Show Notes
“You know what kind of culture you have by how your employees are feeling on Sunday night when they think about getting ready to go back to work on Monday morning.” When Cynt Marshall was hired as the CEO of the Dallas Mavericks in 2018, she presented her vision: that the organization would become a global standard for inclusion and diversity. “I truly believe if you have an inclusive culture and a diverse group of employees, you can get anything done," Marshall says. "I’ve lived it. There’s a bottom line impact to having diversity, and having equity in your organization, and an inclusive culture.” In this View From The Top interview, Marshall sits down with Sankalp Banarjee, MBA ’23, to share stories of how she stepped into her authentic self as a leader, how she navigated personal and professional challenges, and how she keeps burn-out at bay. “A lot of times people ask the question, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ I say, ‘No, to me, the question is, ‘What gets you up in the morning?’” Marshall was named one of 15 of the world’s most inspiring female leaders by Forbes in 2021. In March 2020 and several times prior, she was selected as one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Corporate America” by Black Enterprise magazine.
Stanford GSB’s View From The Top is the dean’s premier speaker series. It launched in 1978 and is supported in part by the F. Kirk Brennan Speaker Series Fund. During student-led interviews and before a live audience, leaders from around the world share insights on effective leadership, their personal core values, and lessons learned throughout their career. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
More from 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.