pivot, to evolve, to move forward, to make things happen when you see that opportunity, you’ve got to go. And I think that not enough CEOs do it. I’ll tell you, at Dreamforce, Jensen Wong came, who you know, is the CEO of Nvidia.

But it was interesting. I did a long conversation with him one on one, and my neighbor here is David Kirk, who was the chief scientist at Nvidia, and helped create the GPU. That was 2009, 2008, 2009, 2010.

SAFIAN: It was a video game company, or at least that’s the way I used to think of it. Right? That’s right.

Chips for video. They—

BENIOFF: Made triangles, all these graphics and things right on the chip level. But they didn’t realize that when they built that technology, it would be able to be used. Oh, for training models and making AI a little better. And in 2011 or 12, when Jensen saw really deep learning evolve out of Stanford for the first time, he made a pretty big decision that no one else made in the whole tech industry, was, “I’m going to pivot my whole company to deep learning.”

And by doing that, as these companies started to emerge and evolve, they would, he would basically say, “Use my chip, use my chip, use my chip.” And they found great performance building their AI capabilities using Nvidia. And he became an expert in AI and became fascinated with that. I know that because I had that same knowledge and that same insight.

And I saw that, but I didn’t pivot my company at that point to that. And essentially, and I was doing the interview, I’m like, “Well, Marc, how stupid are you? Like, you saw all that too, but you didn’t do the hard pivot to deep learning. You did some things with AI, and you built Einstein, and you did this, but did you really do a hard pivot of the whole company to AI?”

No. However, why that’s important right now is because as I kind of have looked at the last two years, and how AI is kind of making a little transformation here with this next generation of capability we’ll have now, that’s when I saw the agent capability emerge that I said, “Oh, okay, you might not have done it in 2011.”

You had other things on your mind. No, no, this is the hard pivot. Where for the last two decades, you’ve built all the customer touchpoints, Marc. Now I’m talking about myself as third party. These are all your customer touchpoints. Why don’t you hard pivot the company? And so that’s why we’ve hard pivoted the company.

To agents and Agentforce. I even had an employee, a top engineering executive say, “This is so big and so exciting. We should change the name of the company from Salesforce to Agentforce.” I’m not convinced he’s wrong, by the way.

Lesson number five: Hold up a mirror to yourself — and to the world

SAFIAN: In a political and economic landscape with so much uncertainty, we need to both keep learning and keep teaching. Midi Health CEO Joanna Strober talked to me about how she raised $100 million to better serve women as they move through menopause. Joanna’s journey included accepting a tough critique about her initial fundraising tactics in service of the larger purpose of her business. Let’s listen in.

JOANNA STROBER: I actually went to a pitch session a year ago before I raised this most recent round, and it was done by David Hornick. He did something called the Lobby for Women, and he was training women on pitching. He had venture people sitting in rooms, and you went in, and you pitched to them.

And you know what? The first two people that I pitched to were super nice. This is nice. Great business. Blah, blah, blah. The third and the fourth one were like, this is not going to get funding. You have not nailed your story. It is not big enough. You don’t understand how to tell a story that is big enough.

And they were really honest about the mistakes I was making, and I just remember driving home, and I was just, wow. Like, that was very helpful. It was a little discouraging, but it was very helpful. And I think a lot of times women probably are like me, very practical, thinking about our margins, and thinking about the business that we’re building. One of these men is like, “Well, you’re not telling me why you’re going to be a 10 billion company.” I was like, “Well, we could be.” And he’s like, “Well, you didn’t tell me that in your story.” And it was a little humbling, but it was actually incredibly helpful. I think a lot of times we don’t tell the story. We women don’t tell the story big enough.

And I really did go back and say, look, every woman in this country is going through menopause. Every single one of them. And if you look at what’s going on in the country with the decrease in OB-GYNs, half of the counties don’t even have an OB-GYN in this country. And in most of the other places, they have nine-month waiting lists.

And then you look at the decrease in primary care, and you realize that we have a massive shortage in primary care. And so when you look at that and you look at the fact we have this aging population of women, every woman in the country could be actually my patient. And so, why am I only saying it’s X-sized business when it really could be X times 100?

And so, it was incredibly helpful, and it really helped me think about, like, what does it take to build a big company? But I have this massive audience. I have a group of workers who really want to come work for us. We are also the recipient of all the burnout in the healthcare industry.

So those women come to us because they want to provide care in a different way. So I don’t know. For me, in this last round, I was able to say, “I think this can be a really big company,” and I do truly believe this can be a really big company, and so it made the fundraising easier. Now we’re just growing really fast, so now it’s a different story because we’re just able to raise money based on numbers, not necessarily just on telling a big story.

Lesson number six: Your best strategy may start with your gut

SAFIAN: I spoke to Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky in June about the company’s new ‘Icon’ experiences. It turns out the prototype for the program started with one-off initiatives that Brian wasn’t even aware of, and that he sort of backed into the strategy. His commitment came largely from his instincts, and even when financial numbers supported the idea, he invested in details well beyond what a numbers person would advise. Here’s Brian.

BRIAN CHESKY: Ten years ago, I remember I was with my cofounder roommate, and we’re—so we’re living in this apartment that we started the company in, and we need to get some furniture.

And of course, back then, Ikea would have been the place you would have gone. We get to an Ikea, we’re walking down the hallway, and we see a bedroom. Like those Ikea showroom bedrooms. I remember saying to him, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we put this on Airbnb?” Like a joke. And we started talking about it internally like a joke, like we’re going to list a night at the Ikea.

Well, somebody in our Australian team, unbeknownst to me, hears about this idea and reaches out to some marketing executive at Ikea. And they one day tell me, “Hey, we’ve got this Ikea in Sydney, Australia on Airbnb.” So it gets listed on Airbnb and it becomes a bit of a sensation.

Then one day, somebody on our team says, “We have an idea to list Blockbuster on Airbnb.” And I’m like, “Blockbuster? I thought there were no more Blockbusters.” They’re like, “Actually, it turns out there’s one left in Bend, Oregon.” So we put it on Airbnb, it went all over the internet.

It got thousands of press articles, probably got millions and millions of dollars worth of press. So then last year, the Barbie movie’s coming out. I think it was Mattel and Warner Brothers who reached out to us and they said, “Can we do a promotion with Barbie?” Because they were going to do a bunch of these Barbie marketing activations.

And so we said, sure. So we found a house in Malibu, in the hills of Malibu, that looked a little like the Barbie house. And we basically, to the last detail, really every corner of the space, recreated it as if it was a Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse. That attention to detail is paramount.

As Charles Eames said, “The details aren’t the details, they make the design.” And Walt Disney would look at the back of a trash can. And I do think that everything is just an accumulation of details. I think that’s a good characteristic of design. But, so anyways, this Barbie house we put on Airbnb, it gets more press than the IPO.

And we’re like, what the hell? Like the universe is telling me that the world wants this.

SAFIAN: So there’s not necessarily a strategy behind it. There’s just like a feeling that there’s an opportunity here.

CHESKY: It was purely a feeling. In hindsight, we backed into a strategy and sometimes things start with a strategy.

Sometimes things start with like, “We need more engagement, and we need blah, blah, blah.” But I got to tell you, Bob, sometimes I honestly think, I mean, the best ideas start with a vision. They start with an idea, they start with a feeling, and then you validate them by reverse engineering a strategy to make sure what you’re doing actually makes some sort of modicum of business sense.

So it’s October, and I rally the team together. It’s only like six, seven months ago. And I said, “We need to create a platform for Barbies. I want to be able to come to Airbnb and see a whole series of Barbies on the homepage, but I don’t just want them to be stays because I want them to be experiences.”

And in fact, I want all these to feel like they’re experiences, not stays, because this is going to be a bridge to where we’re going. We’re going to eventually relaunch experiences. And I said, this can be the way to do that. So we huddle together and probably my favorite concept that the team came up with is the Up house, and the Up house.

The Up house was one of my favorite movies and I said, “If we’re going to build this Up house, you better make sure it is down to the last detail because people have been to Disneyland and their expectation is that it is done to the level of Disneyland craft, and it can’t look like a Disney one-off.”

You open the mailbox, and there are brochures, and they’re graphic.

It’s that level of detail. We assembled fabricators, prop designers. We had to assemble a team of a hundred people to build this house.

Then I have this thought, I said, “Wait a second. I know we’re going to build a house, but if it doesn’t go in the sky, it’s not really the Up house. And the problem is, most houses aren’t constructed to be lifted in the air.”

SAFIAN: No, they’re supported by the ground. Yeah.

CHESKY: And so, if you lift a house, it collapses.

There’s no structural integrity. So we ended up working with structural engineers to figure out, “How can you construct a house that’s 40,000 pounds, okay, 40,000 pounds, that can be lifted 50 feet in the air, 50 feet, 5 stories in the air, and above it will have 8,000 balloons?” Now, you can’t use helium balloons. Obviously, the physics doesn’t actually work out—you’d need the biggest helium balloons in the world.

They deflate, you like fall to your death. So you can’t do that. So we ended up creating a steel structure, and then we found the biggest crane in the world or one of the biggest cranes in the world. And these cranes were basically used for windmills, those wind farms.

We had to work with safety experts to figure out how the house doesn’t rock, and we had to work with meteorologists because it turns out about 11 miles an hour is the amount of wind the house can withstand before the rocking becomes dangerous and the props basically just dismantle.

We found land in New Mexico where they filmed “Oppenheimer,” and that’s basically it. It kind of looks a little like Venezuela, so where the film takes place. And so that’s just one of the icons. We do this for like 11 of them. Given the response of Barbie, I knew if we put out icons, number one, we’d remain top of mind.

Now everyone knows Airbnb, but like our competitors spend four or 5 like performance marketing to stay top of mind and everyone knows of them too. So we’re in an industry where even if people know you, people only come to your app once or twice a year, not like Instagram, ’cause you travel. So you have to remain top of mind.

The second thing is we’re in every country in the world, with only a few exceptions. But this was the best way to reach certain audiences. We want to reach the community in India, who’s the biggest Bollywood star? Let’s work with one of them. So it really works. And the third thing is the Airbnb brand, on the one hand, is pretty amazing.

Like, it’s a noun and a verb. It’s one of the only brands that is like Xerox or Kleenex, right? It means something. The problem is it’s a noun, a verb that means a B&B, a place to stay. It’s almost like if Nike meant running shoes, how do you sell basketball shoes, right? It becomes narrow. It becomes narrow.

So it turned out that by building this platform for icons. It kept us top of mind. It allowed us to reach all these segments, and it became a gateway to people thinking about Airbnb, not just for stays, but experiences. And that allows us to pave the way for the next few years.

SAFIAN: There you have it, our six lessons of Rapid Response from 2024. Of course, there are many more embedded in our episodes. Thanks to everyone who’s listened to the show this year. Your attention and support mean so much to us. We’ll continue to release new episodes every Tuesday and Friday in 2025, to keep you informed on all the rapid responses leaders are navigating throughout the business world. I’m Bob Safian. Stay safe and happy holidays.