253. 4 Podcasts That Will Make You Smarter This Summer

Want to become a better tech innovator while you sit on a beach?

In this episode, Sophia Matveeva shares four podcast episodes you can learn from through osmosis—and enjoy every minute of it.

You will learn:

• Why Netflix’s original CEO got fired by his co-founder—and what that says about startup leadership transitions

• The founder Warren Buffett said was more scary than a grisly bear

• How the New York Times nearly collapsed and reinvented itself in the Digital Age

• Why building a stellar career takes longer than you think—and why that’s okay

These episodes aren’t just entertaining—they’re strategy lessons in disguise.

Timestamps:

01:18 Podcast Recommendations for Tech Innovators
05:36 The Story of Rose Blumkin
08:57 The New York Times Company Case Study
12:47 The Long Game in Professional Development

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Transcripts

Sophia Matveeva (00:00.384)
Do you like learning through osmosis? Of course you do. Who doesn't? In this lesson, I'll give you four fascinating podcast episodes that you can listen to and they will be entertaining, but they'll also be useful because they will help you become a better tech innovator.

Sophia Matveeva (00:21.998)
Welcome to the Tech for Non-Techies podcast. I'm your host, tech entrepreneur, executive coach and Chicago booth MBA, Sophia Matveeva. My aim here is to help you have a great career in the digital age. In a time when even your coffee shop has an app, you simply have to speak tech. On this podcast, I share core technology concepts, help you relate them to business outcomes, and most importantly, share practical advice

on what you can do to become a digital leader today. If you want to a great career in the digital age, this podcast is for you.

Today's episode, I'm going to give you four specific episodes that you should listen to over the summer when you're traveling somewhere, when you're on the road. So basically you are not wasting your time at airports and you're actually learning as you are going somewhere. Okay, so let us begin with my first recommendation. And this episode is from the diary of CEO. So the diary of CEO.

It has lots of different types of guests. Some are great. Some I think are not so great, but the one I recommend you listen to is with the Netflix co-founder, Mark Randolph. So you could literally just go to your podcast feed or just go on YouTube and search for diary of a CEO, Netflix, and then it will come up. So Mark Randolph is one of the co-founders of Netflix and he used to be the CEO of Netflix.

that he's not as famous as Reed Hastings, who was the longtime CEO. So he was the CEO after Mike Randolph. And so this is an interesting story. So, you know, we all watch Netflix. you know, it's just going to be interesting to find out how that company was built. But really, it's a pretty dramatic human story. Like, I think this could be a really good movie. So as I said, these two guys,

Sophia Matveeva (02:46.37)
founded the company and Mark Randolph was the original CEO of Netflix. So he was the early stage CEO. And then at some point, Reed Hastings basically gave him a presentation about why he wasn't doing a good job and asked him to step down. And you will learn all about this in this episode and how the guy felt and like what that was like.

This is actually quite normal as companies grow. So usually the people who start a company are not the same people who take it to IPL, who take it to exit, know, when it's really big, that's not that normal. like when you look at say Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, what they've done is not normal. Obviously they're very good at it, but they're very rare. So usually one team starts the company and then another team

basically makes it really big. And obviously the people who start the company, they're the ones who make most of the money. Anyway, so the journey that the Netflix guy talks about, it's quite normal, but also being fired by your friend and co-founder, that is not so normal. So that's really interesting. Also, this episode is going to be useful to you because at one point Netflix was like,

flying high and they were great and it was amazing. This was like in the late 90s and then there was the dot com crash. And then all of a sudden, literally just within a few days, a few weeks, they were not seen as an internet darling anymore. And actually being a dot com, anything was seen as a bad thing, as set of a good thing. He talks about what actually happened in the company and what the implications were.

But this is really relevant to today because we are living in an AI hype. know, right now companies, all sorts of companies are saying they're using AI when, maybe they're just using chat GPD to write their emails. And as you would have heard in our previous episode, two episodes ago on AI hope versus dot com era, there are lots and lots of parallels. So this is why it's going to be useful from a business point of view.

Sophia Matveeva (05:07.48)
to understand what was really happening then and what was the impact. And also you'll hear how they basically tried to sell Netflix to Blockbuster and the Blockbuster management team literally laughed them out of the room. So this is a really, really interesting episode. I sent it to all of my students and now I am telling you to listen to it. Okay, now let's get to number two, my second recommendation for you, something completely different.

It is the story of Rose Blumkin and you can hear that on the Founders podcast. So just search for Founders Rose Blumkin or I think she's the only Rose that they had profiled. So you could just search for Founders Rose and then you will get it. And I love the Founders podcast. It was actually quite hard for me to choose a particular episode from that podcast because there are

so many, I listen to it quite religiously. Founders is a podcast about what he says that history is greatest entrepreneurs. They're not all entrepreneurs, like there's a profile of Anna Wintour, but essentially history is greatest, think innovators would be more accurate. My only criticism of it is that I wish there were more women on it because there are lots of amazing female innovators that I think he's missing.

But anyway, listen to the Founders podcast in general, but Rose Blumkin, who was she? She is not super mega famous, but listen to this. You know what Warren Buffett said about her? He said that, I would rather wrestle with a grizzly than go up against Mrs. Blumkin. So if Warren Buffett was nervous around Mrs. Blumkin, we want to know who she is, right? So here she did.

end up investing in her company, but that's after she rebuffed the Buffet many, many times. Not many times, but like several times. Anyway, so she is a very different innovator to the Netflix guys because she ran a furniture store. So nothing dotcomy, nothing tech about it. But if you want to create something, you have to listen to how she did it. She had an absolute focus on her customer. She had a manic

Sophia Matveeva (07:33.428)
maniacal focus on cost control and whether you're working in tech or whether you're working in anything else, focusing on the customers and focusing on cost. Obviously, these are really, really good lessons. And she was also very fierce about her competition. So according to this Founders episode, apparently she had cuttings like newspaper clippings.

about when companies that were her competitors had filed for bankruptcy and gone out of business. So she just had them in her office, of like a medieval warlord would have like skulls of their enemies. So she just had all of these clippings of people who had underestimated her and then ultimately failed all around her. So fabulous. think that's really fabulous. You're clearly very formidable.

and she came from very difficult, very humble beginnings. So it's a super inspiring story with very useful lessons. So again, just search for founders, Rose, and you're going to get that. Okay, now again, let's go for a very different vibe. Let's go away from furniture stores to the New York Times Company. So there's another...

podcast that I love listening to, it's called Acquired. And on Acquired, there are two people and they're both investors. They do these really long, very well researched episodes that are super deep dives into a particular company. So the founders podcast that I just told you about, literally David Senra, that's the host, he reads a biography or an autobiography of an innovator and then

He basically does a summary of what he has learned from that one book. Whereas on Acquired, it's two investors who do a deep dive into a particular company. And so they read all the books, they listen to all the interviews. It's very, it's really incredibly well researched. I'm actually surprised they have time to do these episodes and be investors, but that's another point. Anyway, well done to them. So the Acquired podcast.

Sophia Matveeva (09:55.026)
is really, really good. the episode that I, I mean, I love lots of episodes, but the episodes I recommend today for you is the episode on the New York Times company. So just search for acquired and New York Times and you'll get it. So did you know that the New York Times, the company, they had this very kind of squiggly journey. So it was up, then it was massively down, then it was up again. So.

This is a story of how a company that was originally very successful, like, you know, how did that company start? The company was very successful and then digital transformation set in. And before digital transformation, they also just really diversified. So first they were very successful. They kind of got a bit drunk on their own success and they ended up diversifying too much and just

buying all sorts of assets that were really not core assets that they really didn't need. So they were kind of spending money on all sorts of projects that really didn't make sense. So that's a story of what happens when a company is basically making too much money, being too successful, they're not watching their costs. Then tech, digital transformation, iPhone, Google, like that completely changed the media industry and they really struggled and they nearly went under.

And so they had to get rid of all of these pointless assets. And then they actually ended coming through it and becoming a successful and profitable company. But as a business, they look really different to where they were 20 years ago and definitely to where they were when they started. So it is an interesting case study, but also the New York Times is actually, you know, there's family ownership. So it also talks about the people, the

passions, the mistakes. So it's super, super interesting. It is quite a long episode, but definitely worth listening to. And it's especially going to be interesting for people who are working in large corporates or who working in legacy businesses, or maybe if you're working in government, because you are thinking about, we've got a proud history, but how do we take that proud history and make that a success into the digital age?

Sophia Matveeva (12:19.168)
That's what the acquired New York Times episode is going to help you with. A final episode, my final recommendation for you. Now, you might have already figured out that if you want to do something amazing, like if you want to build a great company, or if you want to just build a great career, it is going to be really frustrating. You're going to have a lot of rejections. A lot of the time,

It is just going to be very unpleasant and it will definitely take you longer than you expected. So if you want to do something really amazing, you are basically playing the long game. And we are right now in a time of short attention spans and immediate gratification. Right? So.

When you are feeling like everything is basically just taking too long, then listen to an episode on the Design Matters podcast. So search for Design Matters. There is an episode with Dory Clark. So literally you could just search for Design Matters Dory Clark and you'll get the episode that I'm talking about. So Dory Clark is one of my favorite business authors and she has written Stand Out and she has written The Long Game. She's basically written four books.

And she's an expert in professional reinvention and building a professional personal brand. So I really, really recommend her work because whatever you want to do, whether you want to create a company, whether you want to lead digital transformation, you want to invest in it. Basically, if you want to do something off note, you have to be noticed. You have to get important people with budgets to trust you, to trust you with those budgets.

Right? So in order for that to happen, you have to have an excellent professional reputation. You have to be known as an expert in your field. And Dori Clark is the person that I go to to basically learn how to do that. And in the podcast episode on design matters, she talks about the fact that it basically took her ages. It took her much longer than she expected. It took her a lot of rejection.

Sophia Matveeva (14:38.84)
And it took basically, I would say, quite a lot of unfairness for her to, you know, she had to overcome a lot of unfairness in order to get to where she is. You know, right now she runs a business that's basically just really her she is at the head of it. It's a very, very lean business, but she's had four books published. She's a contributor regularly to the Harvard Business Review. So she got there.

but she talks about really how long and how difficult it was to get there. So she is really the antidote to all of these people that you might see online, especially on Instagram being like, I did these three things and then all of a sudden I was successful in a million years. Like that's rubbish, that doesn't happen. Anyway, I have listened to that episode on Design Matters with Dory Clark probably about four times and it's my go-to episode when I'm feeling a bit sorry for myself.

Anyway, I hope that you have found today's lesson useful. If you did, then I'll be super grateful if you just pressed the like button on YouTube or if you left this podcast waiting in review. It literally takes just a few minutes to do and a like button can actually just do it with one finger. It's no cost at all. It makes like hardly any difference to you, but it makes a lot of difference to me and to my team. So thank you very much for doing that in advance.

At this point, I will love you and leave you and I shall be back in your delightful smarties next week. Ciao.