Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - November 26th, 2021 (Podcast)

edition of Bloomberg Business Week. A special holiday program this week, as we look back on our recent visit to the Stamford Graduate School of Business, it of course topped Bloomberg Business Week's list of America's top B schools for the academic year, Stanford taking the number one slot. It's a repeat winner, scoring highest overall along eighty four us NBA programs and compensation Networking in Entrepreneurship, Dartmouth's Tech School coming

in second, Harvard Frank third. Over the next two hours, we'll hear from some prominent alumni who got their MBA's at Stanford, including TPG executive chairman and founding partner Jim Coulter and the former and longtime CEO of a b NBEV, Carlos Brito. Also speak with some key members of the academic staff that are helping to shape the next generation of business leaders and dig a bit deeper into the criteria that make this NBA program the very best America

has to offer. Let's begin with the man at the helm of the institution, the Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Jonathan Levin. It's just a wonderful thing for the school. I think it mostly because it just

puts a spotlight on what we do here. And I've been at the GSP now for five years, and I think if there's one thing that I have learned in that five years, it's about the value that gets created in a place like this where we're have these academic faculty who are doing great scholarship, and that was exemplified when one of our faculty members, hedo in Beans, won

the Nobel Prize in Economics. And these amazing business leaders who come in and meet with our students, and the activity that just places place on this campus, and having you here is a great way for you to see all of that and what goes on here at the g s B. I'm looking around campus right now, is are we in the midst of a global pandemic? I

don't actually know. I mean it seems like things are pretty much back to normal here, So give us an update about how the pandemic has affected academics and and really how you're pushing through it in Yeah, so we it's wonderful to have our students back on campus. And I think one thing that we have learned from the pandemic.

We've learned a lot about technology and opportunities to deliver education technology, but we've also learned about the incredible value of a residential education, residential NBA education, and how much of the value that's gets created here actually for research and scholarship, faculty interacting, and for education just comes from having people together in a physical environment and the serendipitous

interactions that take place on the campus. You know, Dean Leven, we had kind of a real world life experience of learning how a vaccine was made in the last year and a half, so many different real world experiments we lived through them. I do wonder about the experiment of hybrid education or virtual education. I think some thought, wow, we can do it. Others said no way. I don't know. We've we've lived through it. You lived through it. Does it work? I think we learned a huge amount during COVID.

We moved the school online over a weekend, and the faculty and our staff and the students people dove into virtual education and doing it remotely on Zoom. And I think it went way better than anyone had any right to expect. Incredibly proud of the way. That is great, But what you lose is the unplanned encounters, the unexpected meetings,

the chance things out. Just to give you an example, one of the stories that he to Women's Are Nobel Prize winner told was that he came up with the ideas that won him the Nobel Prize talking to one of his colleagues in a laundromat. And you don't have

that on Zoom. And what we're creating here in this physical environment is lots of laundromat meetings, lots of meetings where students bump into other students and they come with an idea for a career or a company, or maybe they bump into some from the School of Engineering, or a faculty member runs into another factor number a student and that's where the next Nobel Price comes from. And it's so good to have everyone back on campus so

we can have more wondermats. Does it become a tougher sell at any point in the near future, at any point during your tenure, in terms of convincing people that the education is worth the cost. After all, more than one point six trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt for Americans. I think this is a really transformative and important time for business generally. And you think about the

forces that are shaping business today. Very rapid advances in technology, major changes in global economics, concern about social equity, about climate change, these are these are big challenges for business and big challenges for educating business leaders. And where could you better learn and get prepared to tackle those big

challenges in the world and in business. Then by coming to a class like Stanford, where you will get to meet other people and get exposed to the technology that's going to change the world and to the ideas of social science ideas, and be with a set of peers who can help you assimilate them and prepare you for your career. I'm not worried at all about the value of NBA programs. Hey, One of the value of coming to school like Stanford is diversity of thought and diversity

of people from different backgrounds. From all around the world, minorities, you know, obviously, men, women, people just of all kinds of genders. Um, what I'm curious is there was a diversity component to the rankings this time. Most schools didn't do well, and even top schools like yourself, you know has we're ranked a little bit lower when it comes

to diversity ranking. So how do you square that? And how do you teach a population of students that are diverse, and yet they're going to go out in the work world and they're going to be met with employers who aren't very diverse. How do you deal with that? Look, education is fundamental about encountering difference different people, different ideas, different cultures, and the way that you create a great

educational experience. And I think the way many companies are now trying to create a great workplace in productive environment is to bring in a broader range of people and then to create an environment where everyone can be at their best and you get the most out of different people's perspectives. But they're not doing very fast. So I think when we and I think about what we're doing here, first of all, we're thinking about that aspect of diversity,

diversity of ideas and diversity of people. It's a long term investment to add more diversity to institutions like Stanford, but we also have to approach it with urgency, and that's the way we're going at it. That was Jonathan Levin, the dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, coming up the Stanford b School product making waves in the world of venture capital. G two venture partner and Celo Valerie Shan. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. This is Bloomberg.

This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stenovik from Bloomberg Radio. So the Bloward Business Week ranking of the best business school starts with the premise that the best judges of MBA programs are graduating students, recent alumni, and the companies that recruit MBA's. The magazine staff passed through nearly twenty thousand surveys to find out whether top institutions are really offering what millennial

students need, especially in the midst of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Now, part of what makes a great NBA program is the ability for recent grads to leverage what they've learned and tap into their schools networks and to really understand what businesses value most in recruits as they enter the workforce or advance in their own careers. Our next guest is adamant that her alma mater did just that. Valerie Shan is a partner and the CEO at G two Venture Partners.

She oversees all operational aspects of the firm, including fundraising, recruiting, administration, impact reporting, legal compliance, and marketing. Just got a pretty cool background to tam. Prior to attending Stanford Business School, Valerie was an analyst over at Kleiner Perkins one billion dollar Green Growth Fund, where she helped the team found

G two. She was also a management consultant at McKenzie and Company, and despite boasting a resume that stacks up against many Silicon Valley heavyweights, she does still hope to do more at Stanford's Business School. My goal is actually to come back as a professor one day. So hopefully that's really and that's something we heard about earlier in our conversation with one of the professors. So tell us about your time here and how it really set you up for what you're doing now. Yeah, So the most

spectacular two and a half years was spent here. I think what's really amazing about Stanford is you're constantly having great people paraded in front of you in the classroom speaker series, your classmates alum, and they've just done the most extraordinary things, and they're so transparent and honest about how they got to where they are today. And they almost always say, you know, I was just sitting there in your seat. I was actually skiing all the time.

It makes me really feel like the people that are changing the world were just like us, and therefore there's no reason that we, as students stay can't be changing the world in the very near future. And I think that sort of just confidence that the GSP gives you is what carries a lot of us through the rest

of our careers. I can't help but make the connection geographically where we are to the career that you're in now in venture capital and I wonder to what extent you were exupposed to venture capitalists being here in Silicon Valley during your time at Stanford. I took a number of classes here thinking about entrepreneurship. I think what I learned a lot at Stanford was actually how entrepreneurs think.

I didn't have that experience going in. I worked in venture capital, but almost all with people who came from banking or consulting, not from people who were on the ground. And then the classes at the GSP you hear about what founders go through, actually, how founders think about venture capitalists, and the things that often venture capitalists do that founders don't like to the other side of the coin exactly. That was a perspective that I don't think I would

have gotten otherwise from my job. Well, how do you carry that over then to what you were doing now

as you make investments in entrepreneurs and companies. I think that I just always think about my classmates who are going through the entrepreneurial journey themselves, and hearing about their day to day struggles, and thinking about how we can be sort of less annoying venture capitalists, whether that's just making sure that you're responding to the emails in a timely manner, understanding which portions of our term street we should be careful about, because some term that we're just

throwing in there is actually going to cause a lot of heartache to the entrepreneur. Also, just thinking about you know, our reporting requirements and whether that's going to be a struggle and all the little things that we can be helping with because the entrepreneurs are likely struggling with that.

When the companies that come to you for funding or when you actually interact with these companies when they do come to you, give us a characterization of them, like what excites you, what what makes you want to say, Yeah, that's something that we want to bet on, we want to bet our LP's money on. Yeah. So the fund I work at you to venture partners, we invest in what we think of as the sustainable digitization of traditional industries. So and sort of say what exactly, like, yeah, there's

a lot of words. Basically, we look at anything that's heavy asset, real economy based. So if there's something in that sector that you can drop on your foot and hurt yourself, that's something we do. Transportation, logistics, energy, anything that we think can substantially impact the pathway of emissions and environmental sustainability moving forward. And what we want to invest in is businesses that can change those sectors in sustainable ways, and businesses that can get really big and

that have customers that love them. So that doesn't necessarily mean we're trying to count you know, like you're reducing this amount of carbon today, and we're going to invest in the greatest carbon emissions. We're going to invest in something that works, that people love, that makes our lives better, and it's also better for the environment, and as that

grows bigger, our impact will get bigger as well. I love talking with venture capitalists, whether it's early angel or moving it along, because I think you guys are seeing some of the stuff that's being thrown about that we are maybe going to be talking about, as you know, part of our everyday life in five years or ten years.

What would you say that might be you look at some of the investments you're making, or some of the investments that are put before you, that might be something that nobody's really talking about that we probably should be watching closely. One space that we're really excited about now is digitizing warehouses and logistics. I think it's a movement that people were thinking about a bit before COVID, but now has really been accelerated really not digitally yet, So

there's certain problems that are very difficult. For example, if you think about an Amazon warehouse there's still so many people working there and jobs that are often you know, not that exciting, a little bit dangerous, a lot of probability that you're going to hurt yourself, and some specific problems such as just getting a robotic arm to pick up an item, a specific small item and put it in another specific bin are surprisingly difficult, especially if you

need a percent accuracy and you need to be doing

it for all sorts of different shapes and objects. But as we can figure that out and then figure out scanning, figure out last mile transit, so all the goods and services that we're ordering can get to people's homes, and then, by the way, when we return them, we want to make sure those return items are actually sent somewhere where that you can be used as opposed to just going directly their landfill, so that whole logistics supply chain we think about a lot, and we think there's a ton

of potential to reduce waste there. Do you ever hear from founders in the area that there's concerned that there's crowding out from some of the largest tech companies around. I mean, there's several multi trillion dollars trillion dollar tech companies that have the resources to develop a lot of this stuff from within or or develop their own technology when they see a startup working on it. You work for one of them, Google, think Facebook. Well, I think

there's a couple of things. There's one is it is true that the big technology companies are thinking about a lot of these problems, but they can't do it all right, just the number of different things we could be working on, there's space for a lot of the startups. And then I also think the big tech companies are a great exit for a lot of these founders. So there's multiple paths. Now you can get fully to the point where you're going to I P O or maybe Amazon wants to

buy you, maybe Google wants to buy you. Lots of potential paths. All right, Gotta ask you, because we have done the stories at Bloomberg about women in Silicon Valley, what's been your EXPERI ar in so far as a woman working in venture capital it's still largely male dominated. I've got a tremendous experience. I work with great people. I've never felt discriminator and never felt that there's been any sort of issue, but it exists, right. I haven't

found that any discrimination that exists. I think the problem is just how you think about your family, because do you want to, you know, go at it all the way and do you want to have a stay at home spouse or do you want to really make the dual income family work. I think that's the biggest struggle for men or for women as opposed to any specific sort of discrimination against me as a woman. That was Valerie Shan partner and the CEO at G two Venture

Partners still ahead. On the special holiday edition of Bloomberg Business Week, we'll speak with an executive from a company that's been in the news a lot lately, and not all that news tim safe to say has been good. We're talking about Peloton Interactive. It's at a volatile few weeks, from a disappointed quarterly earnings report earlier this month to an unexpected one billion dollar share sale the week before Thanksgiving. Do you have any charge of relaying difficult messages to

investors and customers alike? Explains her process. We check in with Peloton's Chief marketing and Communications officer, Dr Troceedar. This is Bloomberg broadcasting from the financial capital of the world, Bloomberg eleven Rio in New York to Washington, d C. Bloomberg to Boston, Bloomberg one of six, one does San Francisco, Bloomberg nine sixty to the country Sirius XM Chamber one ninety and around the globe the Bloomberg Business and Bloomberg

Radio dot Com. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stenovan on Bloomberg Radio. One of the reasons a Stanford Graduate School of Business is back on top of the Bloomberg Business Week b School rankings is because it prepares its students for the corporate world's most difficult challenges. That's based on the surveys.

One company that we talk a lot about on Bloomberg and of course our audience is very familiar with this Peloton Interactive Carol, you have a Peloton I do, indeed, and to say the firm has become accustomed to volatility would be an understatement. Earlier this month, Peloton shares jumped after one billion dollar stock offering through the interest of major investors. This is a sign that Wall Street is

ready to look past a grim forecast. Earlier this month, it was a big bump up that share price increase mark the biggest one day gain since May, and shares a Peloton had to decline about forty five percent since the company slash that annual revenue forecast by up to

a billion That happened on November four. Company also lowered its projections for subscribers and profit margins at the time, really renewing some concerns at the end of the pandemic would bring a prolonged slump, but definitely a different view from Wall Street after it did that one billion dollar stock offering. Oh last month. Before all of this news, we caught up with Stanford Business School alum of the class of derritrue Cedar. She's Peloton's chief marketing communications officer.

She said to help the firm navigate a really dark period earlier this year. Most notably it was back in the spring when the Peloton tread Plus treadmill was recalled following dozens of reporting injuries, including a child's death. It's been a really tough time and Or is sensitive to all of that, and she's also in wavering about the company's message of providing better access to fitness for people around the world. She spoke with us about her journey

from customer to the company c suite. Our goal has always been to make sure that many more people have access to fitness, and so communicating that has to do with making sure people see that Peloton is for people like them, and so we've been doing that by telling the real stories of our real members and and having people see, Wow, if Peloton really worked for that person, I can I can see that it will work for

me too. If that mom can finally find you know, twenty minutes in her day to invest in her physical health, in her mental health, in our overall well being, oh, that might be able to work for me too. And so I think that what's been really powerful about what we've been able to do is really communicate that. And then recently we lower the price of our original much loved bike, right, we lowered our price by four hundred dollars and so Peloton is now accessible but thirty nine

dollars a month. So that again is another step and another action that we've taken to make sure that people really see that Peloton is something that they can bring into their lives and immediately start using to improve their physical health and their mental health. Full transparency. I've got a Peloton so I just want to put it out there. You guys have also moved aggressively to digital, which lowers

the price point for a lot of people. When you're trying to widen the brand, widen the access, tell us as a marketing officer who's looking to really create strategies to broaden out the base of Peloton, how do you do it with the backdrop of the problems with the treadmill? Plus we know that that is still an overhang on the company. How do you do it as the world reopens that we're at Stanford outside with people, you know, Jim's are reopening, and there's increased competition for the fitness

world of pieces of equipment in your home. How do you do it with all of that? Well, I think, you know, before the pandemic, people were using Peloton, And I think what's been really amazing is the continued engagement with our member base because our our content team continues to put out really really great classes, a wide variety of classes. You are trying to widen the base and

reach customers. When you've got a product that's had, you know, the bad press and the problems like the treadmill, how do you kind of deal with that. Investors have certainly noticed the stock is pulled back about so far. You are in charge of communicating. I'm assuming even investors have got to be listening with you. So how do you kind of get beyond that? How do you how do you how does that make your job more difficulty? You know, are to start Peloton is improving the lives of our members.

That's what we focus on, right, That's what we get up every day excited about. That's what That's what keeps us motivated. And I think continuing to show the myriad of ways that we are doing that, and so I think continuing to tell those stories that continue to show how we're tangibly addressing these things. Those are some of the concrete ways, Um, that we are continuing to push

the business on the brand forward. Of course, like every business we've dealt, we've delta down Barram's share of challenges. That's Peloton Chief Marketing and Communications officer, and of course Stanford Graduate School of Business alum Daratroceder joining us remotely during that broadcast and Tim, her team and the entire organization have had an eventful month of November to say the least. You mentioned volatility earlier. When it comes to

Peloton Interactive, that has certainly been the case this year. Yeah. We talked about that earnings report at the top, and yet the company was able to flip the script, as we mentioned just the week before Thanksgiving by announcing that one billion dollar stock offering. Yeah, Tim, it was actually the first public stock sale for Peloton. Since it's I p O. I'll have to wait and see if that's

enough to help the company right the ship. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week, our special holiday program from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, once again topping the Bloomberg Business Week list of America's top business schools for academic year. Up next a prominent alum TPG executive chairman and founding partner, Jim Colter. He's also a Stanford trustee. This is Bloomberg. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and

Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovich from Bloomberg Radio. Investment, risk, climate, change, in E s G, investing, hybrid work, leadership just a few of the many topics we cover with Jim Coulter during our recent broadcast from the Stanford Graduate School of Business once again. Ranks is Bloomberg Business Week's top American business school, and it counts figures like the TPG Capital executive chairman among its alumni. He's been very involved in

the school, really the university overall. Colter joined us remotely from our Bloomberg Washington d C. Bureau while we were on campus in northern California last month, and he urged our listeners not to be deterred by near term volatility.

My advice has been strapped in. It's going to be interesting and volatile, but at moments like this, as as a long term investor, I say double down on the long term trends, and so we're spend in our time thinking about what's going to be happening next year, what's going to be happy next decade, and making sure we position ourselves for that reality. Are you concerned that some of the volatility that we're seeing right now could last

into next year, could last into the next decade. I mean, I'm thinking about the tensions between the US and China. I'm thinking about the story of transitory inflation, James Warman and Morgan Stanley saying this is not transitory rates. Tim I've been doing this a long time and one of the things I've I've learned is what's behind is not

what's ahead. So we've been through a period of time that has been quite positive, extraordinary market returns and uh snap back, and so I think looking forward, we have to be prepared for more complexity. We have to be prepared for an era of alpha, not beta, and we have to get to work, well, what does that alpha look like? We are in this innovative, disruptive time. You've got the rise fund, you're thinking about you know, certainly

the climate, the impact companies and technologies that play to it. So, um, how do we think about that as an investor? An investor, I think we're going to be encouraged to increasingly wade into industries that are undergoing cyclical and secular change, whether it be content creation, cybersecurity, um, supply chains. Uh. There's a whole variety of broad themes that are coming in the post COVID world, and my advice would be get in the middle of them, sort them out. That's where

you'll find alpha. Well what specifically in terms of how we play it, because you could you could invest it in a major oil company that is starting to look at alternative energies. Maybe not your classic you know, uh, clean energy play. But so how do you think about it? You made the investment along with another in terms of Tata in their e V battery world, So how do

you think about that specifically? I think there's opportunities both in emerging technologies and companies and in helping existing companies change. What you just saw us participate in at Tata is a fascinating case study. Here's a major corporation that has a set of assets and e V s that in the e VIS at the market leading position in India, and yet in some ways the market didn't quite understand

that position. So the ability to drop those assets into a separate company, bringing capital from investors like us who are dedicated to climate change and making a difference really has fundamentally changed how people are thinking about that business. So this opportunity to will support young and growing companies something we learned in the tech revolution and help existing companies spotlight their climate assets is I think a quite

extraordinary opportunity. I'm wondering out spotlighting those climate assets. What moves the company's stock is revenue. It's the top line and it's the bottom line, and I'm wondering if we need some other metric at least when we talk about publicly traded companies that holds them accountable from an E s G perspective, that holds them accountable from a climate perspective, because I don't think we're seeing investors really care about that. Well.

I think you are um and I think increasingly there is what I think of as a new we are of business, and perhaps we can get into that where companies are going to be held accountable not just for what they do, but for how they do it. For example, if you look deeply into the E s G world today, companies that are highly rated on E s G standards, according to recent Bank of American report, have tenent lower

cost of capital. So capital is looking to invest in companies that care that deliver on E s G ratings. There's still a lot of uncertainty as to what those ratings will be over time, how they'll develop, But to be clear, the trend is happening and it makes a difference how you do things. But I do wonder we talked about like when a company reports earning is certainly for the publicly held companies. Do we need to have okay,

top bottom line? We look at margins, but we also are looking at okay, here's your E S G metric and if you don't do well, um, you get penalized. There's got to be some consequences. Do we get to that point? Do we need to have that kind of point? I think we will get there over time, but we can't wait for it. What the market is looking for, when I'm looking for as an investor is authenticity in action.

I'd remind you, Carol, that it took seven years to develop GAP our accounting standards, and it will take a while to develop the standards that will lead the s G ERA. But we can't afford to wait. We need to get to work, and capital is flowing to these opportunities. Well, one of that is, you know, Tim and I were talking about kind of planning for this, about everything that NBA students. Tim, you have an NBA YEA from a couple of years ago. In terms of what you study.

Leadership is such a big part in terms of getting there right. So what is it that the NBA student today on Stanford's you know, uh here at Stanford or elsewhere? What do they need to be learning when it comes to leadership, because I think it's safe to say that a lot of people would say leadership failed us in the last couple of years. I think they need to learn to lead in a new era. Now. Business changes

every day, but there's times where business ethos change. When I got out of business school in a long time ago, we were studying Japanese these business practices. In the nineties, the ethos changed to the Jack Welsh era, where suddenly strategic planning and KPI shove everything. Two thousand it changed radically again, where suddenly we were told to move fast and break things, the ear of entrepreneurship where Stanford leads. Today,

there's a new era, a new ethos developing. As I said, it's not only what you do, but how you do it. Some call it the E. S. G Era. Some call it responsible capitalism, stakeholder capitalism. We don't quite know the name, but it's real and it's happening. So Stanford has an opportunity to continue to lead and prepare business leaders societal

leaders for that new hero. Jim, there's this conversation happening right now about the value of education, especially really expensive education so make the case to us, to our viewers, to future NBA students that the NBA is still worth it for me in I walked out of Stanford and it was a special place. Then it remains a special place today. There's something in the air ideas, innovation and risk taking, and at that moment I chose to take the lowest paying job I was offered. I entered an

industry that didn't have a name. Fast forward thirty years. That industry is now called private equity. It's four trillion dollars. I've helped build organizations within it, and today I'm sitting here talking about how to drive a new idea impact investing. So Stanford's motto is change lives, change organizations, change the world. It changed my life. It allowed me to change organizations, and we're working hard on changing the world. That has

immense value. It doesn't play out necessarily always in year one, although it did for me, but it plays out over the arc of a career. So you said, thirty years you walked into private equity, and just earlier this year your executive chairman still in the company um that you founded it, but yet you're not CEO. How do you as a as a founder, think about succession UH and the next step for your company. As a leader, well,

succession is out there for me. But what I constantly have to ask myself as a leader is what is my highest and best use. We had a co CEO structure, and my highest and best use is actually to invest and to innovate. So I chose to evolve my focus to this question of how can business make a difference in society? How can we address this intersection of social

responsibility and corporate UH and corporate effectiveness? And that ability to continue to invest in innovating is liberating and is something that I think is good for me and good for the company. I'm wondering where else you're thinking about the flying capital when you can think about rise climate right now, where can we expect to see your money

in the near future. You know, we're defining climate as a sector, stretching from the grid through e v s into agriculture, and so if you look at the investments we've already made in this area, I think it will indicate where we're going. UH. We recently made an investment in a company called form Energy, which is creating grid scale batteries. The ability to store power not just for

hours and miles, but for days and weeks. We've invested in a company called grid Serve, which is a e V charging business across the UK, and we're seeing extraordinary opportunities across everything from the software that will enable this energy transition to farther out issues like carbon capture and direct air capture. So I have been investing for a long time, but the landscape of what's happening here really echoes the fascinating landscape of circuit in the tech world.

We know what's happening, we don't know quite how, but being in the middle of it is creating extraordinary opportunities. Well that's what we're thinking about when you were here on the on the campus of Stanford. I mean, the iPhone wasn't created and it's I'm looking at everybody around me. They're all on their iPhones or their smartphones. What's the technology that you think is as transformative as maybe the

iPhone was for our world today? What is the next one that you think that we need to just keep our eyes on. Well, I think we have to be careful not to assume that the climate revolution will be exactly like the technological revolution. Uh, what I've been saying about climate is there is no silver bullet. What we need is silver buckshot. So just as carbon has been put into everything, it has to come out of everything in different ways. So I think what you'll find is

a portfolio of technologies that together address this issue. In some ways, the same was true of technology. The iPhone was only enabled by massive advances and everything from chicks chips to touch screens. That's Jim Colter, executive chairman and co founder of the private equity firm TPG Capital. He's also co managing partner of the Rise Fund. He is an active member of the Stanford community, including serving on the Graduate School of This Advisory Council, and was elected

to the Stanford Board of Trustees just this year. That wraps up the first hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. I'm Tim Stanobeck and I'm Carol master Head. In our next hour, more luminaries from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, including a graduate you definitely have heard of, former a b in BEV CEO, Carlos Brito. It will also hear from the founder and co CEO of Minted Miriam Nafisi on her company's next

big expansion. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week Inside from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business, finance and tech news as it happened, Sloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. I am Carol Masser and I'm Tim stock Plenty ahead in our second hour of this holiday weekend edition of Bloomberg

Business Week. It's our Thanksgiving special recapping our recent visit to the Stanford Graduate School Business. We were there because the school again appeared at the top of Bloomberg Business Week's list of America's top business schools. We had the chance to engage with students, key faculty, and administrators, as well as some of Stanford's most successful NBA recipients ever, among them Carlos Brito of a BNBB. Will hear from

him shortly. First up though this hour, a conversation with a woman who has emerged as a pioneer of the Creator economy. Miriam Defisi is the founder and co CEO of Minted, her business focuses on stationary I know because I use them for my wedding, something that we talked about, as well as our home goods and digital content, and now Minted is expanding into furniture, having debuted its first

line exclusively at West Elm earlier this year. Well, I think the fundamental thread through all of these businesses is this idea that great talent can come from anywhere, great ideas can come from anywhere, and so what we're trying to do is bring great independent, unique art and design two people everywhere and um empower artists around the globe to put their hat in the ring and then really build businesses off of our platform, regardless of where they

were educated, where they're from, um, whether they had any connections to be able to get into business. This helps anyone really, you know, be part of a marketplace. What are you finding is the best way to communicate what you're doing and how you're growing, Because I do think a lot of people know meant it for invitations, I mean full disclosure. It's what we used for you know, my wife and I used for our wedding and and

I think people know it for for holiday cards. But but how do you then communicate that you're doing furniture as well. Yeah, I think it's a great question. I mean, we are targeting niche audiences through niche marketing, so you know, you might not see that the very highest level of corporate marketing, but we are. We are marketing to different audiences.

But I think also you'll see more brand building campaigns from us at the higher level this Christmas season where we really are focusing on the artist as the common thread through all these businesses, so that I think people really understand that it's about it's it's really about an artist marketplace and community that is participating across textiles, paper, furniture, while are many different goods and bring me, but really centering it around the artist story and their journey. And

you'll see that coming out too. You were so great about highlighting other people's journeys and artists journeys, but what about your own journey here? Because you didn't get accepted the first time around, but you came back the next year. How did you make that happen? Yeah, I mean I think it's this idea of being persistent and fighting for what you really what your dream is, and um, you know, I had come into Stanford knowing I wanted to be

an entrepreneur. I'd landed in California after graduating from college. I'd spent some time at some other businesses uh in investment, banking, and consulting, and I knew that I wanted to carve my own path. UM. I felt that if I had gone more of the bigger corporate route, I wasn't sure if that was a good fit for me and or if I would be given the responsibility that I thought maybe in my year old mind, I thought I may

be deserved. And so I really felt that the US is you know, I'm a I'm an immigrant to the US. I felt like, um, this is really a country of great opportunity uh, and that the American consumer would be the ultimate judge of merit, that they wouldn't really care necessarily who made the product. If they liked the product, they would buy the product. And so I was really motivated around entrepreneurship as a way to create the world I wanted to live in and create the products I

wanted to see. Um, have you found out to be the case about the American consumer? I do think so, I mean, we have this is one of the best things about being American is that we have this huge Peatree dish of like several hundred million consumers who can buy your product and test your products. So it's a fantastic It's why we are so good at product development and marketing actually because we have this great we have a great Peatrie dish and so, um, that's exactly what's happened.

And um, that's why I wanted to pursue entrepreneurship and come to Stanford. Um, So when I came out, I knew that that's what I wanted to do. So what's the endgame? And you know, it's a Bloomberg question. I mean, it's got to be nice being private but having investors involved, right, But I mean, is the ultimate goal to be a public company? How do you think about it? Because there are options today. I think it used to be it

was a direct path. You stayed private for a long time, but as soon as you could you get to the public markets. It doesn't have to be that way. There's a lot of cash out there with investor support to keep a business going for years. We see that. Yeah, I mean, I think we're always trying to keep all options open. Um. But you know, it is an independent company in the sense that our artists are independent too.

It's a fungible community. People can come and go, and I think the idea of capturing trying to capture that community inside another company is probably a little bit of a forced a forced It would be forced and kind

of strange. Probably. So I think of ourselves as an independent business, that we're building independent company, and certainly we could continue private financing or or go public, and we're just preparing for, you know, for either, you know, both both paths, and we always keep we always keep ourselves prepared for both. We haven't raised money in a couple

of years since. But you are cash flow positive, Um, what can you share with us, and all known that you're a private company, Sure, well I can share there were several hundred million dollars in sales. Um, we are cashala positive. Um, we are growing rapidly. Uh. And we haven't even begun to tap our international markets at all in terms of you know, consumer marketing or sales. So I think there's a lot of a lot of room

ahead to grow. And finally, just give us an idea of how you made it through the pandemic during wedding season when it completely just dried up. Well, this is the kind of thing that I think, uh, you know, you know Stanford and getting a great education on frameworks and how to how to learn more quickly. I think at Stanford and the GSP teach you how to how to learn, you learn how to learn that. If that makes sense, so I would say, um, we had to quickly.

We did have to quickly cut expenditures for a while because revenue dropped. We ended up cashlaw positive anyway for this for the year, and we did really focus on different um different product lines that we thought we thought people would find very popular home goods for example, that's been booming. That's Miriam the Feec. She's the founder and co CEO of Minted. She joined us on campus at the Stanford Graduate School Will of Business. You're listening to

Bloomberg Business Week coming up. He led the world's biggest brewer for more than fifteen years, and at age sixty one, our next guest says his career far from over. Carlos Brito tells us what's in store for his second act. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week the School special. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stenovik from Bloomberg Radio.

As you may know, Bloomberg Business Week has once again ranked the Stanford Graduate School of Business as the top NBA program in the United States. The eighty four American institutions ranked by the magazine are evaluated based on four indexes that capture key elements of business school education, compensation, learning, networking, and entrepreneurship, and a fifth category to diversity, was added in this year. One lightly less formal measure of academic quality.

I guess you could say is the type of leaders and NBA program produces and the list of stay for his Pea school alumni. No shortage of movers and shakers, that's for sure. Carlos Brito received his NBA from Stanford in nine and went on to work for more than three decades at the company that would become the world's largest beer maker. He spent fifteen years as CEO of Anheuser Busch in BEV before stepping down over the summer.

Now Brito joined our program from his home in Washington, d C. And we began our conversation by asking about the challenges facing global brewers today with supply chain slowdowns and labor shortages weighing on every sector of the global economy. We built in having a global a global brewer is today. Uh by was very lucky to be part of a

very talented team. We didn't altogether and uh we was started in one country in Latin America, one country Europe, and it became a global company with presents in all continents and uh in terms of trends and then you know, the the industry continues to be very healthy. I mean consumers continue to primonize to trade, to to pay more for beer. That's very good. Consumers continued to look for opportunities to engage with beer and they had to go to their homes when bars and pubs were were closed.

But they were very connected to our brands, big brands that very well during COVID. Global brands also did very well continue to grow. So the beer industry a local business to more of a global brand business. Innovation could us to play a big rolling beer and uh you know, being a natural product, it's made a natural ingredients through a natural process which is fermentation, the same way we use for wine or make bread. It's a day. It has a clean label, which consumers favor a lot these days.

And we offer a portfolio that goes from you know, full beer all the way to zero zero beer. So the thing about moderation and uh so this is some of the trans we see great industry to the end. In terms of challenges to your question, I think, like every business you're reading the paper every day, it's about supply chain being very you know, toughtlation creeping up and uh and also some still for beers, some countries that

were traveled is yet restricted. And our business is a lot to do with entertaining it with consumers moving, people having fun, and this is still restricted in any parts of the world. If you were still at the helmet of the company Breed, how would you navigate these supply chain challenges right now? What would you be doing to ensure that you can keep costs down when so many costs of raw materials like aluminum are continuing to move higher. Yeah,

I mean we've always been a very efficient brewer. We are a high quality brewer with very high efficiency abe I'm talking about and cominities. Of course, there's nothing what you can do a b I has a hedging program, the twelve months programs that to react to plan um and everything else. We tried to be as efficient as we can so we can also have last impact on

the environment. So we tried to use one of the best way we can fomity products the most efficient way we can, so we can have high quality with leasting back from the world that surroundses. You know, you're talking about the future. UM, what are the trends that you think are coming this way? Is it more non alcoholic? I know Tim likes that hard seltzer is fad? Does that stay around? Uh? Consumer tastes can change pretty quickly. Yeah.

I mean there are many trends that were there before COVID, and COVID made some of them escalate or progressive and faster. But some of the trends were clear during COVID. People were discovered the home and way to entertain at home. Consumers continue to be you know, treading an episodes saved before, uh, because they continued to consume more beaverages with meals, which for beer is something new. UM. For soft drinks has always been the case, but for beer, because of the

home as a hub became more of the case. Consumers continued to look for alternatives in terms of health and wellness, and that's where Seltzer plays a role. Less carps, less calories, less bloating, and clean labors remains a big prayer party inconvenious consumers and retailers became very usual to interact with companies via apps and had things delivered to them. And that you'ing COVID as we all know, was the name

of the game. And B two, B and B to see wait of adopting went up each time during last year. But it is is hard Selter one of those healthier fans that consumers will continue to move forward, especially consumers here in the United States. And I gotta ask because just last month Boston Beer withdrew its guidance over softness in the hard Selter market. So are you seeing hard Selter as a fat and Americans are going to move

past that? Yeah? I mean Selzer was was a very strong product the last two summers, not just leveled awful little bit, and because of the vision, was strong in the beer category and adjacent categories who continue to have every year new products that will come and capture consumers imagination. So consumers cites a big thing in our business. Trying to understand what consumers are looking for and proved iid in them. What those experiences, that's what let's make a

d I successful. Hey, Rito, what do we want to ask you? As we said, you know, fifteen years of the CEO of the company. From what I understand, from what Tim and I have been reading, is that you've got a lot of people calling you about your next act. You know, what are people calling you about? What kinds of offers? What might be your second act? Yeah, you're right.

I mean when I when I sat down on Jump, you know, people called me even before that, when he became public as was stepping down and with ideas with you know, things we can do together, and I said, hey, I don't have time now, I'll call you in July, August, September time frame. That's what I've been doing. And it's interesting because for the first time, after thirty two years in the same industry, an industry that was always exciting,

changing in consolidating and becoming global. So there was never the board the board moment there, you know, there was never board and it was always very exciting. But now I've had the time, a flexibility to really go deep in many different businesses. And I'm meaning very interesting people learning avelops Asian business that I knew because I was during the paper, but I didn't know much about them. I have the tact to go deep, and I want

to make a decision the next couple of months. I have a couple of things that are now you go becoming more and more interesting it terms of ideas, but right now I still haven't made a decision yet. That's Carlos Brito, longtime CEO of the world's largest brewer and hazer busch in Bev. Well, I'm certainly looking forward to hear what Brito doesn't Actually, he's got so much energy

and I just love his enthusiasm about this world. He knows that he's been in, he's grown up in it, so I can't wait to see where he lands now. I think it'll be, I have no idea. He's also on the board of directors at Ambev, a Brazilian brewer that is part of the A b InBev Empire. Not exactly slowing down, you can definitely feel that neither are we, because still it come we go inside the classroom at

Bloomberg Business Week's top ranked business school. We're gonna learn how the Stanford faculty are preparing students for the boardroom. This is so interesting. I love when we catch up with the faculty. You just get an idea of what's on their radar, how they are taking, especially coming off the pandemic, taking real life experiences, which is what you know so well. Tim, Having gone to a graduate school of business program, you understand about taking the real world

and bringing it into the classroom. Stanford does it really well. Yeah. We're gonna talk to Sarah's Soul, professor of Organizational Behavior. We also shift our focus to the world of ethics

and business with political economy professor ten Shots. This is Bloomberg Broadcasting from the financial capital of the world Bloomberg eleven Rio in New York to Washington, d C. Bloomberg to Boston, Bloomberg one O six one to San Francisco, Bloomberg nine six to the country Sirius XM Channel one nine, and around the globe the Bloomberg Business and Bloomberg Radio dot Com. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer

and Bloomberg Quick Takes. Tim Stenovan on Bloomberg Radio. Back in September, Bloomberg News Managing diversity reporter Jeff Green wrote the following, The ranks of C suite trainees enrolled in today's NBA programs are a microcosm of the challenges playing out across America's corporate landscape. By and large, they are still too male and lack the diversity to reflect the

demographics of future business culture. For the latest Peace school rankings, Bloomberg Business Week factored in its inaugural diversity index and found that women had parody at just five of the eight four schools in the study, and Stanford was one of just twenty with enough black and Hispanic students to equal their respective shares of the broader population. Tim safe to say that all business school programs are really struggling with diversity. They're all working on it, but they still

have a lot of progress to make. As we wind down our special holiday weekend installment of Bloomberg Business Week, we want to take you inside the classrooms of this prestigious institution, though, to find out what students actually have on their minds in the midst of a period of social unrest in America, and also find out what's that top of mind for professors there? And to do that, we're going to turn to Stanford Business School Sarah Soul.

She's a professor of organizational behavior in a leading voice on diversity, equity and inclusion on campus, and she believes some good will ultimately come out of a painful period for both the country and for academia. And it was a very tough year, but it was a year of learning.

You know, we were so fortunate to have so many students, faculty, staff, and alums who wanted to help us as an institution get through the pandemic and also get through the divisions that we're tearing apart this country with respect to race and systemic racism. So we were very fortunate and the conversations that we had with our alums, with our students, with our faculty and staff were conversations that were geared toward our growth as an institution and towards us being

better on the diversity, equity and inclusion front. You're also a professor of organizational behavior, and I'm wondering how your research, how your background, how your education helps you communicate with faculty, with students and help them facilitate these difficult conversations in

the classroom. That's such a great question because one of the things that we have, it's brand new here at the GSP this fall is a mandatory training for all NBA students which I'm leading along with one of my colleagues who's helping with some exercises, and it's allowed me to tap into some of my own research, but also research of many of my colleagues around issues related to implicit bias, to um ally ship to thinking about how we can build a more conclusive culture here at the

school and so we can train our leaders to go out after they leave this program and lead inclusive organizations in an equitable way and to build diversity, equity, and inclusion into all that they do. So that's one of the new things that's happened and that I feel very fortunate to be part of and allows me to draw on my own research and teaching. So this has been

a wonderful new addition to our curriculum. How do you though think that we something is different that we've talked about bias and racism for decades to be fair, hundreds of years, If you want to really think about, how do we know that this time, it's going to be different. That's so it's going to change in terms of action.

Hope lives eternal. Part of what I think is happening is that the new generation of leaders, those who have come to business school now um have I have a different approach to this than I've certainly seen in the past. They're craving um uh leadership in diversity, equity and inclusion, leadership training in diversity, equity and inclusion in ways that I haven't seen in the past. And so I believe,

and I hope. I am an optimist Carol knows that, but I believe in hope that this generation of leaders, the leaders were training at top business schools and other business schools, are going to be the ones to carry forward these goals and make for a better, more equitable society. How do you think about what you're doing on campus attracting a more diverse student body one year from now, two years from now, five years from now. What are

your goals there. One of the things I think that you've probably read a little bit about is we've expanded financial aid in a way with our Bold Fellows program. We have twenty Bold Fellows this year, and we planned to enroll twenty or more if we can every year. And that's a new program of financial aid which specifically geared towards students who have had financial hardship, either because of um less, intergenerational wealth transfer, or some sort of

financial disadvantage. So one way that we're trying to UM. We kept hearing from students who had applied and had gotten gotten in but couldn't come that the financial burden

was too great and the risk perhaps too high. And so one of the things that we're trying to do is make it possible for students to come here because we really believe that to UM to train the next generations of leaders, we need absolutely need a diverse student body, we need a diverse faculty, and we are absolutely committed to continuing our games thus far in those areas that Sarah Soul, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate

School of Business. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. We're going to wrap up with a frank conversation on ethics and business and why that's part of responsible management and governance. Stanford Professor of Political Economy Ken Shots explains how Business Week's top ranked graduate program is helping shape the hearts and minds of tomorrow's corporate leaders. This is Bloomberg. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg

Quick Takes Tim Stinovich from Bloomberg Radio. Alright, So, ethics and business and increasingly important topic, no doubt about it. We talked about it a lot on our daily show. It's one that may not be getting enough attention though in C suites around the world, many would argue that that's something that Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor of Political economy Ken Shots hopes to change. Professor Shots uses game theory to analyze how elections and political institutions influence

policy choices made by government officials. Such a timely conversation. His new book By the Way out next month called Eating with Value Strategies for making Ethical Decisions in Business in Life. He joined us on campus at his alma mater, Stanford to explain exactly how to cultivate those strategies by giving students a sense of purpose and helping them understand how to make moral decisions. I think that you know, when you think about those high profile issues in society recently,

we see that This is part of responsible leadership. So at the g s B, we're really trying to train leaders of companies and other organizations, but really the people who are at the top, who are the most successful

and having the most impact in the world. This is a core part of what it is to be a responsible leader nowadays is grappling with these issues um and And that's not just in the sense of like something gets in the public eye and you could ask questions about it by the media or your employees or activist groups or things like that. It's also because companies foundationally have all sorts of impacts in the world and major, major impacts, and a responsible leader is someone who thinks

about those impacts. And there's a variety of different ways that they could sort out those decisions, but they need to be aware of those impacts. But how does that square with the company's bottom line? Here we are in the midst of earning season. We care about the top line growth, we care about earnings, we care about projections. There are no questions from analysts on investor calls about ethics.

I think there are questions about things that are related to ethics, like what are you doing about sustainability or some commitments you've made about this, that or the other thing. Um. But yeah, there aren't questions about like ethics per se. And I should say I like your question because it

doesn't presume that everything is a win win win. I think there's a tendency for a lot of people to talk as if there are no trade offs, and especially to say, well, in the long run, there are no trade offs, because if you do something that is problematic in some way, it's going to harm your reputation in the long run. And I think a lot of the time the short run benefits can exceed you know, the

long run reputational harms. So the short run financial benefits for a company, and I think the question that's a company claims it has values and wants to live by those values, it actually needs to do it. So you know, in the book that Niel Mahotra and I recently wrote, we have this framework we call the five p s, which is you first got to set your priorities. Saying we care about the world isn't enough, right, you need there's all sorts of things in the world you can

care about. Set the priorities, measure those priorities have performance metrics, then US incentives, paying promotions and put people in positions of power who are aligned with those things. And that's

just like many other things that companies do. If a company says we care about these things, they've got to do it deeply in the organization will help us out with right, I think about how much we talk about all the companies that are over in China, and there's lots of questions obviously in terms of human rights issues and kind of pick your area, the impact on the climate. Um, what do we make of a company like Nike that stays there, uh, sells their works there? LinkedIn who pulls

out is LinkedIn ethical company because they do that. There's both normative and by which I mean values based questions there, and there's also implicitly positive or social scientific questions. So companies often say if we stay in it will have the following positive consequences, or if we get out will have the following effects. Those are those are questions for social science, right, and so you need, you know, scholars to study those things. It's not enough. You don't want to.

We don't know yet. Well, it's hard to tell, right, because to really know at an empirical level. Right, you need to run a randomized control trial. Right, you do what you do with COVID vaccines. You see it doesn't work, doesn't not work, turns out they work. It's awesome. You want to do that same thing as a scientist, as a social scientist, we can't do that typically, So you need and actually this is related to what might call

hedo invents. Just when the Nobel Prize for you need ways of thinking about you know, how you get sources of variation that are sort of quasi random, and how to interpret causal effects from those things. But it's also questions of values. You can have all the social science linked up, and then you can have deep values based disagreements about is your responsibility to investors, to the people

of China, to people in the United States? Yes, yes, and yes perhaps right, And it's hard to weigh those things. And this is the challenge. And you know, back when Milton Friedman was the way that everyone was talking about everything, you know, it's easy to say, long run shareholder value, right,

that's the only social responsibility that matters. But then if you say we have these other things that matter, then you gotta start weighing those and honestly, I haven't seen a really clear articulation from the Business Roundtable or anyone else about how one ultimately should do that. And the reason is because different people have different deeply health value. When you see a company leader make a statement in the wake of George Floyd, for example, how do you

think about it? Do you think about it from the perspective of this leader is taking a stand because this leader believes it's the right thing to do. This leader's employees are demanding it. This leader is doing this because he or she needs to say, this is the type of company we are, and our values align with your values, and we want you to work for a place. I think it. It really varies, and I can't know what's inside anyone's head, right, So each of these is a possibility. Well,

I guess is it more cynical, right? Yeah? Yeah, And that's that's really my question. But to me, if someone the way that I think about it is it's it's great to have good intentions. People like to talk about all their good intentions, but it's even better to have good institutions, right, And what do I mean by having good institutions? I mean that within a company, it's things like that five piece that I was talking about earlier. Things we claim that we care about this, here's how

we're actually doing it with their our company. This is how we're delivering on those commitments. But it's not just within the company institutions, and this is a really important point, it's institutions of society. You know. So when business leaders talk about we care about sustainability, we care about you know, inequality, we care about supply chains, we care about all those things. To me, I think it's wonderful that they care about

all those things. But it's even better if they're supportive of public policy and frankly government regulation, which is how you deliver on this overall within an economic system. Well, let's talk about the January six, you know, capital riot. Not a lot of leaders necessarily came out, certainly in the business community. I mean, is that wrong? Should they

have what's their responsibility? Public? Private sector? Yeah? And I think a lot of us have strong This is I mean, the January six riot is like the height of a hot button issue, right, you know, an insurrection to the US capital. So this is something that a lot of us have very strong feelings about and you know, part of what we're trying to teach at the school is how to deal with those deeply emotional disagreements, some of

which are actually anchored in values. Ultimately, UM, I'm not so sure about the January six stuff, but you know, but some of some of the deep politics, yeah, they're anchored in values, and there are real into to set aside someone else's values and they're deeply held commitments and feelings. Isn't effective. It doesn't. I can't go to someone and

be like, you should hold my values. Not very effective there, Um, But what we're trying to do is we're trying to teach students like, not this is the right thing to do in this instance on January six, But here's how you should think about such things as a leader, and how you should figure out what your values are and your company's values are, so that you can act in

a way align with those when the moment comes. If you have the clarity on the core values beforehand, then when that moment comes, you have a much more clear guidance for what to actually do. If you just have some wishy wash these statements about what we care about, you're not going to be as well set up one last quiet question. How much do students care though about what a company stands for in their culture? I think

it matters a lot to our students. Frankly, our students have a lot of different employment opportunities, and frankly, the more power someone has in choosing who their employer is going to be received this a lot in Silicon Valley right. A lot of the tech companies, who are they responding to it's not activists or consumers, often as their own employees who could choose to leave and go elsewhere. So I think that matters for people who have that power.

A lot of people in society don't have that sort of power and leverage and and frankly don't have the sort of opportunity to make those values based choices as easily as our students do. That's Ken Shots, professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His book Leading with Values Strategies for Making Ethical Decisions in

Business and Life is coming out next month. We do want to think the faculty and administrators at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for welcoming us on campus a few weeks back, Carroll and and for being part of our broadcast. It was it was great to be on campus. I mean we were in the field for the first

time in a long time. Yeah, it's really funny, and it was remarkable to think about it had been a couple of years before we had been on the campus really talking about them being a top of this list again. So obviously, so much has happened, the pandemic and all of that is being brought in, But it was great to be on the campus, students all around us. It felt quote unquote normal, if I can say. That was the first time I got on a plane to go anywhere in about eighteen months. But it was just great

to see. It felt very vital, very alive, and people are just trying to figure out what are the next trends investment, business, uh, technology or in the heart of Silicon Valley. Uh, it just felt like a lot was happening and it felt really good and luck as a California and I never needed an excuse to get back to Northern California. Another gorgeous day in California. All Right.

That wraps up our holiday weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from the Graduate School of Business, once again taking the top spot in the Bloomberg Business Week ranking of America's top business school for the two academic your thanks so much for joining us on Bloomberg Radio. I hope you're having a good weekend. I'm Carol Masser and I'm Tim Stanovik. Could be sure to tune into our Bloomberg Business Week Radio show Monday through Friday. It starts at

two pm a Wall Street time on Bloomberg Radio. You can also watch our daily broadcast on YouTube. Just search Bloomberg Global News. Also check out our Bloomberg Business Week podcast. You can find it at Bloomberg dot com, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. Bloomberg Business Week is available on newsstands now at Bloomberg dot com, business Week dot com,

and on the Bloomberg Terminal. You can also see me on Bloomberg Quicktake, available on Bloomberg dot com, slash Qt, and streaming platforms like Roku, Apple TV, Samsung TV, and more. Enjoy the rest of your Thanksgiving weekend. We'll see you again on Monday. I'm going for some more pie. Me to beacon. I'm just chocolate, peanut butter, a little bit of everything. This is Bloomberg