In sports, everyone has an opinion on your every move. That’s the reality – and the privilege, says Scott O’Neil, CEO of the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils. When the NBA shut down its season in March 2020, O’Neil faced leadership challenges that include both missteps and discoveries about the future of sports.
For Chewy, the pet-supply company, the pandemic is driving unprecedented demand. Ultra-rapid growth has its own set of challenges that CEO Sumit Singh is responding to by: hiring, setting up a task team, rolling out customer-facing innovations in a weekend, and more.
In crisis, having a strong neighborhood makes you more resilient. Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar shares new features, like Help Maps and Groups, that rolled out during the pandemic to help residents connect and coordinate. Some are new products, some in development pre-Covid — but all can help neighbors act as the frontline of support for one another.
Crisis Text Line provides free, confidential crisis counseling via text, 24/7. To help counselors meet the moment, they anonymize and analyze real-time data on how their users are feeling – and that data is telling them the story of the onset of pandemic.
The secret to massive scale? Be a platform. Build a virtuous cycle where everyone wins, and you’ll emerge the biggest winner of all. This is what Tobi Lütke did when he built Shopify – and then opened it up to the world.
Behind every successful business is a hidden back-end business powering it behind the scenes. No one knows this better than Jenn Hyman, CEO of Rent the Runway. RTR is known for creating a glamorous “closet in the cloud,” but it achieved ‘unicorn’ status by mastering the businesses behind their public-facing brand — including the world’s largest dry-cleaning operation and a data insights practice that’s changing the fashion industry. Cameo appearance: Kevin Venardos (Venardos Circus); Stewart Butterfield (Slack)
How do you gain your users’ trust? How do you build a team and company culture at the same time? Reid Hoffman answers questions from eight early-stage entrepreneurs all over the world. Co-hosted with Jason Feifer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine.
That constant roar of customer feedback? Be thankful for it. It holds all the secrets to your success, if you learn how to read the signs. Listen to what users say, sure. But also watch what they do and interpret what they need. Eventbrite’s Julia Hartz embodies this principle. She believes passionately in learning from her customers, and has made rapid response to user feedback the driving force behind Eventbrite’s strategy — as it grew from a simple ticketing app to a full-service platform for event creators, offering everything from ticket sales to custom-made RFID readers.
You can marshal the power of millennials to grow your company, but you have to redefine your concept of loyalty. To keep millennials as users (and employees), you’ll need to keep evolving — and help them evolve. No one understands this better than Brit + Co founder Brit Morin. As a maker and media creator, Brit is constantly co-evolving with her (mostly millennial) audience—and team. It’s a secret to scale with the generation adapted to a world of constant change.
You may think that to scale you need to cut humans out of the equation. The opposite is true. You can harness the power of the “human cloud” to solve almost any problem — as long as you keep the word “human” in the equation. That’s what TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot champions for this community of people who work with each other, teach each other, and continually learn from each other.
The price that bleeds your business could also save it. When you invent something innovative, you can’t know how to price it on day one. First, get people in the door — get a LOT of people in the door — even if you have to price your product fatally low at first. In this episode, ClassPass Founder and Chair Payal Kadakia shares their winding path to pricing and how it revealed what was invaluable about their service.
Starting a business? You’re also starting a community. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and an early investor in everything from Etsy to Kickstarter, says it’s vital to establish guidelines for your community early on — because the tone you set is the tone you’re going to keep.