ExecuTalks

In this episode, we sit down with Barbara Humpton.  Barbara grew up to parents who were both math professors so initially set her eyes on being a math professor “when she grew up.”  After taking a job at IBM and working on a globally impactful project, she was hooked into the world of working on impactful technology to make our world a better place. I won’t give too much away before you listen, but if you decide to listen to the entire episode you will get to hear:Some of Barbara’s formative experiences that empowered her career journeyBarbara’s advice for you if you’re thinking about changing jobs or making a career pivotHer take on the federal government’s latest initiative to increase manufacturing in the United StatesWhat she would tell her younger self

Lynne grew up in the bay area and accidentally learned what she loved to do when she was helping a friend become more physically independent by helping her up stairs, and taking her to the gym.  So after getting her undergraduate degree, she dove right back into school and used her savings along with student loans to pay for training to become a Physical Therapist.  After getting her certification, she worked for a terrible boss that made her want to start her own business.  If you stick around until the end you'll get to hear all about how she negotiated her salary, started her own business, and why she got into politics, eventually becoming the Mayor of Bellevue, Washington - Home to some of America's most influential companies like T-Mobile, Microsoft, Paccar, Expedia, Concur Technologies, and many more.

Bracken began his career in accounting after college.  After working in accounting roles for an accounting firm and then PepsiCo he transitioned into brand management early in his career.  He first worked at Procter & Gamble, then moved into a General Manager position at General Electric.  There are other career moves we talk about in this episode, so make sure you tune in!Stick around until the end to hear about:- The key positions that Bracken targeted early in his career that empowered his career journey- Why Bracken decided to go back to business school after gaining experience- What advice he has for you while you think about how you want to navigate your career journey

Kara grew up in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona and naturally developed the skill of persistence growing up.  In her early years she worked many different jobs including working at a toy store, interning for a local senator, and waiting tables at a local Mexican restaurant.  After college she used unique approaches to reach people and get hired at a media company in New York.Listen to the full episode to get the full scoop on- How Kara used unique communication approaches to reach senior executives early in her career- Why storytelling is so important in marketing and brand-building- Important skills she emphasizes, and tailored advice that she has for you while you’re on your career journey

Wes was born in Canada, grew up in Columbia, and lived in Southern California .  He admits his dyslexia and ADHD growing up caused him to hate school and didn’t attend college after high school. After high school, Wes took the first job he was offered, which was a job making high-end cabinets in Los Angeles; a business that his neighbor owned.  Listen in to this episode to learn about how a kid that grew up with a learning disorder and didn’t even go to college, started a highly successful coffee-chain in the Pacific Northwest: Woods Coffee.  Stick around until the end to hear about what advice Wes has for his younger self, and what he wished he would have known as an young entrepreneur.

In this episode, we sit down with Jeff Roe, CEO of Premera Blue Cross.  Employing over 3,200 people, Premera Blue Cross is the largest health plan insurance provider in the Pacific Northwest, serving more than 2 million people.  Jeff grew up in Bellevue, WA and had an early interest in politics growing up.  His curiosity and enjoyment of politics led him down a route of working in politics after graduating from the University of Washington.  He worked for a U.S. Senator based in Washington named Slade Gorton; his first job being his driver.  After working his way up and gaining more responsibility in Washington DC, he pivoted to the private sector when he got an offer to return to the Pacific Northwest and help run a public affairs consulting company.  One of their clients was Blue Cross and he eventually jumped into the insurance industry. For the past 24 years of his career, Jeff has been a key leader in the insurance industry.Listen in to hear about how and why Jeff made career shifts from politics to public affairs to insurance.  Also gain insight to why role models can be so critical to your career development, and what advice Jeff has for those who aspire to climb the corporate ladder.

Seattle's Former Police Chief Carmen Best published her book “Black in Blue” in October of 2021, and it was the #1 book in new releases when it came out. Carmen grew up in the Puget Sound area to a loving mother and a father who was in the military.  She had a close relationship with her siblings and seemed to always be driven from a young age.   Carmen served in the military for some time before working for an insurance company in their finance department.  She was looking for something new and saw that the Seattle Police Department was hiring.  She submitted an application and was eventually hired as an officer.  That would be the beginning of a thirty-year career in law enforcement as she would eventually work her way up to becoming the City’s Chief of Police.Listen in to hear about Carmen’s early days as a police officer, why she stayed in law enforcement for 30-years and hear her expand on some of the impactful stories she shares in her best-selling book, Black in Blue.

Howard Behar grew up in North Seattle, attended Roosevelt High School, and struggled to find his way early on in his life.  He took some courses at Everett community college but didn’t finish school because he was directing his energy towards his work.  At the time he was helping run his brother’s furniture store in Edmonds, WA.  He would spend the next couple of decades in the furniture business – eventually becoming president of one of the companies he’d worked for.   Then, when he was in his forties, decided to purchase a business.  As he was searching and networking with people, he met Howard Schultz, who had recently purchased Starbucks.  After getting to know each other, Howard Behar made a proposal to work at Starbucks for free for one week before committing to join.  When Howard Behar first joined Starbucks, it was a regional brand with a few locations – as we chat about in the conversation, he played a critical role in not only expansion across the country, but international expansion all over the world.  Today, Starbucks has a market cap of over $138 billion, employing more than 349,000 people worldwide, with more than 62,000 stores in over 83 countries. Tune into this episode to get a full look into Howard’s career journey leading up to Starbucks, what challenges and setbacks he faced at Starbucks, and what his advice is for those of us who strive to excel in our careers and live an exceptional life.

Mike Clayville is the Chief Revenue Officer of Stripe, a payment processing company that is building the economic infrastructure of the internet.  Their mission is increasing the GDP of the internet -- and Stripe is valued at almost $100 billion.  In our conversation, we talk about Mike’s career journey leading up to Stripe.  He was born and raised in Idaho, got a degree in geotechnical engineering and then went on to get his MBA after he had a hard time finding a job.  After graduating, he went to work for IBM, the world’s most profitable company at the time, and worked his way up the ranks eventually becoming an IBM executive.  After IBM, Mike made several career moves, eventually landing at Amazon Web Services, as a Vice President, where he helped grow their business from $1.8 billion to $43 billion in sales.  Stick around until the end and hear about how Mike was able to make career moves that positioned himself to win big, what he thinks are important things to consider when making career moves, and why he started the Clayville Foundation to lend a helping hand in curing cancer. 

In this episode, you’ll get to hear from Howard Tiersky.  Howard began his career in theater and performing arts before starting his consulting career at Ernst & Young.  There, he would build E&Y’s first website and get exposed to a whole new world.  After 15 years of being in the consulting space, Howard started his own business; From Digital, a digital transformation agency that helps companies develop new digital products for all kinds of industries.  Howard is the author of the Wall Street Journal’s best-selling book, Winning Digital Customers.  In our conversation, we talk briefly about Howard’s career journey before transitioning into an especially important topic; business in the digital age.  Stick around until the end and you’ll get to hear Howard’s thoughts on how to really understand your customer, building digital experiences around your customers, and what causes most digital products to fail in our world today. 

A fourth generation Puget Sound native and nascent New Yorker, Kurt has always felt passionately about authentic, full-flavored foods, free of artificial additives. Kurt is the owner and head chef of Sugar Mountain, a creative food company that is home to extraordinary food brands and restaurants, from the award-winning Beecher’s Handmade Cheese to The Butcher’s Table, a swanky steakhouse that features Mishima Reserve, Sugar Mountain’s American Wagyu beef brand. With each operation, Kurt’s goal is to demonstrate how quality ingredients make for delicious meals, without added food colorings, flavor enhancers, or preservatives. Beyond the retail world, Kurt is effecting change in people’s eating habits through his book, Pure Food, and through The Beecher’s Foundation (501c3). Through education and community engagement, the Foundation inspires people to eat real food and vote with every food dollar.In our conversation Kurt takes us way back to his early childhood growing up in Seattle, what struggles he faced at work coming out of college, and ultimately, what inspired Kurt to purchase businesses like Seattle’s famous Pasta & Company and start Beecher’s Cheese, one of the most successful food brands in the world.  And if you stick around until the end, you will get to hear all about Kurt's ambitious philanthropic goal of changing the way America eats.

In this special episode, we chat with Chris George, a serial entrepreneur who has successfully started and managed 7 businesses in his career (most recently Founder of Certified).  His first business that he started in college, was a debt collection agency that he worked in for almost a decade.  His most recent venture was a subscription-based men’s fashion company: Gentleman’s Box.  Today, he’s chairman of the subscription trade association, a for-profit association that he co-founded. You’ll want to listen closely because in this episode we discuss business strategy, marketing tactics, and what it takes to be successful as an entrepreneur in any industry.

In this episode, we cover the man behind the largest biotechnology IPO in history, Steve Harr.  Steve co-founded Sana biotechnology, a company that  went public earlier this year (2021) and raised almost $600 million dollars in its IPO.  Sana is changing the way diseases are cured.  Their approach is based on repairing and controlling genes within cells, essentially engineering cells so that they are better equipped to fight off diseases.  Prior to co-founding Sana, Steve served as an executive at Juno Therapeutics, a biotech company that was acquired for $11 billion in 2018, and worked as managing director at Morgan Stanley for over a decade.  If you stick around for the whole episode, you'll get insight into the extreme highs and lows of Steve's career journey, you will hear what Steve would advise his younger self, and you will get a peek into how he thinks about leadership.

In this episode, we hear from Finimize CEO & Co-Founder, Maximillian Rofagha.  He grew up in Berlin, Germany, attended a very diverse, international high school, and went on to study economics and international relations in Scotland.  He did a year abroad in the U.S., and interned at eBay, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Company, and a German Stock Exchange.  After college, he worked in management consulting for a year and half before starting his first business.  3 and half years later, he started Finimize, a company that was sparked by a movement, a community of people that believe everyone should have access to financial information that is not complicated to understand.  Today, Finimize is building the world’s largest and most engaged finance community, democratizing financial information for people who need it most. Headquartered in London, Finimize has amassed a community of over 1 million people from all over the world.

Mary grew up on a very rural, cattle ranch in New Mexico just above the US-Mexico border, where she learned to drive when she was just seven years old and had no television in her home.   She attended Williams college, in Massachusetts town near the New York-New Hampshire border.  She first intended in going into politics, then fell in love with drama and theater, so she shifted her major.  After college, she decided to study law.After law school, Mary went to work for a natural gas utility in El Paso, TX, the city in Texas that borders Mexico and New Mexico.  She worked as an in-house lawyer at the utility for several years, then went to work for a traditional law firm for a short period of time before she realized she didn’t like working as a traditional lawyer. So, she went to work for the (FERC) Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. abbreviated FERC or “FERC”.   She spent her time prosecuting utility companies that were not abiding by the law.  After 4 years, she went back to work for El Paso Electric Company, where she would work her way up to the CEO position. After spending a huge portion of her career in El Paso, Mary decided to join Puget Sound Energy in Bellevue, WA in 2019 to take on an ambitious challenge. Today, Puget Sound Energy, employs more than 2,500 people, and serves over 1 million customers.

Today’s guest is Scott Torrey, PayScale CEO.  Scott always knew he wanted to be in business, so he attended a commerce-focused college and worked in consulting after college.  After an 8-year career in consulting, Scott pivoted and joined Concur which was later acquired by SAP, and would remain there for 20 years of his career.  He took a very short break before a recruiter presented an opportunity to lead PayScale in 2019.   PayScale serves 100 million monthly website visitors, powers compensation information for over 35 million employees and 7,000 companies, with a vision of democratizing compensation information. 

Today’s guest is Surabhi Gupta, Robinhood’s VP of Engineering.   Surabhi grew up in India and pursued an education in computer science.  She participated in an internship with Microsoft, and her research focused on artificial intelligence and natural language processing.  She worked on creating a system for producing scalable summaries of conversations extracted from video content.  Surabhi then took a job with Google as a software engineer and worked on improving the relevance of search results for users. Eventually, Surabhi got introduced to executives at Airbnb, and was exposed to the search problems they were aiming to solve.  She joined as a software engineer on the search team in 2013, and in 4 years became the Director of Engineering, overseeing the entire engineering team.  While she was there, the company had grown from just 60 engineers to 1,500 engineers.  Surabhi spent almost 7 years of her career at Airbnb before leaving to join Robinhood in 2020.   Robinhood's  mission is to democratize finance and investing for everyone, offering commission-free trading.  Never before has any financial services company offered commission-free trading.  This is a completely new approach, and it’s what drew Surabhi in to join their mission and lead their engineering team.  Today, Surabhi leads Robinhood’s engineering team of more than 500 people. 

Today, we make history.  It’s the first time we’ve had an executive from the city on our show.  All of our guests before this show have been business executives. Today’s guest is Debra Smith, Seattle City Light’s CEO.  She graduated with a finance degree from Arizona State University, and kickstarted her career in the oil industry working for ConocoPhillips.  Shortly after, transitioned into commercial banking in Portland, then moved into utilities at the Eugene Water and Electric Board, then Central Lincoln PUD, before joining Seattle City Light in 2018.  Now, you’ll want to be sure to stick around until the end because Debra takes us through not only her career journey, which pivoted from oil and gas to banking to utilities management, but her personal journey that impacted her career progression.  Her challenging childhood with her parents being unhappily married, the breakups, divorces, and ultimately, the personal lessons from all of her experiences.  In 2018, Debra was nominated by Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan to lead Seattle City Light, Seattle's largest department by budget, as the CEO & General Manager.  Today, Debra leads Seattle City Light, responsible for providing power to the entire city, has over 1,800 employees, and is responsible for 25% of Seattle’s entire budget as a city. 

Today’s guest is Adena Hefets, CEO & Co-Founder of Divvy Homes.  She grew up in Long Island, New York to immigrant parents who lived paycheck to paycheck, and were not financially stable, and this drove her ambition to be financially independent at a very young age.  She would go on to work in lots of finance roles like investment banking, private equity, venture capital, and also worked in product management, before starting Divvy Homes with her cofounders.  In 2016, Adena started Divvy Homes with two other co-founders with a mission to make home ownership accessible to everyone.  Today, Divvy has raised almost $300 million in funding, and is changing the world of real estate. 

Today, you will hear from Ryan Hogan, CEO & Co-Founder of Hunt A Killer.  He joined the Navy out of high school, got admitted into a very competitive military program after 6 years of hard work, started multiple businesses that needed multiple pivots, until they ended up failing.  In 2016, a few years after Ryan’s last business had failed, he got together with his childhood friend Derrick and together, they began thinking of how they could create experiences for people that felt real.  Hunt A Killer was born, and today, with a mission to provide first-class entertainment to mystery and thriller lovers around the world, Hunt A Killer has been listed by Inc. Magazine as the 6th fastest-growing private company in 2020, and one of the World's Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.