How Tara Keeney's Walking Business Show Blew up in 9 Months | Fortune Daily

0:00Tara Keeney: I heard that you had a bath molded to your body. That's the most iconic thing. Is that true? Is that true?

0:06Ellie Austin: It's true. In January of this year, she quit her corporate job. She bought a$10 microphone and she decided that she wanted to interview the world's biggest founders. Fast forward 10 months and Tara Keeney's Look Who I Found walking interview series, which is formatted as 90 second clips on social media, has become a huge hit. She's interviewed Oprah, Kim Kardashian, Airbnb's Brian Chesky, and Snap Inc.'s Evan Spiegel. And that's just to name a few. Why did we want to speak to Keeney? Well, she's become an important figure in this new landscape of business media. And there's a lot to learn from how she thinks and how she operates.

0:47Ellie Austin: She believes, for example, that entrepreneurship is in desperate need of a rebrand. She's also a one-woman business with a completely AI c-suite, something that we talk about in the interview. And she also wants to use this, her first show, as the building block of what she hopes will become a billion dollar media company. But what does the rise of creators like Keeney mean for traditional business journalism, which doesn't shy away from hard questions and which, when necessary, holds leaders to account? It's an important question and one that we discuss with her. Also on today's show, we're hearing from Jordan Bloom about the Australian fracking boom and Kristen Stoller on how AI is reinventing HR.

1:35Ellie Austin: I'm Ellie Austin in New York and this is Fortune Daily.

1:47Ellie Austin: Hi Tara, I'm Ellie. So nice to meet you. Lovely to meet you. Do you want to go for a walk like you always do and do an interview?

1:53Tara Keeney: Do you have a studio?

1:53Ellie Austin: We do have a studio up set. Should we go there? Okay, let's go there instead. Okay. Tara, hello. Welcome to New York. Thank you. So nice to have you here. So you have had a pretty crazy year or so of it. Your show, Look Who I Found, is the fastest growing founder interview show. And you have created it as a one-woman machine with a microphone. Tell me how on earth you did that.

2:23Tara Keeney: Okay, we rewind. So I used to work in corporate. I worked at WeWork for a bit, et cetera, and then suddenly lost my dad. And I was like, do you know what? I want to do something with my life. I want to make an impact. I want to, if I'm working till 3 a.m., working for someone else, making them a lot of money, making, you know, my hair was falling out working in corporate. I was working crazy hours. and I just suddenly had this shift when my dad died of, I don't know, I wasn't embarrassed about anything that I was going to do in my life. Someone actually said to me really recently, how are you not embarrassed when you started making this?

2:59Tara Keeney: And I said, because I never thought this wasn't going to work.

3:05Ellie Austin: Take me inside that. Where did that sense of self and confidence come from?

3:09Tara Keeney: It's not, it sounds arrogant and it sounds really confident, but it's actually just quite delusional. I knew that I was never going to give up that this was going to become my life's work that I was going to do every single thing I possibly could until this became successful so that there was no point maybe for the beginning it would be embarrassing but I was going to keep going and commit until it worked and why interviewing founders so I started so I worked at Uber and then I worked at WeWork and I had all these different corporate jobs and when my dad died I suddenly was like I want to build a company because I want to make an impact I want to do something I want to remember for something I want to change someone's life I want to do something that has meaning and I applied for Y Combinator if they're watching this they will know Gary yeah I applied with the most bananas ideas the what literally when I look back now it was like a phone case that could talk to you and all this bollocks and then I was like right I need to find out how I can learn how to build a business because clearly I don't and I'm not getting into Y combination I know I want to do something with my life so I had this amazing Rolodex from working at WeWork because when you work at WeWork you're selling startups offices all day long I worked in about 100 buildings in like multiple different countries and I knew people I'd sold someone like there's a company called Marshmello in the UK I sold him his first office and then he became a unicorn decacorn etc and I knew him because I'd been there from the beginning called them was like can I go for a walk with you to learn.

4:38Tara Keeney: I'd always gone for a walk with my mum since I was like very young, kind of talking about boys and how the world works and school and like everything. And I tried listening to Diver's CEO, the Acquired, How I Built This, 20VC. They are unbelievable podcasts. They are incredible, Joe Rogan, but I couldn't focus. I have the attention span of an eight-year-old. I have ADHD. I found it really hard to sit there for two hours and listen to how someone built their company. I knew that the only thing that was going to make me want to learn how to build a make me feel courageous enough to start a company was who are these people can I see myself in them is there anything about them that's relatable if they can do it so can I strip them back what's their karaoke song what do they do in the morning what's their best relationship advice things that I think sometimes on a i don't know two-hour podcast it kind of becomes like who's on your cat table when did you last cry questions actually make me feel more intimidated and less more scared to build a

5:41Ellie Austin: company so you're getting to know the person you want to know the person the human and so you publish these 90 second clips on your social media of the interviews um how long do you film with a

5:52Tara Keeney: person depends how long they've got so like you know someone super super the originality of the format was I was like these are the busiest people in the world and if I want 20 minutes with them I need to kind of be with them from A to B and I need to slot into their day not them slot into mine and I realized that quite early on so the first thing is I was like how can I reduce the barrier to entry how can I make this as easy as for possible as possible for someone to say yes to agreeing to meet with me and I was like I need to slot into their day I need to be standing outside their front door outside their office outside their street where they get a coffee I need to be where they get their steps in basically make it as little nuisance for them as possible to meet with me and tell us about how you scored that first interview and who it was so my first interview was um Vinay from Blank Street coffee yeah coffee we had a few mutual friends um I'd followed him on Instagram for a while I was in totally awe of what he built and how he built it and he built it from a car all the way up to you know one of the fastest growing coffee brands in the world I was in New York and I messaged him and I think I messaged him a lot a bunch of times and I I was saying this to you I think people say to me they're like wow like I can't believe you've grown so quickly I can't believe that you have got to where you've got to that you've got these people to say yes I personally feel like the opposite I think it's if you have a really good pitch and you know exactly what mission you're on and you know exactly what you're trying to achieve I always say there's like a format that I use to kind of get people to say yes and I don't think it's that difficult what is that format I don't I think the biggest mistake I see people making when they're trying to reach out to people is how long the messages you don't read something that's longer than 10 sentences even five at max if you can't get your point across as to why someone should agree to meet with you in five sentences then I don't think they should meet with you because just my biggest advice do not send someone an essay

8:03Ellie Austin: they will never reply to you we have a lot of aspiring founders who watch this show so take us back to the beginning when you started how much money did you invest in the show how many social media followers did you have what did it look like in those very early days

8:16Tara Keeney: i bought a ten dollar microphone great from amazon keep it cheap it's the worst microphone in the world i still have it i didn't know how it worked every single thing that could possibly go wrong i didn't zoom out the it was so tinny because it was so cheap everything i have me and 13 ai tools right now that run around me as a c-suite there is no one else so you have ai doing your marketing your legal finances codex is my queen I'm not saying I'll never hire of course I'll hire but I know what a great editor looks like I know how to read contracts I say to chat GBT I'm like explain this clause to a five-year-old tell me what this means tell me how I can understand it how I should go against it can you teach me how to get a better offer for this like I want to learn how my business works from the inside out and then I'll hire people

9:04Ellie Austin: when you're interviewing these founders I mean some of them at some point will be people who they're involved in a scandal or something's gone wrong in their business you know because business is a complicated landscape and you obviously are uh in the business to use the word again of getting to know the person so I wonder how you think about that side of things because as journalists obviously one of the tensions we are experiencing right now is that a lot of interviewees they want to go to creators because they know that they're going to get a different style of interview there there's no reduction in the entertainment value but I just wonder if you think about that broader ecosystem and kind of your role in asking the questions

9:41Tara Keeney: I think there's too much negativity in the world right now I don't need my show to be causing someone more stress or more harm when they go to bed at night I want to be celebrating founders I want more people to see that they want to become founders because it's the greatest thing in the world I think there's definitely shows for that and I mean you know Piers Morgan shows like they do an amazing job at it my role in what i'm building is to be a safe space for founders to be celebrated and if someone wants something cut out my show i don't even blink it's out i don't care if it would go viral that's i never it's whenever i do my reals i it's so funny i always watch stuff back and i know sometimes that there is a bit in there that would get two million views i've had some of the craziest founders on my show say the most bananas things but I was I never started this to be the most famous person in the world or to go viral I started it to learn so I will stay true to that in the show I know I could be a thousand times bigger I know I could maybe be clipping and all this jazz a thousand times but I started the show because I wanted to learn from the greatest found in the world and wanted more people to want to build companies and it will kind of grow at the rate that it's supposed to go you said when we're walking in that you want to build a million billion billion billion dollar billion dollar media company what do you envisage that looking like i have many i have many plans i every day i come up with something else and i think the craziest thing right now is i don't sleep at the minute not at all no probably like three hours a night how do you function i'm so excited about what i'm building i could even cry with how much this means to me and how happy i am with this i have a new plan every single day i know i mean i'm i'm meeting great people i have all these different plans there's like other formats i want to do other shows maybe a product in there maybe an event there's other people that i want to bring in people i want to partner with like my brain i always say is like when you drop a paracetamol in a glass of water and it pivots every single day is it a good thing if every young person wants to become a founder what does it mean to society it's amazing i think everyone should have a side hustle of some sort whether it's a vintage account that you're building whether whatever it is i think the learning the school learning the tools of how to become a founder how to build something where you will grow so much more as a person all the relationships you have in your life i think i'm a better friend for doing this ish that's actually a lie i think i'm probably a really bad friend at the minute but I think I'm a better person for this I think my patience my understanding my brain is growing I think the worst thing that you can ever do is like when when you stop learning in a company and you kind of hit that ceiling of where you think you can grow the best thing about being a founder is it never ends there's no exam that you can fail and not retake.

12:45Tara Keeney: You just keep going. And that's what I love.

12:49Ellie Austin: Well, Tara, it's been such fun talking to you. Thank you. Up next, big business breakthroughs in the Beetaloo Basin. What a tongue twister. Fortune Energy Editor Jordan Bloom tells us the tale of how an Australian valley's similarity to Pennsylvania was the key to a decades-long quest to unlock its energy resources. Texas oil men finally cracked the code for fracking in Australia. Let's get into it. So you have this little known, weirdly named basin in Australia called the Beetaloo Basin that just so happens to look a lot like the Marcellus Shale in the Pennsylvania, West Virginia area, where a lot of the fracking boom in America first took off.

13:35Ellie Austin: People have eyed it for years, going back to the 1980s even. But it wasn't until just the last 15, 20 years, once the fracking boom took off in the U.S., that it became possibly feasible to duplicate in Australia. Now, you have this group of Texas oil men and frackers, the co-founder of Liberty Energy, who is now U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Over the last several years, they've been trying to kick off a fracking boom in Australia to power the country, the continent, and to also send natural gas as exports to feed Asia. The fracking boom is essentially the combination of two existing technologies in the U.S.

14:20Ellie Austin: that were perfected over time and in really the last two decades. It's horizontal diagonal drilling combined with hydraulic fracturing, which is called fracking, which is shooting all this sand and water and chemicals and little explosives into the shale rock to pop things open and get the gas or oil to flow to the surface. It's enabled really the US to become the leader in oil production and natural gas production worldwide and unlock all these basins that were previously thought almost impossible or way too expensive to reach. The companies that do it are all US-based and they've been focusing on oil and gas here in the US.

15:05Ellie Austin: The basins are starting to mature a bit here, not run dry, but mature. and now they're looking at the rest of the world starting to. This is happening at a particularly interesting time with the war in Iran right now too. Australia is trying to show that it can become a much more reliable partner. It's certainly a unique and unusual angle where it took all these, you know, Texas oil men to essentially to unlock fracking down under. But that's what we're starting to see in the outback. And now CEOs want an HR chief who can decide which jobs AI should automate. as long as dealing with all the more traditional people remit side of their roles.

15:45Ellie Austin: Editorial Director Kristen Stoller joins me to explain why HR candidates are now expected to have twice as many skills as they did a decade ago, and what this all means for the job market and how companies are run. Kristen, a joy to see you as ever. We're talking about HR today. Your newsletter this week says that CEOs in 2026 are looking for something very different from heads of HR than they were previously. So tell me, what is HR supposed to be now that it wasn't, say, five years ago? Yes. So this is really the rise of what I and some of the others in the industry are calling the rise of the enterprise CHRO.

16:25Ellie Austin: So this is a CHRO who doesn't deal just with, like, you know, the interpersonal relationships and fights and raises and promotions. This is someone who actually deals with the AI transformation of an organization. So deciding which jobs to automate, deciding what the new org chart should look like, and really working in tandem with the CEO, CTO, and CFO to figure out what the new automated workforce looks like. That's really interesting because that feels like a complete job in itself. And then managing interpersonal relationships in the offices and salaries and raises and culture feels like something different.

16:58Ellie Austin: Is there an argument for having two CRHOs managing those two different remits? That's a great question, Ellie. And you are not the only person who is asking me that because when I posted this newsletter on LinkedIn, this is the most divisive I have ever seen in the HR community. I think I angered them maybe a little bit because half are like, wait, so if you're telling me I have to basically be like the AI person, all this, like what happens to all the people functions and what happens? And half of them were like, oh, don't worry. They'll be automated. You as a CHRO can focus on all the other stuff.

17:29Ellie Austin: And half of them are saying what you're saying. Like, we still really need the people person and the people connection. And that's still important. And arguably, culture and developing culture is more important than ever as we head into the automation era and as remote work continues. So yeah, I would argue as well that you cannot abandon the people function. So, okay, fewer than 5 % of sitting HR chiefs, according to the data, come from strategy, consulting, product, or engineering. And those sound like the exact backgrounds that CEOs now want to hire these AI-savvy HR chiefs from. So where are the next generation of HR leaders going to come from?

18:10Ellie Austin: That's a great question, especially because only one in four current sitting CHROs are actually these enterprise CHROs. So one theory is that this will have to come from the new Gen Z, Gen A workforce. They'll rise up through the ranks. The other theory is that CHROs who are not enterprise CHROs right now should really be trying to become that. And they can do that by hiring, you know, instead of a chief of staff who's traditional from like a human resources background, hire a chief of staff who's a product person, hire a chief of staff who's in engineering, and then learn from them and kind of build up your own profile that way.

18:43Ellie Austin: Or do your own upskilling to figure out how to be that type of person. Let's look at who the big AI companies are hiring to run their HR right now, because as with so much, these companies are the bellwether for much of what's happening across the business landscape. So OpenAI made a former Palantir CIO, its head of HR, and a Google engineering VP is now its chief people officer. Neither is a traditional HR person. What does that tell you about trends that might be coming down the track? That's a great question. Again, it's something that people are very divided on. I think people are seeing these AI-native companies hiring non-traditional HR people to lead HR and being like, we want to do that.

19:22Ellie Austin: We need to do that. And I'm also talking to, I actually had a Wharton professor email me this morning when I asked him about it, and he said, that's a terrible idea. So have me on in the future, and we're talking at 3.30 a day. I'll tell you what he has to say. Oh, I was going to say, did he elaborate on that? No, and I'm curious why. So I think a future newsletter is saying, I want to explore in my reporting. Why is it a terrible idea? and what happens to the HR leader if we're just taking from product engineering and all these technical backgrounds. So definitely something I'm going to explore.

19:51Ellie Austin: Okay, and what's your advice from your reporting to someone working in HR, they're not an HR lead right now, but maybe they want to be in the future. How should they be thinking about their trajectory and upskilling? Yeah, so I think the number one thing, and I talked to a partner at Hydrogen Struggles, the executive search firm, he was like, the number one thing you can do is just in your downtime, just play around. You're already thinking about how to redesign your workforce, but play around with the tools to do so. Don't just go to Claude, ChatTBT. Really look at the breadth of tools available and then figure out yourself how to do it and then surround yourself with people who have that knowledge.

20:24Ellie Austin: So go spend a day hanging out with the engineering team. Spend a day hanging out with product. Talk to them about what you can learn from them. Kristen, remind us where we can find your HR newsletter. Yes, it is every Monday, the Fortune Workplace Innovation Newsletter in your inbox. Kristen, thank you. Thank you, Ellie. that's it for fortune daily i'm ellie austin thank you so much for watching today's show we really appreciate you all tell all your friends and family about what we're doing and we'll see you next week

20:56Ellie Austin: okay that's a show okay